Investing in social impact
The Esmée Fairbairn Collections Fund supports projects that involve communities and have a real impact on their lives. Rob Sharp reports
The impetus for the two-year Encountering the Unexpected project led by the University of Leicester – in which museum collections about the natural world are used to give older people a stake in contemporary British life – was the country’s ageing population. Nearly a fifth of people in the UK are more than 64 years old, and this group of people can make a valuable contribution to the country’s cultural and social wellbeing.
“Rather than celebrating people living longer and healthier lives, the dominant deficit model of ageing teaches us to fear getting old rather than seeing the valuable contribution older people make,” says Jocelyn Dodd, the director of the Research Centre for Museums and Galleries at the University of Leicester.
The project saw partner museums develop workshops and one-off events to engage older people through local community groups and housing associations. The initiative was made possible by the Esmée Fairbairn Collections Fund (EFCF), which is run by the Museums Association (MA) and supports collections development projects that achieve social impact. Dozens of schemes have been supported since the fund was set up in 2011. And between 2017 and 2019 it is expected to offer a total of £3.5m in grants.
The most recent funding round in November 2017 included £110,530 for Cardiff Story to ensure the museum’s collection is reflective of the city’s cultural diversity, and £96,197 for Cornwall Museums Partnership for a project that will involve a training programme for community volunteers to form a Cornish National Collection.
Dodd says the fund enabled her project to be innovative and experimental in a way that is normally not possible.
“The nature of the funding fitted with the research we wanted to do,” she says. “It allowed us to be honest about the challenges, and the opportunities, that we encountered.”
The breadth of the projects funded and explored in this article demonstrates the collections fund’s strength – from Pontypridd Museum’s plan to put the public at the heart of the collections assessment process, to initiatives at Derby Museums and Tyne & Wear Archives & Museums that engage with issues around gender inequality and diversity. Gawthorpe Textiles Collection is undertaking groundbreaking work on stories related to its founder, Rachel Kay-Shuttleworth, while Museums Sheffield is exploring the city’s rich history of protest.
“The fund is primarily about sharing what is amazing in museum collections, which makes the projects we support distinctive and engaging for participants,” says Sally Colvin, the programmes manager at the MA. “The best of our projects find themes in collections that resonate with communities and audiences. Collections are a great way in to socially engaged practice for venues, and EFCF projects support how they develop in the long term.”
Colvin adds that the fund is flexible and provides a network of support to maximise the impact of programmes.
Doncaster Heritage Services successfully bid for £78,850 in the funding round in June 2017. The money will enable the service to build skills and raise aspirations in Doncaster’s ex-mining communities using Doncaster Museums’ mining collections to inspire intergenerational collaboration and encourage community cohesion.
“The funding is going to be transformative for the service,” says Jude Holland, the project manager for Doncaster 1914-18. “The Esmée Fairbairn Collections Fund will help us to get an understanding of the rich nature of the collections, transform the museum’s displays, and make our approach to the collection more people-focused.
“It will also help achieve an impact in parts of the community that might not otherwise engage with the collection. The areas we are focusing on are in the highest 10% of the index of national deprivation.”
Doncaster Heritage Services recently became an Arts Council England National Portfolio Organisation, so the collections funding was a catalyst for how this approach could be embedded more widely across the organisation.
As more museums undertake collections work to add social value, it’s important that they can demonstrate this, and consider the most ethical ways to undertake an evaluation. The MA has developed a toolkit to help museums think about how to measure the social impact of project work, especially using short-term projects to work towards long-term aims.
“We have had some great projects come through that are doing socially impactful work, especially with museum collections,” says Sarah Briggs, the collections development officer at the MA. “We wanted to produce an outcome that we could share with the sector, with tips and techniques that museums could use to show the social value of their collections work.”
The MA hopes that the toolkit, which was published online last month on the organisation’s website, will encourage more museums to submit high-quality applications.
“We want to see the best possible grant applications and projects,” Briggs says. “Even small museums will be able to do some planning that looks to long-term outcomes.”
Derby Museums, Derbyshire
In 2016, Derby Museums secured £77,637 from the EFCF to work with black, Asian and minority ethnic communities to explore how to create a more inclusive museum relevant to peoples’ lives.
