Toolkit: Going Places Community Engagement Toolkit

By Art Fund

SUMMARY

Community engagement supports museums to develop relationships with audiences, generate visitors, become more relevant, build trust with local people, and give audiences a sense of ownership over a museum and its collections. Art Fund's Community Engagement toolkit is designed to help you plan, deliver and evaluate community engagement work in museums.

This practical guidance will help you to consider, develop and deliver opportunities for community collaboration.

This toolkit, developed in collaboration with museums and galleries across the UK, offers practical guidance for developing and delivering community engagement activities.

Covering consultation, collaboration and co-curation, the guidance is suitable for both beginners and experienced practitioners, with resources that support a wide range of engagement activities.

The toolkit includes short films, reflection opportunities and easily actionable steps, and aims to help museums build stronger, more inclusive relationships with their communities.

The toolkit and videos are available in English and in Welsh (Cymraeg).

Watch: Short films

Lawrlwythwch y pecyn cymorth (PDF)

Going Places is an Art Fund programme made possible with support from The National Lottery Heritage Fund and additional support from Esmée Fairbairn Foundation. Going Places aims to engage and involve underrepresented and underserved audiences with museum collections through high-quality collaborative touring exhibitions and public programmes.

We are grateful to Going Places partners for co-creating this toolkit, contributing valuable ideas and experiences and shaping its scope and content. Thanks also to the team at Art Fund and independent consultants who supported the Going Places project and offered expert advice to support the creation of the toolkit. Community engagement is always a work in progress; terminology and leading-edge are continually being developed. To acknowledge this, we have included an Incomplete Glossary in the toolkit, setting out definitions relating to community engagement as they stand in 2024. We hope this toolkit and glossary will continue to be updated as the sector develops its community engagement practice.

The toolkit has been created by independent museum consultants: Laura Crossley (www.lauracrossley.com), Sarah Plumb, and Marek Romaniszyn.

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