MGS Grant Outcomes

Funded organisations will be more resilient

We want our funding to help your museum strengthen its ability to respond to challenges and opportunities in order to secure its long term future and financial sustainability.

The kinds of things that could help you do this include, but are not limited to, the following:

• Developing your governance to ensure that you have the right mix of skills to help your museum thrive
• Exploring new operating models
• Updating and developing business plans in relation to current conditions
• Developing advocates and support for your museum and its work
• Activity that will increase income for your museum
• Decreasing your costs
• Creating efficiencies in how you work
• Forging sustainable partnerships and mutually beneficial collaborations to share resources.

Funded organisations will be more environmentally sustainable

We want our funding to help you to take steps that will enable you to operate your museum in a more environmentally sustainable way and to achieve net zero targets. We are also keen to support you to use your collections to raise awareness and understanding of the climate and biodiversity emergency.

The kinds of things that could help you to achieve these outcomes include, but are not limited to, the following:

• improving carbon literacy amongst your staff and volunteers
• reviewing your environmental impact and identifying improvements that you can make
• capital works and purchases that will improve your energy efficiency and your contribution to biodiversity and reduce waste for your organisation
• exhibitions, events, activities that help visitors to engage with the climate and biodiversity emergency

Collections will be better cared for and managed and more accessible

We want our funding to help you to make your collections more accessible and to share them more widely. We understand that to do this, collections need to be well documented, conserved, stored and researched and that sometimes a period of focused project work in these areas may be necessary to help you take a time critical step forward.

If you are asking for funding to undertake documentation, conservation, storage improvements or collections research, it is vital that you include within the project, steps to actively share and increase access to these collections.

We can support a wide range of activity around increasing access to and sharing collections including but not limited to:

• Exhibitions
• display redevelopments
• new interpretation
• online and in person engagement activity

Please note that we expect projects focused on this outcome to be striving to achieve outcome 5 as well – “A wider range of people will be engaging with and represented in museums”.

The museum workforce will be more skilled, confident and diverse

We want our funding to help you to develop and diversify your workforce (which includes both paid staff and volunteers and trustees) so that you are better equipped to address the challenges and opportunities that your museum encounters.

The kinds of supported activity that could help you in this area include, but are not limited to, the following:

• Identifying gaps in skills and representation within your workforce – Board, paid staff and volunteers
• Training and other development activity to address skills gaps
• Activity to increase representation within your workforce by removing barriers to those from underrepresented groups getting involved in your work
• Activity around succession planning and preservation of skills and knowledge within the museum
• Collaboration with other museums, heritage and non-sector organisations to share skills and knowledge

A wider range of people will be engaging with and represented in museums

We want our funding to help you make your museum a more inclusive place through co-creation and by removing barriers that have previously excluded certain groups and people.

The kinds of things that could help you do this include, but are not limited to, the following:

• Work to understand your visitor demographics and who is currently underrepresented
• Work to understand and remove barriers to participation
• The development of co-creation as your museum’s way of operating
• Collaboration with community groups and agencies working with excluded groups
• Sensitively working with communities of origin
• Engaging with intangible cultural heritage as a way of developing connection and understanding

Museums will enhance quality of life for people by improving wellbeing, supporting learning, and contributing to place-making

We want our funding to help you deliver activity that will have a positive impact for individuals and communities.

The kinds of things that could help you do this include, but are not limited to, the following:

• Partnerships and collaborations to address local or community specific need and opportunity
• Providing places and spaces where stories, traditions and objects that people in the locality or in a community of interest consider to be part of their cultural heritage, can be explored and celebrated
• Developing programmes that support health and wellbeing
• Increasing and developing your provision of learning opportunities
• Building relationships with learning providers