Heritage Skills Programme

The Heritage Skills Programme is a 10-month scheme of in-depth professional development for local heritage groups, organisations and individuals who want to build on and deepen their skills, enabling the heritage sector of Bradford to become stronger, better sustained and more agile. With a host of inspiring leaders from West Yorkshire’s heritage sector, Bradford 2025 will deliver monthly talks, workshops, and resources to ensure that the local independents are strengthened, feel more confident and secure, and can move through 2025 and beyond with ambition. 

The cohort will consist of 10 independent projects or groups; a team member of each of these groups will attend the workshops and sessions. The same person does not have to attend all the sessions. Applications will be considered from individuals, groups, and organisations that are small-to-mid-scale, and will exclude organisations that receive regular funding, such as NPOs, or funding from a large national body. All applicants must be based in the Bradford district to be eligible.  

We understand that heritage can mean lots of different things, so your group or individual work does not need to be focused on a historical building, or collections of objects, although it may do. Your work could instead focus on a particular community or experience. The primary requirement is that you seek to engage the public through heritage stories and/or heritage sites or collections.

We are also looking for applications from those representing communities, cultures, groups based in, or groups under-represented in the heritage sector whose physical heritage objects and places are at risk or have been lost. 

Over one day per month (roughly 4 hours) we will cover a range of topics, developed in consultation with local groups, such as:

• Volunteer recruitment and retention 
• Audience development 
• Digital marketing 
• Partnership working and fundraising 
• Access 
• Digital technologies to enhance your collections and stories 
• Safeguarding 
• Evaluation

The sessions will include workshops to explore these skills, ideas and areas in more detail, including applying them specifically to your organisation or project. For example, a session covering the strategies used in audience development, will then lead to a session on creating or developing your own audience development plan. 

The programme is free to access, and those participating will receive:

• A contribution to their costs of attending
• A travel bursary to visit a nationally recognised heritage organisation or project
• A grant to realise an event as part of Heritage Open Days 2025 
• Mentoring sessions from industry professionals, across three sessions, throughout their time on the programme
• Ongoing support from the Bradford 2025 team
• Lunch at each monthly session 

Alongside this, Bradford 2025 will also announce a series of public workshops and talks from well-known historians, academics and writers, both local and international, to illustrate the breadth and depth of what is possible in the heritage sector. Members of the cohort will receive free tickets to these events. 

To apply for the Heritage Skills Programme, as part of Bradford 2025, please fill in the application form below.

The deadline for applications is Monday 28 October, at the end of the day. Selected participants will be informed the following week. 

The application form is short and designed to be simple to fill in. We want to hear about your work, its impact and why a professional development programme would take it to the next level. There are some prompts for each question, and you don’t need to be an experienced or confident writer to fill it in.

If you need help filling in this form, or have any questions please contact [email protected]