 So this is the museum I'm a director of and this was taken in 2017, but when this small museum now a museum was completely ruined and the municipality of Maribor wanted to sell it to the highest bidder, you can go on. As I said, people started organizing and protesting and media were involved, and they have decided that they want to do something with it. They found a donator who was willing to restore this beautiful, although small building, someone started collecting money. The other one was participating the program or division of this museum. And so it became obvious that this was a project of a local community. Go on, please. So this is this museum today. We opened it in 2019. As you can see, it's a beautiful building now with a beautiful, although small exhibition and this museum became how they say, a meeting point for the local community. People come there, people share their memories. And people of course take a look at the different exhibitions that although museum is very small, we are still able to prepare them and talk about the history of this beautiful Slovenian city. You can go on. This picture is from the opening of the exhibition in 2019 and it was a very emotional moment for the local community. This is just a part of the crowd that actually gathered at the moment. And old and young and rich and poor and members of the representatives of the municipality and the Ministry of Culture and just the local community all came. And they all showed that this, although it is a small building, this means a huge story to them because in a way they were all connected to it. Please next slide. At the moment we were also starting to prepare a strategy for our museum, the National Liberation Museum in Maribor, which includes also Trafica. The Kiosk Museum for one and the photographic museum. So we have four buildings that we work in. The Kiosk story actually gave us a represented or was a proof that the local community, if we want the museum to make sense, if we want the museum to be meaningful to them and important to them. The local community has to be included in all parts of the museum. That means that we started preparing the strategy of the museum for the next five years with their help. You can go on now. We invited different groups of people, our visitors, those who do not visit the museum because why then don't come is it was very important to us. You can change the picture. We invited the people from the local different kinds of types of people from the local community NGOs, then the representatives of the municipality of Maribor, the visitors, the outside outsourced collaborators of the museum so different types of people, a lot of them, and one of the most important groups that helped us where the secondary school primary school and kindergarten teachers groups from schools and kindergartens are our most important visitors. Most of the visitors come from there. So we knew that if we have if we want to be meaningful to them if we want them to really come to the museum and use what we have. We have to ask them what do they expect and what they want from the museum. You can go on with the picture, please. So this is one of the groups that met regularly at the museum. Well, we were very sorry when COVID came of course we all were but that meant that we have to move our cooperation online, which was not as vivid and nice as this live in meetings at the museum, where, but nevertheless we managed to to make it through all the meetings and asked all the questions we wanted to, to, to get their answers. And we actually got everything we wanted we we made a strategy if you can share. I mean, change the picture. We prepared a strategy from for the events for the organization of the museum for the exhibitions that we are going to make through the next five years. This made our work in preparing strategy easier in a way, but also much harder because working as a local community expects from you is a bit harder than what you think the museum could be because they found so many new questions they found so many new answers that we sometimes weren't prepared for. But I think that because of that we will be a better museum in the future. Here you can see a group of our workers also working on on the strategy of the museum. Everyone from the technical workers to curators to director of course me and everyone was included. Every opinion was very important. So we built this strategy from from the bottom up. And what we prepared is going to be very meaningful for the future of the museum. If you can change the picture please. I think that with what we did was we started building a new type of museum and the first thing. The second thing is that we opened the kiosk because it was what the local community wanted. And the second thing is that we prepared a strategy on what according to what they want, what they expect, what their vision of the museum is and what why was that so important for us, because we share their stories. We share stories of our local community of the people that live in our local community of their ancestors. And I think it is very important and it is also with accordance with the European strategies of cultural heritage that everyone in the local community, everyone in your nation has a right to decide what their heritage is and what their heritage is going to be. So I think that we built a bridge between the museum and the local community and the nation and anyone at any time can can cross that bridge. So this is what I wanted to say. You can close my presentation now. I'm going to go forward to my, just a second, to our guests to see what they did and how they built a new type of museum. And to see how others did the same thing. I have two speakers with me here today. The stories are inspirational, I could say, and they're full of ideas. Maybe you will get some from them. And without further ado, let me introduce our first speaker. Yasmin Kohalilovich holds a master degree in financial management and is an author of several books. He is a regular keynote speaker at various museums, peace building and entrepreneurship conferences, as well as a lecturer at leading universities in more than 10 countries. He is a member of Global Shapers Community and was included in Forbes 30 under 30 European Law List in 2018. He is the founder and director of the War Childhood Museum that has been awarded Council of Europe 2018 Museum Prize. Ladies and gentlemen, I present Mr. Halilovich, chain processes in museums, organizational development and new forms of governance. Good morning, everyone. Thank you, Alexandra, for the, for the introduction. Let me just share my screen now. Hope you see it full screen. So as Alexandra said, today we are discussing the new ways to create and operate museums. And certainly the War Childhood Museum, which