 Falling in love is a beautifully selfish experience. It brings the world down to a circle of just two people. Falling in love is an experience that we as a culture talk about all the time. Grief is another matter. Grief is hard, personal and difficult to approach. But in my experience, grief breaks you open. Grief gives you this deep need to connect more and to matter more to the world. And over the past two years, Paula and I have both lost someone very close to us. And I don't say this to play the pity card. But we've both found that this experience has significantly changed how we approach our work. And that's what we want to share today. This presentation grew out of a series of conversations that Paula and I have had over the past year about grief and connection, about museums and memory, about what we are here to do, about what we can do for people when they are in a time of need. And we have developed these presentations separately because they tell our own stories. And now I'm going to try to tie them together for you. So Paula sends her apologies for not being able to be here. She's a long-time NDF presenter and supporter and I really miss having her here. She's however really happy to be able to contribute and I think happy and quite nervous about sharing such a personal journey. So this is where Paula works and that's what Paula does. And this is what Paula is asking. What does this idea of a Caring Museum mean? Do we care about other sectors such as health in relation to our collections and sharing memories? And if so, what does this look like? What programs do we have to support those who are underprivileged or suffering ill health? What if we stopped for a minute to reflect on how far our collections and stories can potentially change or help people in ways we haven't already thought of? What if we could all think outside the box a little to realise the potential of how collections can help those less fortunate in need, sick or dying? How can our sector reach different audiences in new ways, ways that we haven't thought of before? How can we take collection stories to people who really need our help? If only to spark a conversation, a memory, to even just pass the time in a hospital bed, how could we do this and what would the benefits be to the people involved and back into our collections? As museum professionals, we all get to experience wonderful stories in our collections, but some areas of the community have no idea we have them or don't know how to get to these stories and how valuable they can be to people who are spending a lot of time caring for people in hospitals. Could we run programs that get museum study students to spend time visiting patients in hospitals with iPads that could connect multiple collections around place, time, interests or themes? What if you could search up the place that you grew up in and then allow patients to tell stories around that place? I was fortunate to spend a lovely afternoon with my father before he died, talking through all the memories he had of Liverpool, England. This experience has made me reflect on museum collections, memories, sharing stories and access to collections for those who don't normally know about them. We did this through History Pin. We spent the whole afternoon searching the map for content in Liverpool. This was an afternoon I won't forget. The stories were incredible. My father's memory of Liverpool from his youth was coming back to him and his knowledge of the area was astounding. I wish I had a recording of this afternoon of sharing stories through other people's content, including museum collections. So here is one idea based on the experience I have had of sharing memories with my father while he was in hospital. How do we as a sector allow people who are in hospital which are usually cold and depressing environments to relive memories through our collections? How can patients with short-term memory loss through sharing memories feel they have important stories to share with their families, carers and friends? I wish hospitals had access to providing this level of connection for patients so they could engage with memories sparked by content that is locked up in the vaults of cultural heritage collections. This is not a new idea and institutions have run pilot projects taking objects into museums. But it's not one I hear us talking about when we talk about reaching digital audiences. And it's not one that I often hear about when we talk about reaching any audience, or when we're talking about the ways in which memory can assist patients and their families while sharing stories through the use of collections. As we make our collections more accessible online, then perhaps we will see hospitals start programs themselves. But maybe we need to give a helping hand in running particular programs through our sector. Collections are really for everyone and we need to think of ways that they can benefit others who are less fortunate. And Paula says thank you. So me. I'm going to try to take kind of what Paula's said and then wrap it into a bigger context, but also do that through a couple of stories of my own. So exactly a year ago I stood up here and I made this impassioned plea for a museum of emotion. And this is what I said. We've become a little timid. Our visitors are hungry for experience. I want to explore what it might mean to have more emotion in our museums, to have more personality, to have more connection between our visitors, our staff and our artists. And then I described this idea of a museum of emotions. The museum of emotions is not about collections, civic pride or community involvement. It is a place you can go to to experience emotions that have fallen into disuse, emotions that are foreign to your work-a-day life, or emotions that have not been part of your life yet. It's not a place to learn about emotions. It's a place to feel them. I had a conversation with Mike Edson about this idea. He talked about a museum where you programmed exhibitions and performances explicitly designed to elicit emotional responses. I talked about a room that you went into where someone would radiate an emotion towards you, like perfume rising off warm skin. It's been really lovely to see this idea embraced by some people in this community. And at the same time, I try really hard not to look back and kind of berate myself for being terribly naive. I still believe in a lot of the things that I said last year, but I think to a large extent I've sort of internalised the museum of emotion. It informs the way I work and the way that I lead rather than shaping what the douse puts out on the floor. One of the things that I talked about last year was about using the