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NCK:S VÅRKONFERENSEN 2015

NCK Ett lärande genom kulturarv sedan 2005

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Abstract: Amgueddfa Cymru’s strategic focus for the next five years is to establish St Fagans National History Museum as a gateway to Wales’s cultural heritage, in a £21.5 million Heritage Lottery Funded development project. In delivering, this we are embedding cultural participation, programming and interpretation as strategic areas within the redevelopment. The overarching goal for St Fagans is to achieve a culture change in skills development and working practices in the Museum and to set new standards in bilingual interpretation. As part of the redevelopment, we have consulted with over two hundred external organisations, and are now working with nine participatory forums which guide the redevelopment and inform gallery design, gallery content and activity programmes. We are also using this model of collaborative working to inform and shape our work across the wider organisation.

In this article, I will draw on examples from my ten years in Glasgow Museums of developing diverse audiences and broadening cultural participation while also giving examples of the different ways we are working at Amgueddfa Cymru with communities and partners to open up our museums, so that we are working with people proactively and co-‐productively. Alongside this, I will chart the journey we are on in our strategic approach to extending opportunities for cultural participation for children and families experiencing poverty. I will also talk about how this is making us change as in order to be a participatory museum, we have to open up ourselves and our museums to different ways of doing, thinking and working.

Introduction: Some provocations

“It is probably not excessive to suggest that the profound feeling of unworthiness (and of incompetence) which haunts the least cultivated visitors as if they were overcome with respect when

confronted with the sacred universe of legitimate culture, contributes in no small way to keeping them away from museums.” 1

This is a damning observation made over 20 years ago. How far has this sentiment of ‘exclusive’ and ‘legitimate’ culture changed over the last 25 years? Do museums challenge exclusive forms of cultural representation through the way we work? Do museums take part in the relationships and issues that our local and global communities care about? How good are museums at questioning how they are organised in terms of how this defines who their audiences – or communities are?

Management consultant Margaret Wheatley, who studies organisations, the systems they create and how this affects the behaviour and abilities of the people within them, claims: “there is no

1 Bourdieu, P., Darbel, A., Schnapper, D. (1991) The Love of Art: European Art Museums and their

Opening Up the Museum Janice Lane

Director of Learning, Exhibitions & Digital Media

Amgueddfa Cymru/National Museum Wales



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power for change greater than a community discovering what it cares about.” 2 Wheatley, after examining how within organisations control (or power) is confused with order, i.e. if we control how something is done we have the power, argues that this does not always create the most effective approach or outcome, and underlines the significance of relationships to develop better organisations and networks.

Museums are organisations. Museums have an essential role to play in contemporary life and in society. The most innovative and creative cities and societies worldwide are built on strong cultural foundations. In the UK, as a result of five years of austerity measures, many of our communities face severe threats of a kind they have not experienced for decades, if at all. UK museums also face the most serious challenges we have known in our 125-‐year history. Our communities need us to stand with them, and rise to these challenges as a core public service. Individuals and communities are under stress and every museum has a part to play in improving lives, creating better places and helping to advance society. As public expenditure continues to be cut, it is more important than ever to strengthen our strong sense of social purpose and open up all aspects of our museums to achieve this.

Likewise, we need to learn how to open up that control and explore different approaches to achieve a goal, particularly by learning to look beyond our controlling systems for other approaches, experience, knowledge, and skills that can lead to creative solutions. This will put a different lens on what we are doing and potentially bring into focus alternative views. We need to question how good museums are doing that and explore different systems in the way we work and we construct and order our museums and our collections. We have to get better at opening up our control to include our diverse communities, not just in terms of visitors – but also in how we choose our staff.

