The Scottish Government is to provide an additional £500,000 of funding this financial year to help tackle the ongoing cost-of-living challenges facing the museum sector.
Culture Minister Neil Grey confirmed the funding during the launch of Scotland’s Museums and Galleries Strategy 2023-2030 on Thursday.
The cash injection will create a more resilient and sustainable museums sector in Scotland.
Mr Grey said museums make an important contribution to the Scottish economy and communities across the country.
READ MORE: Listeners desert BBC Radio Scotland: audience plummets 20 per cent in just one year
It comes after the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art was forced to close its Modern 2 building in Edinburgh due to challenges with rising running costs.
Mr Gray said: “Scotland has a diverse and impressive wealth of heritage and culture, and this is amply represented in everything our excellent museums offer – to the people of Scotland and to the many visitors we welcome every year.
“Given the current cost-of-living challenges, and the tough financial situation that we are in, we have to prioritise activity to creating a more resilient and sustainable sector.
“The Scottish Government continues to recognise the important contribution that the museum sector can and will deliver to our communities, and to our national priorities including the economy, our journey to net zero, and our health and wellbeing.
“The increased funding for resilience will assist the sector to be more sustainable and ensure it is better able to address these priorities.”
Lucy Casot, chief executive of Museums Galleries Scotland, said: “We warmly welcome the announcement of additional funding for our sector from the Scottish Government.
“We had a huge response to our resilience fund and we are very pleased that this funding will enable us to support more museums and galleries to manage ongoing cost-of-living challenges and to undertake energy efficiency projects.”
Why are you making commenting on The Herald only available to subscribers?
It should have been a safe space for informed debate, somewhere for readers to discuss issues around the biggest stories of the day, but all too often the below the line comments on most websites have become bogged down by off-topic discussions and abuse.
heraldscotland.com is tackling this problem by allowing only subscribers to comment.
We are doing this to improve the experience for our loyal readers and we believe it will reduce the ability of trolls and troublemakers, who occasionally find their way onto our site, to abuse our journalists and readers. We also hope it will help the comments section fulfil its promise as a part of Scotland's conversation with itself.
We are lucky at The Herald. We are read by an informed, educated readership who can add their knowledge and insights to our stories.
That is invaluable.
We are making the subscriber-only change to support our valued readers, who tell us they don't want the site cluttered up with irrelevant comments, untruths and abuse.
In the past, the journalist’s job was to collect and distribute information to the audience. Technology means that readers can shape a discussion. We look forward to hearing from you on heraldscotland.com
Comments & Moderation
Readers’ comments: You are personally liable for the content of any comments you upload to this website, so please act responsibly. We do not pre-moderate or monitor readers’ comments appearing on our websites, but we do post-moderate in response to complaints we receive or otherwise when a potential problem comes to our attention. You can make a complaint by using the ‘report this post’ link . We may then apply our discretion under the user terms to amend or delete comments.
Post moderation is undertaken full-time 9am-6pm on weekdays, and on a part-time basis outwith those hours.
Read the rules here