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Chawton House Library Volunteer Yvette receives runner up for the Ecclesiastical Lifetime Heritage Hero Award.
Last week, the winners of the 2024 Ecclesiastical Heritage Heroes Awards were revealed at Heritage Day 2025. Sponsored by specialist heritage insurer Ecclesiastical Insurance and hosted by The Heritage Alliance, these prestigious awards – now in their 15th year – celebrate the dedication, skill, and passion of volunteers who work tirelessly to safeguard the nation’s history.
Our volunteers are the heart of Chawton House, providing warm welcomes to visitors and information-packed tours, maintaining our beautiful gardens come rain or shine, creating magical Christmas displays, putting on craft sessions and even sometimes donning costumes to bring history to life! Some of the work that they do goes unseen by most, but is still integral to what we do. Our dedicated Library volunteer team undertake the work of caring for our collection, ensuring its accessibility to researchers and the public, and enabling us to tell the stories of our women writers.
In recognition of this important work, we nominated one of our long-serving Library Volunteers, Yvette Carpenter, for the Heritage Alliance’s Heritage Hero Award. Yvette joined Chawton House in 2010, and in her 15 years with us, she has improved the way we manage our collection, undertaken conservation and cleaning, trained staff and volunteers, and helped us with the technical side of putting together exhibitions and displaying works.
We were delighted to hear that she was selected as one of the two runners-up for the Lifetime Heritage Hero Award. Well done, Yvette!
Our congratulations also to the winner, Valerie Bello of B’nai B’rith UK, and Yvette’s fellow runner up, Kathryn Dodington of Canal & River Trust.
You can see the tribute film, produced by The Saltways, showcasing all the nominees and the fantastic work that they do here: