To help us think about the impacts of museums, we’ve consulted the museum sector and commissioned research into public attitudes – you can read reports on both of those on the MA website.
Now, to complement them, and thanks to funding from Arts Council England, there’s a new report on a consultation that we held with charities and social enterprises that specialise in supporting people including vulnerable women, blind and partially sighted people, grandparents, people with dementia and offenders.
Participants were positive about working with museums. They want museums to encourage their organisations to make good use of museum facilities and resources to benefit their particular audience group. Working in partnership can bring further benefits, but the key thing is to be welcoming and truly accessible.
However, in their experience museums sometimes erect unintended barriers, perhaps worrying more about the aesthetics of a display than its accessibility to people with special needs, or being too slow to respond to the interests of an enthusiastic group of hard-to-reach teenagers.
As with the public attitude research, there was a very strong sense that museums should be genuinely for everyone. Things have changed for the better but as a sector we can still come across as precious or intellectually aloof, even stuffy.
Revealingly, some of the organisations we invited to attend turned the opportunity down on the grounds that they couldn’t see how museums could help them. And some of those who attended pointed out that museums are just one group among the many types of partner that they work with.
That suggests museums have a lot more to do to raise awareness about how they can help organisations working for positive social change. I hope the final version of Museums 2020, due in a couple of months, will play a small part in helping with that.
Maurice Davies is the head of policy and communication at the Museums Association
Now, to complement them, and thanks to funding from Arts Council England, there’s a new report on a consultation that we held with charities and social enterprises that specialise in supporting people including vulnerable women, blind and partially sighted people, grandparents, people with dementia and offenders.
Participants were positive about working with museums. They want museums to encourage their organisations to make good use of museum facilities and resources to benefit their particular audience group. Working in partnership can bring further benefits, but the key thing is to be welcoming and truly accessible.
However, in their experience museums sometimes erect unintended barriers, perhaps worrying more about the aesthetics of a display than its accessibility to people with special needs, or being too slow to respond to the interests of an enthusiastic group of hard-to-reach teenagers.
As with the public attitude research, there was a very strong sense that museums should be genuinely for everyone. Things have changed for the better but as a sector we can still come across as precious or intellectually aloof, even stuffy.
Revealingly, some of the organisations we invited to attend turned the opportunity down on the grounds that they couldn’t see how museums could help them. And some of those who attended pointed out that museums are just one group among the many types of partner that they work with.
That suggests museums have a lot more to do to raise awareness about how they can help organisations working for positive social change. I hope the final version of Museums 2020, due in a couple of months, will play a small part in helping with that.
Maurice Davies is the head of policy and communication at the Museums Association
