Projects

Wider Reach

Working for SHARE Museums East I delivered training and 1:1 sessions to nine museums to support their development of an Audience Development Plans. As part of this I also created an Audience Development Toolkit.

Wider reach 2 delivered 4 ‘Audience Development 101’ sessions online and delivered 1:1 sessions with eight museums.

Changemakers

Changemakers focused on giving young people in Fenland new, flexible ways to get involved in volunteering at Fenland’s Museums and creating greater equity between the different generations of people who make up the museums’ workforce and the wider community. These young volunteers researched their local changemaker and working with Youth Champions at each museum to create an exhibition.

Getting ready for a recruitment event at Ramsey Rural Museum

Working with a colleague, Louise Haselgrove, we are supported five museums to ensure that they are safe and  welcoming places for young volunteers and provided training and support for both Youth Champions and volunteers.

Snapping the Stiletto

The travelling exhibition

Snapping the Stiletto was a partnership project working with 11 museums and over 200 volunteers. Volunteers researched collections within the partner museums and co-curated a travelling exhibition celebrating strong Essex Women to help dispel the negative stereotype of the ‘Essex Girl’.

Volunteers also worked with me to take the stories uncovered out from the museums and we visited festivals, theatres and shopping centres celebrating the hidden stories of these women.

Evaluation projects

One of the battle re-enactments

I am currently the Project Evaluator for several projects. In the Footsteps of St Felix is a a NLHF project which is helping to restore parts of the church of St Andrews in Soham. The project is also working with local residents and schoolchildren to celebrate the history of the Town. Working with Luton Borough Council I am evaluating ‘Curating Luton’, a two-year NLLHF project which aimed to create a partnership infrastructure and robust heritage delivery eco-system, and to co-develop a ‘community-owned’ Heritage Implementation Plan.

Other projects include the ‘Accidental Archivist’ which is celebrating grassroots arts and culture in Luton and the ‘Peoples of Essex’ A historical and contemporary exploration of migration in Essex

I have evaluated a range of Lottery Funded projects

A battle re-enactment as part of ‘Great Grimsby’s Viking Journey
  • Great Grimsby’s Viking Journey (Heritage Lincolnshire 2023)
  • Communicating Connections (Essex record Office) 2022
  • Sharing Cultures (Wisbech and Fenland Museum) 2022
  • The Venetian Waterways Project (Great Yarmouth Borough  Council)  2021
  • Breathing new life into St Benedict’s (Heritage Lincolnshire),  2021
  • Marriot’s Way Heritage Trail (Norfolk County Council),  2020
  • Resorting to the Coast (Essex County Council) 2019
  • Mercury Voices (Mercury Theatre) 2018

Other evaluation projects include work for Share Museums East ‘Working with Volunteers’ and projects for the London Transport Museum, the Cultural Development Service for Essex County Council,  and Museum Development East Midlands.

Volunteers at a ‘thank-you event for Mecury Voices

Learning and engagement programmes and projects

I am currently working with the Museum of Power in Langford and the Centre for Computing History in Cambridge to develop their learning offers.

January 31st 2023 is 70 years since the dreadful flooding along the east coast. This event was marked by local history societies and I was commissioned by the Essex Record Office to produce a teachers’ pack to support local schools to engage with the commemoration.

I recently worked with Heritage Lincolnshire and the Watkin Society on a pilot project aimed at linking  the work of Victorian entrepreneur Edward Watkin to school curricula in Grimsby and Cleethorpes.

Previous work includes reviewing the learning offer for Ipswich Museum Service and developing new learning sessions for Christchurch Mansion (Ipswich). I have provided training and support for learning volunteers at the Norris Museum in St Ives and supported the Cambridge Archaeological Unit in their outreach and education programmes linked to excavations at Must Farm.

Talking to a school group visiting excavations at Must Farm

West Stow- Autopsy of the Sunken House

The team at a celebration event

West Stow was given funding from the Heritage Lottery Young Roots fund to work with young people (aged 11-25) and professional archaeologists to systematically dismantle the house and excavate the pit that remains.
Between October 2015 and April 2016 a group of 17 young people worked together on this project under my guidance.

As part of this, they created new interpretation for the site including the film that you can see here