“Derby Museums has a World Cultures collection of 1,400 objects, but they were all in the museum stores,” says Andrea Hadley-Johnson, the co-production and engagement manager of the museums. “It felt wrong that one swathe of the collection was nestled in boxes hidden from view.”
Hadley-Johnson also says the museum’s audience did not reflect the diverse range of people living in the city. The aim is to change this through the process of creating a new project space and gallery.
“We explored how we might use the World Cultures collection to connect with people. We thought bringing items out of storage and working with people who don’t visit the museum would help us understand what they would like to think, feel and do in the gallery that we wanted to develop.”
She adds that it felt uncomfortable to target individuals only on the basis of their cultural background, so the team decided to connect with as many people as possible by showing museum objects in unexpected places. Money from the EFCF was used to employ a part-time team to take objects to locations such as cafes, a barbershop and a boxing gym, and the hashtag #objectwalks was used to promote the scheme.
The issue was, unlike with previous co-production projects, how to involve people who did not visit the gallery.
“It’s been brilliant to start dialogues and nurture relationships with new people,” Hadley-Johnson says. “I am not under any preconception that everyone we speak to will become a museum visitor, but we have seen people come through the doors and into the project space as a result of that.”
“It has been a lovely and interesting way of connecting with local people and learning from them, and great to challenge our assumptions too,” she continues. “It’s a different dynamic to taking a handling pack out or going to a community organisation. It is about literally rocking up somewhere with an object.”
Pontypridd Museum, Rhondda Cynon Taf
This museum won £56,131 in 2016 for its Whose History is it Anyway? project, in which community members were trained to assess collections for disposal, along with basic collections care and documentation.
“It was apparent that some aspects of collections care had fallen by the wayside,” says Morwenna Lewis, the curator at Pontypridd Museum. “Coming from a collections background, I felt it was important to get our house in order.”
Lewis says that when she arrived at the museum three years ago, its displays had been static for 25 years and she wanted an innovative way of looking through the collections and making decisions about their future. “We wanted to go through the collections, make an assessment on their significance and roll out some part of that process to public consultation. For the most part it’s a museum committee that makes a decision on the disposal of items, but we wanted to give the decision to the public instead.”
The museum’s aim is to represent the 10 wards of Pontypridd in its collection and future redisplays. An initial aim was for residents of each ward to identify 200 objects from the collections that were specific to their area, but a lack of documentation on the items has made this difficult. Instead, following a year of object processing and assessment, community consultation sessions are being undertaken in year two to identify common themes for future shows.
Members of the public have been trained to assess the significance of items. This has provoked discussion among volunteers, who have come to understand the value of keeping a collection dynamic and relevant through responsible disposal. The project is also pressing ahead with consultations on themes that local residents would like to see represented in the museum.
“That will feed into how we prioritise our collection and how it colours our collections assessment as well,” says Lewis. “We are spending more of the budget on bigger one-off events instead of running lots of little ones.”
Tyne & Wear Archives & Museums, Newcastle upon Tyne
In June 2017, Tyne & Wear Archives & Museums (Twam) Development Trust secured a £117,732 EFCF grant for a project to create a women’s collection and festival exploring issues such as gender inequality.
“We have always been interested in the collections fund and in recent years it has had more of an emphasis on the social work that museums do, which is something that Twam prides itself on, so we thought it would make a good fit,” says Lindy Gilliland, the collections, research and curatorial manager at Twam.
The stimulus for the project was the centenary of the Representation of the People Act, an important milestone in the women’s suffrage campaign that granted the vote to women over the age of 30 who met a property qualification. The museum wanted to use this as a hook to work on gender issues with women’s groups.
“We have done a lot of work with people from different communities, such as disability groups, and looked at representing disability more in our collections,” adds Gilliland. “We have covered LGBT in smaller projects, but can’t afford to do more with large numbers of participants without external funding. However, that gives us an opportunity to extend our reach in the future.”
