Citizens’ jury urges Birmingham Museums to ‘take risks and be bold’

A citizens' jury convened by Birmingham Museums Trust has published a set of recommendations for the city's museums.

The jury was brought together last year as part of the museum trust’s drive towards participatory engagement. Already trialled in a number of other museums and galleries in the UK and abroad, citizens’ juries, and larger citizens’ assemblies, are intended to help cultural and heritage sector institutions re-engage with the public and increase the impact of their work.  

• Analysis | Citizens’ juries can help museums fulfil people’s needs

Birmingham Museums worked with the community interest company Shared Future to recruit 28 participants from the Birmingham metropolitan area representing many different walks of live. The group met for 30 hours online and three full days in question, with 26 participants attending every session.

The jury was asked to consider the question: “What does Birmingham need and want from its museums, now and in the future; and what should Birmingham Museums Trust do to make these things happen?”

Participants were also asked to share their views on the roles of museums.

In a set of 20 recommendations published this week, the jury called for better promotion of the city’s museums and their activities, including challenging the council’s planning rules that prevent the museums from doing promotion at council entrances, building the museum’s social media strategy and generally increasing the level of physical promotion.

Other high-priority recommendations include ensuring that exhibits are accessible to all of Birmingham’s citizens, and ensuring that everyone feels “they can come to the museum as they are”. The group made further recommendations on sponsorship and fundraising, attracting new audiences and sharing multiple perspectives on history.

The jury’s highest priority role for museums was that “museums should be spaces for a variety of experiences” and “should enable experiences that are educational and improve knowledge and experiences that are fun and entertaining and offer escapism”.

In a joint statement, the jury urged the city's museums to "update how they are perceived in Birmingham and on a national stage" and said they "must take risks in their bid to be inspiring, educating, engaging to all".

Sara Wajid and Zak Mensah, the co-CEOs of Birmingham Museums, said the process had come at a critical tipping point for the city’s museums and the wider museum sector, as financial pressures facing local authorities put collections across the UK at risk.

Wajid and Mensah said they had been heartened by the jury’s main finding that “citizens value and feel ownership of their museums and believe that they can be of immense value in helping to create a city which is proud of its great history and its super-diverse present and can combine trust and hope with honesty about past injustices and contemporary issues”.

In the foreword to the report, they said: “It’s hard to recall this now, after such a ringing endorsement, but we started on the process of commissioning the jury with a real fear that people would say that museums were not relevant, or were important but not a priority given the pressures of the cost of living crisis and of the dire state of Birmingham City Council’s finances.

“This seemed like a real risk, as unlike most consultations about museums, we were not asking visitors about what they might like; we were asking a representative sample of the entire population what they wanted from their museums.”

However, said Wajid and Mensah, “the findings of the jury were truly inspirational for us, and we are more determined than ever to develop Birmingham’s museums into world class institutions that everyone can be proud of”.

The foreword added: “We know we cannot deliver these recommendations on our own. We need support from, and partnerships with, a wide range of civic, third sector and commercial organisations who share our vision of enabling Birmingham to realise its potential to become a model city for 21^st-century Britain. This may seem like an extravagant aim, but the other key message from the jury to Birmingham Museums staff was to take risks and be bold. What else would you expect from Birmingham?”

Jury statement

“At the beginning of this process we didn’t know what to expect. Many of us haven’t been to a museum in a long time, we didn’t know what Birmingham Museums Trust was about, and what it could mean to us. We were not engaged and did not feel close to our museums. As a result of the process, we feel more pride in our museums and the city.

“We heard a range of perspectives speaking on diverse topics that relate to how the industry works. As a group of different people with different lives we have different opinions, but have found consensus in our shared aspirations for Birmingham Museums Trust to thrive. We feel more connected to our museums and hopeful for their future. We have enjoyed being a part of this decision making process and it has made us advocate for and promote our museums in our own communities.

“Our museums need to update how they are perceived in Birmingham and on a national stage. The re-opened Birmingham Museum & Art Gallery is much more appealing, we hope to see this continued across the other sites and that the trust makes sure the people are aware of the amazing things it has to offer and the process it has gone through.

“We acknowledge our museums are fighting for their survival; they must take risks in their bid to be inspiring, educating, engaging to all. It is important for our museums to involve and represent the communities they are responsible to, ie the people of Birmingham and they shouldn’t be precious about doing so.

“We deserve museums that are proud of us, that we can be proud of, that celebrate what’s unique about Birmingham. The voice of the museum is to some extent, the voice of the people, and we want everyone to hear us a mile coming.”