Past Grants
In 2009 The Pilgrim Trust awarded a total of 99 grants amounting to over £2 million.
2009 Geographic Split of Grants
Full list of grants
To view the full list of grants awarded in each year, please click on the relevant links.
Recent Grants
The Belfast Buildings Preservation Trust
Grant awarded: £10,000
The Belfast Buildings Preservation Trust (BBPT) is a cross-community organisation dedicated to the re-use of historic city buildings for which no viable or commercial use can be found. The Trust was founded in 1996 following arson attacks on two of Belfast’s most important historic buildings and it has since gone on to win several awards. In addition to the work required to preserve the historic buildings, the Trust felt it was important to engage communities in the regeneration of the buildings and in the preservation of its architectural heritage.
Research carried out by the Trust indicated that the local communities strongly desired the retention and regeneration of historic buildings that were local character landmarks. The Pilgrim Trust funded the post of a Community Engagement & Outreach Officer. The purpose of the job was to establish the role that heritage could play in regeneration and to act as an advocate to government and business on the benefits of heritage-led regeneration. In funding this post, the Pilgrim Trust enabled BBPT to add to the number of its active regeneration projects and to continue the work of engaging at a community level as well as helping to ensure that the civic efforts of the Trust were not lost.
The Jewish Museum
Grant awarded: £15,000
An outstanding item of British Jewish heritage known as the ‘Lindo Lamp’ had been on loan to the Jewish Museum since the museum opened in the 1930′s however in 2009 the owners decided they wished to sell it, and there was a real possibility that it could be lost to the museum and removed from the public sphere. The Lamp was commissioned from silversmith John Ruslen in 1709, on the marriage of Elias Lindo, whose father, Isaac, arrived in England in 1670, fleeing the Spanish Inquisition and is the earliest known English Hanukah lamp.
The Pilgrim Trust supported the acquisition and helped ensure that the lamp could remain on public display where it can now be seen in the newly developed gallery, Judaism: A Living Faith, housing the museum’s collection of Jewish ceremonial art.
The Paddocks Riding for All
Grant awarded: £20,600
The Paddocks-Riding for All based in Canterbury, Kent was established in 2001 to offer free daily educational activities and training focused on horse riding for people who might usually be excluded from such activities.
Project Learn aimed to engage with substance users and introduce them to practical and formal education in equine studies. The subjects offered to participants included horse riding, animal husbandry as well as access to numeracy and literacy classes taught by tutors from Canterbury College and the equine training was delivered by qualified internal staff. The charity also sought to interest students in a broad range of NVQ courses available via Train2Gain. At the end of the course many of those taking part had not only had gained qualifications but a significant proportion of them had chosen to continue to attend the centre as volunteers passing on their new skills and experience to other students.
The Pilgrim Trust was impressed with the combination of innovation and a structured training programme provided by this small local charity.
The Prisoners’ Advice Service
Grant awarded: £30,000
The Prisoners’ Advice Service (PAS) was founded in May 1991 to provide advice and information on a range of issues to prisoners in England and Wales. The PAS does not receive any statutory funding and works independently as the only national free legal advice charity.
Recognising the importance of this work, the Pilgrim Trust agreed to support the salary costs of a Women Prisoners’ Caseworker to provide the service by phone, letter and at outreach surgeries to prisoners in England and Wales regarding their legal rights, particularly concerning the application of the Prison Rules and the conditions of their imprisonment. The caseworker is available to address the areas of concern faced by women prisoners and is able to make them aware of their rights, to ensure fair treatment for women prisoners under the law and Prison Rules.
The Wallace Collection
Grant awarded: £15,000
The Wallace Collection contains one of the finest collections of fine and decorative arts in the world and the greatest single bequest of art ever left to the British nation. The collection also contains one of the most important collections of medieval and Renaissance arms and armour.
The armour collection is part of the Sikh heritage trail in the UK and contains, among many other things, the gold sword of Maharaja Ranjit Singh, the ‘Lion of the Punjab’ founder of the first Sikh dynasty to control the entire Punjab. The Pilgrim Trust agreed to support a project to establish a firm documented understanding of this part of the Collection. This research will ultimately be published in the form of a complete catalogue and will set a new standard for worldwide scholarship in this field.
The Wallace Collection will transform the display of these objects, providing reliable and detailed information to everyone, making it available not just in print but also online. The first three years of the project will be devoted to research, followed by completion of the text and execution of the substantial, comprehensive photography project.
