Wednesday 4 November

Meet other delegates and our conference supporter companies while relaxing with a tea or coffee.

If you’re a first-time delegate, or haven’t been to conference for a few years, come along to this welcome session to explore the programme. Tamsin Russell, workforce lead at the Museums Association (MA), shares networking hints and tips while MA reps host facilitated table discussions.

Day two is opened by our hosts, four members of the Birmingham Museums Citizens’ Jury. They look forward to the day’s sessions and how they relate to our theme, Museums Connecting Communities.

Maya Hussain, Sean MacGowran, Kevin Saunders and Mark Wilson were among the group of Birmingham residents that were chosen in 2024 to help reshape the city’s museums. This innovative initiative aimed to directly involve local residents in the decision-making process.

The Citizens’ Jury is part of a fundamental transformation of Birmingham Museums Trust into a resilient and financially sustainable organisation with the structure, culture, skilled workforce and audience insights to deliver its ambitious vision.

More details coming soon.

Collections volunteering is one of the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust’s most requested areas, but traditionally the team had limited capacity. In 2025 they worked to change this by creating an exhibition volunteer role that enabled new, collections-informed, public-facing opportunities for volunteers and visitors.

Exhibition volunteer is now the organisation’s fastest-growing role, with 18 volunteers participating and contributing almost 700 hours during 2025. Some individuals have enjoyed being the first point of contact after ticket-booking, developing their skills greeting visitors in a range of languages, while others have helped to take the object handling collection out into the community.

Panel members will share the key learnings of exhibition volunteer recruitment, hearing from two of the volunteers involved.

This session provides practical learning from museums of all sizes that are collaborating with community partners to address what being anti-racist means for their staff, and how this is changing the ways they work, including the impact on collections, displays and programming.

The workshop draws on the learning taken from the Museums Association’s Anti-racist Museums Programme, the Welsh Government’s Anti-racist Action Plan and Race Council Cymru’s mentorship scheme.

The session will share practical skills on how to critically interrogate race and racialisation within a museum context; and approaches taken to leadership and workforce development through mentoring, learning and development.

We also explore whiteness, how institutional racism is often upheld and how this work is increasingly challenged in a polarised political environment. The learning from country-wide initiatives will be shared directly, and the challenges and benefits of working with museums from a community partner perspective.

This session comprises a conversation about the community-led approaches to working with African collections taken by museums in Manchester and Birmingham.

By centring “care” at its heart, the discussion addresses the emotional, cultural and spiritual needs of engagement from the outset, while reflecting on how self-care shapes curatorial practice for curators of Black, African and Caribbean heritage or descent. The session also responds to how institutional policies translate care into the visitor experience.

Speakers also outline the history and context of their respective collections. Both Birmingham Museums Trust and Manchester Museum are running two-year projects, funded by the John Ellerman Foundation, to advance research, development, interpretation and co-production of their Global Majority collections, and African collections specifically.

Key discussion points include:

• Building trust and sustaining community relationships.
• Engagement approaches including film screenings, performance, discussions and volunteering.
• Navigating research methods from ethnographic, archival, to community led.
• The values of co-production, fostering inclusion and platforming marginalised histories.
• Capturing, valuing and preserving community-generated knowledge in collections management systems, equal to curatorial knowledge.

The discussion’s conclusion highlights how this work contributes to the organisations’ respective restitution and repatriation policies and processes.

When The Box opened Beryl Cook: Pride and Joy in January 2026, the team didn’t just mount an exhibition – they gave a city back its artist.

This ambitious retrospective marking Beryl’s centenary was a cross-city celebration reframing Britain’s “best loved artist” through partnerships with KARST and Theatre Royal Plymouth. What followed exceeded expectations: 104,000 visitors, a 50% increase in newsletter subscribers, £102,000 in donations, 500 pieces of coverage, a companion exhibition examining her contemporary impact, and life-size sculptures embraced so warmly that visitors travelled from across the UK.

This session explores how local investment creates national resonance both within and beyond museum walls. The panel examines the strategic decisions behind commissioning four citywide 3D sculptures with TRP, how the team turned Cook’s working-class joy into civic celebration, and what happened when a museum fully embraced its sense of place and community.

