Do you want to future proof volunteer involvement at your museum? Ensure you’ve got what’s needed in place to so that volunteers can thrive as they support your museum to deliver its goals? Then Volunteering Fit for the Future could be for you!
This is is a light touch programme of support for museums across the South West, including Hampshire Solent and Isle of Wight, focussing on volunteer involvement. There are 12 funded places on the programme, providing four to six hours of support for your museum, with additional opportunities for learning together. The time commitment asked of museums taking part is around five hours, with optional extra time in drop in surgeries to deepen the benefits for your museum.
“Many thanks for this – it’s very timely for us and supports our objective of enhancing and strengthening our volunteer relationships”
– St Ives Museum, 2023 programme participant
The programme will kick off in September 2024 when participant museums complete a short preliminary assessment to outline their current position and aspirations for volunteering.
From mid-October and into November, museums will take part in an hour one on one conversation with our Sustainable Volunteering Officer, Eleanor Moore who will carry out a light touch review of their processes and priorities for volunteering and provide targeted advice and signposting at this point.
We will round off the year with an online December ‘social’ for our 12 participant museums, and introduce the online drop in ‘surgery’ sessions for Volunteering Fit for the Future museums programmed for January and February 2025. These are participant museums’ opportunity to bring questions, explore a particular issue or topic together in more depth, learn from each other and be inspired to plan their next steps.
Museums will then build action plans for achieving their priorities for volunteer involvement, with support from Eleanor, so that plans are in place before the end of March 2025. Museums will then have the opportunity to apply for Museum Development South West’s new grant programme, launching in Spring 2025, to achieve their objectives.
Interested? Talk to your governing body and management team about whether this is a good fit for your museum and also contact your local, place-based Museum Development Officer at this stage to let them know you’re thinking of applying.
Then, email [email protected], copying in your Chair or senior manager. Priority for places will be given to Accredited museums / museums Working Towards Accreditation, then to other museums/heritage organisations, with the aim of achieving a spread of participation across the region.