lens of the web world to look at the gallery world. And what Paula and I have talked about throughout the year and what we're presenting here today is a different lens, a different way of organising and understanding our work. Rather than making emotional experiences at work, I generally find myself having them. And I want to give you two that have changed the way that I view what I do. So, on my best day this year, I took some baking down to Yagata, who is the incredible woman who looks after our Potomely Setlers Museum all by herself down on the waterfront. And Yagata asked me if we could share the baking with the man with the bicycle. Every Thursday, a man on a bicycle comes to visit PSM and he is shabbily dressed and he doesn't smell very good and he doesn't communicate very well. He likes to look at the videos and the exhibitions and when he leaves, Yagata always gives him some of her lunch. So I went into the gallery and I gave him the brownie and Yagata told him that yes, the cake was for him, but he had to wait to leave the building until he could eat it because he can't leave crumbs in the gallery. And then I went back to work. It was a long email from Yagata. Thank you for giving the chocolate cake to Chimney Man. I call him like that because he reminds me of back home. We used to have an annual chimney cleaning and it was a saying that the chimney man brings luck and when you see him, you have to touch and hold onto any buttons on your clothing and make a wish. Yes, the chimney man ate cake in the east gallery. Maybe he couldn't resist or he was so hungry and he crummed on the carpet. On the way out, he told me, see you next Thursday. Goodness me. On Friday, Cynthia visited and I mentioned her PSM's Thursday regular visitor. Before I finished describing him, she told me she was familiar with him. He is a solvent abuser, she said. She saw him in the past sniffing a glue. English isn't Yagata's first language, but I'm just going to give you her email straight. That explains why I couldn't solve a mystery of the unusual smell in the air both galleries had after he left museum. For me, it's smelt of gas, solvent, not exactly sure. I am feeling for a man with the bicycle because he is badly damaging his health. I'm imagining him having a makeover like we can see on some TV shows. Having a bath, a haircut as well as wearing some decent clothes and shoes and still riding a bike. Except for the Hey Waka Waka Hono Tangata video he likes to watch in the east gallery. I realised every time he comes he expects to get some food from me. I have to think what is clever to do to continue giving him food or stop. What do you think, Courtney? Anyway, despite his unusual behaviour, I think he is harmless. And so I found myself asking that day, is it our job to feed homeless people? And it's not a question that I ever thought I would have to deal with in this job. So earlier this year, my division of Hutt City Council which encompasses libraries and recreation and museums as well as community development had a meeting with some external stakeholders to help inform our strategic vision. And at the meeting, Ann and Josh spoke and Josh is a social worker out in the heart and Ann is this amazing woman who with her husband fosters local kids. And Josh and Ann are working through their church and outside of their official systems to help make life better for a group of local teenagers and when I say make it better that means everything from buying them toothpaste through to helping a girl get out of a home where every time her parents host the weekly drinking event their friends rape her. And in this meeting, we were asking Josh and Ann what we could do to help them and to help these kids. And they basically said, just do a good job of what you're doing. You're a council. You can't love these kids and that's what they need. That's what we do. And after the meeting, I walked out with them and I talked to them in the street for a while and I felt that really the only worthwhile thing I could do was quit my job and retrain and learn to do something that was actually useful. And they told me not to be silly and they said that having people inside organisations who are aware and care is important as well. And I drove home that night in tears like those big messy ugly ones not the pretty ones, just horrible golfing, bad on the motorway tears. So later on I had a meeting with Josh and Ann and Jen, major cash manager at the Dows. And Jen's kids had been to the Dows on school trips and they had done school holiday programmes and she felt really at home there but I don't think Josh should have ever been in the building before. And I brought them into my office and Josh looked pretty uncertain and I was talking about how we want to extend our education programmes so we can do more with lower hut kids and families and how we've started fundraising to do this. And Jen talked about wanting to make the Dows a familiar and safe and happy place for kids who don't have many of those places but Josh kind of he leans back and I remember it so that he puts his hands on the table in front of him and he looks at us and he says I just don't understand how this is happening where did this come from and he really didn't understand why people like us would want to talk to a person like him. And I said to him I keep on thinking about what you said about being able to love those kids I keep on thinking what if a museum could be a more caring organisation what if we could care about people and we could create and he said that's not normal that's not what museums talk like and I thought yes I thought I've got it. I often feel like institutions like mine operate between two modes the academic and the tourist stick on the one hand we generate and share new research and insight and stimulate the creation of new art and understanding and on the other hand we have visited our business KPIs and we compete with other tourist attractions for attention and visitation and compete with institutions like our own for staff and funding and product and what I began thinking especially after that time with Josh and Ann and through those conversations with Paula was what if instead of seeing ourselves as a meld of academic and tourism impulses we saw ourselves as part of the health and community sectors what if we became part of the caring professions what would a museum of the future look like if it was focused on improving the lives of the people who use it and I found this really exciting and it sent me rushing off in all directions having these really impassioned conversations and kind of acting mentally I always think of it as being like a border collie inside a tank full of tennis balls just