An award-winning Scottish marine conservation and education charity has been awarded almost £250,000 to increase the resilience and sustainability of its operations for people and nature.
The Scottish Seabird Centre, based in East Lothian, said it was "thrilled" to receive the grant of £249,685 from The National Lottery Heritage Fund.
The funding has been awarded to improve the overall sustainability of the charity’s operations, develop partnerships with business and to better steward and grow its membership base.
The grant supports the appointment of three new members to the charity’s core team - Florence Gygax who joins as the Corporate Partnership Development Manager, Jasper Rea as the Sustainability and Assets Officer and Carrie Bevan who moves into the Membership Development Officer role. All the posts are supported for an 18-month period.
The new project team will work together to increase audience diversity and promote greater inclusion through the charity’s award-winning visitor attraction and programme of events and activities and create additional capacity to engage more effectively in partnership development projects to improve nature and the connections people have with nature; especially with businesses and communities.
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The overall sustainability of the charity’s operations will also be improved with new renewable energy installations.
The Scottish Seabird Centre is supported by an award-winning visitor attraction, which contains a wide variety of story boards, digital interactives, virtual reality and remotely operated cameras that enable people to experience and learn about the spectacular wildlife of Scotland’s marine environment.
The charity was established with support from the Millennium Commission and will celebrate it’s 25th birthday in 2025. It is now looking to the future, building on the legacy of their first 25 years, to allow it to continue to inspire and educate people about the Scotland’s internationally important seabirds, marine life and habitats.
Caroline Clark, The National Lottery Heritage Fund Director for Scotland, said: “We would like to extend a warm welcome to Florence, Carrie and Jasper as they join, and strengthen, the team at the Scottish Seabird Centre.
“Last year we launched our new 10-year strategy - Heritage 2033. Included in the key priorities of Heritage 2033 are protecting the environment; inclusion, access and participation; and organisational sustainability. Those are all goals shared by the Scottish Seabird Centre with this project.”
Susan Davies, CEO of the Scottish Seabird Centre, said: “We are delighted to have received this significant support thanks to National Lottery players. The project will help our Charity to continue to support the restoration of nature and to offer more people opportunities to learn about and take action for nature. It also enables us to take further steps to invest in and improve the overall sustainability of our visitor attraction”.
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