In this special episode created in collaboration with NEMO – the Network of European Museum Organisations, I’m sharing voices and ideas from the 2025 NEMO European Museum Conference ‘Who Cares? Museums, Wellbeing and Resilience’ in Horsens, Denmark.

Recorded during the conference itself in the unique setting of the FÆNGSLET Prison Museum, this episode features eight speakers from across Europe and beyond.

Together, we explore how museums are engaging with wellbeing and care – for their communities, their staff, and the wider world.

You’ll hear from museum professionals, researchers and cultural leaders reflecting on what care looks like in practice – from building organisational resilience to creating spaces for recovery, reflection and connection. The episode weaves together their experiences to to show how museums are finding new ways to care for people and communities.

In this episode

• How museums are rethinking their roles in wellbeing and resilience
• Practical examples of care-centred work in action
• The emotional and organisational challenges of supporting wellbeing
• The importance of caring for the people who care for others

Featuring

Julia Pagel (Germany) • Vera Carasso (Netherlands) • Elizabeth Merritt (USA) • Inga Surgunte (Latvia) • Sinéad Rice (Ireland) • Yurii Horpynych (Ukraine) • Roberto Casarotto (Italy) • Dr Nuala Morse (UK)

The Art Engager is written and presented by Claire Bown. Editing is by Matt Jacobs and Claire Bown. Music by Richard Bown. Support on Patreon

Links

• NEMO – Network of European Museum Organisations
• NEMO 2025 Statement on Museums and Wellbeing
• Conference webpage with recordings

✨ If you've enjoyed this episode, please consider supporting The Art Engager on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/c/TheArtEngager

Or pick up a copy of my book, The Art Engager, for step-by-step guidance on creating meaningful, interactive guided experiences https://www.theartengager.com/

Buy it here on Amazon.com: https://tinyurl.com/buytheartengager

Hello and welcome to The Art Engager podcast with me, Claire Bown.

I'm here to share techniques and tools to help you engage with your audience

and bring art objects and ideas to life.

So let's dive into this week's show.

Hello, and welcome to a new episode of The Art Engager.

I'm Claire Bown, and today's episode is a little different.

Instead of one guest, I'm bringing you voices from an entire conference,

the NEMO Annual Conference, Who Cares?

Museums, Wellbeing and Resilience that took place in Horsens,

Denmark a few weeks ago.

Now one quick thing before we start.

I started this podcast in 2021 thinking I'd make perhaps 25 episodes.

And here we are at over 150.

Creating each episode is mainly a solo endeavor, and your support of

the podcast helps cover hosting, editing costs, research, and interview

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less than the price of a cup of coffee.

Thank you.

So in late October, 2025, I traveled to Horsens, Denmark

for the NEMO annual conference.

NEMO is the network of European museum organizations, and NEMO represents over

30,000 museums across 40 countries.

And this year they dedicated their entire conference to exploring what it means

for museums to engage with wellbeing and resilience, both for communities

and for museum workers themselves.

This was a hugely popular sold out conference with over 328 participants

from all over Europe, many of whom were at a NEMO conference

for the first time, including me.

Over two days, I spoke with people across this emerging field, from those thinking

about policy frameworks and cross sector partnerships to practitioners designing

and delivering programs on the ground to researchers examining what this work means

for the museum workforce implementing it.

What I heard were conversations about possibility and practice, about the

profound personal impact of care work and about what it actually takes to sustain

this kind of work in the long term.

This is what I heard in hors.

So to start with, I spoke with Julia Pagel, the Secretary General of Nemo.

I wanted to understand why NEMO chose to dedicate this year's

conference to the theme of wellbeing and resilience and why now.

she talked about what prompted this focus, what she hoped the conference

could achieve, and the unique role she sees for museums across Europe

in promoting care and wellbeing.

I think that's probably the beauty of what networks are.

You feel that themes are emerging.

You hear the topic of wellbeing and resilience come up once, twice, four

times, 10 times, a hundred times, and we realize that we need some

kind of central moment to bring these projects, the ideas, but also the many

questions that come with it together.

And this is why we decided to do the conference.

And if I may add, of course, because we are a European organization and

we see the same thing happening on European cultural policy level.

So mental health and wellbeing is a strong topic at the moment,

very visible at European levels.

So this was a good moment to connect.

And I think what conferences can do is that they bring those preferred futures,

the futures that we want to get to, they bring them to the very present, and then

we really know where to work towards and how to work towards in order to get there.

So creating cooperation between museums to work on these issues.

Opening up funds, and not only in the cultural sector, but of course also in

the health sector and maybe even help to create those cross sector partnerships

that we really need to grow more.

