Culture Recovery Fund Emergency Resource Support: Heritage Orgs

Grants available for cultural and heritage organisations in England who are at imminent risk of failure to ensure they have sufficient funds as they transition out of lockdown and resume business activity.

The Culture Recovery Fund for Heritage is provided by the Government and administered by the National Lottery Heritage Fund in partnership with Historic England. The Fund is part of the £1.57 billion rescue package announced by the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) to safeguard cultural and heritage organisations across the UK from the economic impact of COVID-19.

The National Lottery Heritage Fund is distributing £40 million of the third round of the Culture Recovery Fund. This round of funding will have two strands:

Strand One: Culture Recovery Fund for Heritage: Emergency Resource Support - for organisations that are in severe need and have not yet received support from the Culture Recovery Fund.
Strand Two: Culture Recovery Fund for Heritage: Continuity Support - for organisations that are in need and have already received support from the Culture Recovery Fund.
The funding will be distributed between the two strands of funding based on the level of demand. The first allocations from this funding round will be for strand one.

The aim of the Emergency Resource Support strand of the fund is to help maintain England’s cultural ecology by supporting culturally significant organisations, which are now at imminent risk of failure due to the ongoing impact of COVID-19, and have exhausted all other reasonable options for increasing their resilience.

In line with previous rounds of Culture Recovery funding, the central aims of this strand are to enable cultural organisations to:

Reopen/restart their operations, where appropriate; or
Operate on a sustainable, cost-efficient basis, so that they are able to reopen at a later date if, for example, reopening under social distancing is not permissible or does not represent a value for money approach.
Applications will be accepted from heritage organisations and businesses in England who have not been able to access any funding through the previous two rounds of the Culture Recovery Fund.

Organisations must be able to demonstrate that they:

Are culturally significant.
Are at clear risk of no longer trading viably within 12 weeks of the point of Expression of Interest
Normally generate at least 50% of their annual income from their heritage activities. For example through exhibitions, admissions, tours, educational activities and associated food and non-food retail; heritage construction, conservation or consultancy services.
There is a total funding pot of £40 million for round three. Grants of between £10,000 and £1 million are available.

The deadline for Expressions of Interest (EOI) is 30 September 2021 (12pm).

For more information visit https://www.heritagefund.org.uk/funding/culture-recovery-fund-emergency-resource