Health and Wellbeing in Museums Fund

The Museums Association, funded by the Julia Rausing Trust, is providing a programme of grant-making, networking and learning dissemination for health and wellbeing programmes in museums. Grants will enable the development and continuation of groundbreaking health and wellbeing programmes in UK museums during a time of financial crisis and increasing demand for services.

Meet the 2025 grantees

The first round of grants was awarded in September 2025, with nine museums given funding to develop and continue their programmes. 

• Find out more about the 2025 grantees
• Reflections and lessons learned from round one (pdf)

The next round of the Health and Wellbeing in Museums Fund is now closed to new enquiries. Around 30 organisations will be invited to apply from the enquiries we have received.

We’ll make around 10 grants of £50,000 to £75,000. 

Throughout the application process, we have been working to provide support particularly to museums in Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales, recognising that although applications from all four UK nations were shortlisted in 2025, the final list of nine awards are all in England.

Over the lifetime of this fund, we aim to support a balanced cohort of museums in terms of national representation, size and type of museum and a range of audiences participating in programmes. The MA will provide opportunities to learn more about the fund in all of the UK nations and is offering support to all applicants to help them shape and develop their application.

We expect to announce the 2026 grantees in October.

Purpose and process 

The fund is designed to enable museums to build on their existing leading health and wellbeing work. This means you should have: 

• A proven track record for the work you are doing 
• A strategic commitment to health and wellbeing at your museum 
• A clear idea of how you would like to develop your work 

We can fund a “next stage” of work you have undertaken, but you should be able to tell us the need for the work, how you will improve or extend your impact, and what legacy you hope to build with the funding.

We acknowledge that making a grant application takes precious time and resources, even when we try to keep our application forms as simple as possible. Therefore we have designed an application process (below) to ensure we only invite applications from those who have real potential to be funded. There are three stages to this process: 

1. Potential applicants must complete a short online eligibility quiz.
2. Those who successfully complete this will be able to book in a conversation with our team to talk through your idea. During this conversation we will guide and assess your idea further.
3. Those who meet all of our essential criteria and excel in at least one of our criteria for success will be invited to complete the application form.

Key dates 

• 12 January 2026: application process opens. Interested museums should complete the application quiz to check eligibility before getting in touch with us via the link provided at the end of the quiz.
• 20 May 2026: support call deadline and final invitations to apply sent. The final submission deadline will be shared with invited applicants and will provide adequate time to complete an application.
• Late September 2026: applicants advised of the outcome.
• 2-5 November 2026: first meeting of successful grantees takes place at the Museums Association’s annual conference at Birmingham Repertory Theatre, Birmingham. Bursaries are available to cover a conference place and provide limited travel and accommodation expenses. You should ensure that someone from your organisation is able to attend in person unless an access need means that you need to attend virtually.

Lead image: Euan Baker courtesy of the Amelia Scott, one of the grantees of the fund’s first round