National Lottery Heritage Fund is launching a new funding initiative which will give pioneering organisations the freedom to be ambitious in their thinking and help shape the future of the heritage 
workforce.
The Heritage Innovation Fund will give groups the power to be more experimental, creative and try new ways of working to meet the future demands and ambitions for the UK’s diverse heritage.
Through a combination of financial support, expert advice and collaboration, the Heritage Innovation Fund will help organisations to explore, test, and grow ideas to meet the challenges faced by the sector.
The initiative will help enable organisations to investigate the challenges they have in areas such as diversifying the workforce, developing volunteering opportunities or making the most of advances in digital technologies. It is intended to have three phases:
- Explore: defining the problem and developing potential solutions
- Test: putting promising prototypes into practice and gathering evidence of what works
- Grow: implementing findings more widely within organisations and across the sector
The Heritage Fund is currently accepting applications for the Explore phase with grants of up to £25,000 available to cover organisations’ time and exploration activities for six months.
The pilot is open to not-for-profit and public sector organisations, local authorities, as well as a private owners of heritage.
Apply to the Heritage Innovation Fund
Deadline: 27 September 2022, 12pm