Project team
Jenna Marrion, Freelance Safe Access Project Manager
With a career spanning over two decades, Jenna is an experienced Project Manager, data manager and impact storyteller. She has dedicated her career to working for non-profit and charitable organisations, and specialises in managing collaborative wellbeing-focussed programmes that bridge the gap between cultural organisations, their communities and audiences, and creative practitioners.
She combines rigorous project methodology with a “user-led” approach to system design. She is particularly skilled at translating complex data into actionable insights, utilising social value models alongside training in data analysis and AI to demonstrate the positive impact of cultural interventions. Her work is driven by the belief that culture and creativity are vital tools for building healthier and more equitable communities.
As the Freelance Project Manager for Safe Access, Jenna leads the delivery of this Heritage Innovation Fund programme, overseeing and implementing the project plans for the two year initiative.
Fiona Woolley, Safe Access Lead at AIM
Fiona is AIM’s Programmes & Grants Officer and joined AIM to support the independent heritage sector. She is passionate about museums and their development, and loves helping AIM members access the grants best suited to their needs.
She brings a wealth of knowledge and experience gained through 20 years working in museums across the Southeast. Including roles as a Museum Development Officer, Fine & Applied Art Curator, Collections Manager and Heritage Interpretation Manager with responsibility for education and events.
Peer cohort facilitators
Antonia Canal
For over 10 years, Antonia has worked across Greater Manchester’s charity, education and cultural sectors. Her practice is focussed on anti-racism and decolonisation, with a commitment to transforming heritage spaces into places of radical belonging, creativity and imagination.
Alongside her role with the Safe Access Programme, Antonia is Collections Engagement Officer at the Ahmed Iqbal Ullah RACE Centre and Education Trust. Working with a rich archive and library collection focussed on race, migration, anti-racism and social justice, Antonia leads engagement and event delivery with researchers, community partners and schools.
Antonia is an advisory panel member on the Guardian’s Legacies of Enslavement programme, aiming to deliver restorative justice in collaboration with communities still affected by the legacies of transatlantic slavery.
Antonia has previously worked for the Portico Library, People’s History Museum, Museums Association and the National Lottery Heritage Fund.
Hamza Rana
Hamza is a community organiser, youth worker, facilitator and cultural worker who explores capacity building through anti-racist, decolonial and community-centred practice. His work spans political education, archival storytelling and community power building, with a focus on creating infrastructure for care, accountability and transformative change.
He is the Executive Director of the Muslim Social Justice Initiative (MSJI), a grassroots community project supporting solidarity, political education and peer-based organising among Muslim and racialised young people, building spaces for collective learning, care and long-term movement building.
Hamza has previously spent a decade working across the charity and cultural sector, including as Senior Volunteering and Community Officer at the National Trust’s Castlefield Viaduct, its flagship urban heritage site, where he led community strategy and developed co-created programmes that centred local communities as active participants in shaping the site’s cultural and civic life.
Steering group
Dr Laura Crossley, Consultant, Coach and Facilitator
Laura has over 15 years’ experience in the museums and heritage sector and specialises in workforce culture, strategic planning, audience development, programming, community engagement, and evaluation. She has worked for diverse clients, including volunteer-run museums, local authority museums, and nationals. Recent clients include Royal Hospital Chelsea, York Museums Trust, Culture Croydon, Tullie House Museum & Art Gallery, Wordsworth Grasmere, The Museum of Wigan Life, British Library, and the Stained Glass Museum. She has also worked in senior leadership roles for Oxford University Museums and the National Football Museum.
Following a Clore Cultural Leadership Fellowship (2023/24), during which she researched how to create positive workforce cultures in the arts, Laura was awarded funding from Clore and the Arts and Humanities Research Council to conduct research into burnout in the cultural sector workforce. This has included researching the experiences of marginalised people who engage with museums and heritage organisations. Her research, which was published in summer 2025, includes recommendations for how institutions can create healthier spaces for their in-house and freelance workers. Laura’s work also draws on her own experiences as a disabled freelancer and a member of the LGBTQIA+ community.
Laura is a member of the Safer Museums Network Steering Committee, which was founded in 2021 to meet a need for a space to explore the role of museums and staff in supporting survivors of domestic abuse, and within the wider advocacy movement to end domestic abuse. The Network supports and advocates for museums to create safe spaces for the heritage workforce and audiences.
In addition, Laura is an experienced mentor and a qualified coach, and regularly mentors and coaches individuals and those working in organisations in the cultural sector. She has an AHRC-funded PhD in Museum Studies (2018) from the University of Leicester, in which she explored the factors that enable resilient community engagement practice in museums.
Click here to visit Laura's website (opens in a new tab)Sarah Hartshorne
Sarah Hartshorne is the Senior Manager for Museums and Cultural Property at Arts Council England and currently oversees the Designation and Museum Accreditation schemes, as well as the Museum Development partnership across England which support museums that sit outside of the ACE funded National Portfolio. Alongside colleagues, she focuses on policy in these areas, with a specific focus on how to make these schemes as impactful as possible for their users.
