Working Together is an National Lottery Heritage Fund programme involving 6 heritage organisations across the UK, led by the Culture Health & Wellbeing Alliance (CHWA) and Group for Education in Museums (GEM).
A year into the project we want to share an update and some emerging findings which we hope will resonate across the sector.
The museum and heritage organisations taking part are: York Museums Trust; Royal Museums Greenwich; Scottish Maritime Museum; Sunderland Museum & Winter Gardens; Newark and Sherwood District Council (Castle and National Civil War Museum); and the National Museum of the Royal Navy, Portsmouth.
Working Together is underpinned by an understanding that creativity and culture are integral to health and wellbeing and that engaging with participatory museum-based / -inspired activities can help to reduce social inequities and have a positive impact on people’s mental and physical health and wellbeing.
The project has been established during a cost-of-living crisis, and in the context of chronically under-funded services, including health and social care. Increasingly we see voluntary and third sector organisations providing front-line support and filling in the gaps once provided by statutory services. Perhaps less publicised is the work of regional museums up and down the country who are responding to need by developing creative health projects, programmes and partnerships to support community wellbeing.
Through Working Together, The Culture Health & Wellbeing Alliance and GEM aim to strengthen and embed this work, to understand the challenges and barriers to creative health work within museums and to create useful and relevant training that can be shared across the sector.
So where are we a year on?
An increasingly supportive network has been established, enabling museum colleagues and senior leaders to bounce ideas around, learn from and be inspired by others and talk about the challenges and complexities of this work. When we are fighting to legitimise and validate creative health work, finding a ‘fail safe’ space to talk about things that aren’t quite working or that feel uncomfortable can be difficult. Working Together has aimed to do just this by encouraging partners to come together, virtually and face-to-face, to reflect individually and collectively on the progress of their pilot projects and the impact that the programme is having more generally on their professional practice.
A bespoke training programme has been developed, responding to the identified CPD needs of Working Together museum colleagues. Working with inspiring professionals from a wide range of backgrounds, we have aimed to share relevant and authentic practice and expertise . These sessions have included Safeguarding & Boundaries in Creative Health work, Co-production (in Theory & Practice), Representation & Wellbeing and Understanding Health Systems.
Using the Creative Health Quality Framework, our 6 museum leads have been supported to slow down and focus on developing mutually beneficial, sustainable, long-term relationships with external partners. This has meant moving away from the outcomes-driven, delivery-focused work that many of us are used to. By giving partners ‘permission to pause’, to take risks and resist pressures to do more, colleagues have been able to try out new ways of working including co-production, in-depth community consultation and whole-museum training to embed greater understanding of this work internally.
Most of the Working Together museum partners are now moving into the delivery phase of their projects (supported by micro-grants), and we are excited to see the innovative and sustainable practice that is developing. The next phase of this project will focus on understanding the experience of the communities and individuals involved in and participating in this museum-led creative health work.
Let’s hear from two Working Together partner museums …
"The Working Together project has been a motivator for change and development within our organisation supported by relevant thought-provoking training and a call to action of how we implement this in our improved way of working. It has encouraged us to look more closely at staff wellbeing and improved our understanding of supporting communities, shifting us to a focus on co-production. The project has enhanced our partnership with third sector charity Barnardo’s and artists working in community participation, which is enabling us to become a more inclusive, safe and welcoming place where people can come together and enjoy creative activities. The project has also given us new insight into the objects in our care, what matters to people, and [has] made us closer examine how we represent and facilitate that."
Claire Munroe - Scottish Maritime Museum
"Being part of the Working Together group has not only been informative, with such a wide and diverse set of training, but by bringing together colleagues from across the country working in similar roles, has been immensely valuable to share success and how to avoid mistakes!
The generous funding, with very few strings attached, has allowed us to co-develop projects from the very start with our communities, allowing it to diverge from our initial thoughts to something that will truly support them and allow us to embed our projects into our day-to-day programming."
Philip Newton - York Museums Trust
Learning from this project will be shared and used to create bespoke creative health training and resources for the wider sector. We hope to launch these in autumn 2025.
Emerging evaluation from Working Together is enabling CHWA and GEM to advocate more effectively to funders and strategic partners on behalf of museums engaged in creative health work across the UK.
If you are a museum practitioner interested in delivering health outcomes we’d love to hear from you.
Photo credit: Meeting up! Working Together Museum Partners at Castle Museum, York, 2024
We are very grateful to The National Lottery Heritage Fund for their commitment of an award of £249,071 to realise the Working Together project from Autumn 2023 -25.
For further information about Working Together please contact:
Louise Campion, Project Lead: [email protected]
Below: a flyer for sessions organised by Royal Museums Greenwich and their project partner Less Talking as part of Working Together
