In July 2021, the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) put out a funding call for UK Research and Innovation-recognised Independent Research Organisations to deliver a pilot research project for the Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museums sector.
The idea of the funding call was simple: how could Independent Research Organisations like HES support community-led research projects that would help to understand the value of the arts and culture, and promote more inclusive engagement with culture and heritage?
HES were approached by Historic England, who were interested in making a bid with us with the UK Government’s recent policy announcements on community asset ownership and levelling up in mind. This was new territory for many public bodies in England, but Scotland has a long history of supporting community ownership from which we could draw. We put together a project proposal on the theme of ‘From Community Outreach to Community Ownership’ and were one of two bids awarded £250,000 at the end of 2021. We funded five community partnerships through the project:
- Heritage Lincolnshire, whose project ‘Building on History’ explored the potential of a co-created digital tool to recognise diverse heritage.
- The Scottish Council on Archives, whose project Everyone's Stories Matter explored the obstacles and opportunities around managing community archives in Scotland.
- MSDS Marine and Moder Dy, whose project ‘Cladaichean to laebraks: Maritime heritage and engagement on Skye and Shetland’ explored inclusive heritage engagement in island communities
- The Art House, whose project ‘Makey Wakey’ sought to understand the impact of creatively using vacant shop spaces in the Ridings Centre in Wakefield.
- The Churches Conservation Trust, the Heritage Trust Network, Historic Churches Scotland and Churches Trust for Cumbria, whose consortium project ‘Bridging the Gap’ explored the barriers and solutions to sustainable community ownership of historic rural churches.
Our pilot followed a ‘hub and spokes model’. The central ‘hub’ was run by Historic England and Historic Environment Scotland: we put out a funding call for community-led research partnerships, and supported the resulting ‘spoke’ projects through capacity building and other support functions. Each ‘spoke’ project had a defined organisational lead, but involved a significant number of organisations and people working together at a local level to conduct research on an issue that mattered to them. Everything was run remotely as we were still at the tail-end of the pandemic and supporting community partnerships from all over Scotland and England.
The project ran in two phases. The first, starting in October 2021, lasted for a year and was supported by £250,000 funding from AHRC. Towards the end of this period we secured a further £150,000 funding from AHRC until July 2023, to allow our community partners to run additional impact and dissemination projects stemming from their first phase work.
Our project was a pilot, and the success we had in our work led to AHRC launching a £1m call for a full, nation-wide version of the pilot.
Our project itself had extensive geographical reach across England and Scotland, with a diverse range of stakeholders and communities engaged through the five projects and their activities. Across the ‘Outreach to Ownership’ projects:
- Approximately 440 people took part in 30 workshops either in person or online
- 159 people responded to surveys
- New or strengthened partnerships were created with 79 community groups
- 652 people attended pop-up exhibitions or events
Outcomes have included:
- Development of a new business model for an organisation
- Community archives trained to look after their collections more effectively in future
- New approaches to the designation of heritage assets in England
- A charter and new shared approach to inclusive engagement in island communities
- New evidence about, and approaches to, supporting churches falling out of use in remote rural communities
- Changes to Historic England’s own grants
You can find more information about Outreach to Ownership, including all the project reports, on the Historic England website.