In this paper, I will start with a brief overview of the national context we are working in and the museums that make up Amgueddfa Cymru -‐ National Museum Wales. I will then outline the participation agenda we are setting ourselves in response to public need and in terms of our responsibility as a national public body to be accountable to social and government agendas in Wales. I will also explore how this is making us change: to be a participatory museum, we have to open up ourselves and our museums to different ways of doing, thinking and working. Secondly, I will discuss one area of work that is the vanguard for how we are developing and which is informing our approach nationally. This is the major redevelopment of St Fagans National History Museum. I’ll explain the philosophy guiding our way of working to transform the museum and the challenges we are facing in doing this work ethically and effectively, using one specific case study around volunteering. Thirdly, I will discuss the journey we are on in our strategic approach to extending opportunities for cultural participation for children and families experiencing poverty across Wales by working with Welsh Government and other partners.

Overview:

I have worked in large city museum services for most of my career (in Brighton and Hove, in the South East of England, and more recently in Glasgow, Scotland) that have strong local and regional accountability, and commitment to engagement and social agency. In Glasgow, the city’s cultural institutions have been held accountable as core public services for decades. They actively contribute to tackling some of the endemic social and economic problems of exclusion, poor educational

2 Wheatley, M., (2002) Turning to one another.



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attainment, low skills and other consequences of poverty – and have been a significant factor in the successful re-‐emergence of Glasgow as a now thriving, culturally vibrant and internationally renowned post-‐industrial city. For many other museums in the UK (most of which are under threat as a result of public sector cuts), their relationship with their communities is their most powerful way of defending themselves.

I now work in a national museum that has a clearly stated commitment to participation and engagement. Amgueddfa Cymru -‐ National Museum Wales is accountable to the Welsh Government for contributing to the betterment of the country -‐ it is written into our remit letter. Working at a national level in a country with significant social and economic problems, under a relatively young devolved government, has thrown up major challenges for us organisationally. Within this article I will share the lessons we are learning as we try to develop as an open and national participatory museum.

National Context:

Wales is a small nation – the third smallest in the UK after England and Scotland. It accounts for less than 5% of the UK population. It has devolved powers for health, culture, and education. Devolution is starting to have an impact: it is allowing Wales to make some decisions about the type of society it wants to be. Wales faces very difficult challenges nationally. In terms of geography, it has large rural areas with high unemployment. The highest population density is in SE Wales, where the capital city Cardiff and other largest Welsh cities, Newport and Swansea are as well the former mining Valleys. It is a post-‐industrial nation and, as such, is still trying to develop new economies and regenerate communities who have suffered greatly since the 1970s and 1980s. There is now only one operational commercial coal mine in the country.

Wales faces huge challenges with health, employability and skills and poor educational attainment, with one in three children living in poverty (many of these in working households – not work-‐less ones). Two of our major challenges are the low investment into the country as well as the poor infrastructures and transport, which contribute to inequalities of opportunity for participation and development. The 2011 census showed that approximately 19% of the population overall are welsh speaking,3 with the percentage of native Welsh speakers being higher in north Wales whereas in some areas it is just under 50%. In terms of population, approximately 5% of the population comes from BME background – approx. 2% of these from long standing BME communities (largely in SE Wales who have been established there for decades). Wales now has two ‘Cities of Sanctuary’4 -‐ Swansea and Cardiff -‐ so it actively welcomes new communities.

Amgueddfa Cymru – National Museum Wales:

Amgueddfa Cymru – National Museum Wales is a Registered Charity and were established by Royal Charter in 1907. We are a Welsh Government Sponsored Body and an Independent Research Organisation, with seven National Museums across Wales and a National Collections Centre, employing just over 600 people. Most of our museums are in South Wales: two in Cardiff, one in Swansea, one just outside of Newport and the collections centre in Nant Garw near Caerphilly. We have one museum in North Wales and one in Mid Wales. Most of our museums have a local museum role in their communities as well as a national role. They are very different in terms of scale

3 National Office for Statistics, 2011 Census 4 ‘City of Sanctuary is a movement to build a culture of hospitality for people seeking sanctuary in the UK’ http://www.cityofsanctuary.org/



