I attach below a response from Fiona Talbott, Director of London Museums
Agency, to the recent objection to one of our projects.

"The Black Figureheads project is one of a number of projects which will
help us achieve our aim of enabling museums to realise their potential for
audience diversification (to represent and engage with the full social and
cultural mix in their communities). I can understand that, taken out of
context, the project could appear tokenistic but that is not our intention.
We want London's museums to have collections which reflect their
communities and tell their stories. Part of our project will involve
consultation by the participating museums with their black and Asian
communities and it will be they who determine who the museum chooses as the
figurehead.

I have attached a document which outlines what London Museum Agency aims to
do to address cultural diversity issues and tackle racism. I do hope that I
have addressed your concerns and that this project will be positive step in
ensuring that museums fully involve their users in ensuring representative,
reflective collections."

Yours sincerely

Fiona Talbott

The document appears below:

London Museums Agency – addressing cultural diversity


1. Introduction

Two of the strategic aims of the London Museums agency this year are to:

§ To improve access to museums and enhance lifelong learning
experiences in museums. (physical, sensory, intellectual, cultural, social,
attitudinal, economic, geographic and virtual access).

§ To enable museums to realise their potential for audience
diversification (to represent and engage with the full social and cultural
mix in their communities)

One of LMA’s priority areas for work is in the field of helping museums
address issues around cultural diversity. This is a major issue for a city
like London where over 300 languages are spoken, almost half of Britain’s
black and minority ethnic residents live and more than a third of Londoners
belong to an ethnic minority community.

We believe that working with our partner museums to address both the needs
of a diverse city and diverse audiences is a long-term process. The work we
undertake this year is part of a planned approach and essentially lays down
the building blocks for programmes of work in future years. On a pragmatic
note we hope that this preparatory work can be used or adapted for our
archives and libraries colleagues. The Black and Asians Figureheads project
was one high-profile project that LMA has developed to raise awareness of
diversity issues. We know that this work takes time and that it is
important to develop sustainability and capacity within the museums
community otherwise projects may appear tokenistic. However as the
strategic agency for museums in the capital we know that issues like
tackling racism and meeting the needs of  a culturally diverse population
have to be addressed by ourselves, by museums and, in all cases, in
partnership with Londoners.


2. Holding up the Mirror

Originally LMA had two projects, which would run side by side. The first
was a cultural and social audit of collections in local authority museums.
This project would determine how the collections of the borough museums
were representative of their local communities in terms of whom and where
the collections had originated. The borough museums were chosen for the
project because their collection should reflect their local community in
historical time span, localities and different communities. Following that
audit LMA would develop a project in 2003/4 to support local historical
museums through the process of `filling the gaps’  where collections  were
insufficiently representative, either through retrospective or contemporary
collecting.

The second project `Holding up the Mirror’ was a version of the McPherson
Report for museums identifying good practice in tackling racism and
diversity issues and areas where improvement and/or new approaches are
needed. One of the main outcomes of the report would be an action plan for
LMA that would feed into a strategic programme of work in the next
corporate plan.

There is a lot of synergy between the two projects especially around the
programmes of work that may flow from both. The two projects are more
coherent if they become two complementary parts of one project focusing on
LMA’s approach to tackling racism and addressing cultural diversity. The
overall project will be known as `Holding up the Mirror’.

This project will be a major LMA publication comprising of the results of
the two strands of the project. A steering group will be set up for the
project as a reference for LMA and to bring in additional expertise on both
museum collections and anti-racism. All participants must have a commitment
to the aims of the project, but will have varying degrees of experience of
working with diverse local communities. This committee will shape the
structure of the project and might be expected to meet 3-4 times during the
course of the project. The committee members will be expected to act as
champions for the project in their wider hinterland of networks and
contacts. There will be extensive consultation with the museums sector. For
this report to succeed in its implementation both the process and
recommendations need to be owned by the museums sector.

