Social work
As work on the Museum of East Anglian Life's capital project continues, its director, Tony Butler, tells Simon Stephens why progress at the organisation has been about much more than just bricks and mortar
Shortly after Tony Butler arrived at the Museum of East Anglian Life (Meal) as its new director he sat in his living room and wondered what he’d let himself in for.
“The museum was known for being in really bad shape,” Butler says. “We had more horses than computers at the time, there was no infrastructure and the money did not stack up.”
Butler says the museum, which was created in the late 1960s, had been seen as quite cutting edge but had been declining for some time. Before his arrival in 2004, its funding partners had been threatening to pull the plug unless the museum reviewed its governance arrangements and appointed a new director.
Butler joined after working in museums for nearly ten years, but Meal was his first director’s job. He says it quickly became clear that he needed to get the business on a firmer footing, address some collections issue and take better control of the organisation’s assets.
The completion of a £3m capital development project in March 2012 will be tangible evidence of how he has turned the museum’s fortunes around. But many of his achievements have not been about bricks and mortar at all; they have been related to investing in people.
“ I have always been influenced by asset-based community development, which is used in the rural development sector, where you try and understand your assets in a broader sense,” says Butler. “So it’s not just the buildings and collections, but also the social networks that are built up within your organisation.”
What this means in practice is the development of programmes that encourage the broadest possible participation by the community. This has led to the creation of a range of projects, such as a work-based learning programme for long-term unemployed people.
Butler says that his work has been inspired by people such as Iain Tuckett, who runs Coin Street Community Builders, a social enterprise that started 20 years when local residents attempted to turn a bleak area on London’s South Bank into a better place to live. Meal is a social enterprise itself, which means that its social purpose is central to what it does.
“We have all these assets – there are 80 acres here, 16 historic buildings and 40,000 objects in the collection,” says Butler. “Using these for social good is a really important driving factor in what we do.”
The successes of the museum can be shown in a number of ways. It is now on a sound financial footing, has a broad range of income streams and the ongoing capital project. There are 14 full-time staff, compared with four when Butler joined, and about 140 volunteers.
Butler has also been keen to prove the value of the museum’s social programmes. The Investing in Culture and Community report assessed the social return on the museum’s investment in work-based learning in 2009-10. The report found that Meal generated £4.30 of social value for every £1 invested.
“Through all of this we feel there is a strong need to demonstrate what we do, so it is not just standing up in conferences and saying aren’t we brilliant, here are some nice pictures of happy vulnerable people, but there is some quite strong evidence to show that the work we are doing is creating value.”
Happy talk
As part of demonstrating the benefits of the museum’s approach, Butler has worked hard to spread his ideas to other museums. He has been part of the Mission Models Money Reevolver programme, which is trying to build peer-to-peer networks around ideas of resilience, relevance and responsibility in the cultural sector.
Meal was also one of the 12 museums that took part in a programme funded by the Paul Hamlyn Foundation (PHF) to investigate the ways the sector engages with the public and encourages participation.
And Butler has developed the Happy Museum project, which is an attempt to help the UK museum sector respond to the challenges presented by the need for creating a more sustainable future.
The initiative, which was launched in March, includes a £60,000 fund for museums to show that the principles of happiness and well-being can leave a legacy of cultural change within their organisations and communities.
“The Happy Museum project was inspired by observations that we made through operating our social enterprise,” says Butler. “We could see that people who had led isolated lives who joined our programmes or became volunteers were building new friendships through a shared interest in heritage or by just coming to this space. You could see they were progressing and leading happier lives.”
Many of these projects seem a bit removed from what people perceive as the core work of museums, but Butler says this is not the case.
“One of the things that came out of our social return on investment research is that without the cultural heritage all the projects have much less meaning and impact. The fact that people can work with collections and historic buildings means the projects have much greater value and they vastly improve their well-being as they can connect to their surroundings.”
Butler says that he has wanted to spend more on collections and displays, but recent funding arrangements have made this difficult. He has only been able to access about £30,000 from the Renaissance in the Regions programme, for example.
“I have always found it very strange that we have been able to raise money to do really interesting social programmes but never to do things with the collections,” he says.
New ways of working
Butler is hoping that Arts Council England’s (ACE) new responsibility for distributing Renaissance funding might change things. He has suggested that ACE could use its existing model of National Portfolio Organisations for the arts to create a scheme of National Portfolio Museums. Rather than fund a select few, he argues, it could support a range of museum organisations of varying sizes.
“If the process for obtaining Renaissance money was opened up, ACE could be a bit more strategic about how it supports museums,” he says. “Renaissance was a good thing, but there was never a sense that it rewarded innovation – you got money because you were big.”
Meal could get bigger itself as it is working with Suffolk County Council Records Office and Archaeology Service to explore the possibility of forming a new heritage trust for Suffolk. It’s early days for this initiative, but one scheme that will definitely increase the museum’s capacity is the £3m capital scheme.
It is the largest project that the museum has ever undertaken and the new displays will tell the story of Abbot’s Hall itself, as well as rural life in East Anglia.