Prior to joining ACE, she led the team that reopened Nottingham Castle in 2023 after the Local Authority took the service back in house. As such, she can most definitely empathise with the current crisis facing the sector in Local Authority funding reduction, and also how important safe civic spaces are for all communities to have access to.
On a personal level, she is passionate about championing societal equity and is a founding member of the Safer Museums Group and was previously a Vice Chair for a Domestic Abuse Service in Nottinghamshire where she supported the team during the unprecedented times of violence against women and girls seen during the pandemic. With two young boys she is kept active (to say the least) and they have only continued to galvanise her promotion of safe access for all.
Kyle Lewis Jordan
Kyle Lewis Jordan is an early career archaeologist and curator who specialises in the study of disability in antiquity. Born with Cerebral Palsy and a full-time wheelchair user, Kyle studied the Archaeology and Heritage of Egypt and the Middle East to postgraduate level at UCL, before going on to curate exhibitions and displays at the Ashmolean Museum and Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford as part of the Curating for Change project.
More recently he has worked freelance as a Guest Curator for the Verulamium Museum in St Albans, and is now looking for his next opportunity. His curatorial work so far has involved a lot of community co-production with disabled people, something he is passionate about continuing in his curatorial work. Alongside his museums work, Kyle continues to research and write about disability in the ancient world.
Sophie Meyer (She/her): Founder and Director of Queer Kernow CIC
With a BA and MA in Archaeology from the University of Southampton and over a decade of experience working in the heritage sector in Cornwall, Sophie’s practice brings together academic and professional expertise with her lived experience as a neurodivergent queer woman.
Her career is focused on making history an equitable, engaging, and inclusive experience for all. Sophie founded the award-winning, Queer Kernow CIC, as a way to forge new paths for queer research and representation in Cornish museums, often acting as a lynchpin for bringing communities and institutions together.
Sophie also forged the idea for the Safe Access Project in collaboration with Cornwall Museums Partnership. She and her fellow Queer Kernow Director, Nicki Foley, were delivery partners for the project during both the Explore and Test Phases.
Charlotte Morgan
An experienced, creative, and strategic fundraiser and project manager, she has managed extensive and diverse portfolios of work with a strong focus on social justice, equity and wellbeing. She is currently the Philanthropy Development Manager at Historic England and is also on the Board of Trustees at AIM.
Maya Sharma
Maya is Head of the Ahmed Iqbal Ullah RACE Centre and Education Trust, a unique Global Majority-focused open-access library and archive, which supports Global Majority community groups to document their histories, experiences and culture. The Centre and Trust is a centre of excellence in community-led / centred archiving, and ethical engagement work.
Maya has worked in heritage, higher education and community sectors over the past 30 years. She is a strong advocate for anti-racist and anti-discriminatory practice, particularly building anti-racist cultural organisations. She works to support and challenge the heritage sector as a critical friend, and was project lead and co-author of If Nothing Changes, Nothing Changes, (a review of racism and EDI in England’s heritage sector).
Louise Thompson: Culture and Wellbeing Consultant
Louise has 18 years of experience of working within the cultural sector and was Health and Wellbeing Manager at Manchester Art Gallery for 12 of those years, working directly with people who were experiencing mental health difficulties, social exclusion and trauma. She has a special interest in mindfulness-based engagement with cultural collections, museum learning, creative psycho-education and trauma-informed practice in museums and galleries.
Towards the end of her time at Manchester art gallery she led the research on applying trauma-informed principles to gallery practice. Working with trauma professionals and people with lived experience Louise were able to explore just how cultural spaces could become more welcoming, inclusive and trauma-informed. She believes creativity, culture and heritage are for everyone and that they can help people lead longer, healthier and happier lives.
Click here to visit the Mindful Museums website (opens in a new tab)Stephen Welsh
Since 2020, Stephen has worked as a freelance curator, consultant and cultural practitioner, specialising in supporting museums and heritage organisations to develop co-creation and other participatory approaches. His work focuses on helping institutions become more responsive to — and representative of — the communities they collaborate with.
In December 2025, he joined the University of Liverpool’s Cultural Heritage team as Head of Exhibitions and Public Programming.
As a consultant, Stephen has collaborated with a diverse range of clients — from museum designers Mather & Co. to Queer Amusements, an LGBTQ+ festival in Blackpool — on projects focused on widening access to culture. Recent work includes supporting the Whitechapel Centre, a housing and homelessness charity in Liverpool, in the co-creation of an exhibition, and serving as a critical evaluative partner for Rising Arts Agency, a Bristol-based not-for-profit organisation led by young, underrepresented creatives.
From 2016 to 2025, Stephen served as a committee member for the National Lottery Heritage Fund North. He currently sits on the board of the Ahmed Iqbal Ullah RACE Centre and Education Trust, having held the position since 2025.
Click here to visit Stephen's website (opens in a new tab)