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Conference 2024: The Joy of Museums booking open now – Book before 31 March 2024 for a 10% discount

Conference 2024: The Joy of Museums booking open now – Book before 31 March 2024 for a 10% discount

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What would be in your museums manifesto?
Museums Association
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Emma Routley, project officer, National Museum Wales
Museums amaze, entertain, educate and inspire. They make us question what
we see, who we are and what we know. To do this we need a commitment to culture and our history. We need political representatives who are actively interested in our resilience and the impact that we have on their communities. We need support to create meaningful relationships and to preserve stories for our future generations. But what we really need is money. Give us this and just see what else we can achieve as Museums Change Lives.”


Paddy Gilmore, the head of programmes, National Museums Northern Ireland
An end to the austerity measures that have ravaged museums and threaten their sustainability. Create a lottery funding body specifically to support museum development programmes, both capital and revenue. This would be time limited like the Olympic Lottery fund and would redress the damage done over the past six years.
Increased funding for schools and support for out-of-school programmes to ensure that this generation of children can fully participate in their local museums and benefit from cultural engagement.”


Nat Edwards, museum consultant, Shared Stories in Shared Spaces

“Forget policy wonks. Forget Twitter. I would paint my manifesto on walls. Museums and galleries are arsenals of ideas, distilled from the best of humanity over thousands of years. Make them yours. Treasure them. Play with them. Hack them. Occupy them and create a common space to learn, debate and forge ideas for the future – fade in stirring music – because the hollowed-out has-beens knocking on your front doors are short on ideas. You can find a better path. Throw open the stores and use what you find to light the way.”


Richard Evans, director, Beamish, The Living Museum of the North, County Durham
“We must work together to secure some clear, realistic asks that will help us all prosper. Don’t let the recent promises to extend exhibition tax credits be forgotten – encourage us all to adapt to meet future needs and create new content. Introduce relief from business rates – recognise the public benefits of museums and don’t treat our trading activity as if it was a commercial business. Finally – back the UK’s tourism industry and recognise how critical museums are to creating vibrant, attractive places for us all to live, work and visit.”

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