The purpose of the project is to invite Tyneside women to identify objects with which they connect, with the aim of co-curating a new physical and digital collection, as well as a festival based on their view of Tyneside women 100 years on from the act being introduced. The women involved are documenting their experiences linked to objects from the museum’s social history, art and craft collections.
“We have often told the stories of world-changing men’s achievements,” Gilliland says. “These have all been interpreted by male curators, so we wanted to look at women’s achievements and experiences, and how they have been overlooked in history and art.”
Gawthorpe Textiles Collection, Lancashire
The internationally renowned textiles collection secured £92,540 to research, share and reinterpret the museum’s collection, which was inspired by the beliefs of its founder, Rachel Kay-Shuttleworth (1886-1967).
“The collection was used as a learning resource,” says Charlotte Steels, the director of the Gawthorpe Textiles Collection. “Kay-Shuttleworth kept detailed notes and information about the samples she was collecting, but over the years these sources had come adrift. So part of the rationale behind our project was to try to unite the sources of information that had been collected about the objects and undertake research on the founder and the items to provide a detailed picture about the collection and stories behind the objects.”
The museum is working to capture all of Kay-Shuttleworth’s research and aims to make this available in exhibitions and events, and the collections database. The institution is entering the final year of the three-year project, with work so far including researching and uniting available information, and updating collection records.
“One thing we have been doing is whenever we come across a name we do a bit of research about that person so that we build a wealth of information about Kay-Shuttleworth and her links with London society,” Steels says. “We are hoping all the stories we discover will inform not just future exhibitions and displays, but also talks, and groups that come to see the collection. Everything we are discussing will inform our practice.”
Museums Sheffield, Yorkshire
In 2015, the EFCF granted Museums Sheffield £83,530 to research and share collections and ideas relating to protest and activism in the city. Although Sheffield has a rich history of protest, including the miners’ and steelworkers’ strikes of the 1980s, this is not reflected in the museum’s collections.
“We had nothing about the steel strike and little that related to the miners’ strike even though those protests have affected the city,” says Louisa Briggs, the curator of the project.
The two-year programme’s aim was to connect with groups and individuals across Sheffield to find stories and objects to comprehensively reflect the history of protest in the city, as well as discover which stories people wanted to see in the collection.
“Last spring, we held something called the Protest Lab, where we had a few objects related to protests on display, but essentially invited people to tell us about the causes that were important to them and the items they thought we should be collecting, to help inform two exhibitions that we opened in February,” Briggs says.
One exhibition, Changing Lives: 200 Years of People and Protest in Sheffield (until 1 July), explores examples of protest in the city ranging from the radical press of the 19th century to causes championed in the city today. The other, Hope is Strong at the Millennium Gallery (until 10 June), explores the power of art to question the world we live in.
“We had a phenomenal response,” Briggs says. “We didn’t know how people would respond because it wasn’t something we’d done before. We asked people to write on the walls of the Protest Lab, fill out a timeline and create stickers with a protest logo that we could put on the walls.”
As well as informing the museum’s curatorial practice, the endeavour also brought new objects into the collection, including a collecting bucket used in the miners’ strikes.
Rob Sharp is a freelance journalist
The grants available from the Esmée Fairbairn Collections Fund (EFCF), which is managed by the Museums Association, are provided by the Esmée Fairbairn Foundation. The organisation was set up in 1961 by the British financier Ian Fairbairn. He endowed a charitable foundation with the bulk of his holdings in M&G Investments, the asset management and investment company he had joined 30 years before.
Fairbairn pioneered the unit trust (a form of collective investment constituted under a trust deed) and believed that investments in equities should be available to everyone so that there was a wider ownership of stakes in the country’s economy.
The foundation – named after Fairbairn’s second wife, Esmée, who was killed in 1944 by a V1 flying bomb in a second world war air raid – is one of the largest independent grant-makers in the UK and follows Fairbairn’s original aims.
He established the foundation in the interests of wider prosperity – to promote a greater understanding of economic and financial issues through education.
Today, the foundation has a £45m social investments allocation for organisations, with the aim of creating social impact. In 2016, grants of £42.4m were awarded to projects involving the arts, children and young people, the environment and social change.