I founded and which I worked together with my team to create here in Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina is a new kind of museum. Let me just see why I cannot. Okay, I can. So the War Childhood Museum is based on a book 10 years ago in 2010, I started this project, not aiming to create a museum but rather a book about experience of growing up affected by armed conflict. I was part of the generation which was affected by armed conflict in my own country, Bosnia and Herzegovina 1990s. I wanted to create a book which will speak about these experiences. I made a website where I invited people to submit their short memories, their recollections of the conflict. I limited their answers to just 160 characters, like tweets or text messages. And this resulted in a huge number of submissions. So more than 1000 people responded with their memories and this book came up as a mosaic of these short memories like tweets short recollections of this experience from the whole generation. What happened during the work on the book. And what inspired the creation of the War Childhood Museum is that I realized that people have a tendency to connect their memories to physical objects, to personal belongings. And that's how the idea for the War Childhood Museum was born. People would bring me some different objects like diaries, photos, letters, many different things. And they would say, can you include this in the book as well. But this wasn't, it wouldn't really fit the concept of the book. So I thought, okay, maybe we can add the next chapter of the book or something like that. But then there was many more and more people coming. I started thinking what would be the next stage, what could we create to be sustainable in the long term to do a research and presentation of this experience. And I was thinking about different media like multimedia online platforms, research center, different, different institutions, and then I came up with the idea of the museum. It was natural because so many of these memories were focused on personal belongings and objects. I saw that there is a big opportunity to crowdsource the collection because people were very eager to speak about their experiences but also showed interest to donate their personal objects and the longings. So that's when I decided, okay, after the book, we will create the War Childhood Museum. After the book was published, I brought a very small team of people, which included historians, anthropologists, psychologists, child rights experts, and we developed methodology and started creating the collection for the future War Childhood Museum. Different items started coming in from ballet shoes, toys, pieces of clothing, for example, this is a piece of fabric, which was meant to be used from for a prom dress but because the war started the prom night never happened. So therefore it remained unused and it's now part of the War Childhood Museum collection. There's also another toy, an apple, which is made of Vox and it's actually a pencil sharpener, but the boy who got it, he thought it's a real apple because he didn't see a real apple for a long time so he bite into it and there are traces of his teeth on the apple today, it's part of our collection. And the other that's had, this is like just everyday objects from the home, because there was a lack of toys so many different different objects or this one which speaks about creativity and it's today exhibited at the European House of History in Brussels. It's a solar powered radio, which one of the people who contributed to our collection, he was a boy and he used it to get the news to his whole neighborhood. So many of these objects came in, and we started creating the actual museum, and this was quite a turbulent journey. And today I want to speak about a couple of aspects of this journey, which I identified to be key to create a successful museum of 21st century. So I was thinking for a long time which of these aspects were really the most important for, as you know, many of you know the creation of a new museum is very complex process. I came up with this acronym 2E2T, it stands for entrepreneurship, equality, trust and teams. And I thought these four aspects were key for the creation and today also for the operation of the War Childhood Museum. So I will tell a couple of words about all of these concepts. Entrepreneurship. I noticed that many people in the museum industry have prejudiced towards entrepreneurship and business. They immediately related to over commercialization of our institutions. Here I'm not talking about business, I'm talking about entrepreneurial mindset that I believe is very needed in museum industry today. The continuous drive to make things possible, to make things better, to advance the resources, the optimism that hasn't to be necessarily rooted in already secured funding, but rather in the trust you put in your team that you will make it. The readiness to take risks and manage them rather than to avoid them. The readiness to fight for employees with the strongest industries. I can give numerous examples when exactly the entrepreneurial spirit and mindset were key for the War Childhood Museum to get to go forward. Be it when we didn't have space for our permanent exhibition or money to renovate the space. We were still pushing for it. For example, one day I would say to donors, we almost got the space from the municipality, give us money to renovate it. The same day I would say to the municipality, I have money ready, we just need the space. Or for example, now when we faced the space limitation issues, we identified the lack of space for our educational activities and our offices. And we were looking for a while to find a space to which we could rent, but nothing was available near our museum. Then one day we said, let's buy a space. We took a bank loan, which was a commercial bank loan, and we bought a space just 200 meters from our museum. Not only it will strengthen all of our activities, but it will also open as we will also open a small cultural center in it. So we'll be able to further benefit the community and the city. So I believe we need to change the mindset of leadership in the museum industry. It should not be about motivating people to keep working under constant pressure of limited resources. Rather it should be about branding our institutions as the best places to work. It should not be about how to protect usual revenue sources only. Rather it should be how to create new ones. It should not be about how to ensure the base level of funding needed to keep the doors open. Rather it should be about how to add value to society and market the museum to relevant stakeholders to make it sustainable and to make it growing. And I think all of this is even more true today during this crisis you are