The symposium also threw up some interesting challenges to cultural sector beyond the immediate issues of well-being and resource equity. This was an important by-product of this creative enquiry and I think in no small way spurred on by Paul Allen from Centre for Alternative Technology and Andrew Simms from New Economics Foundation affirmation that change is possible through determination and imagination. So for me here are a number of  initial provocations, which I intend to explore over the next few months

1. The link between high-well and good stewardship of our environment is obvious. Why are museums good at the former, but unsure how to address the latter with their users?
2. Why has the dominant radical social history paradigm in many museums been so poor in linking social justice with resource equity and climate change? (I think M-Shed in Bristol is a notable exception). The gap between rich and poor will continue as rise as global, regional and generational disparities in access to resources widens.
3. Why is it that we have to revisit examining the relationship between culture and well-being when we have years of experience and analysis? Dr Dave OBrien noted that the evidence base for museums contributing to well-being is still patchy and Shelagh Wright said that there is a real need for evaluation that is about genuine learning and not advocacy
4. It is possible for a relatively small amount of targeted investment  to effectively enable change. Why does larger scale funding for organisational or cultural change often miss the mark?
5. Is risk taking more likely through funding of ideas and individuals rather than organisations or projects? Why is this so difficult for public funders to do and why does it only happen at the margins through Trusts and Foundations?
6. Could the ancient notion of the Commons provide a framework to deliver this change, gathering virtual and real-time communities around a desire to share and steward heritage through their relationship with each other and their surroundings?
7. This change only happen if embedded within highly participation organisations… right?

Nos. 18 and 20 Crowe Street in Stowmarket are a pair of late 18^th century estate cottages. Largely unchanged in 200 years they were the home of Mr and Mrs Wilding, formerly the cowman and cook of Abbot’s Hall. Mrs Wilding left her home in 1970 and to go into sheltered accommodation, she donated all her furntiture and some personal effects to the museum. Once the restoration is complete, the museum will put her house back in order.

During the 1950s and 60s Mrs Wilding ran a very small dairy from the back of the cottages. She made butter and cream using the milk from the cows on the estate. Until the early 1980s the cottages backed onto the old Stowmarket Cattle Market. Within its collection or oral histories the museum has memories of locals and farmers buying milk from a very cheerful Mrs Wilding.

The Cattle Market closed in the 1980s as stock farming in East Anglia declined. The land was sold to ASDA who built a supermarket on the adjacent Cricket ground and turned the market site into a shopping precinct, Wilkes Way (named after a former Stowmarket Town Clerk). ASDA was formed in 1949 in Leeds as Associated Dairies and Farm Stores ltd, it’s now wholly owned by the giant American Walmart corporation. Today Wilkes Way contains two charity shops, two travel agents, two empty shops, a learning centre and a Costa Coffee. Mrs Wilding’s defunct little dairy now backs onto ASDA’s staff car park.

No amount of costumed butter making activities in the cottages will give a sense the old townscape or how attached the market town was to working life in the nearby countryside.  Market towns,  more than any other kind of settlement relied on the connectivity of rural and urban. Whilst the hinterland was both exploited and stewarded the town remained a hub for rural social and economic life.

In the space of 30 years the context of the townscape has changed utterly. From being a meeting place for people engaged in the rural economy, the growing town in now shaped by its road and rail links towards London and the Midlands. Stowmarket, like many settlements within 2 hours of London could become a Clone Town, a place to stay rather than a place to live. A place where buying and selling no longer has a social or human dimension is but is reduced to a transaction between individuals and corporations.

There is a regular refrain that the UK lacks the engineers who would be in the vanguard of any ‘re-balancing’. The country has a a good number of top range engineers who are experts in research and development, but it desperately needs people to fill the middle ranks of the profession.

