The National Archives Resilience Grants Programme (United Kingdom)

The programme will support archives to be adaptable, resilient and sustainable, creating lasting solutions that enable them to respond to change, and contribute to communities and the economy.

Funding Information

• For grants of a value lower than £20,000, 100% of the grant’s value will be paid to you up front, except in circumstances where The National Archives, in consultation with the grantee, deems that an alternative payment structure is necessary for the successful delivery of the funded activities. For grants of and over £20,000 in value, payments will usually be made in two instalments, at the start and end of your projects.

Project Requirement 

• Archives Resilience projects could include (but are not limited to):
  • proposals that would lead to increased organisational stability, including long-term organisational, financial and strategic planning
  • increased staffing capacity and enhanced skills
  • reduced costs
  • increased income
  • improving capacity to develop, care for and enrich collections, physically and digitally
  • ensuring that collections are safely preserved, including digitally
  • work on diversity, equity and inclusion
  • responses to climate change, such as developing energy-efficiency within an archives service
  • strategic development of existing archive networks or establishment of new networks with a clear strategic focus

Assessment Criteria

• It is assessed on the following four criteria:
  • Need
    • It’s important to outline why the grant provides a solution or partial solution to the challenge, and why it is important for the investment to occur now. It may be helpful to include evidence supporting this answer: for example, you could include photographs or supporting letters.
    • Every archive service will have different needs, both short-term and long-term: use this response to tell them what they are.
  • Impact
    • Impact should scale according to the size of the grant being provided: for smaller grants, impact may be personal (new skills or learning), or institutional (such as improved ways of working within your archive service). For larger grants, strong applications will evidence impact beyond their own organisation. Please read the question carefully, to ensure that you are focusing your answer on the relevant areas of focus.
    • It is also important to consider the impact that your project will have on users of your archive. The users of archives can be diverse, with audiences having different motivations and needs from your service. You are best placed to understand who your audiences are, and who they could be: it might be helpful to explain the change you want to bring about, in how existing users interact with your service and collections, and/or in how you reach new audiences.
  • Delivery and Management
    • When giving a grant, they need to be confident that it is possible to deliver every project that they fund, within the organisation and with the team you have available. Use this question to fully explain how you intend to carry out the project’s activities, spend its budget and achieve its delivery milestones.
  • Knowledge Sharing
    • The National Archives has a leadership role for supporting the archive sector in England and across the UK, and often, they do this by knowledge sharing. Knowledge sharing refers to the ways in which understanding, experiences and learning and resources generated by the grant programmes are disseminated.
    • There are many more archives in the sector than they can provide funding to: therefore, they would like to understand, as part of your proposal, how you intend to disseminate the knowledge generated, both internally to your organisation and externally to your audiences and the wider archives sector.

For more information, visit The National Archives.