facing. And then equality. The fact that museums in the 21st century have a greater obligation to promote equality and human rights than ever several legal and social barriers to equality such as segregation slavery and sexism have been shaken. But this does not mean that we live in an equal world. The tens of thousands of museums around the world, which welcome millions of visitors on a daily basis, or work with tens of thousands of visitors online today during the pandemic. These museums play an important role in informing, educating and influencing society. Museums of the future should share the responsibility of promoting peace, equality and human rights. It is not only history museums to assume this task, but the entire museum community, entire museum industry should be involved. I envision art museums promoting the rights of refugees, toy museums, finding ways to promote gender rights, and entertainment museums promoting freedom of speech. This is something our audiences expect from us. This is something our employees expect from us. And this is something we owe to the community in these times of tensions and polarization of our societies. And I think this approach, standing for equality was very important in establishing the relation between the Warsaw Museum and our community. And that's when I want to move to the trust. It's also about the relation with the community. Museums are among the most trusted institutions in society. Research shows that museums are publicly perceived as highly credible sources of information ranked higher than newspapers, NGOs and government agencies. Museums of the 21st century will not only provide facts, but also experiences. They will move from places that present gathered knowledge to places, which will be a platform for exchange of knowledge. From places that communicate to visitors, one way to places where visitors communicate with museums, two way and to places where visitors communicate with each other, multivay. Museums will become more people and community centered. To achieve this, museums of 21st century have the obligation to continue to build trust with all of their stakeholders. The first but often overlooked aspect of trust is self trust. Museum leaders and professionals need to be more confident in sharing their ideas, successes and failures. Also, our museums and the industry as a whole need to be more confident regarding our position in society and the influence we can yield. The Warsaw Museum could not exist without the trust of its participants and the public. Participants trusted the Warsaw Museum enough to donate to our collection before we had the permanent location secured. And people continue to trust the museum enough to give us their most most cherished belongings and life stories. They trusted that their stories will be told with dignity and integrity. They trust that their stories will never be misused or politicized. When museums are trustworthy and at value. People are listening and they are receptive. Many visitors need to trust that they are walking into a supportive safe safe place when they join any activity hosted by the museum. Visitors need to trust that museums present with confidence and credibility that they rely on facts and truth that they respect privacy that they fight for equality and that they exist for the good of the community. It is our job to be worthy of that trust and to carefully consider how we can best support the diverse audience before they arrival to museum during their visit and after their visit. And the last and not least, I want to say something about museum teams. And entrepreneurial spirit, equality and trust are important pillars of the Warsaw Museum work, but they are not the main reason why the museum succeeded. The foundation of the museum was built by passionate dedicated individuals are personally invested in the mission of the Warsaw Museum. All of our employees connect to the subject matter in different profound ways. And I believe that this work culture is exactly what makes the Warsaw Museum a colorful, thoughtful and safe place to visit despite the difficult sensitive subject matter. This work culture that underlies the experience of visiting the museum and all of the museum separation is also important, especially in the 21st century for museums to have diverse teams. We have lived in times when people were educated to work in museums. Now museums will hire people educated to create value regardless of the industry. It will not only bring fierce competition to employ and hold museum staff, but it will also change the internal dynamics of museums. Museum leadership will need to respond by providing a vision teams want to contribute to a shared vision and mission will ensure a great team capable of competing global markets, only museums with most engaged and diverse workers on the market will be successful people centered museums in 21st century. So what I mentioned several times during this presentation is that museums have to compete and I think this is true, not only for audiences attention but also for funding, especially now during the crisis. We need this competitive spirits to be inspired inspired in our institutions at the Warsaw Museum we really do love to compete. And we enjoy competing and the whenever we had we faced obstacles, we found some way to, to, to overcome them using some of the things and some of the approaches I just now shared with you. And just wanted to finish with with a very positive thought, which I usually finish my presentations with is that the future belongs to museums it's something that I really still strongly feel even during this pandemic, and I really feel that in the times when we are struggling to, to, to have decent and true sources of information and presentation I think this is the time when museums emerge as precious platforms and spaces in our societies that will not only inform what we told but will also create a space for, for so much needed dialogue. So, I'm pleased to try to respond any questions which might follow up and it was a pleasure to share some of the aspects of the Warsaw Museum's creation and work which I consider were the most important for us. Thank you. Thank you very much, Yasminko. This is a really inspirational story. And I urge you all to visit Sarajevo in this museum, of course, I completely agree with you Yasminko, in opinion, that museums have to find a way to talk about prejudice and peace, freedom, human rights and everything concerning humankind and seeing this more and more at the different museums makes me positive about the future. And I completely agree with you also on a question of trustworthiness. So we do have to be trustworthy. There were several comments that our colleagues gave on your museum in your presentation. One was incredible stories