We’re pleased to announce that Thackray Museum is among the latest recipients of the Esmée Fairbairn Collections Fund, joining nearly 200 organisations funded since 2011.
This set of grantees includes independent, local authority and national museums further developing their participatory practice and addressing societal issues. They each demonstrate the potential to use museum collections to connect with communities and be guided by them to create more democratised and inclusive museums.
Thackray Museum of Medicine has been generously awarded £100,000 to transform collections, interpretation and exhibition practices to make the museum more representative of audiences and local communities and recruit a specialist curator to lead on decolonisation of its collections.
Here are July 2024’s successful grantees:
Centre for Computing History, £93,200 for “Broken Tech: Broken Earth”, a participatory project with local communities to explore the environmental and societal impacts of the computing technologies celebrated in the museum’s collections.
Herefordshire Museum Service, £99,000 for “Revealing Our Roots: Unearthing Common Ground”, a community engagement project to reinterpret the Herefordshire Hoard through working with marginalised and underrepresented communities across the county.
National Museums Liverpool, £94,156 for “Cuerpos del Tiempo (Bodies of Time)”, a partnership project with Luma Creations to work with the Latin American community in the north west of England to shape the reinterpretation of the Latin American collections, beginning with the redisplay of the Mixteca Codex.
North Hertfordshire Museum, £75,000 to research and review colonial and other world collections with members of communities from the countries where the collections originated.
Orkney Islands Council, £99,928 to boost core hours to re-engage with Orkney’s geographically harder-to-reach communities and facilitate community-led outputs.