kind of frantically running everywhere and not really achieving anything and I get really righteous like I'm quite self-righteous and I start saying things like why do we employ educators and public programs people but not social workers and all this emotion is great but it's got to be tempered if you're going to use it and made me really reflect on Ann's observation that we need to do a good job of what it's our job to do the first is a research report published by the British Museums Association that seeks to capture what regular people want and expect from regular people want and expect from museums and it's called public perceptions of and attitudes to the purposes of museums and society and it was written after gaining feedback with a bunch of workshops held around Britain and the most actively selected polls of both museum visitors and non-visitors and this report found a strong positive emotional attachment to museums by both visitors and non-visitors and also that attitudes have warmed over the last generation as museums have shed their image of stuffiness and sterility and become more entertaining and interactive and one of the most notable findings was the trust that participants accord to museums with museums being perceived as more trustworthy than both the Government and the media perhaps given the current British cuts to cultural funding museums were widely seen as being under threat and concern was expressed that museums were spreading themselves too thinly participants wanted museums to focus on what they are good at in order to preserve the essential purposes for which they are respected and loved and so the question is what are those purposes and the museum sector had put forward a range of potential purposes for these workshops to debate and so they agreed that at the core of museums existence is our role as the caretakers of national and local heritage and this is strongly linked to national and local pride and seen as a key contribution we make to society in addition to caring for the collections they did emphasise their display and also the need to keep refreshing exhibitions to attract more visitors and they liked interactivity a lot we were seen as having an important role in public education we provide equitable access to education and we provide opportunities people can use easily rather than generating elite research while they did think that museums had a role in promoting well-being and happiness they didn't broaden this definition to encompass mental health and well-being instead this purpose was seen as being largely about entertainment and linked to the education goal and that's what makes us different from theme parks where it got almost hurtful for me with these nascent ideas about museums and social work was when participants got on to the low priority purposes which included fostering a sense of community and helping the vulnerable and this was a summary from the report both these purposes were seen to be aimed at specific individuals or groups in society and were therefore somewhat at odds with the essential purposes that provide accessible benefits for everyone in society the idea of museums reaching out to communities or sections of society isn't one that the public sees them as being best place to do as one attendee put it, social services should look after the vulnerable and museums should look after the history hardest of all to read were the purposes that were challenged by the workshop of 10 days two objectives were seen to not sit well with the core purposes of museums and were seen even to undermine their essential values of trust and integrity these were providing a forum for debate and promoting social justice and human rights this is where the report observes, participants consistently agreed that museums were not appropriate environments in which to hold controversial debates rather museums are regarded as places to go to to find out factual and unbiased information and for people to subsequently make up their own minds this is not to say that people felt museums cannot broach controversial topics but that they should remain neutral in the displaying of information as a leader in telling people what to think and I was initially deeply thrown by this finding and were gathered here today in a building that was originally made to help a society talk about a deeply divided past but for the participants in this particular exercise attempts to tell people what they should think threaten the perception of the privileged and trusted position that museums hold and as the report noted although museum professionals might question the notion of an objective truth that can be expressed through an exhibition the public as represented by the sample does not I was really dashed by that report it kind of broke my heart a little bit all the things that we've all been talking about for years all the things that the staff and our institutions hold so dear are clearly not communicating themselves well or there's just a mismatch in expectations I felt like I had all these great ideas and that no one wanted them and as per usual Nina Simon is about five years ahead of me on this topic and in April she wrote a blog post called Seeking Clarity about the complementary nature of social work in the arts and in it she unpicks what we're talking about when we talk about cultural institutions as vehicles of social and civic change the post grew out of a conversation she'd had with two of her friends who work in knock for profits she's focused on issues of homelessness and criminal justice and while all three work in organisations that care about making a difference in the community when you move from the why to the what museums and social service organisations are emphatically not the same thing and she writes their work involves a life or death situation museum work is mostly non-contact the consequences of risk taking and experimentation are incredibly different there is infinite demand for their services whereas we struggle to generate demand for ours there will never be enough meals for hungry people or mental health facilities for those who need them meanwhile arts industry leaders worry about oversupply of organisations in the face of dwindling demand social service providers often find themselves working in a reactive stance to unexpected incidents arts organisations can operate on their own timelines and internal values those that want to be more relevant often have to push themselves to work responsively to events outside their domain as both the participants in the museum associations research and as and the foster parent observed we're not social workers while we might be moving into the social sphere we are