Strengthening and Sustaining Heritage Champions
in Yorkshire and the Humber: Survey, January 2025
Introduction
We want YHACS to be the natural home for all civic and amenity societies across the region. To be successful in this, we need to have the skills and resources as a regional organisation to be able to offer support, advice and encouragement to our members and to provide opportunities for sharing information (networking events, newsletters and other communications, etc), training and coaching to member societies and their officers or representatives.
Our vision is for a vibrant and active civic society movement across the region where all our member societies are contributing positively to the preservation, conservation and re-purposing of heritage assets within their localities and are involving a broad range of people from their local communities, whether they be civic society members, local authorities, local businesses, developers or other stakeholders. We want to see our member societies offering a full range of activities commensurate with the context in which they operate.
To support this vision, we have formulated a bid for funding to the NLHF (National Lottery Heritage Fund). They will fund projects that connect people and communities to the national, regional and local heritage of the UK, with awards from £10,000 to £250,000.
We are conscious that although Yorkshire and the Humber have a relatively strong civic movement, it has declined. In 2010 YHACS had 70 member societies. This has fallen to 40 representing a loss of local heritage champions though some societies remain active outside the YHACS umbrella and others have formed building preservation trusts. We believe YHACS plays an important role in supporting the civic movement in the region and needs funding to increase our capacity to help you thrive. We are interested in the views of all societies in the region whether current YHACS members or not.
NLHF will support projects which contribute to their four investment principles:
- Saving Heritage
- Protecting the Environment
- Inclusion, access and participation
- Organisational sustainability
The Project
Our initial thoughts on a project to help civic societies in Yorkshire and the Humber are:
- Build resilience and capacity to support member civic societies across Yorkshire and the Humber.
- Provide targeted support to 10 societies in the region, giving focused 1:1 support to
- Undertake a SWOT analysis and develop a strategy and action plan for sustainability and growth.
- Identify two or more heritage-related activities where the opportunity for growth is clear
- Submit an application for a small grant (up to £2k per society) to provide pump priming for these activities
- Through the SWOT analysis identify training needs, which will be delivered either at a society level or across the region where necessary
- Develop a roadshow focussing on best practice from across the region (in person or online) drawing on the particular experiences of individual societies.
- Build and strengthen the YHACS brand as the ‘go to’ organisation to support the civic movement in the region
- Develop an improved communications strategy to promote the civic movement in the region with a view to growing the membership of individual societies.
We have received encouraging feedback from initial discussions with NLHF but we will need to refine the project for it ultimately to be successful in what is a highly competitive environment.
Most of all we will need to develop the evidence base of the need for the project and this is where we need your feedback as an organisation involved in our heritage in the Yorkshire and the Humber region.
It is essential to the likely success of our bid that we receive information from as many civic societies as possible and we therefore urge you to respond to this survey.