Alison Holdom, a Funding Manager Lead in Esmée’s Creative, Confident Communities team, writes about the new Esmée Fairbairn Communities and Collections Fund, how it’s evolved, and our long-running partnership with the Museums Association.
Since 2011, Esmée Fairbairn Foundation and the Museums Association (MA) have worked in partnership to deliver the Esmée Fairbairn Collections Fund, offering grants and support for work on museum collections, working in collaboration with communities. To date, the Fund has awarded over £14m in nearly 200 grants to museums across the UK.
A new iteration of the Fund was announced at the end of last year with a new name: the Esmée Fairbairn Communities and Collections Fund, to help highlight how communities are central to the work supported. This could mean local people working with museum staff or local organisations working as an equal partner with the museum, encouraging active public participation in decision-making As the first deadline for Expressions of Interest for the new Fund approaches on 5th February, we look at the impact of grants to date, the changes we have made, and how this affects the grants we will make.
The new Communities and Collections Fund
In Spring 2024, working with a group of museum and community researchers, the Museums Association reviewed the Fund’s impact in the context of the wider UK museum sector and the society in which it exists. The researchers recommended that the fund should enable museums to become more of a social and cultural space for action, activism, and transformation. The recommendations mirrored what we see in grants made towards our Creative, Confident Communities aim, including:
- People and community organisations should have more of a stake in funded work
- The well-being of museum staff needs to be considered, recognising that value-led work can be difficult with the potential for project staff to feel isolated.
- Legacy planning was needed for longer-term changes and appreciation of the risks that can come with short-term projects and relationships.
This has led to the new Esmée Fairbairn Communities and Collections Fund placing more emphasis on equitable working, supporting well-being and legacy planning. The new name better represents the dual focus on collections and inclusion. It will offer £1.185m per year (supporting up to 10-14 grants annually) in 2025 and 2026. The funding will be split between grants supporting equitable partnerships between museums and their communities, and core grants to those museums who are embedding inclusive practice in all their work. The Collections Fund has consistently driven new practice in museums, and we’re excited about the potential of this iteration to impact partnership practice and inclusion in the museum sector.
© Museums Association - A mannequin from Horniman Museum & Gardens' exhibition exploring the history of tea.
Working in partnership with the Museums Association
The Museums Association was set up in 1889 and is a membership organisation that campaigns for socially engaged museums and a representative workforce. It advocates for and supports museums and everyone who works in and with them, so that the value and impact of museums and their collections is realised. Its membership includes over 10,000 individuals, 1,500 institutions and 250 businesses. This overview of the museum sector and their strategic impact made it the perfect partner when Esmée first set out to engage more deeply with the civic and community role of museums.
The Fund is managed and delivered by the Museums Association, with Esmée staff and trustees involved in the decision-making panels and in designing the fund’s structure and funding priorities. This ‘delegated’ approach to Esmée Fairbairn’s funding has become more frequent, particularly when we know our reach into sectors or issues is limited. By partnering with organisations more directly involved, we can expand our reach and our knowledge and make better grants through both the delegated funds and our main funding programme.
The context in the museum sector
The MA’s Sarah Briggs explains the context for this Fund in the museums sector.
“The campaign, Museums Change Lives, was first launched by the MA in 2014 and is being updated in 2025. It recognises the shift in museums in the last decades to become increasingly participatory organisations, and encourages further, embedded change in how museums work as part of society. As civic spaces, museums can play a critical role in delivering social justice, bringing communities together, actively breaking down barriers and fostering conversation and reflection.
“Museums across the UK are doing this by working with community partners, listening to and acting on their priorities, and setting common goals to achieve more inclusive and equal spaces. These partnerships mean that museums of all sizes are using their spaces and collections to make a positive difference to people’s lives by working collaboratively with community groups, health charities and other third-sector organisations.
“We have seen this change reflected in the applications we receive, increasingly seeing work that has been asked for or led by community partners or that is much more embedded in the longer-term organisational goals of museums. We have adapted our funding to encourage the best of the partnership applications we have seen in recent years; and to help more museums in their core work to be truly participatory organisations.”
What do these changes mean to both the Museums Association and Esmée?
The new Fund offers a strong link to Esmée’s Creative, Confident Communities strategy, particularly our community-led art and creativity priority and work that can contribute to our long-term outcome ‘a collaborative approach to creativity and culture enables people to work together to strengthen their community’.
The new iteration will also bring the MA into more direct contact with community organisations, providing it with learning on equitable access, which it can share with the sector. The changes require both our organisations to develop new, more accessible application processes which support partnership building and participatory budgeting. And this is learning that we can use to help us improve how we fund in other areas too.
© Museums Association - A group of people sat around a table while doing artwork together.
What do these changes mean to potential applicants?
Museums applying to the new fund will continue to be able to apply for core and project funding. The core funding element (which was first included in 2022) has not changed substantially but remains restricted to museums that can show that participatory practice is embedded across their work and that funding would support strategic development of inclusive collections work.
The project funding element has the most significant changes. Now, museums can only apply for ‘partnership project grants’ for programmes working equitably with community organisations to achieve shared aims for inclusion. Applicants for partnership project funding are encouraged to have a partnership with a community organisation in place before applying and be able to show how that organisation has been involved with designing and leading both the funding application and the project.
Case studies that illustrate the future direction of the fund
The changes to the fund are a natural progression, based on the learning of grants made in recent years such as:
To see which projects have been funded and learn how to apply to the Communities and Collections Fund, visit the Esmée Fairbairn Communities and Collections Fund. This includes a new toolkit ‘Working Equitably’ and a planned guide to Supporting Wellbeing for museums and community organisations.
For information about Esmée Fairbairn Foundation’s wider support for culture and creativity, see our aims and priorities. Our support for culture and creativity mainly falls under two of our funding priorities, arts and creativity making change and community-led art and creativity.