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and size: National Museum Cardiff is a grand Edwardian civic building housing our internationally significant Art and Natural Sciences collections. National Museum Cardiff is also our major exhibitions venue. It is located in Cardiff City Centre. In comparison, The National Wool Museum in Carmarthen, West Wales is small rural museum run by a staff of 5 -‐7 people. Two of our Museums are also heritage sites. The National Coal Museum: Big Pit, part of Blaenavon World Heritage Site, is a real working coal mine located in the valleys, staffed by ex-‐miners. The National Slate Museum in North Wales sits in a heritage site in the foothills of Mount Snowdon.

All our museums are free to enter, but we do charge for activities and are looking to expand potential commercial opportunities (such as charging for blockbuster exhibitions). We remain committed to free entry as we see this as both a public right as well as the most effective way to retain and grow our audiences. When in 2001 free entry was introduced by the Welsh Government, our visitor numbers doubled: we welcome over 1.65m visitors annually with over 210,000 being school children and over 200,000 being informal learners, making us the largest provider of bi-‐lingual learning outside the classroom in Wales. Additionally, over a million of our visitors are families, making us one of the largest providers of informal family learning and experiences.

A Changing Museum:

We are in a long-‐term process of change and re-‐visioning. This is moving us away from a very traditional 20th Century paternalistic museum model of information provider and guardian towards becoming a national participatory museum of social agency. It is a long and complex journey, made even more difficult by the significant cuts (potentially up to 40%) over the next 2-‐3 years to our budgets. We are also trying to address long-‐term systemic organisational problems, which make investment in change difficult and expensive.

In order to make this transition, we have to: • make a shift in how we utilise and allocate our resources and people, mainly through major

restructuring and reductions in workforce levels; • align our policies and vision with the needs of Wales in the 21st century, ensuring that we

stay relevant and proactive as a public body competing for diminishing funds in a country where alternative funding streams such as private investment, commercial opportunities or sponsorship are not well established or easily attracted;

• change core skills of our staff. We have a very static workforce with many people being in their post for over 10 years (even those relatively young in their 30s and 40s, for example, do not move as there is not an alternative cultural employer nationally). This makes bringing in new skills and experience more difficult, particularly in times of austerity. One of the major changes we are making is putting responsibility for public engagement into all staff roles -‐ a major exercise in culture change. We are using key projects like the redevelopment at St Fagans National History Museum to drive forward this change in working practices, and

• find ways of working better with other cultural heritage stakeholders and other non-‐cultural sector agencies across Wales so as to see how we can support and help shape the key Welsh Government agendas of tackling child poverty, health and well-‐being and participation poverty.

All in all, our ten-‐year vision and strategic plan can be summarised as below:

Our Vision: inspiring people, changing lives



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St Fagans National History Museum

St Fagans National History Museum is the vanguard of the changes we are making. It comprises galleries and open-‐air museum on the outskirts of Cardiff. St Fagans has been undergoing a 5-‐year redevelopment process funded by Heritage Lottery Fund and Welsh Government. St Fagans National History Museum was established in 1948 and was considered radical and pioneering in its day as it aimed to show the lives of ordinary people, not merely the concerns of a powerful elite. As to who constituted the ‘folk’ or ‘gwerin’ that were to be St Fagans subject, one of its founders, Iorweth Peate, said clearly that they were to include all parts of the community -‐ “ffordd yr holl Gymry o fyw.”5 This was his founding vision, and it captured the imagination of people in Wales. From the very start St Fagans received around 80,000 visitors each year. 6 The museum's collections increased rapidly in size, including recordings of oral testimony from 1958 onwards.