It’s often said that British engineering has a low status. This seems hard to reconcile with the way that industrial heritage is venerated. Abraham Darby’s 1703 blast furnace at Coalbrookdale is a world heritage site and a hagiography has been built around characters like Brunel. Ironbridge and the SS Great Britain in Bristol are two of the most iconic and most visited monuments to Britain’s industrial past.

These places are also a reminder of the of an economic system utterly dependency upon fossil fuels . Ironbridge’s Chief Executive Steve Miller has called his museums “The Birthplace of Global warming”.

To face the challenge of climate change, resource depletion and growing levels of inequality, we should recognise the need for a more equitable and sustainable society. In addition we’ll need technological innovation to better use the dwindling resources and to wean the world off fossil fuels. Much as they remind us of achievements of the past, museums could inspire tomorrow’s engineers in a quest for a transition to a low carbon and high well-being economy. The 6^th Manifesto Point of the Happy Museum calls for “Museums to lead on innovation into Transition” to a low carbon economy. They might:

Test ways that assets like your collections, staff and communities canbe imaginatively applied to current problems. For example, could you work with corporate sponsors to develop products and services that are highwell-being, low-carbon?

At the Museum of East Anglian Life the story is told of the self-sharpening chilled cast-iron plough share invented by Robert Ransome in 1808. This vastly improved crop yields, which helped feed growing populations across the world. Could Ransome’s ingenuity arouse thoughts of how developments in agriculture or hydroponics might feed 7 billion people today?  For the 60m people in the UK, allotments alone will not be the answer. In recent years the National Trust has led the way in designing renewable enegy solutions for its historic buildings.

We’d love to hear from museums who are already ‘leading on transition’. Museums should prompt people think about real-time  problems  and in future perhaps they will low carbon the low-carbon innovators.

A Ransomes Plough

So how is the Happy Museum Project different from what goes on or has gone before?

It accepts that many museums do appreciate their position at the heart of their community. There are great examples of those which combine scholarship, stewardship learning and participation. What the Happy Museum Project is trying to do is to show that organisations should respond in new ways to a different context.

May Redfern noted that in her work in Castleford, to talk about happiness against a backdrop of poverty falls into risk a political fate akin to seventies environmental groups, who according to Dominic Sandbrook, were merely seen as creating opportunities for: “spoiled middle-class do-gooders to get together and indulge their bleeding hearts [offering] nothing to working-class households who supposedly had neither the time or the money to worry about…issues like the future of the planet.” People’s capacity for happiness is limited if their lives are crap.

I think Social justice is elusive without a more equal distribution of equity. The last 13 years saw the gap between rich and poor widen than more ever.  Orthodox economic growth (seen as the best way to improve the lives of the poor) ensures that the continued consumption of this equity is the very thing that will make our planet unliveable. There is a greater need than ever to steward and share what we have.

We are also in the throes of a recession deeper than any since the 1930s, but this was preceeded by years of untrammelled consumption. People’s aspirations of personal wealth are greater than ever, but the generation now in their 20s are likely to be the first to be poorer than their parents.

Society has not only become more atomised but there is compelling research to show that rates of mental illness and anxiety have increased at the same rate as economic wealth. There is a need to decouple people’s sense of well-being from materialism

The civic realm has changed. The state, either national or local no longer has the monopoly on providing services. In some places this has led to loss of public spaces (closure of public libraries is especially alarming) resulted in privatisation of public spaces, in others it has led to more democracy as community groups provide innovative solutions to local problems.

Finally New Technology and social media means that people engage in the civic realm in a range of uncontrollable ways. Crowd sourcing and co-production is a reality, if museums don’t provide it, people will make it themselves.

The Happy Museum paper notes that museums in their role as story tellers, keepers of collective memory and meeting points they are well placed to interrogate these challenges. Many social history museums inspired by Springburn Museum in Glasgow in the 1980s articulated the local human impacts of loss, despair and hope of industrial decline. Today there’s an equal need to face the uncertainty and vulnerability felt by people in their localities in the face of global climate change and sustained decline in material wealth. Culture and especially museums should be in the vanguard in re-imagining a more liveable world.

