William Grant Foundation

📢 Opportunity for a Scottish textile designer/textile artist: Bernat Klein Fellowships 2025 Bernat Klein (1922-2014) was a Serbian-born textile designer, artist, and writer who emigrated to Scotland and established a successful textile design and manufacturing business in the Scottish Borders. His 1960s couture fabrics were bought by the leading London and Paris fashion houses such as Chanel and Dior. Klein’s work also gained significant recognition in Scandinavia and this new initiative will see two Fellowships awarded to established textile designers / textile artists based in Scotland and in Sweden. The Fellowships are fully-funded and include residencies, the opportunity for supported research including access to the national Bernat Klein archive collections in Scotland, and the support required for the development of new work. We're pleased to be supporting this exchange, along with the Swedish Embassy, building on our established interest in Klein's legacy as a source of inspiration for today's artists, designers and manufacturers. Details and guidance on applying are on the Cove Park website. https://lnkd.in/e8NY_DPj

🥃 Did you know that Scotland's newest operational distillery is community-owned? Huge congratulations on reaching this milestone to everyone at The Cabrach Trust, for whom The Cabrach Distillery is the keystone social enterprise in their wider plans for regenerating their rural community on the Aberdeenshire/Moray border. The distillery will create employment, a visitor attraction, a brand and - once the whisky that started flowing from the beautiful copper stills last week has had a chance to mature - profits for reinvestment in the community. Having been an early supporter of the masterplan for the site, which is transforming an historic farm steading, our latest grant - approved just last month - is helping with the development work on the adjacent heritage centre and visitor facilities. #WhiskyWithPurpose

'Preserving, researching and showcasing aspects of Scotland's heritage, especially those most at risk of being lost or overlooked' - one of our aims under our Scottish Culture and Heritage strand. And there are few more overlooked in Scotland's history than the thousands of poor Glaswegians buried in unmarked common graves in the Necropolis, the city's famous 'city of the dead', whose resting place is overshadowed by the grand monuments of the wealthy. We're supporting arts charity Aproxima, whose Glasgow Requiem project, is creating a living wildflower memorial for these forgotten folk whilst celebrating the diversity of today's Glasgow residents, including those newly arrived in search of safety and a new beginning. "We just wanted to celebrate people's right to be visible." This short film documents this creative commemoration/celebration.

📢 Invitation to tender: Year ten review   Did you know that the William Grant Foundation is in its tenth year of grant-making?   Since 2015, we’ve awarded over £30 million to a range of good causes in Scotland and also globally through the employee-led giving schemes at William Grant & Sons.   We’re now looking for a consultant to support us in a review looking back on our first decade and ahead to the next one.   This isn’t a review of our programme areas – we’ll continue supporting a wide range of work that helps people, places and communities to thrive, building on our current areas of focus. Instead, we want to reflect on our overall approach and ways of working to ensure the Foundation is fulfilling the purposes for which it was established and to ensure we are as effective as we can be.   Our usual grant-making activity will continue uninterrupted.   We’re looking for a consultant or consultancy organisation with knowledge of UK grant-making and civil society – ideally with insight into the third sector in Scotland – and experience of working with family trusts or foundations around strategy, governance and operational design.   ⬇ You can download the invitation to tender document from our website. https://lnkd.in/eEFFB7Du   📅 The deadline for proposals is Monday 11 November.   🗣 Please do share this with any relevant contacts in your networks.

🌍 How can funders use their influence to respond to a changing climate? We've been working with Creative Carbon Scotland as we try to apply a 'climate and nature lens' to all our work, not just our environmental grant-making. Starting with our Scottish Culture and Heritage strand, but moving on to consider all our themes, we're asking 'what should we be doing differently as a funder that reflects how the many causes we give to - and the organisations we fund and partner with - can respond to the changes we're experiencing in our climate and natural world?' In a blog on their website, Creative Carbon Scotland's Director, Ben Twist, and our CEO, Nick Addington, share some reflections from our work together. (This was one of a series of 'stories' published by Creative Carbon Scotland during Climate Week - read them all on their website: https://lnkd.in/eGd6dmV5) https://lnkd.in/eAB68VYU

🏛 Enabling community-led regeneration across Scotland. 🙌 Great to read this positive evaluation of The Architectural Heritage Fund (AHF)'s work in Scotland, which recognises its role as a catalyst for enabling community-led projects to develop their plans. Demand for support with community-led heritage regeneration here is high compared to other parts of the UK: Scotland, with just 8% of the UK population, was responsible for around 27% of all applications to the AHF in the last five years! We're pleased to help it meet some of that demand by providing funds it can award to projects that might otherwise not get supported - including for non-listed buildings that are nonetheless valued by their communities. A couple of stats that stood out for us in this report: Around one-third (35%) of projects are on the Buildings at Risk Register and just over two-thirds (68%) are in areas of deprivation (30% most deprived on Scottish Index of Multiple Deprivation). Another thing that really comes through in the report is how approachable, supportive and expert are AHF's "small but mighty" team here in Scotland. That's certainly our impression and we're grateful to them for helping our funding get to where it can make the biggest difference.

🌆 Which horizon are you looking to? Looking up and ahead is important if we want to contribute to big change. Our latest blog explains how we’re thinking about our role as a funder in the present and the future and one model that's helping us do that. #Funding #ThreeHorizons #Blog https://lnkd.in/eNsCHHiK

🔎 We've recently published details of the grants we awarded in the first six months of 2024. You'll find the list on 360Giving's GrantNav website, where you can also explore over a million grants made by nearly 300 funders. We publish full details of our grants in this way, using 360Giving's #OpenData standard, so that data about our grants can be easily shared, analysed and compared with other funders’. See our latest grants here: https://t.co/jjBmaRLdjz

📖 Congratulations to Shetland-based writer, Sally Huband, whose first book, Sea Bean: A Beachcomber’s Search for a Magical Charm, has been awarded this year's Highland Book Prize (for books published in 2023). Presented by the Highland Society of London and facilitated by Moniack Mhor, Scotland’s Creative Writing Centre, with support from the William Grant Foundation for public engagement, this annual award celebrates the finest published work that is created in or about the Highlands and Islands of Scotland. The prize aims to recognise the literary talent of the region, and the rich and diverse work inspired by its culture, heritage, and landscape. About the book: On the storm-tossed beaches of the Shetland archipelago, Sally Huband is searching. A message in a bottle, a mermaid’s purse, a lobster trap tag, each find connects her more deeply with our oceans. But it is Sally’s quest for a fabled sea bean that unlocks the myths of these islands and carries her through chronic illness towards a new and more resilient self. Sally Huband said of the news, “I'm deeply grateful for this award. It will give me the impetus to keep writing about disability, a subject that has yet to receive the space that it deserves in the literary world." Our support for the Highland Book Prize relates to our aim to support a thriving and inclusive cultural sector in Scotland. Read more about our interests in relation to Scottish culture and heritage on our website: https://lnkd.in/eEYC6fyW https://lnkd.in/e5bfZHX9

👍 👎 Why feedback matters to us. We regularly ask the organisations we fund and engage with to let us know how they find the experience of working with us. This helps us identify opportunities to improve, especially around our grant-making processes and relationships. In our latest blog, Partnerships and Learning Manager Elaine Gibb explains how we've recently reviewed our feedback system and shares what we've learned and what we'll be doing differently in future. https://lnkd.in/eUnkxwYu