Older Grants
Foundation Friends of the Royal Botanic Gardens Kew
Grant Awarded: £15,000
Marianne North was an English naturalist and painter born in 1830 who travelled the world painting its flora. The Marianne North Gallery opened in Kew Gardens in 1882 and remains one of a few galleries designed and built by the artist to house their own work. Marianne North herself took charge of the hanging of the paintings over 800 botanical paintings that were displayed there. Sadly the gallery and the paintings had both suffered over the years and a programmed of restoration was planned for the building and The Pilgrim Trust was approached to assist with the cost of funding the conservation of the paintings. The majority of the paintings in were in a reasonable condition considering their age but they had been backed onto boards which had deteriorated with age and were by now highly acidic. The unusual wall-to-ceiling framing system invented by Marianne North to display her works worsened the problem as paintings in direct contact with the walls had soaked up moisture that had seeped through the brickwork.
All of the paintings were surface cleaned and re-backed onto new conservation grade boards, after all remnants of the adhesive had been removed from the backs. The gallery is now fully restored, the paintings have been re hung and it is open to the public.
Edinburgh World Heritage
Grant awarded: £15,000
Standing on Calton Hill, an extinct volcano to the east of Edinburgh’s New Town, is the Grade A listed Nelson Monument. The monument was erected in commemoration of the death of Admiral Lord Nelson in 1805. It replaced an existing mast on Calton Hill with a stone signal-tower, tall enough to be seen by the shipping in Leith docks. A time ball was installed in 1852 atop the monument, a visible signal to enable captains to set their chronometers accurately. When in operation, the time-ball drops on weekdays, at 12pm in winter and 1pm in summer, coinciding with the firing of Edinburgh Castle’s one o’clock gun.
Today the monument is at risk and the time-ball mechanism no longer works. Edinburgh World Heritage, whose primary purpose is the management, protection, enhancement and promotion of the World Heritage Site made up from the Old and New Towns of Edinburgh, approached The Pilgrim Trust to help fund the restoration work required to stop the monument deteriorating further. Trustees felt that taking action was prudent as it would save considerable expenditure in the future.
The Crosland Foundation – Ryedale Folk Museum
Grant awarded: £60,000
The Ryedale Folk Museum consists of 13 historic buildings that reflect different aspects of rural life, from an Iron Age roundhouse and settlement to a sixteenth-century manor house. The Museum records the daily life of North Yorkshire people from the earliest inhabitants to the mid-twentieth century.
In 2008 the Museum received a significant bequest from local residents, collectors Edward and Richard Harrison. The Harrison Collection, described as having ‘national significance’, consists of more than 10,000 items and has been valued in excess of £1m. From an early age the brothers collected an eclectic range of objects of importance to both social and domestic history. Some of them date from the Medieval period and many are unique. The collection is un-catalogued and details of some of the objects are sketchy. The Pilgrim Trust has funded a curator’s post to help uncover further information about the objects and to catalogue the collection.
Prisoners’ Education Trust
Grant awarded: £15,000
The aim of the Prisoners’ Education Trust (PET) is to provide learning opportunities for offenders in custody. PET fulfils this aim primarily through the provision of distance learning courses that are run in prisons across England and Wales. ‘Stretch’ is a project that has been developed to provide vocational education for over two-hundred female prisoners in 2009/2010. As part of the package, an ‘information service’ will also be available to candidates to help them choose a course that would best suit their employment or self-employment ambitions.
PET believes that women show the commitment that distance learning requires. Women account for around 5% of the total prison population but significantly make up nearly 10% of all the applications the Trust receives and once on a course, the percentage of women completing the distance learning is high. The Trust hopes to tackle the cycle of re-offending by addressing the problem of low educational attainment among female prisoners. Women who leave prison with few, if any, qualifications have difficulty finding jobs and are more likely to re-offend. The Pilgrim Trust believes that this is a project that is worthy of support as it will benefit not only the women who take the course but their families and wider community.
A record in watercolour paintings, funded by The Pilgrim Trust nearly 70 years ago, of Britain as she was at the start of World War II. For more information about the ‘Recording Britain’ project, click here
To see the images of the watercolour paintings, put the words ‘Recording Britain’ into the search facility on the link below:
http://collections.vam.ac.uk/indexplus/
(Picture credit: House on the Square, King’s Lynn 1942, Barbara Jones)
