Kids in Museums is a visitor-focused organisation founded in 2003 that works with museums, galleries and heritage sites nationwide to make them more welcoming for children, young people and families. It's a small organisation with a modest budget but it still has a massive impact in its industry, leading significant change in the museum and heritage sector.
A critical part of the work Kids in Museums does is spotlighting the need to have more young trustees on boards. Arts Council England (ACE) diversity data collected from 2021/22 shows that only 11% of board members are under 34 and less than half are under the age of 49. This means the perspectives of younger generations are missing, causing a disconnect between museum leadership and the younger audiences they want to attract. The EDI work Kids in Museums does aims to bridge this gap by diversifying boards and creating a platform for younger voices.
We interviewed Alison Bowyer, Executive Director of Kids and Museums to learn more about the organisation's responsive, reactive approach, the essential elements of its EDI activity and what makes it so successful.
What are your motivations for addressing diversity and inclusion within your organisation?
I think it's twofold really. As a charity, Kids in Museums exists to make museums better places for all families, children and young people to visit. We know that around 40% of children don't visit a museum within a 12-month period. We know that you're much less likely to visit a museum as a child with either your family or school if you come from a non-white background, if you have a disability or a life-limiting illness, or if you come from a lower socioeconomic background.
Those inequalities are becoming quite ingrained; there hasn't been a great deal of change in who visits museums in about a decade. So, that's our starting point really and as an organisation, diversity and inclusion is incredibly important to address this lack of access for millions of children and young people.
How are your EDI motivations embedded within your wider company strategy?
It basically informs all of the work we do in the museum sector. Our goal is to support museums to change who is visiting and to make them more welcoming spaces for everyone. We want to encourage them to programme in a way that is relevant and interesting to more diverse audiences and to make their activities accessible for more people. So, it really encompasses everything we do—how we programme, our training, the resources we create, and the work we do to try and encourage a more diverse range of children to think about museum careers.
We are always looking to talk to the people who are visiting museums already and want to understand their experiences. It's really important to us that we bring as diverse a perspective as possible into those conversations so we can reflect that back to the museum sector. This includes a range of different perspectives represented among our staff, board and trustees. We need people who bring different experiences. We've worked a lot since COVID to become a much more inclusive employer for this reason.
What are some of your key EDI goals?
Our biggest goals right now are around board diversity. Although we have young people on our board, we are not so great with other measures of diversity. We've just completely overhauled the way we recruit trustees and we are continuing to work to understand why we are not receiving more applications from the groups that we're hoping to reach. That's very much an ongoing project for us.
In terms of our work with the museum sector, I think we've got two sets of priorities. We are trying to update our understanding of what barriers audiences are facing now that the pandemic is fading away as a barrier to museum visiting. We're trying to unpack what barriers have been caused by the pandemic and cost of living crisis and what other barriers are still there. Then, we have priority audiences that we are trying to engage with. They are people from low socioeconomic backgrounds, people who identify as D/deaf or disabled and people from minority ethnic backgrounds, particularly black and black British backgrounds— the most underrepresented museum audiences.
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What are some of the essential elements of your EDI work?
Focusing on our work to bring young people onto our Board, I think our understanding of how we do this successfully has evolved over time.
One thing we’ve thought a lot about and learnt a lot about is how we create a recruitment pack and how we market the roles. We've been working to find ways of demystifying what being a trustee is. If you just read a normal trustee role description, it will say things like, 'Ensure effective charity governance' and 'Engage in stakeholder relations' and 'Assess risk'. But a lot of those things don't really mean anything unless you're already involved in the charity sector.
So, we've spent a lot of time trying to create recruitment packs that give a clear understanding of what being a trustee involves and why it's really important for us to involve young people. We really emphasise that this isn't a tokenistic exercise and explain what they will learn, the skills they'll develop, the support they'll get, and try to make it as easy as possible to make an application.
We try to avoid having a long person specification and role description so it's not too intimidating. We've tried to make the whole recruitment process as easy as possible, including applications in different formats, sending interview questions out before the interviews and making sure that we give everyone feedback.
How do you know your EDI activity works to improve diversity and inclusion?
When you map the age of our board and compare the age range of our board to either an average charity board or an average Arts Council-funded organisation board, we have a younger age profile. The majority of our trustees are now under 50, so we've now got a much wider spectrum.
Also, the feedback from the young trustees about the fact they felt they've learned, been able to have an impact and been listened to. Plus, the things we've achieved within the organisation as a result of [the young people's] ideas and their support in decision-making. They completely reshaped how we programme conferences; all our conferences now have a dedicated young people strand. They're also helping us to set up a new board committee and our youth panel. There's still work to be done but we've made incredible progress in having more diverse perspectives.
What do you think makes this initiative successful?
I think because we're a small organisation, we're able to be quite agile, quite flexible and make changes and implement learning quickly. We try to be very responsive to our young trustees and to make sure we're listening to what they want and trying to respond to it. They have their own support network but they also work with the youth panel a lot. I think this gives them confidence in the views they're representing but also provides them with people to consult with.
At the moment, our current young trustees are very involved in setting up a new board subcommittee about inclusivity and relevance. So, they're doing something that shapes how the board works and enabling them to do things like that and see change has been really important.
Having a group of trustees who have had an open and welcoming attitude to having young people involved in the group is so important too. A lot of our trustees are quite senior people inside and outside the cultural sector but there's a willingness to understand the perspective of a young person. There's an understanding that while young people may not have a specific level of professional expertise, they still bring something really valuable through their experience and it’s relevant to our organisation. The willingness of the staff team to really support this project has been invaluable too.
What are some of the challenges you have encountered so far?
Some of the challenges have been finding suitable external training about governance because we didn't feel we had the expertise to do that ourselves. We're not necessarily experts, but it has been hard to find training that is pitched appropriately. I'm almost at the point where we might do a sort of demystifying governance for young people course with a partner we're working with at the moment. We’ve worked with them to create a handbook for chairs, particularly about inclusive meetings but lots of other things as well.
What advice or key learning would you share with other organisations considering delivering similar activities?
Making sure your board is genuinely committed to it as more than just a tokenistic exercise. Make sure they are prepared to work on being inclusive, and they are genuinely prepared to value and listen to the perspective of young people and potentially change the way they work to create an environment where young trustees can truly flourish. Keep listening and be prepared to be flexible and make changes to the programme as you need to.
Also, don’t assume that people know anything. So, for example, why should most 19-year-olds (or indeed people of any age) know what a trustee does or what financial governance means? I wish I'd known at the start how much a trustee role is groupthink and jargon. I wish I'd questioned my own assumptions about what people know a lot more. Plus, don't assume that young people just want to do social media and digital things. It creates a stereotype for young people, which a lot of them are quite angry about.
What do you perceive are the risks of not addressing EDI in your organisation?
The risk for us is almost existential in that we exist to break down barriers to audiences attending museums and if we do not understand those audiences, our work is not useful, relevant or trusted by the museum sector. We know from our research that the support we give the museum sector is perceived to be relevant, supportive and trusted, and for our work to be effective, we need to keep it that way. We need to maintain the audience focus we have and we need to maintain our understanding of the groups that are underrepresented to help museums create new ways and adapt existing ways to bring them into their venue.
To learn more about Kids in Museums and to show your support by signing the Kids in Museums Manifesto, visit kidsinmuseums.org.uk.
Image Credits: Tees Valley Museums and Glasgow Life
