Invitation to Tender – Community Engagement – Hampshire Cultural Trust

Invitation to Tender: Data Hunters & Story Gatherers – Community Engagement Support

Introduction 

Hampshire Cultural Trust (HCT) was established as an independent charity in 2014 to promote Hampshire as a county that offers outstanding cultural experiences to both its residents and visitors. From museums to galleries and arts centres, we manage 24 attractions across the county that were previously operated by Hampshire County Council and Winchester City Council. We run a varied programme of exhibitions, workshops, classes, events and programmes for both young and old, in schools and in communities, with particular emphasis on reaching people who are vulnerable or disadvantaged and would not normally be able to access arts and culture. In addition, we care for 2.5 million objects that relate to Hampshire’s rich and internationally important cultural heritage.

The Project 

HCT is exploring sustainable, meaningful and impactful ways of engaging our communities in the process of curatorship. In 2020, we launched a flagship project to challenge our traditional approach. For the refurbishment of our museum at Gosport, we invited community engagement specialists to support us as we embarked on a community co-production journey that would take over the permanent display development. In November 2022, as Gosport reopens its doors, we have learnt much from this project. As we shared at the Social History Curator’s Group conference earlier this year under the title ‘Celebrating Randomness’, our two main blockers to achieve community co-production were:

• Poor quality and incomplete collections data means only insiders can access stored collections effectively
• Too much of our collections have been collected as generic examples of a middle-class ideals of the bygone life rather than being place-specific and relevant

In 2023, HCT is starting a new project called ‘Data Hunters & Story Gatherers: towards community curatorship’ (H&G) designed to establish the structure required to address these shortcomings.

This project will develop and then embed two new processes within HCT collections management: ‘Data Hunting’ – an innovative new approach to improving the quality, reliability and completeness of our collections’ documentation from inventory to online catalogue; and ‘Story Gathering’ – the act of bringing new information, perspectives, and objects into the collections through research, consultation, donor relationships and acquisitions. The purpose of the project is to establish these processes fit for engaging with non-traditional museum volunteers, complimentary to the existing subject-specialist expertise.

Contract Objective

Hampshire Cultural Trust are seeking community engagement expertise to guide, train and support the project team in delivering the agreed outcomes of the NLHF funded H&G project which is supported by the Dynamic Collections funding.  For more information, please see the supplementary material attached to this Invitation to Tender.

Click here for the full brief>>

How to Respond 

Contractors must provide the following information with their application. Failure to provide this information may result in your submission being disqualified.

Send a covering letter, a short proposal including your methodology, confirmation of deliverables, and how many days are allocated to whom within your project proposals, with updated CVs for all proposed team members.

Applicants will be interviewed against the criteria for the role, by representatives from Hampshire Cultural Trust.

All communications and submissions are to be sent via email to Emma Banks, Collections Programme Manager: [email protected]

Deadline for submissions: 10 September 2023