Connected Communities Legacy Manager – AIM

Connected Communities, part of the Know Your Neighbourhood Fund supported by DCMS

Legacy Manager Brief

Introduction

Museums have unique abilities to bring people together around collections, treasured local sites, and interesting ideas. AIM’s new programme seeks to harness these opportunities to increase wellbeing in twenty-seven specified deprived areas in England and give more people the chance to get involved in their local museum and build meaningful relationships.

Funded by the Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) Know Your Neighbourhood Fund through Arts Council England (ACE), AIM’s Connected Communities scheme offers grants of £15,000 – £100,000 to Accredited museums delivering projects in the eligible areas that will improve community connections through high-quality volunteering opportunities and/or reducing loneliness and increasing social bonds. Alongside the grants museums will participate in a capacity-building programme that will support and upskill staff and volunteers, offer expert guidance through mentorship, help build partnerships with local organisations, and ensure the grant-funded projects have a legacy both organisationally and in the eligible areas.

This programme is part of Know Your Neighbourhood. Other elements delivered via the Arts Council are through Creative Lives UK and Libraries Connected. The other strands of the project encompass Heritage Action Zones, UK Community Foundation projects, and National Lottery Community Fund projects.

Connected Communities is supported by the What Works Centre for Wellbeing and Heritage Volunteering Group.

More information about the programme, including guidance for applicants, can be found here.

Legacy Manager

AIM wishes to recruit a legacy manager to capture and disseminate learnings from Connected Communities around the museums sector and in civic society more widely, and to work with project mentors to support individual Connected Communities projects to build local relationships and ensure a life for their project after the funding where appropriate. This is an exciting opportunity to play a role in the implementation of a central Government fund which is exploring how museums and other community organisations can tackle social issues through projects and build systems and relationships in local areas to make the work sustainable.

As legacy manager you will form a key part of the AIM Connected Communities team, alongside AIM staff and the freelance Project Support Officer. This is a new strand to our grants plus capacity-building through mentorship and other activities model, building on the strategic investment by the National Lottery Heritage Fund into AIM’s New Stories, New Audiences programme, testing it for the first time with significant projects up to £100,000 which AIM expects will involve working with bigger organisations and consortia.

A key part of Connected Communities is the need to work within the overall Know Your Neighbourhood Framework, which is intended to be a place-based programme supporting volunteering and tackling loneliness in the eligible areas through the Arts Council-funded strands as well as wider civic society funds. Some of AIM’s funded projects may be delivered jointly with other programming also funded by other parts of KYN, and many of the projAects will be in areas and potentially with communities also working with other KYN-funded projects. There are therefore complex networks in the local areas but also a great deal of potential for projects to add up to more than the sum of their parts and enable the creation or strengthening of relationships between museums and other institutions doing similar social work, including other charities, local authorities, universities etc. KYN aspires to build systems and processes in these eligible areas and between these organisations that can last beyond the life of the programme and part of the role of the legacy manager will be to support and empower the AIM-funded projects to do this.

The legacy manager will be responsible for delivering, by spring 2025:

• Development of a suite of resources openly available to the wider sector e.g. case studies, AIM Success Guides, AIM Bulletin articles
• One day-long conference bringing together the projects with the wider sector and civic society organisations, in autumn 2024, likely in partnership with Libraries Connected
• Supporting partnership building centrally and at project level with projects funded through the two other ACE Know Your Neighbourhood programmes
• Working with mentors to support partnership building at local level within the project museums aimed to enabling systemic change for loneliness and volunteering in their area
• Support for the cohort programme/peer support for people running programmes, starting after award of round two grants in early spring 2024, with consideration to turning this into a community of practice for the wider sector towards the end of the programme
• Supporting AIM to use Connected Communities to help build relationships between the museums sector and other civic society and research organisations working in the loneliness/wellbeing and volunteering spaces.

Across these tasks you will work closely with the Connected Communities Project Support Officer, AIM Head of Programmes, and AIM Director.

Person specification

We are looking for experienced consultants who:

• Have good knowledge of project and/or programme management, preferably with experience of ensuring legacy from major public funding programmes (from any of the funder perspective, programme management perspective, or grant recipient perspective)
• Have good knowledge of the culture sector in England
• Have experience of event programming and organisation
• Have experience of developing resources based on audience needs
• Are approachable, organised, capable of initiating and shaping workstreams, and communicate clearly and regularly with other team members

Carrying out the work

The role will start in January 2024 and run to the end of May 2025, with likely some busier periods e.g. as projects complete and have material available for resources and case studies and around the conference, which will be agreed between AIM and the successful contractor. The legacy manager will be expected to participate in some of the cohort/peer support activities e.g. attending day events where the projects meet one another in order to provide sessions on partnerships and legacy as well as getting to know the project museums.

Payment

There is a fee of £23,400 excluding VAT, which is based on an assumption of 36 days at £650 day, starting in January 2024 and ending around April/May 2025. This is to include travel and expenses but much of the work is expected to be conducted remotely. A payment schedule will be agreed on appointment. 

Contract Management

The role is freelance and the contractor will need to be able to work from home and provide their own IT and office equipment.

AIM has a standard self-employed contractor agreement.

The contractor will report to the AIM Head of Programmes.

How to apply for this role

Please supply:

• Please supply a CV (no more than 3 pages) and brief covering letter (no more than 2 pages) setting out: how you meet the points in the person specification; and how you would approach the goal of bringing together disparate projects across our scheme and other KYN schemes and supporting them to have a legacy as projects, in their areas and as a cohort experienced at working on volunteering and loneliness within the museum sector.

Proposals should be sent to AIM Head of Programmes, Margaret Harrison Margaret@aim-museums.co.uk by 12noon on Monday 27 November 2023.