from simple objects. Then another one was very touching, and it also confirms it is always the story, the context that gives value to the object. But we also have a few questions. And first, I would like to ask my question that since this is a really new kind of museum, I'm interested in what was the reaction of a local community and a wider community to your concept of the museum. Thank you, Alexandra. Obviously, during the creation of the Warsaw Museum, the biggest pressure I felt is exactly that what will be the reaction of the local community. I mentioned the museum was, before the museum I did the book about this experience and after the book was published, it was really accepted as a testament of our generations experience. It was overwhelming support from the community. And this is actually what gave me the confidence to proceed to the next stage of the creation of the museum. Once again, when we were working to create the museum, I was really stressed how people would react one day. For me, the most important thing was to create a place which community feel that does not present to them, but rather represent them. And this was one thing. Another thing is that really there is so much victimization around the topic around the experience of children in war. And I wanted to avoid this. And we wanted to tell these stories with dignity and integrity, and to highlight the resilience, the creativity, some other aspects of the experience which are often overlooked. And I think this was very important and the feedback, the majority of the feedback was overwhelmingly positive and there were a couple of concepts emerging like pride, hope. So some concepts which we really wanted to inspire rather than only sadness and pity which often surrounds these topics. And I think we were successful in this. Another thing is also the long lasting relationship in the community. Today, these people who donated their objects would bring their children to museums educational activities. They bring their family members to our exhibitions, their friends. So it's really a long lasting relationship. We celebrate museums, birthdays together in the city, hundreds of people come, we have music concerts. So it's a range of activities which still involve these people and really strengthens our community and relationship with them. Okay. The organizers asked me to give the floor to Katie Ashton first and then come back to questions because we have a lot of questions for you, Yasminko. And I will have to move on to Katie. She is a leader within the museum sector with 20 years of experience working in museums in the United Kingdom. She started her career as a project developer at the National Railway Museum, built her way through museum learning and became a director of the Manchester based People's History Museum in 2010. She has different experience working in national, local and independent museums, working on different subjects from social history to military history, transport, citizenship and democracy. Her skills from leadership and strategic planning to learning and audience engagement make her a perfect person to talk about power to the people. I present Katie Ashton. Thank you so much for that introduction and thank you so much for the welcome. Hello. Sorry, I got my video turned off. So yeah, so thank you so much for the welcome and the invitation to seek at this virtual conference. And just to say, in a period of lockdown, so UK museums are similarly closed at the moment. It's just amazing to have that insight into museums in other parts of the world that we unfortunately can't visit at the moment. So just amazing to see those two examples already this morning and it's really warmed my heart to see some museum collections on screen. So thank you both for sharing your presentation and as well, lots of themes and lots of similarities. And I think what we're going to discuss and talk about, which is amazing. So I'm really pleased to be able to share some of our experiences from People's History Museum in Manchester in the UK. And my presentation really is going to do a number of things. I want to kind of introduce you to our museum. If you're not familiar with the People's History Museum and talk a little bit about the difference that we want to make in the world and the reason we do what we do. I'm going to talk a little bit about our approach to co-creation with communities, give you some real live examples of how we've done that in practice. And then reflect a little bit on how that co-creation I think really impacts on people's lives but also changes us as organizations and institutions in our sector. So hopefully that's all going to kind of link really nicely to what you've already heard. So let me just get up my... So this is our museum, People's History Museum in Manchester. Just before the pandemic we had a birthday. So we were celebrating 30 years in Manchester, 10 years since this building was built. And also we've got a longer history than that in London going back prior to our move to the north of England. So we had the most amazing party in February just before we closed in March due to Covid. So just a really warm kind of time for us really to celebrate everything that we've achieved as a museum and a really nice time for the People's History Museum in our kind of journey. So I'm just going to show you a few slides of what the museum looks like on the inside and kind of some of our galleries and exhibitions. But if you go to our website, we do have a virtual tour so you can go and explore the museum as a really brilliant virtual tour that we've done in partnership with Manchester University. So do go and have a look at that and you can explore, see some of our highlights and other objects, find out about our history yourself. So please do do that after the conference. So we have a collection and the content in our programmes are all centered around 200 years in the fight for democracy, equality and inclusion in the UK. So we talk a lot about how we got the right to vote in the UK as citizens. We also talk about really broad campaigns for equality throughout history and into the present day. The slides that you see here are just a snapshot of some of the gallery spaces that we have in the museum that chart that story. I believe this makes us as a museum uniquely placed to talk about the importance of democracy, both today and in the past, but also the importance of campaigning, activism and protest. And it's in a way that's really authentic because it's embedded within our collections. It connects us to current political and social change, and it makes our museum very powerful and very relevant to what's happening, particularly in the world today. That's fundamental to our manifesto. So as a museum at the heart of our business plan, we have a