27th October 2021

Success with yet another national award

We're very excited to tell you that our group has won yet another national award for our work, when the Community Archives and Heritage Group (CAHG) today announced the winners of its annual Awards for Excellence 2021.

CAHG is part of the Archives and Records Association (UK & Ireland), and its awards are highly competitive, receiving nominations from across Britain and Ireland.

We won the ‘Community Engagement’ category. The judges noted the wide range of activities that we employ to reach a wide audience. They also commented on how well we continued to maintain our community links through lockdown.

Susan Major and Anne Houson with our award

Anne Houson, Chair, said “We’re absolutely thrilled to receive another national award for our work. We share our stories with a mixture of traditional activity, exploring archives and using oral history, but adding new techniques, such as smartphone apps and Zoom talks. Following our publicity and engagement efforts, by the end of last year we doubled our membership from around 50 to over 100 in 2021.”

Susan Major, group volunteer said “During last year and this year we’ve used a variety of ways to keep engaged with our local audiences in the face of the pandemic, and to encourage new people to join in with our local history work. We moved our talks to Zoom, but at the same time we enlisted the help of our local York Press to run features about our researches, for those not online.

We adopted a pub, the Trafalgar Bay on Nunnery Lane, to be our ‘local history hub’ for our shops and pubs research, making good use of their beer garden.

Our series of books about the history of local shops has proved tremendously popular, attracting new people to our group work.

We’re very active online with our website and social media and we also created a series of smartphone audio-guided history walks for individuals and families to follow, as well as continuing to work with schools.”

Our history group has won two other national awards. In 2018 we won the CAHG Digital Award and in the following year, 2019, we were Highly Commended by the CILIP Alan Ball Local History Awards for our digital work.