But was (and is) the museum a mirror to the nation? Not really – it was more a mirror to Peate’s belief that rural communities and their traditions needed to be protected from the effects of industrialisation. We were not effectively telling the stories of our industrial communities or the stories of Wales’ diverse communities. Cardiff has one of the most diverse populations in Wales and the UK – many of its diverse communities contributed to its success as an industrial powerhouse in the 20th century. By the 1980s, St Fagans was not reaching large parts of the population. With criticisms by left-‐wing historians and museum professionals, together with the realisation that the industrial communities were themselves now under threat, the museum tried to make changes. This led to the inclusion of buildings from our industrial heritage at the Museum, such as the Oakdale Working Man’s Institute from a South-‐West Valley town and the Rhyd-‐Y-‐Car row of miners’ cottages. These changes have, in a way, just moved the goal posts. Others have stepped up to observe other gaps in the portrayal of life in Wales at the museum. We are still far from being ‘a mirror to the nation’ as a whole.

More recently, St Fagans has been reaching out to new audiences, over the last five years particularly, through projects such as The Refugee House (2011-‐2012).7 The project was a co-‐production between St Fagans Museum and the refugee and asylum seeker communities and organisations that support and work directly with refugees. The Refugee House took visitors through real people’s houses (recreated with their possessions) and stories in order to tackle misconceptions of what life is like for refugees in Wales and the UK. We learnt a lot from doing this project but it was temporary and it still felt tokenistic in terms of the overall experience at the museum. Through the redevelopment, we are embedding community representation more inclusively. This project (and others like it) has been useful in developing relationships with communities and core partners as several have continued to work with us on the redevelopment. However, we have much more work

5 Peate, I.C. (1948) Amgueddfeydd Gwerin – Folk Museums. Cardiff: University of Wales Press. 6 St Fagans received 566,426 visitors in 2014/15. 7 To read more about The Refugee House: http://oasiscardiff.org/workshop-‐to-‐plan-‐the-‐refugee-‐house/ and http://oasiscardiff.org/the-‐refugee-‐house-‐now-‐open-‐to-‐the-‐public/

Our Purpose: Inspiring people through our museums and collections to find a sense of well-‐being and identity, to discover, enjoy and learn bilingually, and to understand Wales’ place in the wider world.



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to do in representing and engaging diverse communities in Cardiff and across Wales, as well as improving the way we tell the stories of industrial and post-‐industrial Wales and the new realities for rural communities.

St Fagans National History Museum Redevelopment Project: Creu Hanes -‐ Making History

The main aim of the redevelopment is to address some of the complexities mentioned above and transform the way we engage with the people of Wales, so that the museum is more representative of the many diverse communities and histories of Wales. For people to make informed decisions about our futures, we need to have a critical understanding of history and our place in it. We are trying to build this concept into the way we display and interpret our collections in the new galleries. Specifically, in order to promote greater critical understanding, we are not trying to tell a definitive history of Wales but instead, many different histories, showing that historical evidence can be interpreted in different ways.

When the redevelopment is completed in 2017: • visitors will enter the museum via a covered courtyard (large enough to cope with the

enormous volume visitors) and introduce them to the diversity of things on offer at St Fagans every day;

• two wings around the courtyard will be a new Centre for Learning, providing up to date facilities for school and other learning visits, workshops and lectures during the day, as well as access to collections in store and after-‐hour facilities;

• two new galleries will lead off from the courtyard: one exploring national stories, the other looking at the everyday details of daily lives.

• the third gallery will be built at the far end of the museum's grounds, thereby encouraging visitors to explore a previously under-‐developed part of the open-‐air site, and

• there will be two substantial buildings recreated from archaeological evidence: an Iron Age farmstead based on findings at Bryn Eryr on Anglesey, North Wales; and a recreation of Llys Rhosyr, one of the courts of the medieval princes of Gwynedd – again from Anglesey in North Wales.

