Case Study
Amersham Museum
Investment in team capacity is enabling staff to focus on their expertise and strengthen engagement with four key audience groups
(Above) Young Curators lacemaking session, photo credit: Amersham Museum
Fund and priority area: Strategic Fund – Arts & Heritage: A resilient cultural sector
Who: Amersham Museum explores life in the town’s past through intriguing objects and local stories.
What:
In 2023, the Rothschild Foundation awarded Amersham Museum a 3-year grant within our resilience priority. Investment in the staff team involves increasing the working time of the Collections Manager, Learning Office and Director, as well as appointing a Project Admin Officer to provide support across all programmes. This funding is enabling the museum to strengthen its work with four key audience groups by allowing staff to focus more fully on their areas of expertise.
The audience groups are defined as: makers, researchers, schools, and special educational needs and disabilities (SEND) visitors.
- Makers launched a monthly Makers Hub, growing from 5 to 9 members contributing to the current exhibition, supporting their first Craft Weekend, and running monthly workshops. Their lacemakers ran sessions for the museum’s Young Curators programme, and a Toddler Takeover. They’ve hosted strawplaiting workshops for beginners and intermediates to support this critically endangered local craft.
- Researchers facilitated new online collection resources, supervised research visits, supported volunteer-led cataloguing, and expanded opportunities for people to explore and share their own connections to Amersham’s history.
- Schools piloted a continued professional development (CPD) session focused on object-based learning, laying the groundwork for more work with educators.
- SEND piloted quiet morning sessions, introduced discovery bags, launched an online visual story, contributed to NPHT global virtual museum project, and delivered their first access and inclusion pre-season briefing for all 69 front desk volunteers.
Thanks again for an inspiring last session- really got the creative juices flowing.
Maker attendance at hub session
(Above) Amersham Museum timeline of activity for SEND visitors and groups. photo credit: Amersham Museum
Next Steps
Increasing the hours worked by staff has allowed the team to take on more ambitious delivery – offering more events, growing online collections and being more proactive with new acquisitions.
Amersham Museum has been able to leverage additional funding for complementary activity e.g. for SEN-focused engagement, enabling 12 free visits and installation of a handrail on the mobile museum, and accessibility improvements across its website.
In the second year of funded work, the team will explore more innovative evaluation, bringing audience areas together to look at opportunities between activities offered, for example, a makers workshop for SEND audiences.
