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Improving access to cultural heritage through community engagement

A UCL Special Collections team is partnering with festival organisers and young people in an East London borough to tell stories of local history and encourage them to consider a career in heritage.

2 young people in front of a poster board.

30 June 2022

Engaging young people in museums and local heritage can be a challenge, particularly when 18- to 24-year-olds have other priorities such as studying and finding work.

To explore how they could work together to address the issue, the organisers of the London Borough of Newham’s Heritage Month – an annual festival held near the UCL campus – contacted Vicky Price, the Head of Outreach at UCL’s Special Collections, with which they had worked to create previous festival content.

In 2020 the partnership produced a training video for the festival’s contributors, to help them to create engaging content for young people entitled ‘What is Heritage?’

“We have become starkly aware that the cultural heritage sector is a tricky field for young people who do not have many qualifications or opportunities to gain voluntary experience,” explains Vicky.

The UCL and Newham teams went on to develop a three-month training programme for local young people interested in working in the cultural heritage sector. The New Curators Project provides relevant training and offers real-life opportunities to deliver work to public audiences.

“We designed the project to act as a metaphorical ‘foot in the door’ for young people who hadn’t been to university or had the financial support required to complete considerable amounts of voluntary work,” explains Vicky.

With just seven months to deliver the first series of events for the 2021 Newham History Month, the team reached out to more than 40 community organisations and to Newham Council’s youth team to recruit participants. Eleven ‘New Curators’ were recruited and seven professionals from the heritage sector were brought in to develop workshops aiming to impart advice and wisdom on working in the heritage sector.

The online sessions covered topics such as how to use archives, what public history means, how to create an exhibition, how to speak to the public about your research and how to communicate your ideas digitally.

“We designed the project to act as a metaphorical ‘foot in the door’ for young people who hadn’t been to university or had the financial support required to complete considerable amounts of voluntary work.”

The trainee curators developed and staged a pop-up exhibition called ‘Fast Food-ward’ that explored the history of food and its production in East London. The exhibit toured nine of Newham’s public libraries and the curators delivered an online talk and produced social media content.

“The exhibition produced by the first New Curators’ cohort was a great opportunity for them to learn about Newham’s trade and manufacturing history,” says Vicky. “Their work was inspiring, and we hope to create an annual programme of training and coaching that will assist many more young people to find work in museums, libraries, arts organisations and galleries."

 

Related links

> New Curators Project