The ARA Archive Volunteering Award is now accepting nominations for the 2026 award
The ARA Archive Volunteering Award is a great opportunity to acknowledge the work of volunteers and to thank them for their continued support. It also helps to highlight and celebrate best practice around volunteering in the record-keeping sector. Winners have a national platform to celebrate their volunteers’ contribution to the service and gain publicity for their archive’s role in supporting individuals and community through volunteering programmes. Our publicity around the winning project helps to spread the word to a wider audience of why archives matter and how they can successfully interact with their local communities, benefitting both the archive itself and the people it serves.
The award is also supported by The UK National Archives, the Welsh Government’s Museums, Arts, Archives and Libraries Division, and the Scottish Council on Archives.
What are we looking for?
Volunteering activity with an institutional archive service that has taken place in 2024/25 – it could be a one-off project or something that is ongoing across that period. The award is open to archive services operating in the UK (and UK overseas territories) and Ireland.
We want to know about:
How the activity has impacted the volunteers - For example, the organisation can demonstrate good employer support of the volunteer or that it has supported volunteers in gaining entry into workplace or further training, or that volunteers with particular needs have been accommodated, or that volunteers have gained some kind of wellbeing benefit from their volunteering (eg combatting loneliness, helping with mental health etc)
How the activity has had an impact on the service - For example, the project/programme has encouraged diversification of volunteers within organisation, or that the organisation can demonstrate that it has robust plans for sustaining and developing its work with volunteers, or that the project/programme has had a benefit in understanding collections in the archive from a new perspective, or allowed them to be brought to light and shared with a wider audience
Any wider impacts of the project or programme - For example, that the input of volunteers has had an impact on local or other communities, or the organisation can demonstrate how it has been able to share the learning from its volunteering activity with others (enabling it to act as a role model). Or the project itself has led to discoveries that have impacted the local community or have national or international impacts.
Evaluation of the project – and this should include some feedback from the volunteers involved in the project
The award welcomes projects which demonstrate how archives have supported volunteers through the past year and have adapted projects to suit their circumstances whether remotely or in new ways of working together.
The 2025 Award was awarded to Lancashire Archives for their project “Keeping East Lancashire in the Picture”. You can read about this project and other winning projects here.
You can also see Case Studies about the projects that were nominated for the 2025 award and this will give an idea of the wide range of projects that we considered for last year’s awards – this was a particularly strong year for nominations and many of the projects could have won the award!
How to enter
You can read more about the awards process here and this information is also available in Welsh here.
Or go straight to making your nomination using the relevant form (below in either English or Welsh) to put forward your project - to be emailed to volunteeringaward@archives.org.uk by 27th March 2026
Nominations for the award are judged by a panel drawn from the supporting organisations and with representation from the nations that ARA serves. Any comments submitted by the panel that may be useful feedback to the nominating organisations are provided to them in confidence.
Material submitted for the nomination (ie the nomination form and any images) is used to create case studies which are publicised via ARA’s various communication channels.
Timetable:
Nominations open 4 February 2026
Nominations close 27 March 2026
Panel considers nominations April – early May 2026
Nominees informed of outcome Early May 2026
Public announcement 1st week of June 2026 (Volunteers Week)
Any questions?
If you have any queries about the award please contact Deborah Mason, Volunteering Awards Administrator, (01823 327077) or via volunteeringaward@archives.org.uk
Thumbnail image by Ray Sangga Kusuma via Unsplash