Speakers will share data, practical lessons, and the unexpected magic when audiences feel genuinely seen. From postcode analysis revealing extraordinary geographic reach and record merchandise sales, to a donation point that broke every Box record, this is audience development rooted in authenticity, confidence and place.

If you believe place-based storytelling is museums’ future, this session is for you.

Do you have any burning ethical questions you would like to discuss? If so, members of the Museums Association’s Ethics Committee will be available in our 1:1 mentoring surgery.

The Ethics Committee can support your ethical practice by talking through specific situations, acting as a sounding board and offering confidential advice.

Your ethical questions can relate to any area of museum practice, including but not limited to equitable working with communities, freedom of expression, anti-discrimination, sponsorship and disposal.

Check back soon to book a time slot to speak to one of the following members of the Ethics Committee.

Open to all grant recipients of the Health and Wellbeing in Museums Fund and their partners, this collaborative session explores our opportunities for working together, sharing learning and expertise, supporting ourselves and our colleagues, and celebrating the exceptional health and wellbeing work being delivered. If you have been awarded funding in 2025 or 2026, please come along.

A relaxed networking session for disabled, d/Deaf and neurodivergent delegates. Meet other disabled people, discuss your experiences in the industry and learn what opportunities for collaboration are out there.

Hear from AI experts in the museum sector who reflect on how museums can take a responsible and transparent approach to AI use in order to maintain public trust in museums. This session relates to the work of the MA’s AI and Ethics Expert Working Group who will support the development a resource to help guide ethical decision-making on AI in museums.

More details to follow soon.

As the Migration Museum works towards developing a permanent home in the City of London, it is developing a network of Community Curators from rural and urban areas across the UK to create exhibitions rooted in local knowledge and storytelling. Opening in 2028, the museum will share stories of people and communities across the UK, working with institutional partners nationwide to deliver this major project.

From Hastings to Glasgow, and Derry-Londonderry to Newcastle, the programme supports creative outputs reflecting migration histories within local communities, recognising migration as a national story expressed through local contexts.

The team shares its approach to scaling community co-production from a local initiative to a national programme. The session explores partnership development, shared authority and accountability across sites, and how locally produced work can shape a new museum – alongside practical realities such as resourcing, safeguarding, accountability and sustaining meaningful relationships.

Eat the Collection is an innovative culinary approach at Manchester Jewish Museum, where collections inspire our catering offer and bring stories from our archives to life. We use stories as our primary ingredients and explore the tastes, aromas and cultural memories represented by our collections, translating those abstract histories into tangible dishes.

The Eat the Collection workshop will provide participants with a chance to use this inspiration to come up with their own food and collections ideas to create immersive visitor experiences, income generation and community connections.

Participants are invited to choose a museum collection from organisations represented and create their own Eat the Collection experience ideas together.

Each group will present and share their Eat the Collection Big Idea to the workshop audience and share how they will use that idea to attract new audiences and bring communities together.

Journeys with Mai is a partnership project led by the National Portrait Gallery, London, in collaboration with Bradford District Museums & Galleries; The Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge; and The Box Plymouth.

The national tour of Joshua Reynolds’ Portrait of Mai was designed in parallel with a youth-centred, cross-cultural engagement programme, positioning shared interpretation and community voice as core to the project’s purpose.

Across four cities, young people have co-curated displays, led public events, created digital work, and challenged dominant Western narratives. The project has fostered a community of practice between partner organisations and youth participants, strengthening relationships and creating space for knowledge exchange across regions. Crucially, Pasifika artists and cultural advisors have shaped interpretation, ceremony and public programming, ensuring that the project does not speak about Mai without Pasifika voices present.

This session brings together representatives from across the partnership in conversation with the project’s national convenor. Together the panel will examine what shifts when young people move from participants to co-authors, how we can share interpretive power, and what meaningful partnership looks like across institutions.

Rather than presenting a polished case study, this session offers an honest reflection on collaboration, discomfort and the structural changes required for museums to connect meaningfully with communities.

Maryhill Integration Network is a grassroots community organisation established to bring together people in the asylum process, refugees, migrants and members of the “settled” community.

Since 2001, MIN has been developing projects that support positive social change, connecting communities by investing in them and providing welcoming space with opportunities for collaboration and connection.

