Discussion chaired by Karen Brookfield, Deputy Director, Heritage Lottery Fund.

Panelists were:

• Maurice Davies Department Director, Museums Association
• Dr Nick Merriman Director, Manchester Museums
• Dave Roberts Executive Director, Community Foundation for Merseyside

They discussed what sustainability actually means and how organisations can rise to the challenge of sustaining work with new audiences that goes beyond project limited funding.

Maurice Davies talked about how audience work is expensive and needs specialist staff. It is usually project funded but needs to be core work, so core budgets perhaps need to be realigned. There are still unresolved issues about what skills 21st century museum/heritage professionals need. We’ve ended up with rather separate professional groups of curators and educators, outreach and community staff (with marketing / audience development specialists sitting alongside). Would things be more efficient if there was a single group of multi-skilled professionals who had both knowledge of heritage/collections and of audiences?

Nick Merriman said that the overall answer to making development of new audiences sustainable and less dependent on project funding is, as Maurice says, to make it core, to ‘mainstream’ it. He acknowledged that this will probably need some adjustment in what is core funded, with some areas receiving less funds in order to allow audience work to grow, and it may also mean that we will have to re-train existing staff and recruit slightly new kinds of staff in core areas.

Dave Roberts talked about how many environmental groups are so ‘project’ (or ’single- issue’) focused that they are never around long enough to share learning, move onto new things, develop capacity or structure themselves in order to secure funding etc. Projects need to ensure that they end up being self financing and skills are past on. Projects need to be more entrepreneurial.

Delegates raised a lot of issues which included:

• Is it the resources or the mind set which are important in sustaining projects?
• How do we engage communities not just with visiting heritage but also in building skills within the heritage sector?
• Is changing the sector by adding on new things addressing issues? Is this sustainable?
• Strategies need to be long-term and buy in support from communities. This is not an easy job.
• Can we have more training or pre-project development to ensure sustainability?
• Surely endowment funding is the only way we can ensure projects are sustainable? Assets are much more at risk without it.
• Endowment funding is the way forward but needs cultural shift. At the moment no motivation in UK towards this type of funding.
• Is there anything that funders should be asking about how applicants are going to sustain their projects?
• Make learning, engaging people the basis of where you are coming from. It should be core work rather than waiting for project funding.