manifesto in place and we have a kind of vision and values and the principles that kind of tie all of our work together. So this is a snapshot from a little bit of our manifesto that we are the home of ideas we're fighting for. We use that radical past very much to inspire and motivate people to take an active role in shaping a future where democracy, equality, justice and cooperation are thriving. So we've got a real kind of active sense of our purpose is to kind of stimulate and promote action for people to do something as a consequence of their experience at the museum. Our democratic engagement is fundamental to the work that we do and that we want people to be involved in their communities. We want them to care about the world that they live in. We want them to engage with a democratic process. We want them to use their right to vote. So this is kind of building on that. We've started working on our next 10 years really. So 2023 to 2030, what do we want to build on that we've achieved so far? The success that we've had. How do we want to take that forward? So a more cohesive and fairer society and people's voices and actions can make a difference. This is a snapshot again of the kind of vision and mission statement that's inspiring our work going forward. And we're just collectively working on how does this play out and how does this influence the work that we do. But today really with that kind of context and background of who we are as an organization and I could do a whole presentation just on museums kind of content and vision and values. What we wanted to focus on today, what I've been asked to discuss and share with you is our kind of approach to co-creation and how we use that, how we work with local communities to deliver that manifesto in collaboration. So how we co-create with communities and the impact that that has. So firstly just to say why, why do we co-create? Why do we work with communities and why is it so important to our museum and our work? Some of the themes that have already come up this morning in terms of being embedded within communities and representing people's stories and people's lives and people's experiences very much key to the People's History Museum. But we do believe that the themes, the issues and the messages at the heart of our museum are people's histories, people's stories and people's lives. They're not always our stories to tell, they're not always the experts. And what we want to do is provide that platform and a space for people to share their stories and the things that they believe are worth fighting for. I think this is particularly important for those that are underrepresented in society whose stories are often unheard or hidden or missed. And it's particularly important for a museum like ours with a subject matter which demonstrates how people have affected change. Changes happened over centuries because people individually and collectively have fought and campaigns and protested and taken action on issues that were important to them and still are important today. So we really understand that we have a facilitative role, that's the word, we have a role to kind of facilitate that activity. We want to provide access to our collections in as broad and open and transparent way as we can. We support physical access to our stores and to our collection spaces, we uncover collections and we provide that support with research and skills of kind of understanding and using collections to their full advantage. We facilitate people's thinking as they start to explore the stories that they might want to share, so we use lots of creative techniques and tools. We bring people together physically and virtually to do that. And then we also help to translate those ideas into exhibition concepts, exhibition designs. We connect communities with designers, we connect them with our experts and our technicians. We play a role in training and upskilling people and being able to put on their own exhibitions and supporting them with creating their physical and again virtual experiences. And then we promote and share and amplify those community voices so we have a role to provide that platform but to then share that and to promote it. So through our programme and our wider work, through press opportunities, through the shop, through retail, through events, through all the publicity that we can provide to some of this content that otherwise wouldn't necessarily have that space. And I think finally in terms of the wider why, before I move on to some of the practical examples of the way we've done, is I think like broader issues and activity around equality, diversity and inclusion. It just makes sense for our organisation's success in terms of looking back to our manifesto. This way of working is what makes our organisation thing. It makes our organisation come alive. It makes our organisation deliver that manifesto in a really meaningful way. But it also connects our museum with new and different and diverse audiences. It brings people into our spaces who wouldn't normally cross that threshold. It reaches out, engages people through these programmes in a way that we wouldn't necessarily be able to do by ourselves. As the director of the museum, it has a practical kind of governance and stakeholder engagement role. So these are priorities for our local and national governments and particularly supporting our local residents and our local communities and thinking about our sense of space and place. And it's just a fundamental part of our commitment to social change and to social justice. So moving on to how it works in practice, I've got a number of examples from the last four or five years, I think of different programmes that we've run in different ways of approaching it and we have worked for a long time with communities in the work that we do. We've worked a lot of time investing in those relationships and building partnerships and reaching out and trying to be a very open and transparent organisation. We've done lots of community exhibitions over previous years and a part of our programme to provide that space has always been there for 20, 30 years. But over recent years, this has become mainstreamed, it's become a core part of our work. So it's not an aside to our main exhibition. We're moving to where there is no differentiation, there's no difference internally or externally between a community exhibition and a museum exhibition. And then kind of following that journey, which I'll say since 2016, 2017, we've tried to different models along the way, we've tried different structures, we've thought about different ways to empower individuals and communities to help shape and deliver our programmes. And we've had a very small team of community curators who are very actively involved through the whole process. We've