The Lipman-Miliband Trust - Applications for funding

The Lipman-Miliband Trust is still open for applications for the current round ending on 31 May. We understand that you may not be able to predict when you may be able to run the project or do the work that you are proposing but please don’t let that stop you applying – we will still make awards and you can spend the money when it becomes possible to do so. Our usual limit is £2000, and we don’t normally allow payments for salaries. However, you can apply for up to £2500 during the current round and the extra £500 can be used for supporting project/staff workers should you have them.

History

In 1974, socialist businessman Michael Lipman established The Lipman Trust, a progressive charity whose mission was to help support the practice and dissemination of socialist education and research, an area routinely discriminated against by other charities or official sources.

The Trust’s first director was socialist intellectual and leading architect of the New Left, Professor Ralph Miliband, who chaired the Trust until his death in 1994. Miliband’s international reputation as an innovatory Marxist scholar, enhanced through his involvement with The Socialist Register, which he co-founded with socialist historian John Saville in 1964, brought the Trust’s open and generous approach to the attention of thousands of potential fund seekers. In June 1995, Miliband’s work for the Trust and his lifelong commitment to socialism were posthumously acknowledged when the Trustees renamed the Trust, the ‘Lipman-Miliband Trust’.

In the same year, the Ralph Miliband Memorial Appeal was launched to raise more financial resources for the Trust. The response was overwhelming and enabled us in 1997 to award a one-off prize of £3000 in honour of John Saville’s outstanding contribution to social, economic and diplomatic history. The John Saville Award was granted to Dr Janaki Nair of the Madras Institute of Development Studies, for a documentary film on the community work and culure in the Kolar Gold fields of South India. In 1998, we went one step further with our special Social Justice Award of £6000 for a piece of accessible research or policy work that contributed towards the development of socialist alternatives in public policy; won by Melissa Benn, Robin Blackburn, Joan Smith and John Pierson.

Today, the Trust continues to play a vital role as one of the very few charities able to respond to the needs of those engaged in socialist education. We encourage new work within this broad field, taking into consideration new areas of cultural and political work in institutions of learning but also in community organisations and among NGOs. It is both a sign of hope and a cause for dismay that the call on the Trust’s funds has always outstripped its limited resources.

Mission

The Trust has the following aims:

• To promote research into the history, theory and practice of socialism and other allied fields of study;
• To support cultural projects associated with socialist education and research;
• To support research and education associated with progressive causes involving community activity and social movements;
• To enable the wider dissemination of such research and cultural activity through publication or the procuring of publication by means of books, pamphlets, reports, films, lectures, conferences, exhibitions and all other suitable media.