We are very grateful to The National Lottery Heritage Fund for their commitment of an award of £249,071 to realise the Working Together project from Autumn 2023.

Thanks to National Lottery players, GEM and CHWA will be working with six museum and heritage site partners from 2023 to 2025. We will be able to develop and embed health and wellbeing work in museum and heritage settings. By doing this, we will help the sector build stronger relationships with healthcare and community partners, both nationally and strategically.

The museum and heritage organisations taking part, who responded to our joint call for participants in November 2022, are: York Museums Trust; Royal Museums Greenwich; Scottish Maritime Museum; Sunderland Museum & Pleasure Gardens; Newark and Sherwood District Council (Castle and National Civil War Museum); and the National Museum of the Royal Navy, Portsmouth. We are looking forward to working with them to add capacity to their health and wellbeing work.

This holistic new project will offer training and advocacy, and catalyse new, lasting partnerships. It will galvanise the strategic organisational commitment needed from heritage sites and museums to support wellbeing in all of their work.

Matt Walsh, Co-Chair of CHWA, said: “We know how much amazing work is already happening in museums and heritage organisations to support the health and wellbeing of local communities. This funding from The National Lottery Heritage Funds will help all of us involved in this partnership to build sustainable programmes based on strong relationships with local partners.”

Caroline Marcus, Chair of GEM, said: “We recognise the importance of embedding the health and wellbeing agenda as a core value within the museum and heritage learning sector. GEM is excited to embark on the journey of supporting museums and heritage sites from across the UK with developing the health and wellbeing programmes and creating a long term legacy, for the stronger sector, healthy public and thriving communities”.

We will shortly be advertising for both a Programme Lead and an Evaluator for Working Together. Please see the CHWA site for further details.

About The National Lottery Heritage Fund

Using money raised by The National Lottery, we inspire, lead and resource the UK’s heritage to create positive and lasting change for people and communities, now and in the future.

www.heritagefund.org.uk

Follow @HeritageFundUK on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram and use #NationalLotteryHeritageFund

Since The National Lottery began in 1994, National Lottery players have raised over £43 billion for projects and more than 635,000 grants have been awarded across the UK. More than £30 million raised each week goes to good causes across the UK.

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