Being a high-well being, sustainable organisation isn’t just about programming or collecting decisions.  It is a much about institutional behaviour. Museums should be judged on what they are as well as what they do. If you work in a museum ask yourself::

• Do I have people who play a true leadership role in local civil society
• Do local people making decisions both about programming and governance
• Do I actively lead campaigns in the locality based on clearly articulated values
• When did I last measure the  museum’s impact on the environment (including visitors)
• Has the museum ever shared its assets with community groups and enterprises
• Do I really know how emotionally engaged your users are. Are they happy and sad or are they just indifferent?

Embracing these challenges could lead to an invigorating transformation that places museums at the heart of an active public realm with significant benefits for society and museums alike.

At MEAL we’ve had our fair share of difficult conversations with planners over what is ‘appropriate’ development for the Abbot’s Hall project. The hall itself is a former private dwelling which will be brought into public use for the first time. In the past townspeople would have walked up Crowe Street from the market place to be faced with closed wrought iron gates and a sign saying Private Property. From March of next year these gates will be flung open as the Hall is opened to the public.

Aside from being a new asset for the town it’s hoped that Abbot’s Hall will generate income in attracting new visitors and hires, thus enabling the museum to broaden its public programme and leaning and participation activities. MEAL does not receive the levels of public subsidy enjoyed by neighbouring museums and earned income is vital to its sustainability.

Our negotiations with the Planners centred around the positioning of a new car park. Despite Stowmarket having excellent road and rail links and despite the fact that the museum offers discounted admission for those using public transport or bicycles, the vast majority of visitors from outside the town come by car.

The museum has poor parking provision. Although it lies within a former farming estate the museum’s 80 acres are hemmed in by recent housing developments . To the south in what was open country, new housing was built in the late 1990s. Only by the view over Vera Waspe’s farm to the south west is there any impression of being part of a working countryside.

Our initial plans allowed for a 70 space permanent car park in the grounds of Abbot’s Hall. This was rejected by both English Heritage and the Planning Authority. We had only two other alternatives, one of which involved concreting over green space near our 14^th century tithe barn (also a popular eating spot) or another which meant accessing the site through a quiet residential area. The first would have been unpopular with visitors the second with locals. Eventually we were granted a temporary planning permission for five years for a car park with a re-enforced grassed surface for around 30 spaces. The compromise, though not perfect, satisfies both museum, English Heritage and Planning Authority.

Under the government’s proposals the planning authority must give the presumption for sutainable development. This may have paved the way for the  museum to gain  permission for a larger car park or even greater access through the leafy Lockington Road. Working with planners under the existing guidelines, helped us get the balance right between the needs of the public realm, green space and the practicalities of sustaining an important and much loved cultural asset

The existing Planning rules are not perfect, no workable guidelines should run to 1000 pages. Moreover the intracacies of these vules allow some very strange decision. My local town of Saxmundham (population 3,500) is now to have two supermarkets. A Tescos being built next to an existing Waitrose as a site had been previously designated for retail.

However an effective planning regime is the only safeguard against urban sprawl, the corporate takeover of local retail and the preservation of green and freely accessible public space.

Abbot's Hall Barn, surely not appropriate for a car park

I was asked to speak about what influenced the Museum of East Anglian Life’s decision to consider itself   a social enterprise and how it addressed the competing or complimentary demands (depending on your viewpoint) of being a museum. I was also indulged and able to talk about MEAL’s side project, The Happy Museum, which advocates that all museums should aim to be high-well being, sustainable organisations. I galloped through my influences, including Sue Clifford from Common Ground; George Ewart Evans, the historian; EF Schumacher and Richard Layard, the economists and Edgar Cahn, lawyer and  social activist.

