TWO months ago Nottingham’s Galleries of Justice won the first £100,000 Gulbenkian Prize for Museums, beating among others the Natural History Museum, for a unique initiative which takes issues of citizenship and the law to Nottinghamshire’s youth.

The museum and its outreach programme was, said judge Joanna Lumley, “astonishing and thrilling and frighteningly good”. Its slogan is “learn about the past, act in the present, change the future”.

It won because part of its mission, as the National Centre for Citizenship and the Law (NCCL), is to use the museum’s subject matter to educate the wilder elements of youth to deflect them from crime and drug abuse; so successful are they that the juvenile court refers offenders to its courses.

But after the celebrations Peter Armstrong, chief executive, said: “It was back to worrying about whether we could pay the electricity bill or not.” Without core funding, the future of the best museum in the country is in doubt and it is contemplating having to break up the teams of experts it has built.

The Galleries of Justice was established a decade ago in the old Shire Hall, the county jail and courthouse near the historic lace market, after the local authority had considered turning it into a bingo hall or a theme pub. However, it had been persuaded by Mich Stevenson, a businessman, to go for a unique museum about law, justice and punishment. The Victorian court was restored and is used for re-enactments of trials, and cells have either been returned to their former bleakness or converted into display spaces.

Everywhere are the historical reminders of some of the inmates who languished here, the often paltry crimes for which they were sentenced, from the photographs and brief, miserable biographies to their graffiti. Actors appear as inmates, jailers, policemen, judges, all part of a programme now branded “Feel the Fear” and devised to appeal to the curiosity of young people and to fit the national curriculum.

The Gulbenkian money will go towards the £900,000 needed to open up an area of the Shire Hall dating from 1833 in which will be created a Victorian street and displays aimed at primary school children.

Five years ago the galleries lurched in a new direction — to use the historical material to create a crime reduction programme. It won designation from the Lord Chancellor’s Department as the NCCL.

Nottinghamshire has the highest truancy rate in the country, and double the national average of teenage pregnancy. Each year 15,000 schoolchildren attend programmes at the galleries, mostly for pure learning experiences involving dressing up in 19th-century costume and role-playing for a couple of hours, including being locked in the cells. But 500 of them are referred to the museum by police, the courts, probation officers or social workers as being at special risk of slipping into crime, or “hard to reach”, as the official designation has them.

These have courses tailored for truancy, burglary, exclusion from school, street crime and so on, in which social workers and police participate. Much of the problem is down to poor self-esteem; one course is simply called “Big Up Yourself”.

One programme is specifically aimed at Clifton, an estate with the highest juvenile crime rate in the region. Called “Recycling Youth”, 12 participants do the intensive six-week course. All have been offenders, and five years on most of those who have been through it have never reoffended; some have returned to full-time education, and one has learnt to read and write and gone on to college.

“Winning the Gulbenkian was a wonderful accolade, but it was the latest recognition of something we already knew, that what we do works,” said Stevenson, now chairman of the museum’s trustees. “Juvenile crime is an enormous national problem but we are the only scheme that is proactive, all the others are reactive, and we have shown that this is a role museums can take on.

“Everybody says we’re doing a fantastic job but no one is prepared to fund us. We are a blueprint for a national programme and we have identified 12 centres where this could be replicated, but no one will take it up.”

The Galleries of Justice is a private charity whose running costs are met by its earnings. Programmes are funded by project, so that when funding runs out there is no continuity and the experience is lost with the staff who are laid off.

“It means we can’t plan properly, and we can’t develop,” said Armstrong. “The Recycling Youth funding is about to finish, and that team will go with the programme.”

Museum and NCCL programmes costs are £1 million a year; core funding of £350,000 a year for a minimum of three years is being sought.

“The problem,” said Armstrong, “has been that local authorities do not have funding to spare — the irony is that they are committed to dealing with truancy, which our course could be preventing — and we don’t fit into any existing category for a central government grant.

“We’re working very hard to keep going but although we will be able to make the new Victorian street feature with the Gulbenkian money, I won’t have revenue funding for it. I don’t know that in five years time I won’t be coming here to find it turned into a wine bar.”