These covered spaces will provide a better-‐wet weather offer for our visitors; we know from our visitor numbers that numbers of visitors decrease during the winter months and wet weather periods. Most visitors are from Wales, but St Fagans is also the biggest heritage tourist attraction in Wales. A key aim is to grow our UK and international visitors as well as better serve the people of Wales. We aim to increase visitor numbers and provide better experiences for all our visitors, but also to reduce inequalities in participation in the cultural activities we provide by working with groups that we find hard to reach and do not have strong relationships with us.

A Participatory Museum:

We are aiming to develop a truly participatory museum and transform the way we engage with people. Research shows that people learn best when they’re actively involved. The current visitor experience tends to be very passive and in the past our engagement work with communities has been empowerment light. For us, participation is about the way we operate as a museum as much as the experiences we provide for our visitors. We want to develop a participatory museum driven by the social needs of contemporary Wales. Our aspiration is for the museum to become a place where people can create, share and connect with each other around the content and objects of the



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museum, the experiences they bring to these and through interaction with others. It will be a museum turned inside out so people don’t just see the end product of an exhibition or historic building but also experience and contribute to the work behind the scenes. We want St Fagans to be a museum that is relevant to people’s needs, where they feel they can influence what we do, where we make a difference to their lives.

To achieve this, we are questioning and testing the way we work and who we work with. Our starting point was this primary question:

Are we working in ways that reinforce the museum as benevolent ‘givers’ of cultural access, where privilege may be presented as ‘the norm, or are we changing and finding ways to actively explore and

share cultures and knowledge?

There are many different kinds of experts, and much of the expertise that is relevant to us sits outside of the museum. But connecting with new people and bringing different expertise together is still a challenge. Our commitment to participation and co-‐production means we have involved nationally over 130 groups and agencies in creating and developing the purpose and design for the redevelopment. These relationships then developed into participatory forums covering a range of target audiences and communities of interest. They are working with us through each stage of development and design. Many of them are actively part of the building process while others are shaping the content of galleries, or informing the design decisions we are making for the new main building, learning centre and galleries. They are also working with us to scope, design, deliver and test activities and learning programmes.

This is not new -‐ Glasgow Museums worked extensively with communities of interest in its redevelopment of Kelvingrove Art Galleries and Museum, Riverside Museum. Glasgow Museums continues to do so in its current projects for Kelvinhall and the Burrell Collection. The approach taken there has also matured and developed and our two organisations are sharing experiences. What is different for us at Amgueddfa Cymru -‐ National Museum Wales, I believe, is the extent of involvement we are sustaining with our partner communities long term -‐ not only at key stages of development. We also have to find ways of working directly with communities across Wales so that we include a national audience and have national reach. We are and have been working closely with communities in North Wales, communities in the valleys and mid Wales, as well as with more local communities in Cardiff and its regions. We’re doing this on site and in their local areas. Their involvement is enriching our research and knowledge about our collections and galleries, and how we can use and interpret them. It is also enriching and bringing new skills and expertise into our teams. Our participants are finding connections, confidence and enjoyment in contributing to this national project.

The new spaces at St Fagans have participation built into every aspect of their design. For the Dyma Gymru (pronounced ‘Duh-‐ma Gum-‐ree’) – Wales Is (current gallery working title), the content of this gallery has been much debated. However, it is a debate we hope to incorporate into the approach to the gallery. This is not an attempt to produce a definitive historical narrative for Wales or a chronological history book on a wall. In fact, we want to redefine people’s expectations of national history museums. We want visitors to use our collections to develop historical skills, “to turn the past into an instrument with which the present can build a future” as Gwyn Alf Williams once said. 8 History is our past coloured by the present, and visitors will bring much of the colour into

8 Williams, G. A. (1991) When Was Wales?: A History of the Welsh, Penguin Books Ltd: England.



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the stories told in this gallery. It will present snapshots in the history of Wales and provide gateways to other Welsh heritage sites.