The text of the paper is called Conflation of GEM and MGS keynote chats and the presentation is on SlideShare  

Under 7s growing in MEAL's Walled Garden

Dale Farm has become a cause celebre in the debates regarding the provision of traveller sites. The saga appears to have come to a head. Yesterdays High Court decision accepted that Basildon Council could evict families from a portion of the Dale Farm site. The site in question is home to over 800 people and has two parts. The original half was developed with planning permission and another half developed without. The whole site is owned by traveller families but a portion is just inside ‘green belt’ and attempts to gain retrospective planning permission have been unsuccessful.

Basildon Council is entitled to close down half the site and have stated that the groups of travellers have not developed it within the Law. It has offered to find alternative accommodation for those evicted in line with its homelessness strategy. It is not surprising that some Travellers ignore planning regulation when 80-90 % of applications from Traveller families are turned down, mostly due to objections from local people who don’t want them in their area.

Until the last 20-30 years, Gypsy and Traveller lifestyles fitted into the rhythm of the seasons and local life. In East Anglia they provided much of the itinerant labour for the wheat or fruit harvest. Before all road repairs were hived out to large scale contractors, small companies would take on seasonal labour (many from the Gypsy Traveller community) to assist with laying tarmac. Today with seasonal employment almost non-existent and there is a greater disconnect between Gypsy Traveller and settled community than ever before. Health and education outcomes are poorer with life expectancy of Travellers 10 years below the national average.

The decision to evict families from Dale Farm ironically co-incides with a government proposal to loosen the planning laws regarding the green belt. The National Planning Policy Framework white paper proposes to replace rural planning restrictions with “a presumption in favour of sustainable development”. What could be more sustainable than a community with strong, supportive families living within a locality, having established their own  ammenities such as a chapel and a youth club.

The total costs of closing half of Dale Farm will be close to £8 million and over 500 people are likely to be dispersed around East Anglia.

The Museum’s new displays in Abbot’s Hall will be themed around home and belonging in East Anglia. In one of the rooms we hope to feature the work of Delaine Lebas an artist of Romany heritage who exhibited in the first Roma Pavillion at the Venice Bienale in 2007. Her work combines embroidery, painting and decoupage/”femmage” with sculpture and installations that reflect domestic claustrophobia, and the tensions that characterise her own experience as a Gypsy.

Delaine’s work, and indeed the recent experiences on Dale Farm, show that despite our highly mobile society where individuals move like atoms looking for roots, there is little sympathy for large groups of Travelling families trying to do just that.

The Collecting Connections Project from Godalming Museum brings local initiatives active in the field of sustainability and community building to look at past ways of life and current ideas and hopes for a sustainable way of living,  including Transition Town Godalming, allotment holders and a new local Hydro electricity project.  Connections are made to new ideas, a new public and to new knowledge and skills . In south London the Cinema Museum in Lambeth are using their connections with a social enterprises and community groups around Waterloo and Bankside to create a slew of community curators.

Although not large organisations, these museums fully know their place in their world. They understand their role in enabling peoples ‘everyday’ participation in culture. It might mean curating a display, leading a guided tour, researching collections or helping out on the information desk.    The value of such activity is frequently overlooked, occupying that vast ground between subsidised and commercial culture.  But this cultural ‘3^rd sector’ is highly participative, hugely diverse and very attuned to its environment.

As part of Mission Models Money  Re-Think community of practice Catherine Bunting is exploring the role of the arts in ‘everyday life’ . I hope she articulates the positive contribution of community cultural organisations to civil society, when so often they are the recipient of withering looks from professionals (I have heard small museums described ‘the long tail’ by a senior manager from a major regional museum).

At MEAL, the team had a go at identifying all the organisations we have worked with in the last two years. The photo below shows that farmers, metal health service users, Universities, London Sinfonietta, the British Museum and Travellers have all been involved with work at the museum.