But I'd say the inspiration that we can be these allies is the

most important for the network.

I think we have a great strategic advantage, and that is that we are large

cultural infrastructures across the globe.

There is a museum almost everywhere, and that I think gives us an amazing

advantage to really be close to where the people are, to where communities

are, to where needs are emerging.

But of course that comes along with many challenges that we have to address

and new profiles that the museum needs in order to be that place.

And I think what we also have to have very clear is that we are at

the prevention stage and making this prevention one of the say, cornerstones

of what healthcare means nowadays.

That can be translated into data and into money because it's way less

expensive to prevent from becoming ill, falling ill than to be ill,

and then having to be cared for.

So I think we, we really need to position ourselves in that preventive section.

After hearing Julia outline the wider European picture, I

wanted to explore what this focus on care and wellbeing means in practice

for the people working in museums and for the organizations themselves.

Vera Carasso is director of the Dutch Museum Association representing more

than 460 museums across the Netherlands.

She's also vice chair of Nemo's executive board.

I spoke with her about how the conversation around care is evolving

and why she believes museums need to build a true culture of care,

both for their audiences and for the people who work within them.

When you see the speakers in the panel are all focusing on

wellbeing in the organization, and what I really like about the subject is that

like when you're in an airplane, you first have to put on your oxygen mask

yourself before you can help others.

And that's I think, the whole thing.

Museums play a very important role in health and society, mental

health, but also physical health.

But first, when you wanna help society, you first have to make sure you have

a healthy organization yourself.

Museums are more and more aware of their role in society.

I think 25 years ago, museums were more thinking about their collections

only and focusing on the inside.

And now they're more aware of their importance for society.

And I think they also have to, because finance is under pressure,

so we have to be relevant.

And if you wanna be relevant, you have to see what kind of

situation is there in society and how can we help society with that?

And museums can play a vital role in caring for society, making

people happy, inspire people, bring people together, but also to educate

them, for example, about history.

And in that way, make sure that there's less polarization because

people understand each other better.

The European museum sector is under a lot of pressure.

Of course, there's financial pressure, there's war in Europe.

There's a lot of polarization.

There are a lot of political shifts where also culture is sometimes used as

a political tool and sometimes really threatened by politicians and we have

to stay together to stay strong and to help each other, support each other.

Like we also do with, for example, the museums in the United States.

It's very important we stay in touch with them, but also as a group, as

a strong group in Europe, it's very important to stay together and work

together in within this Nemo network.

So Vera talked about how museums need to care for

themselves before they can care for others, about creating healthy

organizations that can really support the wellbeing of their communities.

She also spoke about the pressures museums are facing financial,

political, even social, and how staying connected through networks like NEMO

helps them face those challenges.

These ideas link beautifully to the keynote that opened the conference.

Elizabeth Merritt, vice President for Strategic Foresight at the American

Alliance of Museums and founding director of the Center for the Future

of Museums brought a futures perspective inviting participants to imagine how

museums might play a role in health and wellbeing in the years ahead.

Elizabeth outlined three possible futures, one shaped by technology and

data, one focused on human connection, and one where museums become part

of a new infrastructure of care.

So many of us nowadays are connected to the an internet of

data through little devices that live on our wrist or on our finger that are

continually collecting and transmitting our blood pressure and our pulse.

And as they get more and more sophisticated, they may even be

monitoring our brain waves and they're giving us feedback on our health.

So I can imagine a future in which I wake up and I look at my phone and it

says, you've been logging so many days.

When you're feeling down and your basic systems seem depressed.

Maybe you need to spend some time in a museum.

Because when you do that, you always feel better.

So imagine a future in which people have either chosen to completely disconnect

from the internet because they don't wanna share their data or they distrust

how it's being used, or the companies that run these systems have collapsed.

Imagine you go into a museum and someone comes up and says, hello, who would you

like to be your personal guide today?

We have available for checking out your personal poet or your personal musician

or your personal therapist who might help you talk about your feelings in response

to the paintings you're looking at.

We already have such a wealth of data that's being presented at this

conference about the well-known health benefits of being in the museum space.

But what if that were personalized and got a little human assist so that

you could go and say, I know that when I go to the museum, there're

gonna be people at the front desk to sell me a ticket, and there are going

to be people helping me find my way.

But there they're also going to be the people there who are trained

in mental health, who might be able to make most of my experience by

giving me some one-on-one feedback.

Our previous Surgeon General Vivek Murthy, actually declared loneliness to be a

national epidemic because so many people are suffering from social disconnection.

