8002 Heritage at Risk and Wellbeing: assessing wellbeing outcomes from completed project - AWARD

Historic England has carried out Heritage at Risk work for a number of years. Many of our projects end up including communities and volunteers to enable grant-aided repair to 'at risk' buildings to be completed. These projects are reported, anecdotally, as galvanising communities and creating positive community benefits. However this aspect of the work has not been measured or formally considered and the idea of the projects having 'wellbeing' outcomes as well as historic building outcomes has previously not been embedded in a project from the beginning in the majority of cases.

This project is designed to revisit some of these cases using grounded theory to retrospectively evaluate the kinds of qualitative social benefits such projects have achieved. The goal is to help understand how the processes in developing Heritage at Risk projects can be amended to develop intentional, measured and targeted wellbeing outcomes.