Heritage Emergency Fund

The National Lottery Heritage Fund is awarding urgent grants of between £50,000-£250,000 for heritage assets at immediate risk.

The Heritage Emergency Fund is short-term funding to support the immediate actions needed to stabilise operations, manage unforeseen risks and help organisations begin to think about recovery.

Applicants can apply to the Fund to cover essential costs for up to four months. You may also apply for a contribution towards increasing your digital activities and offer during this period, testing new activities that will help your organisation’s recovery, and reviewing and revising your strategic and operating plans.

To be eligible, applicants must:

• be a current or previous recipient of a grant (over £10,000) directly from the Heritage Fund;

• not have applied to the Heritage Emergency Fund (£3,000 to £50,000) successfully or unsuccessfully; and

• not be in receipt of any other emergency funding from another National Lottery distributor e.g. The National Lottery Community Fund.

The funder will prioritise organisations that:

• are focused on a heritage asset that is at risk as a result of COVID-19;

• are making an outstanding contribution to places and communities;

• have received significant past investment from the National Lottery Heritage Fund

• can demonstrate a good track record working towards the Heritage Fund’s mandatory inclusion outcome, a wider range of people will be involved in heritage;

• can demonstrate they are managing heritage attractions that are significant to the heritage visitor economy. Particularly those in areas of deprivation that meet our economic regeneration outcome, the local economy will be boosted; and

• can demonstrate a good track record working towards the Heritage Fund’s wellbeing outcome, people will have greater wellbeing.

They will also prioritise applications where:

• an organisation is working within one or more of the 13 Areas of Focus we identified in their Strategic Funding Framework;

• there is willingness and potential to play a leadership role in the recovery and reconfiguring of the heritage sector longer term; and

• there is evidence of exploring and successfully developing new income streams to support sustainability and organisational reconfiguration longer term.

In assessing applications, the Heritage Fund will consider the scale and scope of the wider impacts and benefits your organisation provides, in line with their outcomes around economic regeneration, inclusion and wellbeing. They will also consider the material difference their support is likely to make in the context of the organisation and the heritage you manage, its size and relative to the scale of the risk faced by you and the heritage you look after.

Before applying please speak:

• to your local engagement team for advice if your National Lottery Heritage Fund project is complete;

• to your investment manager if your National Lottery Heritage Fund project is still running. They will discuss your options; or

• to your investment manager if you need to apply for any direct capital costs, that are not for emergency works, for an existing National Lottery Heritage Fund project. They may be able to offer an increase to your existing grant instead.

Deadline: Continuous rolling programme. Decisions aim to be made within two to four weeks.

What will we fund? The Heritage Emergency Fund is short-term funding to support the immediate actions needed to stabilise operations, manage unforeseen risks and costs to help your organisation recover.

You can apply to us for a grant between £50,000 and £250,000 to cover essential costs for up to four months. You may also apply for activity that will help your organisation begin to recover and follow guidance from government. This could include increasing your digital activities during this period, testing and consulting on new activities that will help your organisation's recovery and reviewing and revising your strategic and operating plans.

Partnership funding is not required.

We want to support organisations to actively deal with immediate risks, to help you become more stable and to work towards longer term recovery.

As a guide you could apply to us for costs to:

• stabilise your organisation in the immediate term to make sure the vital heritage you care for is not put at further risk by COVID19, for example, staff costs to allow you to respond, design and deliver plans
• stabilise a heritage asset that is at immediate risk, for example urgent conservation work to protect your heritage
• help you plan and initiate mothballing, when you put aside or withdraw from use your heritage asset/s, and other approaches to protecting heritage that is at risk
• run immediate risk management reviews and test the actions identified as needed to safeguard your organisation
• reconfigure business plans, governance and activity needed to help safeguard the future of your organisation. This could include trialling new ways of working to improve the stability of your organisation. We will expect you to consider the future environmental sustainability of your organisation and project as part of your future planning work
• help you manage your site during social distancing. This could include additional staff to help manage queues, PPE for staff and volunteers, training, additional cleaning, implementing contactless payment methods, and temporary structures to help manage visitors, like shelter for queues or additional toilets
• get advice from professionals, for example on risk, safety, how to support your staff or on new business models
• cover essential operational costs, for example, site security, maintaining climatic conditions for collections, or managing livestock on habitats
• cover essential IT equipment and connectivity costs to support homeworking and activities to enable your organisation to put information online and to interact with your community/customers

What won't we fund?

• costs that are eligible to be covered by Government support, for example, furloughing
• the remaining salary costs for staff on furlough not covered by the Government’s Job Retention Scheme, or any additional salary costs above the furloughing cap
• redundancy costs of staff not funded by a current National Lottery Heritage Fund project
• costs that are avoidable in the short term. We will let you know if we think this is the case and remove these from your grant request
• operating costs you will incur beyond four months from the point of your application, we may consider some recovery costs that are slightly longer term if that makes sense for your organisation (for example, business plan reviews may need more time to understand the impact of COVID-19)
• anything that contravenes Governments’ advice on COVID-19
• recoverable VAT
• costs related to promoting the cause or beliefs of political or faith organisation