We see the gallery as a container for historical and contemporary discourse, merging conversation in the gallery with various social media platforms, which, with its flexible design that allows for changes in exhibits, invites visitors to explore other artefacts and issues. Wales’ past will be viewed through the eyes of all the people connected with our collections as we aim at inviting users (at St Fagans and through social media) to join the conversation by sharing their stories and responding to those of others. We aspire to allow visitors to:

• appreciate the value of artefacts as historical evidence; • learn how to ‘read’ objects and make deductions about the past from them; • question why do the artefacts touch us, what themes do they represent, what do they stand

for and what issues do they raise, and • challenge their own preconceptions.

Additionally, the Gweithdy (pronounced ‘goo-‐eyth-‐dee’) – Workshop (new building and gallery working title), will be an active, hands-‐on celebration of the skills of the makers of the artefacts in our collections and will provide a platform to celebrate Wales’ creativity and encourage visitors to learn new skills themselves.

During the Depression of the 1930s, craft cooperatives were established to teach new skills to unemployed workers. The Rural Industries Bureau, for example, set up classes in industrial areas such as Merthyr, and Aberdare in the South Wales Valleys and Splott, a district in Cardiff. Examples of the artefacts produced are in our collections and have not been displayed before. Apart from being an engaging place for drop-‐in visitors, we very much want Gweithdy to work in the spirit of these cooperatives, and are working with several 3rd sector partners to develop workshops and courses for skills development.

This gallery will offer a different kind of gallery space, allowing a kinesthetic learning experience, with workbenches being integrated with displays so that visitors can try their hand at various processes and different materials. Through participation in cultural activities, children and adults will reach new understandings about art, design or history, and learn how to make a bowl, or a painting, or a film, while understanding that it is their right to participate in cultural activities. On the other hand, if they fail to encourage wider participation in cultural activities, museums will teach people that they do not have these rights.

Achieving this level of engagement throughout the long process of a major capital project continues to be challenging and has made us think a lot about the museum’s moral agency, especially in terms of what do we do with our resources, who these should benefit, and the ways in which museums can be socially inclusive, share guardianship, and be transparent in the way we work.

Our Museum Volunteering Case Study at St Fagans:

The Our Museum case study is an example of how we have been able test our methodologies for how we embed greater participation and grow different audiences. It is a live project as the redevelopment work progresses. We focused on a specific area for change, that of volunteering, for which carried out this case study through national, regional and local partnerships.



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Although volunteering was something we already did, we had a lot of room to improve. We needed to raise the standards of our engagement and needed expert advice and support to achieve this. Out of a large consultation process with agencies from the third and public sectors involved in volunteering a core group of local, regional and national organisations identified themselves as keen to take an active role. The partners and the museum secured funding from the Paul Hamlyn Foundation and have co-‐produced the project, 9 sharing decisions on how the funds are allocated, shaping job profiles and recruitment, identifying volunteer opportunities by working with our staff to understand the broad range of work that happens in the museum, and broadening the range of staff groups who now actively support volunteer opportunities. Specifically, most of these staff groups had not previously considered working with volunteers or the confidence in working with more diverse audiences or people with complex needs such as substance abuse, mental health issues, learning difficulties and so forth. Together, they identified areas that would work well for volunteering that we hadn’t considered, resulting in a more varied volunteer programme which has brought in new volunteers (and their families, often from marginalised communities) who otherwise may not have accessed the museum.

The process has been demanding and we have had to meet many challenges on the way. A major challenge was overcoming staff attitudes and perceptions, such as conservatism and not wanting to change the way things are done, lack of confidence, fear of the unknown, and the perception of undermining of expertise. Establishing an extensive programme of staff development and training has been an essential tool to overcoming this. Working through our partners to deliver this training made it more effective and it is beginning to make substantial changes to the way we as a museum think and behave and raising staff confidence to work in a more participatory and open way. Conservators, gardeners, builders from our historic houses unit as well as curators, museum educators and front of house staff are beginning to plan participatory opportunities and partnership working into their work areas. Long term, as part of the regular programme of activity in St Fagans, we are turning this ‘behind the scenes’ activity into the public programme inviting visitors and volunteers to take part in it.

