Apply for a Resilience Grant

About Resilience Grants

Programme context

The Resilience Grant programme invites archives services, organisations with archives and archive networks throughout the United Kingdom to apply for resilience-building projects of up to £20,000, with no minimum level of funding required. It is a one-stage application, completed through an online application form.

This grant programme will run twice per year, with projects expected to last up to one year in total.

We ask that applicants submit, as a supporting document, a completed Archives and Records Association Archives Service Resilience Indicator Tool, which is designed to provide archive services with a quick methodology for assessing resilience and identifying gaps or areas for development.

You can download the Archives Sector Resilience Indicator, and guidance notes from the Archives and Records Association.

Resilience projects could include (but are not limited to):

• proposals that would lead to increased organisational stability, including long-term organisational, financial and strategic planning
• increased staffing capacity and enhanced skills
• reduced costs
• increased income
• improving capacity to develop, care for and enrich collections, physically and digitally
• ensuring that collections are safely preserved, including digitally
• work on diversity, equity and inclusion
• responses to climate change, such as developing energy-efficiency within an archives service
• strategic development of existing archive networks or establishment of new networks with a clear strategic focus.

Funded Resilience Grants

Find out more about projects that have been awarded Resilience Grants.

Success rates

As part of our commitment to being open and supportive throughout this programme, we want to share that the current success rate for Resilience Grant applications is 6%.

We recognise that these figures may feel discouraging. However, we want to reassure potential applicants that a low success rate shouldn’t put you off reaching out or getting involved. Every application brings you into the programme, giving you access to our training opportunities, our wider networks, and the expertise of our team. If you’re thinking about applying, we warmly encourage you to get in touch. Our aim is to support you wherever you are in your journey – whether that’s developing a strong application or finding the right pathway forward.

How to apply

Eligibility

The Archives Resilience Grant programme is open to all eligible archives organisations with archives (including heritage organisations) and archive networks in the United Kingdom. We cannot fund organisations based in the Channel Islands, the Isle of Man or whose collections are held outside of the United Kingdom.

The programme is open to all public sector bodies, not-for-profit organisations including registered charities, and for-profit organisations including business archives.

We use the definition of an archive collection as given within the Archive Service Accreditation Scheme:

If the archive is not currently accessible for public use, the organisation must have the intention to make the collection freely accessible to the public in the future.

The organisation must employ or have access to professional support from an archivist or similarly qualified professional.

There is no restriction on past applicants applying, however repeat applications are no more likely to receive funding, and you are strongly encouraged to speak to The National Archives’ Grants and Funding team before submitting a second application for the same project. There are no restrictions on institutions submitting an application for a different project than was previously assessed.

Where appropriate, archives are encouraged to propose partnership projects, and applications from archive networks and consortium applications are particularly welcome in this programme.

What the programme can fund

As part of their application, organisations will be asked to submit a full budget for their project. The maximum award of funding for any grant will be £20,000.

The programme cannot fund:

• Overheads, full cost recovery or management fees
• Collections acquisition
• Costs incurred prior to the date of any award offer from us.

However, most other cost categories are eligible – our intention is to support the resilience-building activity that you have identified as a priority, as flexibly as possible.

The grant may not be used for the following purposes: payments that support activity intended to influence Parliament, Government or political parties, or attempting to influence the awarding or renewal of contracts and grants, or attempting to influence legislative or regulatory action.

Accessibility and reasonable adjustments

We welcome and encourage applications from people of all backgrounds and are committed to making our application process accessible to everyone. This includes providing support, in the form of reasonable adjustments, for people who have a disability or a long-term condition and face barriers applying to us.

You must contact us as early as possible in the application process. We recommend contacting us at least 15 working days before the competition closing date, to ensure that we can provide you with the most suitable support possible.

Application deadlines

The Resilience Grants programme is currently open for applications and will close on 20 November 2026. The assessment panel will meet in January 2027.

Plan your application

We ask that all applications be submitted via our online form. You can download a Word document version of the form to help you prepare.

