Engaging your first Young Trustees

This training and networking programme is for Trustees and staff from heritage organisations interested in appointing young people aged 18-30 to their boards and for young people interested in becoming museum Trustees.

The programme is run by Kids in Museums in partnership with Upstart Projects. It is supported with funding from Arts Council England and the Welsh Government.

Why are we running this programme?

All our recent conversations with young people at our Museum Youth Summit and elsewhere have told us the same things. Young people don’t feel welcome or represented in museums. This is borne out in research. In 2020, a report by Morris Hargreaves Macintyre found that only 12% of young people felt that national museums in London told stories that were relevant to them.

Despite this, the young people we talk to don’t want to abandon museums. They are ambitious for change and optimistic that with more power in decision making, they can help museums change and become better places to visit, participate and work for them and their peers.

While improvements have been made, data from across the arts sector shows that the Boards of organisations working in culture and heritage are not as diverse as they could be. People from minority ethnic backgrounds, people with disabilities and those from working class backgrounds are underrepresented.

Young people aged 18-30 are also underrepresented. Many museums still do not involve them in the highest levels of their decision making. They don’t give them a say in the direction of their future strategy or how their budgets are spent.

There is no data specifically about museum boards, but Arts Council England data about regularly funded cultural organisations from 2020-21 shows that 91% of Trustees were aged over 34 and around half, over 50. Similarly, data from the Arts Council of Wales shows that only 3.7% of board members at their funded organisations are younger people.

The good news is that research shows that all kinds of diversity improve decision making and make boards more collaborative. However, it’s not just a case of recruiting diverse Trustees to improve representation, the whole board has to be committed to changing its culture to be more inclusive in the way it works.

This programme will support museums to prepare to create an inclusive board culture to support the involvement of young people as Trustees. We will work with Trustees to develop an inclusive recruitment process to recruit new Young Trustees. Once the recruitment process is complete, we will support the new Young Trustees through their first six months in post, as well as providing ongoing support to Trustees to embed inclusive working among their board members.

We hope that this will be the start of change in the museum sector, bringing new perspectives to decision making and ensuring the needs of young people as visitors and staff members are represented in museums’ future planning.

Programme outline

The programme includes strands of support for Trustees, museums and for young people who are interested in and become Young Trustees during the programme. It will run from April 2024 to March 2025.

For museums and Trustees we will offer:

• Online training about giving young people a voice in decision making in your organisation.
• Support to plan and implement an inclusive recruitment process for Young Trustees for your museum. This will include preparing role descriptions, advertising roles and interviewing.
• Drop in networking and sharing sessions with other Trustees and staff involved in the programme.
• An end of programme celebration and sharing event.

For young people appointed as Young Trustees:

• Online training about having a voice as a Young Trustee.
• Monthly online support sessions during the first six months of their role as a Young Trustee.
• Option for additional 1:1 mentoring (there may be a cost for this).
• An end of programme celebration and sharing event.

At the end of the programme, we will involve both young people and Trustees in an evaluation process to help us develop the programme.