Culture And Memory

Building a Sustainable Restoration Trust

Improved resilience for the Restoration Trust (RT), which enables the heritage sector to engage with people who live with mental health challenges and are under-served by heritage. We envisage RT as a resilient and sustainable organisation, strengthened to fulfil its crucial and unique role in the heritage ecosystem. RT has pioneered a methodology connecting varied heritage contexts with participants through partnerships with health and academic organisations. We call this novel approach to improving participants’ wellbeing ‘Culture Therapy’. While the projects have been successful the charity has never been able to raise significant recurrent core funding. Founder Laura Drysdale’s retirement provides a stimulus to take stock and decide on the strategic direction for the charity for the next ten years. We have resources to employ a part-time project manager to sustain our current projects meanwhile. This project seeks to identify our key strategic options and how they will be funded.