sometimes done it in a strategic partnership with a charity or a grassroots organisation. We've had steering groups who've influenced and shaped programmes with us. We've had takeovers by charities, by youth groups, by young people, by schools. And we've currently got a community programme team who are a paid group of people who are working alongside and within our exhibitions and programme team. And I'll talk about that in a little moment. Some of these models have been more successful than others. The ones where we've really empowered people from the beginning of the process, from way before a programme theme, to get involved, to do the research, to unpick the collections, to really curate and create. They've had the biggest impact on those individuals, but it does take time and it does take resource. We've been very fortunate in terms of funding partnerships to make that happen. And also we've kind of changed our approach, I suppose, along the way and recognise that the people that we work with need to be paid for that work. It can't be voluntary. Lots of these people can't do that in their free time and it doesn't create that diversity and inclusion that we're looking for. So we need to make that level of investment if we're going to commit to this way of working. And we don't want to differentiate between a kind of traditional museum experience and the qualifications or the skills and training we might have with lived experience. And the value of both in shaping and delivering our programme is of equal value. So I'll quickly share a few examples of a few things that we've done. So this is the first Never Going Underground, which was a programme we delivered in 2017. The Fight for LGBT Plus Rights, talking about the 50th anniversary of the Sexual Offences Act in the UK. And this was the first time we had a team of community curators who worked on all aspects of the programme theme. They worked with us to research, they worked with us to develop the theme, they worked with us to select the designers, they worked with us to crowdsource the content and to put an open call out so that objects and stories could come into this exhibition that we're from outside the museum collection and very much from the community. This really opened up our thinking. It was the first example of doing a big programme theme and I would say this lasted for 12 months throughout the year of 2017. Of opening up our museum to different audiences and communities and introducing us to different partnerships and different ways of working and different ways of structuring our work. The following year was 100 years in the UK since women first got the right to vote and all men were given the franchise. So we did a programme called Represent, which was a much broader look at representation, broader than voting but particularly focused on the anniversary. And this time we had a steering group who again worked with us on the exhibition and worked with us on the programme theme. All of the content that you see here, so all of the articles on the walls, all of the quotes, all of the object labels were written not by museum staff, they were written by members of that group. And we gave and kind of shared that responsibility for creating the content and putting together this which was inspired by a feminist theme. So it was quite busy and quite full on as a space, lots of content. Again, we crowdsourced content and we particularly wanted to focus because it was about representation on targeting work with underrepresented groups, working with people, such as female asylum seekers, diverse communities in Greater Manchester, young people outside of mainstream education who all could talk about their experience of representation, how representatives they felt. The following year, and I would say we've been very fortunate as a museum that we've had lots of big anniversaries to hang our programmes off, which is always a joy for marketing and communications teams. The 2019 was disrupt was 200 years since the Peterloo massacre, which was an event in Manchester, really shaped UK democracy. It was the first time that ordinary working people had protested and fought for the right to vote on a mass level. So this exhibition took a slightly different slant. So we had two aspects to it. So this is a more traditional museum exhibition. These are key objects that are put on display to talk about some of the themes around Peterloo massacre and the kind of fight for democracy and some of the connections to other campaigns and protests for democracy both in the UK and globally. We commissioned a film which sat alongside this about the impact of Peterloo, and then the subsequent space that adjoined it was the protest lab. The flip side of the wall was a space where we wanted people to bring their protest objects and their protest stories. We wanted to capture what was happening today around protesting campaigning to give space for feedback and debate and discussion and to support groups if they wanted to come and use the museum space to plan their campaign and to talk creatively about creative campaigning for issues, lots of the topics and themes that were covered in 2019 were around the environment. We did lots of work on that as a particular focus, but there are all sorts of things represented within this protest lab space. And then moving on to where we are today really so our current program theme which we were planning to deliver in 2020 and has been put on hold because of the pandemic and will now flow into 2021 is migration. So we're doing a program currently with that community program theme I've mentioned that six individuals whose lives have been shaped by migration in some way. We are part of an EU Horizon 2020 project which feeds into this piece of work, but more in common is going to be looking at kind of our experiences of migration and how our stories in the museum have been shaped and how sometimes we don't tell those stories and we don't tell the stories of hidden stories within the museum so we're not doing a big exhibition. And this year next year we weren't planning to, even before the pandemic what we want to do is really pull our program theme up into those main gallery spaces I showed you right at the beginning and have interventions and different ways of approaching our collections and our objects so on picking and and providing kind of scope for some of the hidden stories of migration in the history of democracy over the last 200 years. So there was also planned a social space that we would open up the museum for communities to use as a place to meet and a space to be together. We hope to do that in 2021. And we're also applying to become a museum of sanctuary on the same lines that we very much want the building to be somewhere where people feel safe welcome