Headley Trust support for HCA

We are delighted that the Headley Trust have agreed to support the Heritage Crafts Association with a grant of £30,000 to pay a part time administrator for 2 years

HCA has come a long way in just 18 months and primarily funded by donations from the committee (totaling over £5000) and more recently by supporters signing up to the friends scheme (now totaling over £1500 thank you). We have been limited in what we have been able to achieve because we all work full time and do HCA work in our limited spare time.

There are many things we could have done but have not had time to. For instance the Heritage Lottery Fund are keen for us to apply to the "Your Heritage" scheme to fund some local craft projects. The craft map is just the start of finding out who is practicing traditional crafts in the UK and helping to support them. We hope that an administrator will help us to expand this project, to create a searchable database which will help folk find craftspeople more easily and link directly to their websites. We wish to work towards commissioning some more detailed quantitative research into the state of traditional crafts in the UK. This has been tremendously successful for the National Heritage Training Group as a way of finding what the position is and accessing funding to deal with the issues highlighted.

It will take a little while for us to draw up a job description, person spec and advertise the post but we hope to attract a talented and committed person who can help us really move HCA on to the next stage of it's development and start to make real differences to working craftspeople.