Community wellbeing

The MA is a campaigning organisation with a long history of supporting everyone who works in and with museums. 

Our broad campaign areas focus on supporting our members and the sector to deliver change centred around social and climate justice, community engagement and inclusion.

Our workforce campaigns focus on inclusive and diverse museums with an emphasis on fair working conditions and workforce wellbeing. Our Museums Change Lives and learning and engagement campaigns focus on museums working with communities, placing them at the heart of what we do.

This wellbeing campaign acknowledges the relationship between these campaign areas, and the fact that to do good work in all areas of museum practice we need a healthy workforce with positive wellbeing. This is even more critical in those roles working with communities that have been marginalised or underrepresented, or have experienced trauma.

Campaign aims

• We will work with museums to raise awareness and showcase good practice so that they can put in place programmes and support for their workforce and for the communities they serve
• We will work to improve wellbeing within the workforce through advice, support and programmes
• We will work with museums to actively support community wellbeing

About community wellbeing

Since 2013, our Museum Change Lives campaign has encouraged and highlighted how museums of all sizes and collections can make a positive impact on people and communities.

We know that museums can enhance our health and wellbeing, create better places to live and work, and inspire engagement, debate, and reflection. We also know that museums best support their communities when the wellbeing of our staff is prioritised. 

You can find more information, guidance and resources relating to our commitment to workforce wellbeing in our workforce campaign area.

Our future work and support for the sector has been informed by sector-wide research, which provided rich data for discussion, reflection and recommendations.

Next steps 

This is a dynamic area of work and we will be building and developing resources and programmes to support the sector and deliver the campaign aims.

We are interested in examples of commitment and impact and want to create a bank of case studies to showcase best practice. If you want to add your case studies, please email info@museumsassociation.org with the subject line “wellbeing case study”. 

We are always interested in hearing how we can help or support you and the sector: please email info@museumsassociation.org with the subject line “wellbeing campaign” to share your thoughts.