EFCF started in 2011 and 90 projects have so far received grants totalling £6.7m in 14 funding rounds. Between 2017 and 2019 it is offering £3.5m in grants, as well as providing events and resources for the museum sector.
“Rather than celebrating people living longer and healthier lives, the dominant deficit model of ageing teaches us to fear getting old rather than seeing the valuable contribution older people make,” says Jocelyn Dodd, the director of the Research Centre for Museums and Galleries at the University of Leicester.
The project saw partner museums develop workshops and one-off events to engage older people through local community groups and housing associations. The initiative was made possible by the Esmée Fairbairn Collections Fund (EFCF), which is run by the Museums Association (MA) and supports collections development projects that achieve social impact. Dozens of schemes have been supported since the fund was set up in 2011. And between 2017 and 2019 it is expected to offer a total of £3.5m in grants.
The most recent funding round in November 2017 included £110,530 for Cardiff Story to ensure the museum’s collection is reflective of the city’s cultural diversity, and £96,197 for Cornwall Museums Partnership for a project that will involve a training programme for community volunteers to form a Cornish National Collection.
Dodd says the fund enabled her project to be innovative and experimental in a way that is normally not possible.
“The nature of the funding fitted with the research we wanted to do,” she says. “It allowed us to be honest about the challenges, and the opportunities, that we encountered.”
The breadth of the projects funded and explored in this article demonstrates the collections fund’s strength – from Pontypridd Museum’s plan to put the public at the heart of the collections assessment process, to initiatives at Derby Museums and Tyne & Wear Archives & Museums that engage with issues around gender inequality and diversity. Gawthorpe Textiles Collection is undertaking groundbreaking work on stories related to its founder, Rachel Kay-Shuttleworth, while Museums Sheffield is exploring the city’s rich history of protest.
“The fund is primarily about sharing what is amazing in museum collections, which makes the projects we support distinctive and engaging for participants,” says Sally Colvin, the programmes manager at the MA. “The best of our projects find themes in collections that resonate with communities and audiences. Collections are a great way in to socially engaged practice for venues, and EFCF projects support how they develop in the long term.”
Colvin adds that the fund is flexible and provides a network of support to maximise the impact of programmes.
Doncaster Heritage Services successfully bid for £78,850 in the funding round in June 2017. The money will enable the service to build skills and raise aspirations in Doncaster’s ex-mining communities using Doncaster Museums’ mining collections to inspire intergenerational collaboration and encourage community cohesion.
“The funding is going to be transformative for the service,” says Jude Holland, the project manager for Doncaster 1914-18. “The Esmée Fairbairn Collections Fund will help us to get an understanding of the rich nature of the collections, transform the museum’s displays, and make our approach to the collection more people-focused.
“It will also help achieve an impact in parts of the community that might not otherwise engage with the collection. The areas we are focusing on are in the highest 10% of the index of national deprivation.”
Doncaster Heritage Services recently became an Arts Council England National Portfolio Organisation, so the collections funding was a catalyst for how this approach could be embedded more widely across the organisation.
As more museums undertake collections work to add social value, it’s important that they can demonstrate this, and consider the most ethical ways to undertake an evaluation. The MA has developed a toolkit to help museums think about how to measure the social impact of project work, especially using short-term projects to work towards long-term aims.
“We have had some great projects come through that are doing socially impactful work, especially with museum collections,” says Sarah Briggs, the collections development officer at the MA. “We wanted to produce an outcome that we could share with the sector, with tips and techniques that museums could use to show the social value of their collections work.”
The MA hopes that the toolkit, which was published online last month on the organisation’s website, will encourage more museums to submit high-quality applications.
“We want to see the best possible grant applications and projects,” Briggs says. “Even small museums will be able to do some planning that looks to long-term outcomes.”
Derby Museums, Derbyshire
In 2016, Derby Museums secured £77,637 from the EFCF to work with black, Asian and minority ethnic communities to explore how to create a more inclusive museum relevant to peoples’ lives.
“Derby Museums has a World Cultures collection of 1,400 objects, but they were all in the museum stores,” says Andrea Hadley-Johnson, the co-production and engagement manager of the museums. “It felt wrong that one swathe of the collection was nestled in boxes hidden from view.”
