AHRC Community-Led Heritage Research and Skills Hub

 Funding available to lead a community-driven heritage research and skills hub in the UK.

In October 2021, AHRC funded two pilot GLAM (galleries, libraries, archives, and museums) research hubs. The aim of the investment was to explore how Independent Research Organisations (IROs) can support community-led research that would help to understand the social value of heritage and culture in the UK and promote more inclusive engagement with culture and heritage.

The pilot hubs operated on a devolved funding model, whereby AHRC awards the grant to a principal investigator at an (IRO with a second IRO as co-investigator, and each hub distributed funding to ‘spoke’ partner organisations to complete smaller projects.

To provide longer-term investment, AHRC is now looking to fund one consortium to become a hub for community-led heritage research. Through a framework of devolved funding, the hub will be expected to award, coordinate and support a cohort of the spoke projects across the UK.

The hub’s activity will be driven by the long-term research and engagement aims, and diversity and inclusion challenges of the communities that collaborate in the project. The hub will act as a centre of excellence and expertise in heritage and collections-based research and community participation.

It will provide a place to support the exchange of research and digital skills, to enable heritage research to become more accessible and usable to a range of audiences including researchers, members of the public, practitioners, policy makers and funders.

AHRC will make one award to a consortium to lead the hub. Through a model of devolved funding, the successful hub will be expected to award funding to community-led heritage research projects across the UK. The hub ‘spokes’ projects should include organisations from museums, galleries, libraries, archives and the heritage sector, and it will be up to the hub to outline how they will allocate the funding to the projects within the application.

The hub will have oversight of all the projects and will act in a coordinating capacity.

AHRC would expect the projects to have:

• A strong community-led focus.
• To involve smaller to medium GLAM or Heritage organisations.
• The opportunity to reach new or diverse audiences.
• A commitment to collaborative and equitable working with partners.
• A focus on knowledge exchange and transfer of skills such as digital skills.
• To see a breadth of projects based across the UK to extend the reach of the hub, within the funding available.

The duration of this award is for three years and it must start on 2 January 2025.