Past Grants
In 2008 The Pilgrim Trust awarded a total of 89 grants amounting to nearly £2 million.
2008 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
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.
Older Grants
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)
