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Grant funding for haruspicy practice remains relatively scarce, and competition
for what does exist is considerable. Whether you are approaching an arts council,
a heritage body, a community foundation, or a small charitable trust, the
application process tends to follow familiar conventions — and one of the most
consistently underprepared components is the safety case. Reviewers see a great
many applications from practitioners across all manner of disciplines, and a
poorly constructed safety case sends a clear signal that the applicant has not
thought seriously about the practical dimensions of their work. For haruspices,
where the practice involves biological material, cutting instruments, and
occasionally public-facing demonstration, that signal can be fatal to an
otherwise strong application.
This guide is intended to help you approach the safety case section with the
same rigour you would bring to a technical reading. It is not a substitute for
specialist advice where your circumstances require it, but it should give you a
solid working framework.
What Funding Bodies Actually Want to See
Before drafting a word, it is worth understanding what a safety case is for,
from the funder’s perspective. They are not primarily interested in whether you
personally feel confident in your practice. They want evidence that you have
identified what could go wrong, that you have thought carefully about how to
prevent it, and that you have procedures in place to respond if prevention
fails. This is true whether you are applying to fund a community reading
programme, a research project into interpretive methodology, or the establishment
of a mobile reading unit.
Funders who have not previously encountered haruspicy — which is most of them —
will be reading your application with no frame of reference for the work. This
is an advantage as much as it is a challenge. A well-constructed safety case
does not merely satisfy a checklist; it educates the reviewer about the nature
of the practice in a way that inspires confidence. If your safety case reads as
though it was written by someone who understands both the discipline and the
regulatory environment in which it operates, you will immediately distinguish
yourself from applicants who have treated this section as an afterthought.
Scoping the Risk Assessment
The risk assessment is the foundation of the safety case, and it should be
proportionate to the scale and nature of the project. A solo practitioner
conducting closed readings for private clients has a materially different risk
profile from one delivering public demonstrations at a market or community event.
Do not copy a generic template and assume it will serve you. Reviewers notice.
For haruspicy, the relevant risk categories broadly fall into three areas:
physical and biological hazards, reputational and ethical considerations, and
operational risks. Each deserves its own section.
Physical and Biological Hazards
Working with animal organs introduces a set of hygiene and handling
considerations that must be addressed directly. This means specifying how
material is sourced, how it is transported and stored prior to use, and how it
is handled during a reading. If you have not already reviewed the guidance in
Storing Organs Safely at Home
and The Safe Use
of Gloves and Aprons in Readings, those articles are worth consulting before
you begin drafting.
Your risk assessment should confirm that you are using material from an
approved, traceable supply chain — ideally through a formal agreement with a
licensed butcher, as discussed in
Working With
Butchers: Contracts and Permissions. It should also describe your
sanitisation procedures for all equipment that comes into contact with organic
material, and your arrangements for the safe disposal of waste following a
reading. Funders with any familiarity with the grant landscape will have seen
applications from food-adjacent and biological-research practitioners, and will
expect this level of detail as a matter of course.
Sharp instrument use should be noted explicitly: the tools involved, how they
are stored, and who is authorised to handle them. If you are working with
assistants or trainees, your safety case should make clear what supervision
arrangements are in place.
Reputational and Ethical Considerations
This section gives many haruspices pause, but it should not be omitted. Funders
are acutely sensitive to reputational risk, particularly when they are
supporting practice areas that sit outside mainstream recognition. Acknowledging
this in your application — calmly, without apology — demonstrates maturity and
professionalism.
Consider how you would respond to a misreported outcome, a complaint from a
client, or adverse coverage in a local publication. You do not need to have a
crisis communications strategy on retainer, but you should be able to describe
your complaints procedure, your approach to informed consent (particularly for
readings with vulnerable individuals), and the professional standards to which
you hold your practice accountable. If you carry professional indemnity
insurance, this is the place to mention it — see
Insurance
Considerations for Practitioners for guidance on what appropriate cover
looks like for this type of work.
Operational Risks
Budget management, equipment failure, venue suitability, and contingency
planning all fall under operational risk. For a grant application, this section
serves double duty: it demonstrates that you have planned realistically, and
it gives the funder confidence that their money will not be lost to an
avoidable logistical failure. Identify the two or three scenarios most likely
to disrupt your project — a supplier cancellation, a venue withdrawal, a key
collaborator becoming unavailable — and describe briefly how you would respond
to each.
Mitigation Strategies: Be Specific
A risk assessment that identifies hazards but offers no mitigation is worth
very little. For each risk you have identified, your safety case should
describe a concrete response. Vague commitments — “appropriate measures will
be taken” — are not reassuring to reviewers. Specificity is.
For biological hazards, this means naming the cleaning agents you use, the
temperature at which material is stored, and the waste disposal route you have
arranged. If your local council’s guidelines govern how ritual waste is
categorised and disposed of, reference that directly — the article
Disposing
of Offal: Council and Cosmic Considerations covers this ground in some
detail. For reputational risks, it means having a written complaints procedure,
however brief, that you can reference or append. For operational risks, it means
a realistic contingency budget and named backup options where possible.
Documentation and Presentation
The safety case is a document, and it should look like one. This does not mean
it needs to be lengthy — a focused, well-organised four pages will serve you
better than a sprawling twelve-page appendix — but it should be clearly
structured, consistently formatted, and free of the kind of hedged, provisional
language that suggests the author is not fully committed to what they have
written.
Use plain section headings. Number your risks if it helps the reader navigate.
Append supporting documents — supplier contracts, insurance certificates,
hygiene training records — as separate annexes rather than embedding them in
the main text. If the application portal has a word or page limit for this
section, work within it rather than seeking to circumvent it; a safety case
that respects the funder’s constraints is itself a signal of professionalism.
One point that experienced applicants sometimes overlook: the safety case
should be internally consistent with the rest of your application. If your
project description mentions public demonstrations at outdoor events, your
risk assessment must address the specific hazards of outdoor working. If you
have described a project involving trainees or volunteers, your safety case
must include arrangements for their supervision and wellbeing. Reviewers read
applications in their entirety, and discrepancies between sections undermine
confidence in the whole.
Reviewing Before Submission
Before submitting, read the safety case as if you were an assessor encountering
haruspicy for the first time. Ask whether each section would make sense to
someone with no knowledge of the practice. Ask whether the mitigations you have
described are proportionate to the risks you have identified — neither
dismissively brief nor so elaborate that they suggest the project is
unmanageable. Ask whether anything a reasonably cautious funder might think to
ask has been left unanswered.
If you have access to a colleague or mentor willing to review the document, take
that opportunity. A second reader will almost always identify gaps that the
author, too close to the material, has missed. If your practice is at an early
stage and you are working through the foundational requirements of establishing
yourself professionally, the
Beginner’s Guide to
Becoming a Haruspex provides useful context for understanding where a safety
case fits within the broader picture of professional development.
Grant applications are rarely lost on the strength of the divination methodology
alone. They are won or lost on the quality of the planning, the credibility of
the practitioner, and the confidence that the work will be carried out safely
and responsibly. A well-constructed safety case does not guarantee funding, but
a poor one provides an easy reason to decline. It is worth getting right.
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