and able to just come and be. The program theme is kind of underway and there's much more information on our website as this is our kind of active program theme again lots of open calls for content open calls for events. Again bringing different organizations and people into our into our museum. And really just the last one looking ahead beyond migration is nothing about us without us which again slightly delayed will happen in 2022 this is around disability rights and activism. It's part of a long period of work we've done now probably two or three years with a steering group and partner organizations around disability rights and activism. Looking at historical perspective of what's happened to date but also the issues and challenges that people with disabilities face today and particularly COVID-19 had had an impact on that story that we want to tell. So in 2022 we will be delivering a full year program around this topic. And that's something that again is around providing a space for a current campaign something that's very much an issue for us today in our society and something that we feel we can give a space to but we can also share our collections and our experiences and do something that's very museum specific around that the collection being key and at the heart of our work. So they're just a really quick whiz through and I'm always conscious I speak very fast and I'm doing these apologies. If that was quite quick, but just some snapshots and again please do look at the website and do ask any questions about about the work we've done and I've got more detail of any of those program themes if it's of interest. So just to conclude really I think for us participatory and co creative community engagement is a really powerful tool for an inclusive museum it's really really shifted our professional way of thinking about our role and our purpose. And I think we do create and achieve greater and more meaningful impact as a result of that collaborative approach. Visitors from that position of users and audiences and visitors and people who just passively common and engage with content to participants collaborators and stakeholders in their own rights. And I think it's really important not only to our work but the wider sector in the UK and globally. We continue to review and evaluate and review, sorry and improve our performance and think about how we engage with this practice and how we really fit this into that next 10 years when I shared the vision statement right at the beginning. Kind of where we're going as an organization. And I think the challenge, but also the opportunity for us as an organization is to genuinely let go of control and to be comfortable with that to distribute and develop power, much more widely within our organization it's not just about the programs and the collections and the exhibitions it's about our whole institution. And I think not only thinking about who you have around your table, but also thinking about how you don't try to control what kind of table that is or how big the table is or how often people meet around the table that all of that is up for grabs. So we're really interested in how this practice has has changed us as an organization and the impact that we're having. We're really interested in other organizations that are doing I know lots of collaborative and co created work happening. Using collections and working with museums in different ways so really happy to engage with wider conversation outside of this conference officer to take any questions. And as we follow on from here, and I will stop sharing my screen that's my contact details if you don't have them. Thank you, Katie. Thank you for everything. And now I do have a lot of questions for all of us, mostly for Yasmin Cohen, Katie, and I would like you to answer some of them. There were so many. I don't think we'll have time for all of them, but at least some of them should be answered. And I will definitely start with the very, very important and interesting question that was sent to all of us about the establishment and the financing, because one of the commentators wrote, I absolutely agree that museums can't keep silent on human issues. However, how can we really be critical if we are primarily funded by our governments, and thus part of the establishment we may wish to challenge well, I would just say a few words about that and then I will ask you to comment on this. First of all, we cannot. We should not forget that we are financed by people's taxes, not by the government itself. And it is our primary task is to work for the people, not for the government, even if we are financed by the government and the Ministry of Culture or whoever we are financed by. So at the moment in Slovenia, we are in a in a position that museums are opposing the government that is so that the government at the moment. But that I think is a question for another topic maybe or another conversation. So never forget that it is you the people who pay for everything, not the government. And now maybe Katie or Yasmiko, would you like to answer that question? Yeah, I can come in on that. I mean, I think it's obviously for us as a museum with a political collection and political content meet, you know, we face this all of the time and in terms of our funding we are publicly funded so we do receive funding from Arts Council in England at a national level and from Greater Manchester local authority funding as well. I think we're really opening up front that we're not party political we're not and we're not. We're engaging with the right to protest and the right to campaign and that is a human right that is illegal. And I noticed some questions about violent protest which obviously we do. So I think we're really clearing our position around how we're using that radical path to motivate people to still want to make a difference to the world that we live in today but we don't have any party political we don't receive any government funding that's politically motivated from a party. And we do really embrace that idea that people should be actively engaged citizens in a, you know, a thriving democracy and something that is really important to us. Okay, I would like to ask Yasmin go to answer the next question is Yasmin go with us. Yes, I'm here. Oh, great. Thank you. I have a question very interesting question for you. Which objects given to you. Did you decide not to exhibit because you found they were crossing the line. So the Warsaw Museum is focused on the stories that comes together with the object so object is kind of illustration of this, this, this story shared by participants and we collected thousands of objects and stories. And not everything can be exhibited at the same time. But until today, we never had a reason to do any censorship. People who come to