MEAL's Connectors

Despite presenting numerous examples of ground-breaking, innovative practice, the funding invested in public engagement and participation in the UK’s museums and galleries has not significantly succeeded in shifting the work from the margins to the core of many of these organisations. In fact, as this study demonstrates, it has curiously done the opposite. By providing funding streams outside of core budgets, it appears to have helped to keep the work on the organisations’ periphery.

The Museum of East Anglian Life (MEAL) was one of twelve museums involved in the study and was praised for its participatory work. Dr Lynch praised the work of smaller organisations like MEAL, Ryedale Folk Museum and Hackney Museum (interestingly all social history museums) for taking serious steps to embed participation in their organisation. The challenge for museums is to ‘scale up’ this practice to larger institutions by better enabling user representation on governing bodies and working towards genuinely co-producing museum programmes.

This still does not solve the issue of marginalisation of participatory work due to its reliance on short term project funding. To me this could be solved by two ways. Firstly core funders could imperil organisations to be more participatory, rewarding those for the work they do rather than who they are. Some might be penalised if they show disinterest in sincere dialogue. However this approach is pretty unsubtle instrumentalism. An alternative would be for project funders to wield their influence by making their support dependent upon user engagement and decision making. Cuts in core funding have suddenly raised the importance of foundations like Paul Hamlyn within the funding landscape. They should use their weight to encourage core funders such as MLA/Arts Council to be demanding of their clients.

Recently I spent the day with Comic Relief, who are funding MEAL to work with Mental Health Service Users. They will be working alongside curators to interpret material from St Audry’s Hospital, a psychiatric institution near Woodbridge which closed in the early 1990s. Funding through Comic Relief’s mental Health strand is only possible if it is demonstrably ‘user-led’, meaning participants co-produce and develop activity. They are one of the few bodies I have encountered who make it a condition of an award that recipients attend a workshop to encourage their participants to shape the monitoring and evaluation process.

Not only are Comic Relief demanding that grant recipients demonstrate participation but are trying to equip organisations with the skills to help participants evaluate the impacts of their own contributions. Recent developments in mental health practice has pioneered notions of co-production of services between client and provider. It’s an experience from which the cultural sector would do well to learn.

One proposal mooted by the old MLA is to establish a limited number of ‘core regional museums’ with existing high profile programmes and collections of distinction. These would develop as mini ‘Nationals’ with no obligation to support the wider museum community. Whilst this might suit Tynesiders, Mancunians or people from Birmingham it doesn’t satisfy the needs of audiences outside metropolitan areas or reward smaller organisations who have shown genuine innovation with little or no Renaissance funding.

Arts Council England could do worse than use its existing model of National Portfolio Organisations for the arts to instigate a scheme of National Portfolio Museums. Rather than fund a select few, it should invite a swathe of organisations to apply for Renaissance funding some large, some small, some established some emerging. Similar principles might be set that applied to arts organisations around financial sustainability, governance and management and programming with an additional criterion around quality of collections.

I sit on the board of an arts organisation which although not previously an ACE Regularly Funded Organisation was invited to apply for NPO status.  Ultimately it was unsuccessful in its application but the process caused the organisation to critically evaluate its programming, governance and financial resilience and it will be healthier as a result. Rather than just select the largest museums which are by and large solely funded by the public sector, Renaissance funding should be thrown open to competition.

A competitive approach would cause larger museums to seriously test business planning and might open up the market to smaller organisations which have demonstrated invention and impact. Museums like Woodhorn in Northumberland and MEAL has pioneered work in social enterprise and impact measurement, well-being and sustainability. Whilst they may have garnered plaudits they have received a tiny fraction of Renaissance funding compared to near neighbours. Often these well-funded organisations have sought advice from the likes of us on how to set up their own businesses (we have charged consultancy fees but it’s not the same!).

If there is a genuine desire to create a financially resilient museum sector which is diverse and creative in using its assets to greatest public benefit, then the creation of an open and competitive process to distribute Renaissance funding would be a start.