Hadley-Johnson also says the museum’s audience did not reflect the diverse range of people living in the city. The aim is to change this through the process of creating a new project space and gallery.
“We explored how we might use the World Cultures collection to connect with people. We thought bringing items out of storage and working with people who don’t visit the museum would help us understand what they would like to think, feel and do in the gallery that we wanted to develop.”
She adds that it felt uncomfortable to target individuals only on the basis of their cultural background, so the team decided to connect with as many people as possible by showing museum objects in unexpected places. Money from the EFCF was used to employ a part-time team to take objects to locations such as cafes, a barbershop and a boxing gym, and the hashtag #objectwalks was used to promote the scheme.
The issue was, unlike with previous co-production projects, how to involve people who did not visit the gallery.
“It’s been brilliant to start dialogues and nurture relationships with new people,” Hadley-Johnson says. “I am not under any preconception that everyone we speak to will become a museum visitor, but we have seen people come through the doors and into the project space as a result of that.”
“It has been a lovely and interesting way of connecting with local people and learning from them, and great to challenge our assumptions too,” she continues. “It’s a different dynamic to taking a handling pack out or going to a community organisation. It is about literally rocking up somewhere with an object.”
Pontypridd Museum, Rhondda Cynon Taf
This museum won £56,131 in 2016 for its Whose History is it Anyway? project, in which community members were trained to assess collections for disposal, along with basic collections care and documentation.
“It was apparent that some aspects of collections care had fallen by the wayside,” says Morwenna Lewis, the curator at Pontypridd Museum. “Coming from a collections background, I felt it was important to get our house in order.”
Lewis says that when she arrived at the museum three years ago, its displays had been static for 25 years and she wanted an innovative way of looking through the collections and making decisions about their future. “We wanted to go through the collections, make an assessment on their significance and roll out some part of that process to public consultation. For the most part it’s a museum committee that makes a decision on the disposal of items, but we wanted to give the decision to the public instead.”
The museum’s aim is to represent the 10 wards of Pontypridd in its collection and future redisplays. An initial aim was for residents of each ward to identify 200 objects from the collections that were specific to their area, but a lack of documentation on the items has made this difficult. Instead, following a year of object processing and assessment, community consultation sessions are being undertaken in year two to identify common themes for future shows.
Members of the public have been trained to assess the significance of items. This has provoked discussion among volunteers, who have come to understand the value of keeping a collection dynamic and relevant through responsible disposal. The project is also pressing ahead with consultations on themes that local residents would like to see represented in the museum.
“That will feed into how we prioritise our collection and how it colours our collections assessment as well,” says Lewis. “We are spending more of the budget on bigger one-off events instead of running lots of little ones.”
Tyne & Wear Archives & Museums, Newcastle upon Tyne
In June 2017, Tyne & Wear Archives & Museums (Twam) Development Trust secured a £117,732 EFCF grant for a project to create a women’s collection and festival exploring issues such as gender inequality.
“We have always been interested in the collections fund and in recent years it has had more of an emphasis on the social work that museums do, which is something that Twam prides itself on, so we thought it would make a good fit,” says Lindy Gilliland, the collections, research and curatorial manager at Twam.
The stimulus for the project was the centenary of the Representation of the People Act, an important milestone in the women’s suffrage campaign that granted the vote to women over the age of 30 who met a property qualification. The museum wanted to use this as a hook to work on gender issues with women’s groups.
“We have done a lot of work with people from different communities, such as disability groups, and looked at representing disability more in our collections,” adds Gilliland. “We have covered LGBT in smaller projects, but can’t afford to do more with large numbers of participants without external funding. However, that gives us an opportunity to extend our reach in the future.”
The purpose of the project is to invite Tyneside women to identify objects with which they connect, with the aim of co-curating a new physical and digital collection, as well as a festival based on their view of Tyneside women 100 years on from the act being introduced. The women involved are documenting their experiences linked to objects from the museum’s social history, art and craft collections.
“We have often told the stories of world-changing men’s achievements,” Gilliland says. “These have all been interpreted by male curators, so we wanted to look at women’s achievements and experiences, and how they have been overlooked in history and art.”
