How can we involve people as participants in shaping our cultural heritage?
Our work at New Citizenship Project starts from the premise that people are happier, healthier and able to offer more when we are thought of and treated as participants rather than Consumers. As Consumers, we can only choose between what to do, see or buy; as participants we have the chance to shape those choices, add to them and invent new ways forward.
One place where it feels obvious for people to be participants above Consumers is in shaping our cultural heritage. Where could it be more natural for people to participate than in the ideas, stories and customs that build the sense of who we are, where we’ve come from and where we might go next?
That’s why, together with six organisations spanning the sector — from a civic museum to one of England’s most important cathedrals — we’re exploring the why, how and what of involving people as participants in shaping our cultural heritage. In a process of Collaborative Innovation, we’ll be working together to experiment with how we involve people and to what ends.
In this piece, we share the central hypotheses this project is starting from, developed in collaboration with the six organisations. Please do comment, build and challenge — the aim of this project is to see if we can play a part in pushing the sector on another step, so all contributions are more than welcome.
Participation in cultural heritage is not a new idea…
Participation has long been talked about by museums, arts and heritage organisations. Whether it be in debates on relevance or diversity, there is nothing new in saying that there is a need to involve more people in more ways.
There has already been an evolution from cultural heritage done to people, collections organised by academic logic alone, displayed passively with little chance for people to question or shape what they saw; to cultural heritage for people with visitor experience and audience insight now much more at the heart of how we look after and curate art and heritage.
Participation is a step further still, the move from providing culture for people to shaping culture with people. A participatory visitor experience is part of the puzzle but the shift is more than a tool or technique of exhibition design. It’s forming deeper relationships that go beyond Consumers of products, into people who are willing to offer their time, ideas, money and experience in the pursuit of shared beliefs and goals. This, too, is happening…
But it remains stuck on the edges
Despite steps forward, and some great examples to point to (Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s Local “membership” or Derby Museum’s Remake the Museum to name a couple), there hasn’t been a real step-change. In work such as the Our Museum programme by the Paul Hamlyn Foundation, there is a repeated finding that participation in cultural organisations remains on the sidelines: dependent on project-to-project funding rather than at the heart of strategy; the job of a defined few rather than a shared value and ambition; and perceived as something primarily for the benefit of participants rather than true partnership with value on both sides.
Taking the step from for to with people requires a more fundamental shift in mindset:
The overarching point here is that museums are simply too entrenched in habits of mind to change themselves, no matter how much they talk about it to one another. It requires a degree of ‘un-learning’ to understand that community engagement and participation are not a question of ‘inviting people in’ to the museum’s ‘party’ — it is rather about saying, “We can’t do this without you — we need you!’
Bernadette Lynch — Our Museum: A 5 year perspective from a critical friend
To move participation from the sidelines into the heart of strategy, the starting point needs to change
There are many good arguments to be made for the intrinsic value of participation but what work like Our Museum highlights is that participation for participation’s sake is hard to sustain and often fails to transform. Instead, we believe we need to explore participation in the context of purpose and impact.
Moving the starting point:
When you start from purpose and impact, you create the desire and space for strategic participation
Our hypothesis is that by working backwards from their specific purpose and impact, cultural heritage organisations can start to shift the way they think of and involve people. People are no longer Consumers or beneficiaries, they’re participants in shared goals and beliefs. If we want to best serve our purpose and achieve impact, involving people is no longer a nicety but a necessity, because we need all the help we can get. And the space we create for ideas will be both much bigger, and at the core of our strategies.
This is not just a theoretical idea — it’s come from our experience and expertise as New Citizenship Project, working on and studying emerging trends in participation across sectors (for example in our support for current business bestseller New Power), together with the sector experience and insight of the six organisations.
Interested?
This is our starting point and together with Brighton Museums, Fountains Abbey, The National Archives, Tredegar House, York Minster and Wellcome Collection we’ll be testing this hypothesis out, exploring how to achieve and sustain strategic participation over the next 9 months.
Our intention is to invite in other voices from across the sector to contribute to the exploration, so if these questions are of interest to you, if you’re holding some of them yourself, in or out of the cultural heritage sector, then do get in touch — we’d love you to be part of the journey….
New Citizenship Project are an innovation consultancy company, working to increase greater participation in society by changing the way we think about people. If you’d like to find out more about our current project in the cultural heritage sector, or our work more broadly, you can get in touch with us at info@newcitizenship.org.uk.