Submit your application

Assessment criteria

Scoring system

Each application will be scored numerically against a set of criteria, according to the following scale:

Applications are assessed by a panel of experts from both The National Archives and across the sector.

The criteria information provided below is not intended to be exhaustive: an outstanding answer may not cover all of the points mentioned, and/or may cover other points as appropriate to the applicant and their project.

1. Need

Tell us why your project is needed, and why it is needed now.

You might want to tell us about a particular problem or challenge which you are seeking to address. This might be a long-term problem, such as a long-term issue with your collection or archive service, which can only be addressed by an investment in skills, outside expertise, equipment or staff time. Have you identified a weaker area on the Archives Service Resilience Indicator?

You may also want to capitalise on particular opportunities: whether there are local strategies or wider initiatives which make the project timely, or whether there is other funding or partnerships which are immediately available. What will happen if you do not get a grant from us?

It’s important to outline why the grant provides a solution or partial solution to the challenge, and why it is important for the investment to occur now. It may be helpful to include evidence supporting this answer: for example, you could include photographs or supporting letters.

Every archive service will have different needs, both short-term and long-term: use this response to tell us what they are.

2. Impact

We define impact as 'the demonstrable contribution that a project makes.' Tell us why your project is going to change things: for you, for your archive service, for your users and audiences, for the archives sector, or for society. We want to understand what difference your proposal will make, and what change will result from the project, and for whom.

Ask yourself ‘what will happen?’ What are the short-term, medium-term and long-term changes that the project will bring about, and who will be affected? Is the change physical (new resources, materials or capital), procedural, or cultural?

Impact should scale according to the size of the grant being provided: for smaller grants, impact may be personal (new skills or learning), or institutional (such as improved ways of working within your archive service). For larger grants, strong applications will evidence impact beyond their own organisation. Please read the question carefully, to ensure that you are focusing your answer on the relevant areas of focus.

It is also important to consider the impact that your project will have on users of your archive. The users of archives can be diverse, with audiences having different motivations and needs from your service. You are best placed to understand who your audiences are, and who they could be: it might be helpful to explain the change you want to bring about, in how existing users interact with your service and collections, and/or in how you reach new audiences.

You may wish to outline how you intend to engage with audiences outside of your institution: do you have plans or partnerships in place, to engage with (for example) your local community, researchers, schools or higher education?

It is important to consider how the grant will have an impact beyond its own duration, and create a sustainable legacy of change: is this project part of a longer-term strategic plan, and how does it align with other activities or the future direction of the organisation?

Impact can take many different forms, and every project will have a different response: but a strong answer will always clearly outline what outcomes it is seeking to create, and how it plans to engage with beneficiaries and audiences, inside and outside of the archive service which is applying.

3. Delivery and management

When giving a grant, we need to be confident that it is possible to deliver every project that we fund, within the organisation and with the team you have available. Use this question to fully explain how you intend to carry out the project’s activities, spend its budget and achieve its delivery milestones.

We would like to understand in detail what you are proposing to do, who will deliver the project and what skills they have. Please tell us who has overall responsibility for the project, and who else is involved. Will you be working with a professional archivist? What types of posts do you need, and how are they paid? (You may wish to refer to the Archives and Records Association (ARA) salary recommendations). Are new staff being hired, or are you using existing staff; if so, how are their existing responsibilities being covered? Are you using volunteers, and how will they be managed and supported?

Please provide a rationale for any non-staff expenditure that you need to deliver your project, and how you plan to procure any resources you need, if you don’t have access to them already.

If your project involves multiple institutions, tell us how the relationship between the partners will be managed and governed, and how work will be divided and structured.

Tell us how you are going to manage your project, to ensure that it keeps on track – you may wish to attach a Gantt Chart or similar project planning tool, particularly for larger projects. In most grant programmes, we will ask you to outline at least three key milestones that need to be achieved to ensure your project’s success.

Finally, you may want to think about the risks that your project faces, and what mitigations you will be putting in place to address them.

