We are a group of professionally accredited conservators looking to make a difference.
We want to support community archives to look after and provide access to their collections, in whatever way they need. This might be through better storage, training volunteers, exhibitions or online access and education. Our support takes the form of collection care expertise, practical conservation and provision of training to support and educate volunteers and other stakeholders, so that they have the skills and knowledge to care for their collections into the future.
Community archives might include those of schools, religious communities, political activists, immigrant communities or charities.
We aim to make heritage and its conservation more accessible, helping communities to get funding for projects large and small. This funding already exists but you need to know about it. In order to access it, collections need advice from conservators about what funders are looking for in terms of projects and outcomes. We want to create a network of community archives that are plugged in to these opportunities. We feel that more diverse communities need to be involved in conservation and collection care, because the reach of heritage sector funding can be limited. Impact Heritage is a community interest company (CIC) with a primary social objective. All our profits will be reinvested to provide direct support to community archives and get new projects off the ground.
Please help us to kickstart our initiative so we can start building projects and serving the community archives that we all value.