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The responsibility to make a difference
AIM Director Lisa Ollerhead on developing AIM’s Climate Hallmark.
At the 2023 Conference AIM shared a draft of a brand-new Hallmark for Prospering Museums – one for the environment. This, our first new Hallmark since Tackling Inequality was added in 2020, joins the rest of our framework for helping members to understand what it means to be a good independent museum and reflect on where they’re doing well and where they could improve.
We included the draft in last year’s August issue of the Bulletin so members who weren’t in Edinburgh could comment on wording and concepts that would help assess activity on the environment. Several of you got in touch with feedback, which I was grateful to take into consideration in the next draft of the Hallmark.
It’s been a while since that conference, so I wanted to update on where this piece of work has got to. It has become a small part of a much bigger piece of work looking at how we work with sector partners to support members with environmental sustainability, AIM’s own responsibilities as an organisation, and museums’ role in climate action. We are currently lining up these pieces of work and so releasing a new version of the Hallmarks with the addition of one for the environment – or as we are now referring to it, the Climate Hallmark – has been on pause in the early part of this year.
The main piece of work we have been doing is re-envisioning the guidance we had planned to develop to accompany the new Hallmark. We know how much is out there on environmental issues, from buildings to operations to programming, and how difficult it can be to keep up and understand what’s relevant to each organisation. We want to find ways to help members to navigate all that material – and it’s turned out this is a shared ambition with other sector organisations, so we are in discussions about helping to create a more ambitious resource that can work across museums and heritage. Our Board member Liz Power has been involved in this exciting piece of work as part of her day job of running Historic Buildings & Places as well as being a carbon literacy trainer.
Alongside this work we are initiating a new research project on how museums work with land: from gardens, to fields, to country estates; as part of their operating models, as well as how they approach it as a part of nature in a context of climate change. Click here for more information about this innovative research. We hope the findings of this research will inform future work around climate and the environment, including helping set the scene for next year’s National Conference which will delve into these issues in more detail.
We are also continuing to look at AIM’s own environmental impact, both under the leadership of our Board and as part of our responsibilities as an Arts Council England Investment Principles Support Organisation. Like many of our members we are a small organisation, and it can be a challenge to see how we can make a difference – but we understand our responsibility to do so, and the impact small steps can have.
There will be more on all of these projects in the coming months, including the next draft of the Climate Hallmark. Please do look out for where members can get involved to make it as supportive and useful as possible.
Click here to find out more about AIM Hallmarks>>