Executive summary

In one of the study’s workshops, a participant portrayed the museum as a cake, held by museum staff members as community participants formed an orderly queue to receive their allotted slice. The scene prompted one participant to ask, “whose cake is it anyway?”

If our museums and galleries are, as this metaphor suggests, owned, produced and distributed by staff to a passive public, decades of participation-targeted investment has not hit the mark. Communities remain, or at least perceive themselves to be, fundamentally  separated from processes within these organisations: rather than engaging at every level of their work, they are relegated to mere consumption of museums’ and galleries’ ‘products’.

Despite presenting numerous examples of ground-breaking, innovative practice, the funding invested in public engagement and participation in the UK’s museums and galleries has not significantly succeeded in shifting the work from the margins to the core of many of these organisations. In fact, as this study demonstrates, it has curiously done the opposite. By providing funding streams outside of core budgets, it appears to have helped to keep the work on the organisations’ periphery. This situation becomes even clearer now that external funding streams are under serious threat and museums and galleries are scrambling for alternative sources of short-term funding to support their public engagement work. Rather than further relegating participation to the margins, however, this could be an opportunity to mainstream this work and refocus on longer-term impact and solutions.

Getting ‘under the skin’

It was the intention of the project to get beyond the numerous and well publicised accounts of innovative short-term projects from the 12 well-reputed organisations in the study. It was therefore decided that creating an opportunity for staff members and community partners to come together, step back and reflect on the work was paramount. Facilitating organisations coming together within a safe environment to reflect and comment on each other’s engagement practice was the second most important element of the approach.

Using Augusto Boal’s methods of participatory drama, to which they had been introduced as part of the study, groups of staff members and community partners in each of the 12 locations developed and enacted scenes in which they described their organisations’ consultation and collaboration efforts. Such participatory drama methods facilitate reflexivity and professional self-analysis and, in this case, allowed the organisations and their community partners to challenge effectively their own habits of mind and ways of working. A range of other methodologies, including questionnaires, discussion and ‘Dragons’ Den’ panel presentations were used (see Appendix 2). Thus this investigation of participation used participatory methodologies to get ‘under the skin’ of public engagement and participation in the 12 museums and galleries.

Problems with project funding

The process opened up an evidently overdue discussion between senior management, staff members and their community partners. Given the opportunity to step back from the pressures of delivery, a number of committed staff members revealed a degree of disillusionment. It was explained that this was primarily brought about by the ‘short-termism’ of projects and the frequent lack of strategic planning for engagement work, particularly so as to involve the organisation as a whole.

Despite a shared understanding between the 12 organisations of the realities of sourcing funding to support public engagement, ‘national initiative overload’ was very often cited as deeply problematic. Across many of the organisations there was a consistent feeling of pressure to produce positive reports in the form of advocacy to secure further funding, rather than taking the time to reflect on the work. Working in this way was seen by many as undermining the integrity of the work, particularly in terms of the work being embedded in local needs, and long-term local relations. The study also found a level of insecurity amongst some front-line staff as their organisations’ commitment to the work (and their jobs) have, with recent pressures on external funding, come into question.

The overall impression from these accounts is that, despite a record of excellent project work across the organisations and the undoubted passion and commitment of staff members, there remains a significant level of disillusionment and disengagement, and an overall lack of direction to the work. Many of the staff members talked about feeling ‘stuck’ (a word frequently repeated), unable to escape the merry-go-round of projects that were not having the long-term local impact desired.

Community members describe experience of ‘empowerment-lite’

For some of the museums’ and galleries’ community partners, there were questions about the commitment of the organisations to the development of long-term and sustainable community relationships. In some cases, the organisation’s knowledge of local needs and opportunities was plainly not what it could be, with an assumption of information coming in rather than having in place a proactive system of finding out. In one case, some potentially key strategic partners shared the same building as the museum and yet complained of having no relationship with the organisation.