In 2005, the Museum of Things supported the development of co-production practices at the Hunterian, part of the University of Glasgow, under a broader strategy to shift the power dynamics of museum practice through the building and sharing of social and cultural capital.

Through a process of artistic reclamation, the project delved critically and creatively into the museum’s spaces and objects. The community creators explored themes of history, heritage and personal roots, emphasising storytelling as the key to foster connections between past and present, individual and collective, tradition and innovation.

Bringing diverse community perspectives and lived experience, the group articulated and reshaped how objects are seen and how history is told.

The result was an exhibition that took place throughout the museum, amplifying narratives that resonated with themes of community, existing, belonging and identity.

More details coming soon.

Enjoy a vegetarian/vegan lunch, chat with other delegates and meet our sponsors during this extended lunch break.

Museum attendance has increased in all social groups since the Taking Part Survey began in 2005/06 – but the gap between upper and lower socio-economic group visitation has remained unchanged at 24%.

In 2025, the Research Centre for Museums and Galleries at the University of Leicester received a £1.45m Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) grant over four years to “address the museum attendance and benefit gap”.

The project will clarify the meaning of key terms such as equality and inclusion, and what we already know about “what works” in attracting more representative audiences – providing a workbook for heritage organisations to enable them to address the attendance and benefit gap.

But you don’t have to wait for the workbook – this session offers early lessons in how we might achieve the needed breakthrough in audience development.

Implementing a new visitor management system is rarely just a technical upgrade – it’s a catalyst for organisational and digital transformation.

This session explores how the National Museum of the Royal Navy leveraged its implementation process to break down internal silos and centre the museum’s work on audiences while maintaining business goals.

The museum team shares how it drew internal teams, external agencies and audience insights together to drive an inclusive, accessible strategy. By aligning curatorial, marketing, operations, IT and learning, the museum moved beyond individual departmental requirements to focus on a holistic community journey.

Together, they focused on creating a seamless experience – from the first digital touchpoint to the on-site visit – ensuring the museum is accessible and welcoming to all.

It Only Takes One Seed is a community-led climate project delivered in a partnership between Barnsley Libraries and people-led arts charity Creative Recovery. The project centres the voices of people most affected by climate anxiety – bringing those often pushed to the margins into the heart of the conversation.

Rather than focusing on fear-based narratives, It Only Takes One Seed promotes joyful activism, using creativity and positivity to explore climate issues in ways that feel inclusive and hopeful.

This interactive workshop shares key learning from the project and invites participants to take part in hands-on creative activities. Attendees will create placards of positivity and be guided to write their own short manifesto, exploring how keeping community voice at the centre can strengthen climate engagement.

This session shares how Beamish Museum and community partners and friends from the Gypsy and Traveller communities have built sustainable, trusting relationships and how this work has resulted in huge learning for the museum.

GRT is a label that is often wrongly applied to diverse groups of people with distinct identities and cultures. The team at Beamish discovered this pretty quickly when they started working with representatives from the Gypsy, Traveller and Showmen communities in 2023.

It’s fair to say it’s been a steep learning curve – but one that’s been full of joy, discovery and friendship as part of the museum’s Esmée Fairbairn Communities and Collections Fund project. Working alongside members of the Gypsy, Roma and Traveller communities, the partnership has revisited stored collections to think about how their histories are represented within the museum.

How can museums acknowledge deep pride in place and historic marginalisation without creating exclusion? How do we present contested or emotionally charged histories in ways that build understanding rather than division?

Following a major capital transformation, Cornwall Museum and Art Gallery reimagined how Cornish history is presented, placing it firmly within the context of Cornwall as a recognised national minority with a strong sense of identity, pride and underrepresentation. The challenge was to honour this powerful narrative while ensuring the museum remains welcoming to all.

This session explores the tensions and opportunities that emerged when interpreting identity, migration and belonging in a region shaped by cultural nationalism. Speakers also reflect on the realities of public response, including the challenges museums face when contested histories become sites of polarised debate and amplified public scrutiny.

Drawing on honest reflections from the redevelopment process, the session examines the missteps, breakthroughs and community partnerships that helped reshape gallery narratives, interpretation and collecting priorities. Central to the project was a co-creative approach that worked with diverse Cornish communities to broaden representation and challenge assumptions about who belongs within the story of Cornwall.