9 ‘Paul Hamlyn Foundation is an independent grant-‐making organisation.’ http://www.phf.org.uk/

Our Community Partners



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Getting High Level Support is essential

Including Museum Trustees in the Our Museum engagement team alongside partners and staff has been a powerful way of gaining strong support for participatory work. The Trustees are also able to act as advocates to help us take the message across other organisations and stakeholders. This has helped deepen understanding of what participation is among our wider Board of Trustees -‐ some of whom initially had been sceptical of the process.

Sustaining Partnerships

Sustaining partnerships long term has been challenging. A key tool for achieving this has been creating ‘Service Level Agreements’ with each partner,10 which took the partnership commitment beyond individuals, despite changes in personnel.

Developing a sustainable and robust model

This is one of our biggest challenges. In order to embed cultural change, we are looking at the ‘portable’ elements of the process that we carry across the whole service and into different areas of work. The overall benefits of this project and way of working have been extensive. The museum is now part of a wider national network and our volunteering opportunities are more prominent in the community, more connected and more relevant and accessible overall. For our community partners, their involvement has broadened their understanding of the cultural and heritage sector in general. They also have new, relevant volunteering opportunities for their service users. An unexpected benefit is that, as a sector, they themselves communicate more effectively: they have been reassessing their service delivery and sharing skills and experience in developing volunteer sector policy and services more efficiently. Our participants are recording benefits in terms of confidence, skills and learning as well as pride in contributing to the museum.

As a partnership group we are working across the third, public and heritage sectors and aligning our aims and aspirations accordingly. We also have the opportunity of applying for joint funding and developing sustainability jointly. Partnership working has been key throughout the process; tackling the consequences of poverty through culture cannot be done in isolation from the work of other organisations. Working together, we are greater than the sum of our parts.

Quotes from participants:

10 A ‘Service Level Agreement’ is a working agreement signed by both partner organisations encompassing services, responsibilities and any funding elements.

“My volunteer said he hadn't expected it to be so engaging. He said he feels excited at the prospect of being involved in the re-‐build of the Celtic Village. He smiled and said how he hopes that one day, his children and their children will visit Bryn Eryr and feel proud that their father/grandfather had been part of something so amazing.” (Community Partner NewLink)

“I’ve been down and depressed for a while and volunteering at St Fagans and doing something constructive has cheered me up. I’m coming out of my depression. I’d love to keep going for as long as I’m needed.” (Volunteer Paul Solowyk)



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Cultural Participation and Poverty: We are drawing on our experiences at St Fagans and the Paul Hamlyn funded Our Museum volunteer project to develop a national approach to tackling participation poverty, working with Government and other partners. As a public body in Wales, we are legally obliged under the 2010 children’s measures act to contribute to the Welsh Governments Tackling Poverty strategy and action plan. In 2013, in order to take our thinking and work forward, we held a UK wide research seminar to examine good practice and impact research of how culture can help tackle the consequences of poverty.

We have been working with like-‐minded cultural bodies and other agencies in Wales to try to tackle some of these issues collectively. We are examining how we are working and what we need to do on our own and with others, to increase opportunities for participation, particularly for children, families and young people experiencing poverty. One outcome of this sharing of experience is that we are working on a co-‐produced ethical framework for cultural participation. We are examining the ethical debates and complexities of participatory work with our participants, staff and partners.

We are not experts in this field so we have been working very closely with County and City of Swansea’s Poverty and Prevention Team (they are the local government team who are responsible for all the social and family services in Swansea). They are leading practice in this field in Wales and the UK. For example, Swansea City Council has embedded the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC) (1989)11 into their core decision-‐making processes, policy framework and cabinet duty. Together, we held workshop in December for national cultural agencies, funders and local authorities in Wales. The workshop set citizen engagement within a Rights context (using the UNCRC) and considered current practice and levels of engagement with service users, using National Participation Standards for Children and Young People in Wales (2008). 12 Alongside this, we will also be holding a series of ‘big conversations’ with young people, children and families to develop an engagement framework collectively and discuss the ethics of participation and what cultural participation means to them. We are learning how to do this deep consultation better by working closely with the Swansea team who have been developing this way of working across a whole range of their services in health, education, community learning and children’s services.