not doing social work and when I'd been beginning to get a bit depressed Nina gave me another way of looking at the topic and she wrote instead of asking whether we are focusing too little or too much of our attention on social work we should be asking how we can approach the work of community development in a distinctive way which makes me think that we're in a luxurious position few people rely on us to provide social services and few people expect them of us by drawing on our strengths and thinking about how we direct them we have a tremendous opportunity to create new value in our communities and then finally there came that kind of humbling but very necessary point where I realised that I'm far from the first person to think about all this stuff and that my brain part is someone else's 20-year academic career and in my case it's the work of Lois H Silverman as collected in a recent book which is very sensibly titled The Social Work of Museums and to be honest I'm still wrapping my head around it but what I've got from it so far is a framework for thinking about how I can channel all this desire to do more good and to connect more in a meaningful way in the form of four levels of social action that afford us different ways to engage with people and maybe to create change through the work that we do so social work at its broadest level operates on the level of culture the shared way of doing things that allows us as a species to co-exist with each other and as Silverman says at the widest angle the work cultural institutions do involves nothing less than the making and changing of culture and this is where we through the language that we use the collections that we make the programs we run the products that we create and the audiences that we try to reach social change on a macro level if you come down a level social workers is focused on relationships between groups and this is where we play a role in being as accessible as possible to all people in society and running the kinds of programs that bring diverse groups together with the aim of improving understanding and connection go down another level and you've got interpersonal relationships what opportunities can we create for people to form or to reinforce relationships and what can we do to strengthen connections within a family or within an environment like a rest home or within a refuge at the very narrowest angle social work is concerned with the individual self and the self is defined here as the fundamental building block of all social relationships and even more so the self is defined as being in a relationship already a person to a sense of the divine a person to another person or a person to his or her own experiences and memories and what I'm trying to do now that I've spent a year figuring out how to run a museum and now I'm going to try to spend a year trying to think about how to do that strategically is to use this all as a new lens that I can hold up to our work I'm trying to hold each of the possible projects that we could do up against these four levels and ask myself where can I see this project operating and making a difference because we can't be all things to all people and nor should we try to be and we can't just walk up to people on the street and start loving them really, I discourage it I discourage it, very hard but we can add value through our strengths through our collections, our buildings, our social capital and our staff and we can enhance our strengths by finding new ways to look at the ways that we look at what we do and our missions and this is the point where I realise that at one and the same time none of this is rocket science and I bet many of you are already doing it and you should come and teach me how to do it and that at the same time it's incredibly wofty it's just as wofty as that crazy ass idea about a museum of emotions so what does it actually mean well it means Paula using history pin with her father and history pin was made for exactly that purpose it's not just a site to upload in geotag photos we are what we do create at that site to address what they saw as a growing social problem around distancing between different generations and society and how that creates an environment of distrust and in a society that's not a good place to live in so with that aim they managed to create something that allowed a person who was losing his memory and a person who was desperately trying to hold on to a connection to give each other something I think if you want another example of what I'm talking about you look back at what Paul Tapsell was talking about yesterday with Māori maps and how perfectly aligned the watt of that project is with the why and how and look at the fault lines in society that that project has been set up to mend and to look also at the heart that lives inside of it yesterday also Simon Tanner mentioned in his opening that when we are thinking about value we should not ignore the impact of what we have done on our own selves and this does actually bring me back to the museum of emotions so we can't chase people down the street and start hugging them but we can however continue to find new lenses through which we can understand and test our work and just as university taught me to see the world as a post-modern construct and then the web taught me to see it as a user experience interface learning about social workers teaching me to see the world as a web of relationships that can be tangled or broken or enriched and I'm afraid that none of this is nearly as barnstorming as the idea of a museum of emotion but this is what I've figured out over the past year that every single one of us already works in a museum of emotion that these places that we work and they run on emotion and every day your emotion charges up that building and every day that building runs you back down again and we have to find ways of channeling this emotion so that the work that we do matches up with the emotional return that we seek and this is what makes social work now that I'm starting to understand it a bit better because it's a natural lens to me it gives me a way to see how my work can be meaningful for me and for the person next to me and the person next to them and the people that I can't see yet and this to me is why we as NDF come together every year and we choose this conference because we know that here we will spend time with people who care just as deeply as we do not just about standards and open access and APIs but about making good things that make a real difference in this desire but we can't always see a way of channeling it so I hope that Paula and I have offered you today forms a new lens or a new line of sight for you thank you