Their Past Your Future 2

The Museums Libraries and Archives (MLA) Partnership has launched a second phase to the highly successful Big Lottery funded Their Past Your Future programme. The focus of this second phase has been extended to explore past and present conflict.

The Big Lottery Fund has awarded a further £1,525,000 to the MLA Partnership to manage and deliver the programme which has the following overarching aims:

• Increased knowledge and understanding for young people/younger generations of the diversity of experience of the First and Second World War veterans, military and civilian, and veterans of subsequent conflicts.
  
• Increased knowledge and understanding for young people/younger generations of the impact and contemporary significance and resonance of the First and Second World Wars, and post-1945 conflict, for society today.
  
• Increased and proactive engagement with and participation in, learning, community and/or civic activity to record, publish and make educational use of local, regional, national and international historical sources/archives.

In this second phase of the programme, the MLA Partnership, working with the nine regional agencies including MLA East Midlands, will manage an annual grant programme running each year from 2007-2010, open to all museums, libraries and archives in England. The programme has offered funding for the sector to use their collections to explore innovative and creative ways of increasing community learning and young people’s knowledge and understanding of the impact and contemporary significance of conflict.

The grant programme is currently closed to new applications. The closing dates for subsequent years of the programme can be found on the MLA Council website.