Historic Environment Scotland: The Historic Environment and Community Wealth Building

Apply for this SGSAH-funded internship with Historic Environment Scotland, up to 12 weeks FTE, between January & October 2025.

The project is titled The Historic Environment and Community Wealth Building and will involve producing a report that outlines good practice in heritage-led community wealth building and contains recommendations on how HES could measure heritage-led CWB work in the future.

Deadline for Applications is 15th November 2024.

Location

This will be a fully remote internship, but with occasional opportunities for in-person meetings and the potential for one or two short fieldwork visits.

Project

The project is titled "The Historic Environment and Community Wealth Building". 

Community wealth building (CWB) is a growing focus for the Scottish Government, and a Community Wealth Building Bill will be placed before the Scottish Parliament in its next term.

The Bill will seek to address economic and wealth inequality by supporting the retention of more wealth in local and regional economies. At Historic Environment Scotland (HES) we are actively seeking to embed CWB principles across both our own work and that of the wider historic environment sector. In particular, the national strategy for Scotland’s historic environment – Our Past, Our Future – contains a number of CWB-related outcomes. However, we have gaps in our evidence base for the sector’s contribution to CWB, particularly at local levels, and would like to use an internship to help us fill some of these.

We have two potential projects falling under the CWB theme, and the successful applicant could choose their preferred one:

• How does the historic environment influence local procurement and employment practices? What opportunities exist to better embed community wealth building into heritage conservation efforts?

• How does the historic environment currently feature in Scotland’s community empowerment landscape? What kinds of historic assets are owned by communities, how are they being used by communities, and what opportunities and challenges exist for broadening either the types of owners, or the types of assets in community ownership?

Outputs

We want the researcher to produce a short report on their chosen topic, accompanied by a series of case studies to illustrate how the themes work in practice. The report would outline good practice in heritage-led community wealth building and contain recommendations on how we could measure heritage-led CWB work in the future.

Timescale

Application Deadline: 15th November 2024

Start date (or must start by): Flexible

End date (or must end by): Flexible

Project can be worked full time, part time or flexibly in blocks

Benefits to the Researcher

The intern will benefit from the project by actively helping to understand and shape delivery of a national strategy, and by learning to apply their research skills within an applied situation. They will gain insight into the work of both HES and the wider historic environment sector, gain knowledge of a priority theme for the current Scottish Government, and gain contacts across the heritage sector.

Key Relationships

The researcher will work within the Strategy and Policy team at HES, and work principally with the team co-ordinating delivery of the national strategy. They will also work with HES colleagues working in economic and community development, skills development, grant funding, and planning and consents. There should also be opportunities to build relationships with local authorities, economic development agencies, sector support bodies, and local heritage organisations.

Person Specification

Apply here

Return to the Internships & Artists Residencies 2025 page to see other internship opportunities.

First published: 4 October 2024