Participants will gain practical insight into navigating politically and emotionally charged histories, building trust across communities and balancing place-based identity with inclusive storytelling.

An opportunity to meet Tamsin Russell, the MA’s workforce lead, and hear more about how our professional development programmes can help you.

The Migration Network is a dynamic knowledge-sharing initiative bringing together museums, heritage organisations, academics, charities and migration sector professionals working on migration and intersecting themes.

Anyone connected to or interested in the network are invited to join the Migration Museum for this relaxed networking session for peer-to-peer connection.

Come along to meet delegates from across regions, sectors and institutions to build and strengthen professional relationships, discuss shared challenges and opportunities and explore potential collaborations on future projects or events.

Hear how an exploratory commission to identify queer stories became a powerful and transformative project connecting new LGBTQ+ audiences with Melton Carnegie Museum and wider Culture Leicestershire services.

This project has been a learning curve and a meaningful step forward in how the service engages with marginalised histories.

Hear how the team designed a brief to ensure they partnered with the practitioners who could support real change and connect with new communities.

Welsh Government’s work to support museums in assessing and defining collection significance has culminated in the launch of the Collections Significance Assessment Toolkit and a pilot Cydnabod Scheme, recognising nationally important collections in local museums.

The active involvement of a museum’s communities in the process of defining significance is embedded throughout both and given the same emphasis as input from more traditional experts commenting on artistic worth or historic value. Community expertise is valued and lived experience goes beyond enhancing collections understanding – communities are integral to the decision-making process.

In this practical session, delegates explore how museums can actively involve communities in significant decision-making.
Hear from practitioners on how their work to define the significance of a museum’s collection – be that for developing collecting policies, fundraising or rationalisation – has been a tool for meaningful community engagement.

The Museums Association’s climate justice campaign recognises that we cannot treat climate and ecological crisis as a standalone issue – we need to put forward a systems change approach that focuses on climate and social justice.

To take action on climate justice, museums must consider how it intersects with decolonisation and social justice work, as well as their commitments to diversity, inclusion and being actively anti-racist.

This panel discussion will explore the intersection between climate justice and decolonisation in museums through case studies from two Esmée Fairbairn Communities and Collections Fund projects: Broken Tech: Broken Earth at the Centre for Computing History and Extinction Silences at Bristol Museums.

This session shares the methodology and findings from a pioneering collaboration between Better Health Manchester (BHM), a large inner-city NHS GP practice, and Platt Hall, a Grade II* historic house in development as a neighbourhood centre for creative health.

The partnership comprises a jointly funded health coach role, blending clinical practice with heritage collections and creative practice to improve physical and mental health in a neighbourhood rich in cultural diversity but high in health inequalities.

The session outlines each partner’s motivation to combine creative health and primary care, how this role moves beyond social prescribing into an innovative health coaching model, and the project’s transformative impact to date. Speakers discuss how activating heritage assets in meaningful, community-led ways can secure their long-term sustainability.

The session reflects on the challenges and opportunities of two different organisational cultures and structures working towards shared goals, developing trust, and responding to complex health needs. Speakers will also consider the longer-term future of the role and what a sustainable creative health partnership might look like.

Meet other delegates and our conference supporter companies while relaxing with a tea or coffee.

Born and raised in Nechells, Birmingham, Casey Bailey is an award‑winning writer, performer and educator. He served as Birmingham’s Poet Laureate from 2020 to 2022.

Casey has published multiple poetry collections as well as a cultural history of Birmingham’s grime and hip-hop scene. As a playwright, his work has been staged at a range of theatres. His play Please Do Not Touch, which asks important questions about museum collections, completed a successful national tour this year.

His contributions to the arts and education have earned him numerous accolades, including a Royal Television Society Award in 2022 and an honorary doctorate in education from Birmingham Newman University.

Our closing party takes place at The Exchange, a former bank now run by the University of Birmingham, opposite the conference venue. Say a last goodbye to colleagues under Luke Jerram’s entrancing artwork Helios, a magnified look at our closest star. There will also be a pop-up talk about the art deco banking vaults downstairs.