Gawthorpe Textiles Collection, Lancashire
The internationally renowned textiles collection secured £92,540 to research, share and reinterpret the museum’s collection, which was inspired by the beliefs of its founder, Rachel Kay-Shuttleworth (1886-1967).
“The collection was used as a learning resource,” says Charlotte Steels, the director of the Gawthorpe Textiles Collection. “Kay-Shuttleworth kept detailed notes and information about the samples she was collecting, but over the years these sources had come adrift. So part of the rationale behind our project was to try to unite the sources of information that had been collected about the objects and undertake research on the founder and the items to provide a detailed picture about the collection and stories behind the objects.”
The museum is working to capture all of Kay-Shuttleworth’s research and aims to make this available in exhibitions and events, and the collections database. The institution is entering the final year of the three-year project, with work so far including researching and uniting available information, and updating collection records.
“One thing we have been doing is whenever we come across a name we do a bit of research about that person so that we build a wealth of information about Kay-Shuttleworth and her links with London society,” Steels says. “We are hoping all the stories we discover will inform not just future exhibitions and displays, but also talks, and groups that come to see the collection. Everything we are discussing will inform our practice.”
Museums Sheffield, Yorkshire
In 2015, the EFCF granted Museums Sheffield £83,530 to research and share collections and ideas relating to protest and activism in the city. Although Sheffield has a rich history of protest, including the miners’ and steelworkers’ strikes of the 1980s, this is not reflected in the museum’s collections.
“We had nothing about the steel strike and little that related to the miners’ strike even though those protests have affected the city,” says Louisa Briggs, the curator of the project.
The two-year programme’s aim was to connect with groups and individuals across Sheffield to find stories and objects to comprehensively reflect the history of protest in the city, as well as discover which stories people wanted to see in the collection.
“Last spring, we held something called the Protest Lab, where we had a few objects related to protests on display, but essentially invited people to tell us about the causes that were important to them and the items they thought we should be collecting, to help inform two exhibitions that we opened in February,” Briggs says.
One exhibition, Changing Lives: 200 Years of People and Protest in Sheffield (until 1 July), explores examples of protest in the city ranging from the radical press of the 19th century to causes championed in the city today. The other, Hope is Strong at the Millennium Gallery (until 10 June), explores the power of art to question the world we live in.
“We had a phenomenal response,” Briggs says. “We didn’t know how people would respond because it wasn’t something we’d done before. We asked people to write on the walls of the Protest Lab, fill out a timeline and create stickers with a protest logo that we could put on the walls.”
As well as informing the museum’s curatorial practice, the endeavour also brought new objects into the collection, including a collecting bucket used in the miners’ strikes.
Rob Sharp is a freelance journalist
Esmée Fairbairn Foundation: Backing Change
The Esmée Fairbairn Collections Fund awards nearly £1.2m a year in grants to museums. The next application deadline is 12 September. The grants available from the Esmée Fairbairn Collections Fund (EFCF), which is managed by the Museums Association, are provided by the Esmée Fairbairn Foundation. The organisation was set up in 1961 by the British financier Ian Fairbairn. He endowed a charitable foundation with the bulk of his holdings in M&G Investments, the asset management and investment company he had joined 30 years before.
Fairbairn pioneered the unit trust (a form of collective investment constituted under a trust deed) and believed that investments in equities should be available to everyone so that there was a wider ownership of stakes in the country’s economy.
The foundation – named after Fairbairn’s second wife, Esmée, who was killed in 1944 by a V1 flying bomb in a second world war air raid – is one of the largest independent grant-makers in the UK and follows Fairbairn’s original aims.
He established the foundation in the interests of wider prosperity – to promote a greater understanding of economic and financial issues through education.
Today, the foundation has a £45m social investments allocation for organisations, with the aim of creating social impact. In 2016, grants of £42.4m were awarded to projects involving the arts, children and young people, the environment and social change.
EFCF started in 2011 and 90 projects have so far received grants totalling £6.7m in 14 funding rounds. Between 2017 and 2019 it is offering £3.5m in grants, as well as providing events and resources for the museum sector.