Topics covered will include the work of oral historian George Ewart Evans and the history of a local psychiatric institution. Displays on the role of Gypsy travellers in the area will also be featured.
The museum’s work with traveller communities has already got it attention in the national press, particularly when it hosted the final of Travellers Got Talent in 2010.
“There was a column in the Daily Mail by Richard Littlejohn suggesting that the people of Stowmarket ought to guard their driveways because the Gypsies were coming to town,” says Butler. “So, despite the bigotry, it was quite an honour that something I had been done had been taken notice of by Richard Littlejohn.”
The temporary exhibition programme following the completion of the capital project will kick off with an exhibition about English folk customs developed with the Museum of British Folklore and then there will be a show about outsider art created with Pallant House Gallery in Chichester.
Despite Meal’s capital project, Butler is wary of expansion for expansion’s sake. “Until recently it was about new developments – building new museums, new galleries – and everything was about growth, but that growth is unsustainable and we need to take a more collectivist approach to things.”
Ultimately, Butler feels UK museums need to react positively to the environmental, financial and political pressures they are under.
“All these things are coming together. Yes, museums have been quite successful in seeing themselves as part of their community, but the pressures are different now and we need to reimagine the role of museums within society.
Perhaps they should become less objective, be prepared to lead campaigns within their community, and see themselves more as anchor organisations within their community and start to value the social capital they create.”
Tony Butler will be speaking about the Happy Museum Project at the Museums Association conference in Brighton (3-4 October)
www.museumsassociation.org/conference
Tony Butler started his career in 1996 as a temporary assistant curator of social history at Wakefield Museum. He then worked at the National Postal Museum before becoming curator of human history at Isle of Wight Museums Service in 1999.
From here he moved to Ipswich Museums Service, where he became its public service manager. He was appointed director of the Museum of East Anglian Life, Stowmarket, in 2004.
Butler took part in the Clore Leadership Programme in 2007 and was mentored by Michael Day, the chief executive of Historic Royal Palaces.
He is a board member of the Association of Independent Museums, vice-chairman of the UK Rural Museums Network and is an Associate of the Museums Association.
Stowmarket’s Museum of East Anglian Life (Meal) opened in 1967 on land that was originally part of the home farm for the Abbot’s Hall estate, which dates from medieval times. Meal has 14 full-time and 8 seasonal staff. There are also more than 140 volunteers.
Annual turnover is just over £550,000: 30% of funding comes from revenue grants from Suffolk County and Mid Suffolk District Councils and 15% from visitor admissions. The rest is from projects and commercial activities, including funding from trusts, contracts from public bodies for services and general fundraising events.
“The museum was known for being in really bad shape,” Butler says. “We had more horses than computers at the time, there was no infrastructure and the money did not stack up.”
Butler says the museum, which was created in the late 1960s, had been seen as quite cutting edge but had been declining for some time. Before his arrival in 2004, its funding partners had been threatening to pull the plug unless the museum reviewed its governance arrangements and appointed a new director.
Butler joined after working in museums for nearly ten years, but Meal was his first director’s job. He says it quickly became clear that he needed to get the business on a firmer footing, address some collections issue and take better control of the organisation’s assets.
The completion of a £3m capital development project in March 2012 will be tangible evidence of how he has turned the museum’s fortunes around. But many of his achievements have not been about bricks and mortar at all; they have been related to investing in people.
“ I have always been influenced by asset-based community development, which is used in the rural development sector, where you try and understand your assets in a broader sense,” says Butler. “So it’s not just the buildings and collections, but also the social networks that are built up within your organisation.”
What this means in practice is the development of programmes that encourage the broadest possible participation by the community. This has led to the creation of a range of projects, such as a work-based learning programme for long-term unemployed people.
Butler says that his work has been inspired by people such as Iain Tuckett, who runs Coin Street Community Builders, a social enterprise that started 20 years when local residents attempted to turn a bleak area on London’s South Bank into a better place to live. Meal is a social enterprise itself, which means that its social purpose is central to what it does.
“We have all these assets – there are 80 acres here, 16 historic buildings and 40,000 objects in the collection,” says Butler. “Using these for social good is a really important driving factor in what we do.”
The successes of the museum can be shown in a number of ways. It is now on a sound financial footing, has a broad range of income streams and the ongoing capital project. There are 14 full-time staff, compared with four when Butler joined, and about 140 volunteers.
Butler has also been keen to prove the value of the museum’s social programmes. The Investing in Culture and Community report assessed the social return on the museum’s investment in work-based learning in 2009-10. The report found that Meal generated £4.30 of social value for every £1 invested.
“Through all of this we feel there is a strong need to demonstrate what we do, so it is not just standing up in conferences and saying aren’t we brilliant, here are some nice pictures of happy vulnerable people, but there is some quite strong evidence to show that the work we are doing is creating value.”
Happy talk
As part of demonstrating the benefits of the museum’s approach, Butler has worked hard to spread his ideas to other museums. He has been part of the Mission Models Money Reevolver programme, which is trying to build peer-to-peer networks around ideas of resilience, relevance and responsibility in the cultural sector.
