Bradford Council has successfully secured £1.1m to transform local museums and make them more representative of local communities.
Bradford District Museums and Galleries has been granted Arts Council England’s highly prized National Portfolio Organisation status and will receive over £380,000 a year from 2023 to 2026.
The grant will help drive forward the district’s museums’ development and assist the Council in celebrating diversity and creativity for the 2025 City of Culture.
The National Portfolio Organisation status acknowledges the significant potential for the district’s museums’ world-class collections to support the development of a distinctive sense of place based on the area’s diverse heritage and culture.
The three-year project will help Bradford Museums and Galleries’ staff develop a deeper understanding of the communities they serve, expand co-creation in developing exhibitions, and improve access to their world class collections insuring that everyone has the opportunity to enjoy high quality art and heritage.
In the first year, the museums will focus on engaging and working with local people to trial and assess new ways of working including delivering programmes and exhibitions in community venues in order to reach people who wouldn’t normally visit traditional arts and culture venues.
During the second year the museums plan to use what has been learnt in the first year trials to redesign the exhibitions and spaces to make them more engaging and inclusive.
By the end of year three the new National Portfolio Organisation aims to demonstrate improved confidence, engagement and participation in place-making and creative activity across all its service-users and local communities.
A number of specific initiatives will be also developed with the grant.
Local people will learn conservation techniques and local history at a ‘Pop-up Make and Create’ space where they can repair their family treasures with help from visiting artists in similar way to the popular television series, Repair Shop.
There will be a drive to improve the diversity of the museums’ workforce by building on our relationships with Black-led organisations and hiring a mentored placement for an emerging leader from a Black or other minority background.
Guest curators will be invited in to create new exciting interpretations of the museum’s collections making them more relevant to local BME groups.
Thirty-five new young volunteers will be recruited and supported to develop employment skills, confidence, and work experience.
The volunteers will be given the opportunity to put their stamp on how the museum spaces look and feel, and how collections are interpreted and local stories told.
The museums’ will develop new system to monitor and improve who is visiting the venues and how satisfied and engaged people are with the programmes.
The grant will boost staffing levels adding two new collections access assistants, two programming technicians, an Early Years specialist, and a family learning officer.
A volunteer facilitator will be recruited to build relationships with young people and create a supported volunteering programme to meet their needs and a new audiences officer be hired to develop the museums’ audiences.
Councillor Sarah Ferriby, Healthy People and Places Portfolio Holder, said: “We are delighted that our wonderful local museums have been recognised in this way and look forward to using this significant funding to transform them into more modern relevant 21st century cultural institutions.”
