The project’s long-term vision for heritage preservation is the creation of a fully accredited museum of Scottish cinemas, with the Broadway’s heritage collections already extensive and featuring a varied catalogue of original features, equipment, and preserved memories from both the Broadway, and other cinemas across Ayrshire and Scotland. To continue to capture these memories, an extensive oral history project is planned to be developed by an official filmmaker of the project. This project will ensure recollections of the golden age of cinema in Scotland are preserved for future generations. There is currently no public museum to cinema in the country, despite Scotland once having the highest rate of cinema-going in Europe, and Art Deco cinemas remaining an integral part of our cultural and built heritage today.

This funding will support the acquisition of professional museum exhibit displays, including plinths, glass cabinets, and exhibit labels. These items are essential to ensuring that the museum will deliver a safe viewing environment for visitors whilst protecting and preserving the culturally important items in the exhibits, many of which are fragile and require the correct storage conditions. The items that will be purchased will be utilised in the museum project long-term and continue to serve in showcasing the Broadway’s collections for the foreseeable future as the heritage project continues to grow and expand

The money would be used to purchase a laptop for the Hub, enabling us to modernise our operating system onto a digital platform. The Hub has grown hugely in the 4 years we have been in operation and, although very basic systems allowed the project to get off the ground, it is no longer sustainable or finacially effective to be reliant on mobile phones, library computers and photocopiers. Having the ability to administrate the Hub digitally would allow us to communicate with NHS and other referrers securely and consistently, our accounting could be completed in-house to a higher level reducing costs to the CIC on professional fees, and a digital platform would enable us to communicate with service users in a whole new way, which would impact hugely on our interactions, particularly with young people and those in remote areas with transport limitations. We would be able to provide ongoing support and tailored wellbeing plans digitally, work remotely to ensure the service reaches people at times of crisis without delay, improve accuracy and access to information, and generate in-depth reports for funders.  

Reducing the time spent on admin would free up resources for frontline work and would allow us to provide much more resiliance and adaptability in our future work, which is an essential element in the sustainability of such a fast growing grassroots organisation.