11 http://www.uncrcletsgetitright.co.uk/index.php/right 12 http://www.childreninwales.org.uk/policy-‐document/national-‐standards-‐for-‐children-‐and-‐young-‐peoples-‐participation-‐for-‐wales/

“The project has also made me think about the wider Cardiff community… how we can do things differently, how the community can benefit and in turn how the community can support the project.” (Community partner)

“Working with volunteers -‐ I have a greater awareness of the whole spectrum of mental health disorders. The session also made me realise that we should also 'look out' for our colleagues who may also be suffering or working under pressure.” (Member of museum staff)



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There has also been a National Conversation that has coincided with this work; the Welsh Government commissioned Baroness Kay Andrews to carry out a major review on the role of culture and heritage in tackling the consequences of poverty. Amgueddfa Cymru – National Museum Wales was given the opportunity to make recommendations to the Welsh Government’s response13 to The Culture and Poverty Report14. This commission has given us a real opportunity to build on the work we have been doing and influence future Welsh Government policy and local service delivery. We are now working closely with Welsh Government, local authority and cultural sector partners in taking forward the report’s recommendations.

We are leading the action research and evaluation for what are being called ‘Pioneer areas’ across Wales. The Pioneer Areas Programme is strategically bringing together national and local agencies with individuals and communities to establish opportunities for more lasting engagement with the arts, culture and heritage. They will challenge organisations to work more effectively and collaboratively together. The main emphasis will be on a flexible, ‘grass-‐roots’ approach, to allow communities and cultural bodies to develop approaches and activities most relevant to their own communities. Most importantly, this is being aligned with a major review of the ‘Communities First programme’, the National Welsh Government programme for tackling poverty, which has been operational across Wales for the last five years. This will give cultural bodies like ourselves, working with community partners, the opportunity to inform and influence a national community programme at a strategic and national level for the first time. In addition, the Welsh Government is investing in a dedicated research resource to better understand and evidence the impacts of cultural participation on people and communities. We aim to use this national programme to tackle perceptions about museums and culture. Despite decades of work, with some audiences it is still hard for the cultural sector to dispel the perception that a museum is just a building with collections on display -‐ not an active space for social exchange.

Conclusion: Changing Lives?

“No museum...must come to a standstill.”15

To continue to redefine the role of museums, we must broaden our work with our visitors and communities, partners and stakeholders, so communities are not only decision-‐makers with us but active advocates for us, particularly in today’s civic society where public realm, public ownership and public services are being severely reduced. We must look at our workforce and be clear about the skills and experience we want them to have – and where we don’t have this, develop active partnerships with those agencies who do and who can help us connect better with people to continue to broaden and strengthen our role in society.16 Museums must be something that communities care about and cherish or they will become mere show houses for a prescribed cultural

13 Welsh Government (2014) Baroness Andrews’ report Culture and Poverty –Response by the Welsh Government. 14 Baroness Andrews, K. (2014) Culture and Poverty: Harnessing the power of the arts, culture and heritage to promote social justice in Wales. 15 Peate, I.C. (1948) Amgueddfeydd Gwerin – Folk Museums, Cardiff: University of Wales Press. 16 Paul’s story, a film made by one of our volunteers at St Fagans through the Our Museum Project, illustrates the importance of culture and connecting with people in our communities. With Paul’s full permission, the film is available on our website.



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view. It is culture in action -‐ the uses of culture for learning, creativity and pleasure -‐ that defines the quality of a museum and a society.

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