Welcome to your May Newsletter

Today we are excited to launch our new funded project, Connected for Change! Thanks to the National Lottery Heritage Fund and Arts Council England, this project will embed long‑term, inclusive practice at the heart of the sector. You can also now find useful case studies from Growing Together on our website. 

Our new summer SW Museum Skills programme also goes live today, with training sessions on Accreditation, collections, application writing and more. We are also launching the much anticipated resources which have been created as part of our Hazards in Collections project. 

Don't forget that round one of our Capacity Builder grants is now open until Wednesday 27 May - take a look at our blog highlighting some great examples from last year's grant awards for inspiration. 

In this month's newsletter we focus on volunteering, with our useful list of volunteer recruitment top tips from April's Devon Museums Group meeting. In addition, we have your usual sector news and grants round up.

The summer tranche of the SW Museum Skills programme is now live! All of these free training sessions are being delivered online so that they can be accessed across the South West, and are open to staff, trustees, volunteers and freelancers. These training sessions provide practical guidance and strategic insight to strengthen your museum’s grant applications, collections management, Accreditation journey and more. 

Also, don't forget our EDI Roadmap e-learning module which is available on demand, offering flexible learning to support inclusive practice.

We're pleased to announce our new project, Connected for Change: Building Sustainable Inclusive Practice within Museums. This project will help embed long‑term, inclusive practice at the heart of the sector and grow museums’ relevance to communities. 
 
The £90,000 project has been made possible thanks to a £72,500 grant from The National Lottery Heritage Fund alongside funding from Arts Council England Museum Development Fund. 
 
Building on the work of Travelling Together and Growing Together, Connected for Change is a new phase of activity bringing together expertise, lived experience and established local museum networks to support museums. 
 
At its core is a focus on developing a sustainable and place-based approach to inclusivity—investing in people, relationships and shared learning that is embedded in day‑to‑day practice. The project will reduce isolation for those leading Equity Diversity and Inclusion (EDI) work, sustain momentum across the sector, and help build more resilient museums.  
 
Museums, staff and volunteers across the South West are invited to get involved in Connected for Change. Whether you’re looking to make your organisation more welcoming, connect with peers, or explore becoming an EDI Peer Champion, we’d love to hear from you!

Volunteers are integral to most museums’ welcome to their visitors; without volunteers, many museums simply cannot open their doors.  Beyond vital roles welcoming visitors, volunteers do so much more, contributing right across the museum and heritage sector in the south west – from fundraising and managing collections, to taking on critical governance roles.

So how can museums reach a wider pool of potential volunteers?  At a meeting of Devon Museums Group in April, we exchanged ideas for finding those all important new recruits. We've put all of the top tips from the meeting in our latest blog which you can find on our website.

Museums Change Lives Awards 2026 now open for nominations

The Museums Association Museums Change Lives Awards takes place at their annual conference each year, recognising and celebrating outstanding work by UK museums delivering social impact. The awards promote best practice from museums and individuals that supports communities and engages with contemporary issues, and are now open to enter.

There are three awards to be presented to institutions, and one to an individual. The institutional awards include Best Museums Change Lives Project, Best Small Museum Project and the Inclusive Spaces award. The individual award is the Radical Changemaker Award. 

The deadline for all entries is Monday 29 June 2026. Shortlists for each of the awards will be announced in September 2026.

The Audience Development Playbook: 
An Introductory Guide to Growing Audiences

Based on The Audience Agency's decades of learning, and recent insights from high‑achieving cultural organisations, the Audience Development Playbook is a step-by-step guide which turns complex, shifting challenges into a set of straightforward, usable tools. 

The Playbook offers practical prompts and exercises to support your cultural organisation with strengthening audience‑first thinking, combining data with empathy to reach people more effectively, and overcoming siloed working.

Make a nomination for a national blue plaque

This is your opportunity to get involved and suggest a person, group, or building to be honoured with a national blue plaque. You can make a nomination by signing in to a Historic England account and completing one of the online nomination forms.

The person you want to nominate has to have been dead for at least 20 years. If nominating a group, the group must have been formed at least 20 years ago and must be no longer running. The proposed address must be closely linked to the nominated person or group, but does not already bear their name, for instance birthplace museums.

Nominations for the National Blue Plaque scheme opens on Wednesday 27 May 2026.

Art Fund Student Opportunities

The aim of this funding is to help museums, galleries and visual arts organisations provide paid opportunities for full-time university students to gain meaningful, developmental work experience that enables them to explore their interest in the arts, and related future career options. In turn, museums, galleries and visual arts organisations gain skilled and accountable resource to help realise projects important to them.  

Art Fund encourages applications that benefit as many students as possible. They also encourage applications that focus on facilitating public engagement with art – whether that be online or in real life. 

Art Fund will fund the costs associated with paying students for the time they spend supporting your organisation in delivering projects. This is based on the current national and London living wage rates. 

The next Student Opportunities grant deadline is Friday 26 June 2026.

Developing your Creative Practice

This fund from Arts Council England supports individual cultural and creative practitioners in England thinking of taking their practice to the next stage through things such as: research, time to create new work, travel, training, developing ideas, networking or mentoring.

Grants of between £2,000 and £12,000 are available.

The next round of funding will open to applications in June 2026.

The best ways to get in touch are via the form on our website or by emailing museum.development@bristol.gov.uk

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