The National Holocaust Centre and Museum has been awarded £75,000 as part of the Government’s £1.57 billion Culture Recovery Fund (CRF) to help face the challenges of the coronavirus pandemic and to ensure it has a sustainable future, the Culture Secretary has announced today.

The National Holocaust Centre and Museum is one of 1,385 cultural and creative organisations across the country receiving urgently needed support. £257 million of investment has been announced this week as part of the very first round of the Culture Recovery Fund grants programme being administered by Arts Council England. Further rounds of funding in the cultural and heritage sector are due to be announced over the coming weeks.

The National Holocaust Centre and Museum has been welcoming visitors for 25 years. Before the pandemic, up to 800 school children every week benefitted from impactful learning programmes, featuring our family of inspirational Holocaust survivors and run by our team of professional educators both at our museum in Laxton, Nottinghamshire and in schools.

This grant will ensure the Centre can continue to run and to enhance its ‘phygital’ operating model,  offering an agile mix of livestreaming and offline programmes that meets the needs of schools, whatever their Social Distancing requirements in any given week.

As such it will still always be possible for school children and adults to meet a Holocaust survivor and learn from their remarkable experiences — either through our livestreaming platforms or via The Forever Project which enables a detailed question & answer session with the digital projection of a survivor.

In a further pandemic innovation, we have also made our award-winning immersive museum exhibition The Journey available as a richly interactive story app. It features first person navigation in 360-degree online environments, for home and classroom based learning. The Journey app is a high-quality teaching resource that allows primary school children to step into the life of Leo a young German Jewish boy living in 1930s Nazi Berlin. They learn from this highly interactive refugee story experience not only about the past but about relatable events today. 

In essence this grant will help NHCM to both sustain its physical visitor offering and at the same time, transform its audience reach, impact and frequency online.

Culture Secretary Oliver Dowden said:

“This funding is a vital boost for the theatres, music venues, museums and cultural organisations that form the soul of our nation. It will protect these special places, save jobs and help the culture sector’s recovery. 

“These places and projects are cultural beacons the length and breadth of the country. This unprecedented investment in the arts is proof this government is here for culture, with further support to come in the days and weeks ahead so that the culture sector can bounce back strongly.”

Chair, Arts Council England, Sir Nicholas Serota, said:

“Theatres, museums, galleries, dance companies and music venues bring joy to people and life to our cities, towns and villages. This life-changing funding will save thousands of cultural spaces loved by local communities and international audiences. Further funding is still to be announced and we are working hard to support our sector during these challenging times.”

CEO, The National Holocaust Centre and Museum, Marc Cave said:

“In the first week of lockdown, we introduced a ‘Pandemic 1.0’ online-only operating model. With our museum reopening in July, we evolved to Pandemic 1.1, mixing high-quality livestreaming with physical museum visitation. ACE’s grant not only adds a measure of financial security but will help us create an exciting 2.0 visitor proposition which enhances the experience so much that it will helps us to claw back the traditional daily visitor income we have lost to Covid. We are grateful to ACE for its foresight and its empathy with our creative aspirations and commercial needs”.

ENDS

Notes to editors:

Arts Council England is the national development agency for creativity and culture. We have set out our strategic vision in Let’s Create that by 2030 we want England to be a country in which the creativity of each of us is valued and given the chance to flourish and where everyone of us has access to a remarkable range of high quality cultural experiences. We invest public money from Government and The National Lottery to help support the sector and to deliver this vision. www.artscouncil.org.uk

 Following the Covid-19 crisis, the Arts Council developed a £160 million Emergency Response Package, with nearly 90% coming from the National Lottery, for organisations and individuals needing support. We are also one of several bodies administering the Government’s Culture Recovery Fund and unprecedented support package of £1.57 billion for the culture and heritage sector. Find out more at www.artscouncil.org.uk/covid19

The National Holocaust Centre and Museum (holocaust.org.uk) was founded by the Smith family in 1995. We communicate the memory of the Holocaust for a contemporary purpose: to inspire young people to become Upstanders against ‘othering’ and hate. We were awarded National Portfolio Organisation status by Arts Council England in 2018. Our museum collection houses the testimonies and artefacts of Holocaust survivors which, combined with two permanent exhibitions and a series of temporary exhibitions, form the core of structured learning programmes for Primary and Secondary schools. Our two flagship learning experiences are The Journey, exploring the life of Leo, a 10-year old German Jewish boy in Nazi Berlin and who is rescued on the Kindertransport; and The Forever Project, a revolutionary interactive conversational experience with Holocaust survivors, even when they are no longer alive. Both are multi-platform experiences available on-site, online and in schools outreach.