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MDM

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 will demonstrate what ‘place-making’ looks like in practice through shared learning and workshops.  

The programme will be launched in October at Aurora Wellbeing in Worksop, a truly inspiring organisation putting sense of place at the heart of everything they do, and will be followed by two exploratory online workshops in November and January.

  • Sense of Place Launch Event, Thursday 10 October

    Our in-person launch event will introduce the Sense of Place programme, focusing on how a sense of place and local identity contributes to individual and community wellbeing using Aurora Wellbeing as a case study

  • Explore the Power of Harnessing a Sense of Place, Tuesday 19 November

    Join us for our first workshop in the programme to learn how our place-based approach can influence how people feel about the place they call home

  • Explore the Use of Creative Practitioners in Place-based Work, Thursday 30 January 2025

    Our second workshop will explore the opportunities and benefits of using creative practitioners to connect with communities

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. If you’re interested in applying for this intensive support we would encourage you to attend one or more of the workshops to explore and develop ideas around what you would like to achieve by being involved.

Year Two will help the cohort develop their skills and confidence and create an action plan to work towards. It will involve visits to other sites to see and learn from examples of best practice. The cohort will be able to apply for MDM Strategic Grants to support their development work and 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.

Key information:

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What's involved:

Year one - Three workshops introducing place-making. We recommend attending at least one of the workshops if you wish to apply for the cohort support in the second year.

Expressions of interest for the cohort programme will open early 2025.

Year two - intensive support programme for a small cohort of museums, helping the cohort develop their skills and confidence and to create an action plan.

Eligibility: This programme is open to Accredited museums or museums Working Towards Accreditation in the Midlands. Priority will be given to non-NPO and non-National museums who are Accredited or Working Towards Accreditation.

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