Meal was also one of the 12 museums that took part in a programme funded by the Paul Hamlyn Foundation (PHF) to investigate the ways the sector engages with the public and encourages participation.
And Butler has developed the Happy Museum project, which is an attempt to help the UK museum sector respond to the challenges presented by the need for creating a more sustainable future.
The initiative, which was launched in March, includes a £60,000 fund for museums to show that the principles of happiness and well-being can leave a legacy of cultural change within their organisations and communities.
“The Happy Museum project was inspired by observations that we made through operating our social enterprise,” says Butler. “We could see that people who had led isolated lives who joined our programmes or became volunteers were building new friendships through a shared interest in heritage or by just coming to this space. You could see they were progressing and leading happier lives.”
Many of these projects seem a bit removed from what people perceive as the core work of museums, but Butler says this is not the case.
“One of the things that came out of our social return on investment research is that without the cultural heritage all the projects have much less meaning and impact. The fact that people can work with collections and historic buildings means the projects have much greater value and they vastly improve their well-being as they can connect to their surroundings.”
Butler says that he has wanted to spend more on collections and displays, but recent funding arrangements have made this difficult. He has only been able to access about £30,000 from the Renaissance in the Regions programme, for example.
“I have always found it very strange that we have been able to raise money to do really interesting social programmes but never to do things with the collections,” he says.
New ways of working
Butler is hoping that Arts Council England’s (ACE) new responsibility for distributing Renaissance funding might change things. He has suggested that ACE could use its existing model of National Portfolio Organisations for the arts to create a scheme of National Portfolio Museums. Rather than fund a select few, he argues, it could support a range of museum organisations of varying sizes.
“If the process for obtaining Renaissance money was opened up, ACE could be a bit more strategic about how it supports museums,” he says. “Renaissance was a good thing, but there was never a sense that it rewarded innovation – you got money because you were big.”
Meal could get bigger itself as it is working with Suffolk County Council Records Office and Archaeology Service to explore the possibility of forming a new heritage trust for Suffolk. It’s early days for this initiative, but one scheme that will definitely increase the museum’s capacity is the £3m capital scheme.
It is the largest project that the museum has ever undertaken and the new displays will tell the story of Abbot’s Hall itself, as well as rural life in East Anglia.
Topics covered will include the work of oral historian George Ewart Evans and the history of a local psychiatric institution. Displays on the role of Gypsy travellers in the area will also be featured.
The museum’s work with traveller communities has already got it attention in the national press, particularly when it hosted the final of Travellers Got Talent in 2010.
“There was a column in the Daily Mail by Richard Littlejohn suggesting that the people of Stowmarket ought to guard their driveways because the Gypsies were coming to town,” says Butler. “So, despite the bigotry, it was quite an honour that something I had been done had been taken notice of by Richard Littlejohn.”
The temporary exhibition programme following the completion of the capital project will kick off with an exhibition about English folk customs developed with the Museum of British Folklore and then there will be a show about outsider art created with Pallant House Gallery in Chichester.
Despite Meal’s capital project, Butler is wary of expansion for expansion’s sake. “Until recently it was about new developments – building new museums, new galleries – and everything was about growth, but that growth is unsustainable and we need to take a more collectivist approach to things.”
Ultimately, Butler feels UK museums need to react positively to the environmental, financial and political pressures they are under.
“All these things are coming together. Yes, museums have been quite successful in seeing themselves as part of their community, but the pressures are different now and we need to reimagine the role of museums within society.
Perhaps they should become less objective, be prepared to lead campaigns within their community, and see themselves more as anchor organisations within their community and start to value the social capital they create.”
Tony Butler will be speaking about the Happy Museum Project at the Museums Association conference in Brighton (3-4 October)
www.museumsassociation.org/conference
Tony Butler at a glance
Tony Butler started his career in 1996 as a temporary assistant curator of social history at Wakefield Museum. He then worked at the National Postal Museum before becoming curator of human history at Isle of Wight Museums Service in 1999.
From here he moved to Ipswich Museums Service, where he became its public service manager. He was appointed director of the Museum of East Anglian Life, Stowmarket, in 2004.
Butler took part in the Clore Leadership Programme in 2007 and was mentored by Michael Day, the chief executive of Historic Royal Palaces.
He is a board member of the Association of Independent Museums, vice-chairman of the UK Rural Museums Network and is an Associate of the Museums Association.
Museum of East Anglian Life at a glance
Stowmarket’s Museum of East Anglian Life (Meal) opened in 1967 on land that was originally part of the home farm for the Abbot’s Hall estate, which dates from medieval times. Meal has 14 full-time and 8 seasonal staff. There are also more than 140 volunteers.
Annual turnover is just over £550,000: 30% of funding comes from revenue grants from Suffolk County and Mid Suffolk District Councils and 15% from visitor admissions. The rest is from projects and commercial activities, including funding from trusts, contracts from public bodies for services and general fundraising events.