Since 2010, the Balkan Museum Network small grants programme, generously supported by the Headley Trust UK, has funded over 100 museum projects across the Balkans and wider region. These projects have brought tactile exhibitions to blind visitors, taken museum collections into care homes and classrooms, trained young people as heritage interpreters, digitised endangered collections, and built bridges between communities and their cultural heritage. Each one was implemented by a museum professional who had an idea and the determination to see it through.
Until now, these projects have lived on our website as individual pages — visible, but not easily comparable or searchable. We are pleased to announce that this is about to change.
The BMN Small Grants Database brings together all funded projects in one searchable, filterable resource. You can search by country, year, lead institution, project theme, target group, output type, and more. Whether you are a museum professional looking for inspiration, a researcher mapping access and inclusion initiatives in the region, a funder seeking evidence of impact, or a heritage practitioner curious about what your colleagues have been doing…the database is built for you!
The projects span a remarkable range of approaches: mobile exhibitions that travel to people who cannot travel to museums, community workshops that use craft as a vehicle for social inclusion, cross-border partnerships that reinterpreted shared histories, and digital tools that opened collections to audiences who had never been able to experience them before.
This is a living resource. We will continue to add new projects as the programme grows, and we welcome feedback from implementers and users alike.
Explore the BMN Small Grants Database here.
