FUNDING worth £415,000 is now available for communities to ‘re-examine’ and tell their historic stories through their local museum.

MonLife, which runs Monmouthshire County Council’s heritage service MonHeritage, has secured two funding awards from the Welsh Government and The National Lottery Heritage Fund.

The award will enable the organisation to work closely with communities in the county over the next two years, to ensure everyone’s stories are told in their local museums.

To support MonHeritage’s collections at Monmouth and Abergavenny Museums, they have been awarded £173,318 by the Welsh Government.

The funding is for the project ‘Researching, re-examining and reclaiming: the heritage and culture of Monmouthshire’s Black, Asian and Ethnic Minority communities’.

This work will contribute to the heritage goals in the Anti-Racist Wales Action Plan.

The award builds on work begun at the two museums and will lead to improved interpretation of the collections, better representing their links to slavery, colonisation and empire and acknowledging Monmouthshire communities’ past role in slavery, empire and globalisation

The National Lottery Heritage Fund has also awarded £241,697 for the project ‘Dynamic Collections – Opening the box’ discovering and sharing Monmouth’s local history collection.

This work will transform how Monmouth’s local history collections are documented, making them relevant to today’s communities. The project will run between April 2023 and March 2025 and tasks will include: Improving computerised catalogue database and commissioning a report on empire, slavery and colonialism artefacts within the local history collection, to complement reports that have recently been produced about museum collections in Abergavenny and Chepstow.

The MonHeritage team will work with diverse community groups to critically examine how and what is recorded about collections, including identifying key terms.

This will include working with Race Council Cymru to support sessions with racially diverse groups; those with a disability and the LGBTQ+ community, and working with people who understand ecology and climate change.

This project will result in a community co-curated touring exhibition that explores the question “What makes Monmouth Monmouth?” For more information about MonHeritage visit https://www.monlife.co.uk/heritage/