Furthering community engagement in our museums

Deploying existing staff to ‘do’ community engagement places unreasonable expectations on those individuals and is unlikely to always deliver desired outcomes. Where this approach is adopted as part of a strategy to instigate cultural change within a museum, it ought to be supported by appropriate training and guidance in all cases.

Seeking to engage particular groups may be aided by employing staff who are themselves from those groups (acknowledging the potential contribution of MLA’s Diversity Programme); seeking to engage groups via particular types of project may be aided by employing staff with a background in those types of projects rather than the museums sector.