Strategic initiatives

We support and invest in heritage in multiple ways. Find out more about some of our planned interventions and how we’ll deliver them.

We want to create the greatest impact and benefit from our funding for the UK’s heritage.

Our strategic initiatives are a way for us to address long-standing heritage issues at scale, support coordinated cross-territory approaches and accelerate new ideas and innovations.

Over the life of our 10-year strategy, Heritage 2033, we expect to deliver various initiatives. The ones we’re working on right now include:

Heritage Places: £200m to help 20 places across the UK thrive Landscape Connections: £150m for the UK's most treasured countryside Places of Worship: saving heritage in need and tackling sector challenges Nature Towns and Cities: new partnership and £15m of funding

Heritage in need and other opportunities and emergencies

We remain committed to flexibility and responding swiftly when required. This could mean supporting acquisitions of exceptional heritage, marking significant events or supporting heritage areas and organisations dealing with an unforeseen emergency.

We’re also exploring opportunities for targeted funding for heritage that is at risk and in need of conservation. Alongside funding discrete projects, we want to support organisations to build capacity, develop approaches to project planning and diversify income streams.

The first Heritage in need grant went to Archives Revealed, the long-running partnership between The National Archives, the Pilgrim Trust and the Wolfson Foundation. Our £5m investment is supporting the project to unlock and catalogue archival collections across the UK, making them more accessible to the public.

Decision-making

Our approach to making decisions on strategic initiatives is the same as our processes under the National Lottery Heritage Grants programme.

For grants of less than £250,000, decisions are made on a monthly basis by the senior investment or engagement staff of your nation or area. For grants above £250,000, decisions are made on a quarterly basis by the committee of your nation or area or by our Board of Trustees.

We may vary our decision-making process for specific initiatives, but we will update our website when this happens.

More to come

Our teams are working hard to develop these initiatives and opportunities and we’ll share further details as we have them.

Sign up to our newsletter to get our latest news and announcements delivered direct to your inbox.