Well, it couldn’t have come at a better time! A substantial HLF grant to add to the celebrations as the Bath Royal Literary and Scientific Institution celebrates its 200th birthday at its home in Queen Square..
BRLSI – as it’s better known – is a cultural hub and museum in the heart of Bath. It has just been awarded £225,000 from The National Lottery Heritage Fund.
This grant will enable the institution to diversify audiences, to broaden its mission of advancing and promoting science, literature, and the arts, and to strengthen its foundations for the future.
BRLSI are in 2024 celebrating their Bicentenary, and an intrinsic part of the celebrations will be to encourage as diverse an audience as possible to participate in their range of cultural activities.
Thanks to National Lottery players, the Heritage Fund grant will enable BRLSI to offer a range of creative and family-friendly events that makes our unique heritage and collections available to the community for perhaps the first time.
These family-targeted activities will include the upcoming ‘Brilliantly Engineered’ event featuring exhibits and workshops aimed at school age children, and the relaunch in the Autumn of their very popular ‘Bath Taps into Science’ festival.
Perhaps, most crucially of all, the grant will facilitate the recruitment of an education officer, who will design and develop an imaginative programme of activities for young people designed to inspire their creativity and enthuse their young imaginations through BRLSI’s extensive historical and ethnological collections.
The project will support BRLSI through new sustainable workplace systems designed to expand their volunteer pool, increase their digital activities (encouraging broader participation so access to its impressive Georgian building is not always needed) and develop electronic systems which help them to increase the donations and legacies that will be a vital part of securing their future.
Not only that, the grant will enable them to provide new user-friendly audience management systems, making them more customer-focused and aligned with an offering match-fit for the 21st century.
Ian Gadd, BRLSI Chair of Directors said, “We are delighted to receive this transformative grant from the Heritage Fund. It will make our ambitious programme of talks, exhibitions, and other activities over the coming year even more exciting, innovative and inclusive, and will help us become a stronger and more sustainable organisation. It is also very welcome recognition, in our Bicentenary year, of our importance for Bath’s cultural and educational life.”
Further information: The Bath Royal Literary and Scientific Institution (BRLSI) is a cultural hub and educational charity based in the centre of Bath. The Institution runs a programme of more than 150 public lectures each year, both virtual and in-house on topics including science, philosophy, art, and literature. It maintains collections of minerals, fossils, and other items, as well as a library of rare books. The BRLSI’s Jenyns Room is one of Bath’s leading gallery spaces with a year-round programme of art and museum exhibitions.
About The National Lottery Heritage Fund
As the largest dedicated funder of the UK’s heritage, The National Lottery Heritage Fund’s vision is for heritage to be valued, cared for and sustained for everyone, now and in the future as set out in our strategic plan, Heritage 2033.
Over the next ten years, the Heritage Fund aims to invest £3.6billion raised for good causes by National Lottery players to bring about benefits for people, places and the natural environment.
The Heritage Fund helps protect, transform and share the things from the past that people care about, from popular museums and historic places, our natural environment and fragile species, to the languages and cultural traditions that celebrate who we are.
The Heritage Fund is passionate about heritage and committed to driving innovation and collaboration to make a positive difference to people’s lives today, while leaving a lasting legacy for future generations to enjoy.
Follow @HeritageFundUK on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram and use #NationalLotteryHeritageFund www.heritagefund.org.uk.