our museum, be it former or current children. They understand that this is a space where they share some of their experiences of their childhood and not their political positions, or something similar to that. We never experienced these kinds of issues that we cannot or don't want to exhibit something what was submitted to us. I don't know what the reason might be the energy and the atmosphere around that surrounds the museum, but we never experienced any hate speech, or anything similar to that submitted to us to our collection. Okay. And another question for you was what is the organizational status of the World Childhood Museum is it run by NGO with public money support to rely on private donors or So the World Childhood Museum is incorporated as a foundation. So it is an NGO. It's not funded by public money almost at all. We were established in a country with a very complex political situation and especially regarding the conflict. We don't really fit any of official government narratives. So we are not really liked by government. So the funding provided by government range from zero to 3% at the best from year to year. The most of funding comes from private foundations and they are also significant sources of our own revenues. Of course, those are endangered by the pandemic, because there are no many visitors and ticket sales, but we are also exploring currently new sources. There is also private donors and individual donors membership scheme. So there are many different sources we try to diversify as much as possible, but obviously this position of being none of government run or government funded museums gives us a lot of freedom and opportunities to speak up for things we believe we should And to reflect just on the last question. I know it's more difficult for government funded and operated museums, but still I don't think this is enough of excuse I think we need to be brave and to hold together as industry and government will listen and follow. Yes, I completely agree to your managing museum can be hard, but just because of that, but I still think we should do it. And just another question for both of you, how would you deal with autocratic racist and homophobic positions and protests. I can start. So, like, if I want to reflect specifically on homophobic positions, for example, in Bosnia just last year we had in Sarajevo the first pride ever. Even around the museum there were some people putting some protest notes and some hate speech clients stuff like this. What we did we reacted publicly although this is not the topic we deal with I personally gave the public support to the pride organization. It was distributed all over media and some people would say, you are the watch out of the museum why would you interact with these topics but we didn't know that our employees, our audiences our visitors, our participants they expect this from us to stand behind them and to stand for their rights. And I thought it's writing to do and I think, as I said in my presentations this is a shared responsibility of all museums. Thank you very much and I think that's definitely true. We also had the first the first gay pride parade last year and we were in the same position. So I definitely agree with you. Maybe a question for Katie. Please will you say more about how you pay the community curators. Yeah, so different models depending on the circumstances so the group that we have currently working with us are a paid in collaboration with them the discussion about what works best so particularly if you've got community members who aren't think of the technical. It's a tax a tax issue in terms of refugee or migrant status so different solutions for different people really but paid either as a freelance contract if they're able to do that or all the systems and ways of giving them expenses and fees for the work that they've been doing with us so they're really worried staff in the same way that somebody who's on the payroll with with the accounting kind of tax implications that we do different structures for different different groups of people different individuals as the suits really. But we did think that was really important to not always rely on a voluntary workforce to do that work and to recognize that and the contribution and the value and the need for people to money and not to survive. Okay thank you since we only have two more minutes. I will ask a last question which was published for two times so I really need to ask it. So we heard a lot of museums shoot in a general way. So I would like an answer to my question what the panelists think how the sense of urgency translates to what public knows as fine arts museums. I think I'll. Yeah I don't work in a fine art music I've never worked in a fine art museum actually I've always worked in speciality. I think there is something I am really always conscious that our collection is very specific and we have an opportunity but I do think the wider opportunity to use collections in different ways and to do the work that we've been doing to kind of, you know, bring personal stories and life stories and lived experience alongside those collections can be done with any collection I've worked with, you know, a variety of collections on tanks to trains to industrial mills and I think all of them have an opportunity to do some element of social justice and social change work it might be different in the context of that work. I'll go back to the earlier question I think about governance structures as well and what your how your organizations constituted as an independent charity, we've got, I think more freedom potentially than others. But I do think there is that opportunity for all collections and all museum objects to be used in a multiple perspective approach. Yeah, one of our participants actually also gave an answer to that we are neutral safe spaces enabling calm healthy discussion from all sides so that could be a good, good answer to the question. Well, I'm sorry there are so many questions. Please excuse me I could not ask all of them. Maybe you can contact our panelists. Later on, you should definitely do that we should all definitely visit these museums. And of course, you're welcome to the smallest museums museum probably in the world or maybe not in the motherboard as well. I hope that we will soon meet or we will meet next year at the next conference that call it will be a thing of the past by then. And I give the word back to Julia. Thank you very much. Hello, and also a big thank you from my side to the speakers of this panel. This was a really important discussion. Thank you very much Sandra yes mingo Katie. Yeah, stories from Slovenia Bosnia Herzegovina and the UK and still all of it kind of revolves around the same topic I think we really have so much that we can share in common.