Writing our History:Digging our Past
Connected Communities

Challenge Fund

The University of Nottingham’s School of Humanities has been awarded an Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) grant for enhancing outreach and engagement between research groups in the Arts and Humanities and community groups and organisations interested in exploring their local history and heritage (PI Prof. Elizabeth Harvey). This award is intended to enable future funding bids to be made to the Heritage Lottery Fund (applications to be led by community heritage groups) and to a further round of AHRC Connected Community Funding later in the year (applications to be led by academic researchers).

As part of the current award, and to enable future bidding, we established a Challenge Fund to pump prime new community heritage initiatives led by academics at the University of Nottingham. The deadline for applications was 20 April, with a stipulation that all projects must include collaboration with a constituted community group focused on the development of a community heritage research project. These might include

  • Scoping activities or proof-of-concept pilot to enable a community-led heritage bid to the HLF (e.g. Mining heritage project)
  • Showcase activity to engage community group(s) with an ongoing research initiative (e.g. Nottingham Caves project, Sherwood Forest project)
  • Collaboration with a non-academic partner (e.g. museum, archive) to engage communities with new collections/site research (e.g. oral history programme for Raleigh project, Players project etc)

Application details and procedure:

Applicants were asked to provide a statement on their proposed activity (500 to 1000 words max) to include:

  • the intended community heritage project,
  • the community group(s) involved,
  • any external non-academic partners,
  • any known track record of partnership with the community group and any external organisations that is relevant to the proposal,
  • the research potential of the partnership and the intended external funding opportunity that the challenge fund will build towards
  • a budget for the activity and a programme for the activities outlined in the statement.
  • Head of School/Department sign off to demonstrate School approval.

Applications could be made for up to a maximum of £500, with no match funding requirement.

Successful applications will be announced shortly.