Sense of Place

The Sense of Place Programme explores how museums can form a crucial part of a place’s identity and wellbeing, and how creative practice can support audiences to enhance their sense of wellbeing by focusing on the community they are part of.

This new MDM programme, Sense of Place, is centred around the theme of place and place-making and will support you to identify place-based approaches to your community engagement work over a two year period.

The term Sense of Place looks at people’s thoughts, feelings, and emotions around a place or environment. The programme will focus on how museums can form a crucial part of a place’s identity and wellbeing, and how creative practice can support audiences to enhance their sense of wellbeing by focusing on the community they are part of.  We will support museums to identify the benefits of engaging in this type of work and the opportunities to develop it further.  

Year One took place over 2024/25 demonstrated what ‘place-making’ looks like in practice through shared learning and workshops. The programme was launched at Aurora Wellbeing in Worksop, a truly inspiring organisation putting sense of place at the heart of everything they do, and was followed by two online sessions facilitated by Culture Leicestershire.

Year Two will be an intensive support programme for a small cohort of up to six museums building on the work undertaken in Year One. It will involve training workshops, 1:1 mentoring and peer networking.

Expressions of Interest to be part of the cohort are open now. Deadline: 5pm, Friday 11 April 2025. It’s not mandatory for museums to have participated in the Year One activity.

The programme will be delivered from April 2025 to April 2026.

As an outcome of participating in the programme museums will:

• Develop understanding of sense of place work, and how they can approach and develop models to embed it within their organisation

• Create a plan to enable change and implement sense of place work in their museum

• Identify challenges and/ or barriers to embracing models and approaches within their organisation and work through ways to overcome these issues

• Develop new networks of contacts and expand their knowledge of good practice

• Understand better where they can seek further support and external funding, including how their plans relate to funder’s priorities and requirements

• Be supported to apply for programme-linked grant funding through Museum Development Midlands

• Have access to a peer network of museums for advice, support and collaboration

• Be encouraged to access other MDM training, funding and resources related to their specific plans and objectives.

We will also support them to explore developing applications to Arts Council England’s National Lottery Project Grants https://www.artscouncil.org.uk/ProjectGrants 

The programme sits within the Museum Development Midlands (MDM) Inclusivity and Relevance programme and supports Arts Council England’s Let’s Create strategy.