4. Knowledge sharing

The National Archives has a leadership role for supporting the archive sector in England and across the UK, and often, we do this by knowledge sharing. Knowledge sharing refers to the ways in which understanding, experiences and learning and resources generated by our grant programmes are disseminated.

There are many more archives in the sector than we can provide funding to: therefore, we would like to understand, as part of your proposal, how you intend to disseminate the knowledge generated, both internally to your organisation and externally to your audiences and the wider archives sector.

There are numerous ways to share knowledge, which can be formal and informal. If your project is going to generate materials, such as guidance papers, toolkits or research publications, you may want to consider who the audiences are, what opportunities there are to share the materials, and how you can amplify their impact. You may wish to present at academic conferences, events or workshops. There are also more informal knowledge sharing activities, such as social media. Video or visual content may make your dissemination more accessible.

Networks are an important way of sharing knowledge and outputs: you will score highly on this question if you want to work with others, to collaborate on shared challenges or share results. There are many opportunities to form or participate in networks of common practice, and use these as a means to share learnings.

The National Archives will also offer opportunities for knowledge sharing, through learning outcome reporting, and events such as webinars. Please focus your response on activities delivered in addition to the standard grant requirements.

Terms and conditions

Feedback and reapplication

The panel will score against the assessment criteria and provide feedback. You will be given the opportunity to discuss your application with a member of The National Archives’ Grants and Funding team, upon request.

The National Archives’ decision regarding any application is final, and no appeal process is in place: it is the lead applicant’s responsibility to make sure that all of the information provided in the application is correct, their proposal meets the eligibility criteria, and all sections of the application are complete. Applications that are deemed ineligible will be excluded from consideration. Any points you wish to make should be made clearly and concisely in the application form.

There is no restriction on past applicants applying, however repeat applications are no more likely to receive funding, and you are strongly encouraged to speak to The National Archives’ Grants and Funding team before submitting a second application for the same project. There are no restrictions on institutions submitting an application for a different project than was previously assessed.

Grant conditions

All grantees will be required to comply with the Code of Conduct for Recipients of Government General Grants and all relevant legislation, as well as the monitoring and evaluation conditions outlined in previous sections. Further conditions may be outlined within the Grant Funding Agreement.

Reporting, evaluation and knowledge dissemination

Grantees will be required to report on the progress and outcomes of the grant.

Every applicant will be required to provide a project budget and a minimum of three delivery milestones, within their application. If successful, every project must provide The National Archives with a progress update on these delivery milestones, including an indication of any delivery risks or issues. The timing of reporting intervals will be agreed at award stage, but we expect that some reporting will be due every six months.

Grantees will be expected to take steps to address delivery issues or delays if they arise, and inform The National Archives as part of their regular reporting. It is possible that The National Archives’ team may visit your project, during or after your grant (we will not visit applicants as part of the assessment process).

Grantees will also be required to provide an end-of-project report, summarising progress made against delivery milestones and a final project expenditure statement, based on actual expenditure. If final expenditure falls below the amount agreed in the Grant Funding Agreement, The National Archives may ask grantees to return any unspent funds at the end of the project. The National Archives will not cover the cost of any project spend above what has been agreed in the Grant Funding Agreement.

Grantees will also be required to demonstrate the benefits and key performance indicators (KPIs) that the competition is seeking to realise. Successful applicants will be required to provide evidence against these measures at regular intervals throughout the project, including at project launch and close. The measures against which applicants will be required to report, and the reporting intervals, will be agreed at award stage. While benefit and KPI reporting is compulsory for all applicants, performance against these indicators is for the purpose of measuring the impact of the funding programme only, and does not affect eligibility for the grant.

Our approach to monitoring and evaluation is informed by our vision: through our grant-making, we want to build evidence for investment in archives, celebrate grantees’ success, and advocate for the archives sector, while keeping our reporting requirements as flexible and accessible as possible.

Contact us

Should you have any questions about applying for a Resilience Grant, including about eligibility and reasonable adjustments, please email the Grants and Funding team.