December 2024 Esmée Fairbairn Collections Fund awardees

We’re pleased to announce the final grantees of the Esmée Fairbairn Collections Fund before it becomes the Esmée Fairbairn Communities and Collections Fund. Through the fund we’ve awarded over £14m in nearly 200 grants since 2011.

Here are December 2024’s successful grantees:

Cambridge University Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, £92,000 for “From the Caribbean to Cambridge: Reimagining Pre-Columbian Archaeology Collections Together”, to engage the Caribbean diaspora in the East of England.

Derby Museums Trust, £94,634 for “Coproducing the sustainable future of Derby Museums”, a participatory project using natural history and archaeology collections to create systems for shared decision making with young people on Derby Museums’ sustainable future.

Leeds Museums and Galleries, £99,690 to work with Leeds charity Space2 to connect herbarium collections with the social and historical stories of East Leeds and use a range of creative approaches to help these links come alive for the wider community.

Manchester Art Gallery, £54,527 to work with alternative education providers to co-develop and test new approaches to loaning artworks from the Rutherston Loan Collection.

Milton’s Cottage Trust, £82,183 to explore new approaches to the co-creation of inclusive audio description, bringing together blind and partially blind participants with published poets to respond to the collection of rare and first-edition books by Milton.

Museum of Cambridge, £99,802 to place disabled individuals at the forefront of researching, curating and sharing the histories of disabled people in Cambridgeshire.

Royal Armouries Museum, £100,000 to accelerate the implementation of a participation strategy, embedding inclusive and participatory practice with hard to reach and hardly reached local communities.

South Wales Miners’ Museum, £100,000 to reimagine and revitalise the permanent exhibition space through a participatory process.

Image credit to Leeds Museums and Galleries