FIAT/IFTA World Conference 2025

In 2019 the BFI launched the Young Audiences Content Fund (YACF), a government sponsored lottery fund which was designed to support programming for children and young audiences against a backdrop of declining industry output in this area. The Fund would go on to award over £40m to 221 projects developed for free-to-access platforms, including UK broadcasters, with specific goals including diversity, innovation and representation of the UK’s nations and regions. Though the Fund closed in 2022, it had resounding successes with award winning programmes including Big Boys (2022-2025), Sol (2020) and Milo (2021).

From the outset, the BFI National Archive worked with the YACF to preserve all the completed programmes that were supported by the Fund, lead to a remarkable collection of over 1000 titles. This presentation will explore the significance of this funding initiative and the cultural significance of the collection. We will set out the challenges in developing preservation workflows that aligned with programme delivery from commissioning to broadcast and outline how expectations changed over the course of the Fund. We will also discuss the ways in which the fund and BFI National Archive attempted to embed Equity, Diversity & Inclusion principles into the preservation workflows – with varying degrees of success.

The presentation will conclude with a look at our open source approach to archiving innovative Ultra Access interactive programming for the final series from the fund - Mixmups (2023) - and how this might inform future collecting plans.