In a few cases, at the far end of a wide spectrum of poor to excellent practice (often within the same organisation), there was a feeling expressed by some community partners of being ‘used’ by their museums and galleries as a means to access further funding. For others, while praising the museum’s or gallery’s efforts at ‘reaching out’ to their local communities, the organisation’s claims of community collaboration and reciprocity to their community partners, to be somewhat exaggerated.

Overall, the greatest difficulty expressed by a number of community partners surrounded the issues of collaboration and co-production, with offers of participation typically amounting to the disillusioning experience of ‘empowerment-lite’1.

Smaller organisations take the lead in community relations

There were some smaller organisations in the study with committed leadership and a clear direction that the whole organisation actively embraced. These organisations were embedded in their local communities. They understood that the focus of engagement work was not in terms of treating their community partners as beneficiaries but as active partners. The challenge now for these museums and galleries is to articulate their way of working for others, while further supporting its growth and sustainability within their own frequently under-funded organisation.

The question is: could such practice be scaled up to be a model for the larger organisations? The study concluded that the ‘ways of working’ in these smaller organisations had definite potential to be applied within larger museum or gallery services. With support, these examples have the capacity to help redefine good practice and could play an important mentoring role for others. The study also clearly acknowledges that each organisation’s circumstances – and the nature of its communities – vary a great deal: there will never be a ‘one-size-fits-all’ solution. In addition, it is noted that the larger organisations, as one community partner put it, “serve many masters”.

Elements of good practice in most of the organisations

Despite the difficulties faced by many, there were elements of exciting, new, creative thinking across all 12 organisations. Some had embarked on the road of reorganisation and restructuring (including changes to governance) to set the process of embedding the work in motion (National Museums Wales; Museum of London). Others had begun thinking ‘out-of-the-box’ for new sustainable ways of working that clearly  focused on local community outcomes (Museum of East Anglian Life; Ryedale Folk Museum), or brokering new cross-sector and inter-arts partnerships (Glasgow’s Open Museum; Belfast Exposed) and better community intelligence via an active role on neighbourhood councils and closer, more productive relations with local authorities (Wolverhampton Arts and Heritage Service), or carefully  thoughtthrough community consultation and co-production (Hackney Museum and Tyne & Wear Discovery Museum). There were  elements of good practice throughout the study and, among these 12 organisations committed to public engagement, there is not one that cannot make a claim to some aspects of very good practice.

Time for a reappraisal of engagement

Yet, for the majority of these museums and galleries, now facing cuts to outreach departments or scrambling for new sources of short-term funding to support public engagement and participation, the time is ripe for a root and branch review of the purpose and  fundamental goal of this work. The majority of the organisations in the study have welcomed this honest debate. They share a desire for change and are ready and willing to embark on the formation of new plans to embed the work across the organisation, while renegotiating the organisation’s contribution to local community development.

‘Critical friends’ help bring about change

Echoing the majority of opinion, the study therefore proposes the end of a dependency on centralised short-term project funding. It suggests a new way of understanding engagement and participation as central to the work of museums and galleries within their locality. Focusing on embedding local collaboration and developing individual capability for participation rather than ‘empowerment-lite’, the work becomes firmly situated in the organisation’s locality and developed with the help of new, long-term community partnerships as ‘critical friends’. Thus, a process of real change can only be set in motion through participation, both as the means and long-term purpose of the work. By shifting the concept of public engagement to focus on capability development through the active participation of local communities, it becomes clear that this active participation must be central to helping the organisation bring about change, with local people taking responsibility for their museum or gallery, and gaining valuable experience of active citizenship in the process. The ‘critical friends’ relationship characteristic of the study, between museum and gallery professionals and between organisations and their local community partners, thus becomes central to organisational change in museums and galleries.

Footnotes

  • 1 A. Cornwall, Democratising Engagement: What the UK Can Learn from International Experience, London: Demos 2008