The project will commence with a social and cultural audit of collections
in local authority/history  museums. Its purpose is to obtain an accurate
assessment of how those museums in London, and those others in receipt of
public funding which have a local history remit, have developed and are
developing their permanent collections in order to serve and reflect all
constituent groups within the communities they serve. The audit will
examine the Acquisition and Disposal policies of museums, the types of
collections and their interpretation to provide a comprehensive picture of
how museums reflect their local communities through collections.
Collections are the heart of any museums which is why LMA has specifically
concentrated on this as a first step for the report. This audit will be
published as the main appendix to LMA’s report into how publicly funded
museums are addressing racism and cultural diversity museums.

Alongside this LMA, in conjunction with the steering group, will be looking
at the wider issues of how an organisation (in this case, museums)
mainstreams cultural diversity at all levels. This work will focus on
identifying the key barriers to addressing diversity; including internal
barriers such as policies, practices and staff attitudes, unwitting
prejudice, ignorance and thoughtlessness. It will identify and summarise
examples of good practice and draw out the key ingredients of these case
studies to help museums reach a better understanding about how these
examples could be translated to their work. The report will both recommend
a series of initiatives that will guide and support museums in their
attempts at addressing diversity and how LMA can support museums in their
attempts at addressing diversity, in particular examining the role of grant
aid, training programmes and LMA programmes of work.

We envisage that we will need to use two consultants for the project – the
first person should have a strong museum background with an understanding
of collecting and stewardship issues and of working with diverse
communities in a local authority context. The second consultant needs to
very familiar with race and diversity issues in London and how
organisations can implement an anti-racism agenda in all areas of its work,
mainstreaming these issues so they become part of normal operations rather
than an add-on.





3. Black and Asian Figureheads

This project intends to raise the popular profile of London’s local history
museums and to encourage people, especially from the Black and Asian
communities, to consider how their and their localities’ history might be
better reflected by those museums’ collections. The project will involve 12
local authority museums each identifying and working with a local high
profile Black or Asian person. They need not be nationally known names,
although it is hoped that some will be, but people pre-eminent in their own
field of work, be it politics, public service, teaching, religion, writing,
art, sport and entertainment

Each person will be invited to donate an object of personal or cultural
significance to their local museum’s permanent collection and to
participate in a public event aimed at encouraging local communities to
engage with the museum and consider how their own histories and heritage
could be represented by further deposits into its collections. The 12
objects, and panels explaining why and how the celebrities chose them, will
initially be exhibited together in a high profile London location, before
being dispersed for display in the individual museums and used as a focus
for their outreach activities.

Each museum  will consult with its local community to select the person the
community most wants to participate in this project and only then will they
be invited to participate. Although this project focuses on a small number
of people we hope that the respect and profile that the donors garner in
their own communities will encourage better relationships between Black and
Asian people and their local museums. It is important to see this project
as complimentary to the `Holding up the Mirror’ report because our ultimate
aim is to see museums with collections that are representative of their
local communities and using those collections to tell the story of all
local people.


4. Cultural Diversity Network

Hackney Museum was the venue for the first meeting of the new Cultural
Diversity Network, which is being organised by the London Museums Agency on
behalf of the London Museums, Archives and Libraries partnership (LMAL).
This inaugural event was an opportunity for museum, archive and library
practitioners to explore issues around cultural diversity in London and to
contribute to the development of the network.

The meeting featured a keynote presentation from Professor Lola Young, Head
of Culture at the Greater London Authority and an introduction to the Race
Relations Amendment Act from Omer Ahmed of the Commission for Racial
Equality (a member of the Board of London Museums Agency).

Resource: the Council for Museums, Archives and Libraries will be making
additional funding available to all Area Museums Councils/ Regional
Agencies later in the year to continue the development of the Network. On
behalf of the LMAL partnership, London Museums Agency, will be leading on
developing that programme, in conjunction with practitioners in the three
domains.


Fiona Talbott, Director, London Museums Agency
10 December 2002