Museums Development East Midlands and Kids in Museums are pleased to be launching their partnership support programme for museums in the region, focusing on creating a family friendly museums environment for participating organisations.
This programme aims to:
- Support museums who do not have a dedicated learning member of staff to become more family friendly organisations.
- Understand the motivations and barriers for family audiences visiting museums.
- Learn how to develop family friendly interpretation which can help staff to create labels, trails and other resources for families.
- Promote your family provision to a wider family audience.
- Enable museums to embed family friendliness as an organisation.
- Provide museums with online training sessions, peer group meetings, one to one support, resources and signposting.
Museum Outcomes:
- Museums will have become more family friendly organisations.
- Museums will have developed an understanding of the motivations and barriers (including the impact of COVID-19) for family audiences visiting museums.
- Museums will have developed family friendly interpretation which can help staff to create labels, trails and other resources for families.
- Museums will be able to promote their family provision to a wider range of families.
- Museums will embed family friendliness as an organisation.
- Museums will have worked together across the cohort to provide shared learning and peer support.
The intensive programme will allow 6 organisations to benefit from mentoring, training and hands on support through:
- Training sessions: four online workshops focussing on what family’s needs and expectations are, how to create family friendly content, how to review your practices in this area and links to best practice.
- Programme meeting 1 – 22nd June
- Programme meeting 2 – 21st September
- Programme meeting 3 – 18th January
- Programme meeting 4 – 22nd March
- Site visit: from a consultant to support a full review of each museum’s activities.
- Coaching/Mentoring: each museum will have a half day of dedicated consultancy time split between October 2021 – March 2022.
- Network building: access to peer support through the programme participants and wider MDEM contacts.
This programme has been designed in response to feedback through the Organisational Health Check 2020 and the Annual Museums Survey, to support museums in their priority areas of recovery from the pandemic.
The programme will run from June 2021 to March 2022, with an expected time-commitment of 1 day per month. Additional work may be required to apply learning in between sessions, especially supporting the site visit.
Who is eligible:
To be eligible to apply to this programme you need to be from an Accredited museum or currently working towards Accreditation in the East Midlands. It is designed for organisations who do not have a dedicated learning team.
To join this programme you must have submitted MDEM’s Organisational Health Check within the last 12 months. Please contact the MDEM team if you need more information in this area.
How to apply:
After reviewing your availability to take part in the key programme dates, please complete the Expression of Interest for the Family Friendly Programme and return by the 4th June 2021. For more information, please contact Sarah.Hartshorne@leics.gov.uk.