And so with that kind of social disconnection, the fact that people

can and do use museums as family time to reconnect with people that they

love or with friends, or even to have very light touch interactions with

strangers that have been shown to have very beneficial social effects,

makes them a very important place to provide this basic human connection.

And this goes deeply to my philosophy, that if you put all of the burden

on an individual and organization to do good work, first of all,

it's expecting a lot of them.

And secondly.

It may not stick.

So looking at me as a person and saying, you're responsible for your

health and wellbeing, so you should be wearing a monitoring device

and paying attention to your diet.

Those whole things are, are all true.

But if I'm doing that by myself, it's tremendously difficult and I'm vulnerable.

And the same for museum.

They may be doing good work, but if nobody is supporting them or knows to

come to them or integrates that work into other systems of care, it's vulnerable.

So I like to look at the biggest picture and say, what if you look

at Health and Wellbeing as an entire of society approach, it should

be integrated into our schools.

It should be integrated into our places of socialization.

It should be integrated into our workplaces, and I think museums can be an

effective part of that network of care.

So I posited, for example.

Children already routinely go to museums for school trips where they

learn about history or art history.

They can be going to museums to learn about empathy and emotional

response and self-regulation, social and emotional skills.

These are things, museums know how to teach.

And if schools thought of museums as a place to integrate that into their

curriculum, that could be very powerful.

One of the things I've been delighted to see at this conference is so many

wonderful examples of prescriptions on demand for museums to be actually in

the care system of doctors or healthcare providers, so that they would be saying,

maybe you want to go to a museum.

Here's a prescription.

One museum visit a week for the next 10 weeks and you will feel better.

And even if you weren't previously a regular museum goer, you may start

becoming a regular museum goer.

So I think integrating what museums can do into those formal systems of

support will help what we do be more powerful, pervasive, and sustainable.

I.

So in Elizabeth Merritt's keynote, she imagined what the future

might look like if museums became part of our shared systems of care.

But what does it take to build those systems now in real museums with

real policies and partnerships?

So that question sits at the heart of Inga Surgunte's work.

Inga is a research assistant at the Culture and Arts Institute of the

Latvian Academy of Culture, where she leads the Museum's on Prescription

program in Cêsis municipality.

Inga is also involved in several international projects addressing

the cultural sector's impact on sustainable development,

including health and wellbeing.

In Inga's, work is all about building bridges between culture and health and

between local government and communities.

In our conversation, she spoke about what's working in those

collaborations, but also about the pitfalls, the challenges, the

boundaries, the emotional risks.

And the responsibility that comes with this kind of care work.

First of all, I think it is, uh, recognizing and being aware of the

professional boundaries and staying within the role of cultural, professional, or

artist or museum educator and not trying to step into therapy or, um, healing or.

All those, um, roles that require medical training and sometimes this,

uh, border is very subtle and you can step over it accidentally, but I think

this is the first place I would name.

Then of course everything that comes with this emerging cross

sector that we don't know yet.

So we are constantly discovering new training that we need new knowledge,

all these gaps, and you have to be very attentive and to develop all of that just

by doing, by implementing the program.

I think from my experience now working both on municipal and national levels,

it is easier to start locally and to test small initiatives and see the results.

That's what we did in Cêsis municipality and we were never, as

museums required to deliver some.

Big studies or data because the referral channels, the medical

and the social professionals, they saw immediately the effects of the

program and nothing else was required.

So I think working locally and monitoring closely the programs is the key.

Museums can play a substantial role both in management and

treatment of certain conditions or diagnosis and also in prevention

of disease and promotion of health.

And I think museums have been very enthusiastic to try both

roles and, and both directions and they are often succeeding.

I think the first.

Aspect when it comes to responsibility is a long-term commitment to the chosen

audience or participants, because that will be definitely attachment

and we should be very careful with the responsibility towards that.

And I think sometimes museums don't think far enough and they also are

limited in terms of resources and other possibilities and programs tend to end.

And then there is this dependency created in the audience.

I think we have to be very responsible with that.

And it is also painful then for museum workers to see what they

have created and not being able to continue offering the programs.

So listening to Inga, you can really hear how complex this work

is, how much care and responsibility it demands from museum professionals.

At the National Gallery of Ireland, Sinead Rice leads a team that's

putting these ideas into practice.

As head of education and public programming.

She's been exploring what a culture of care can look like inside a large national

museum, not as a one-off project, but as something embedded in its everyday work.

Sinéad Rice: So I suppose the National Gallery of Ireland is

an old historic institution.

It's one of the leading national cultural institutions in Ireland, and

it's in a beautiful kind of Georgian quarter in Dublin city center.

And the collection that the gallery has spans from the 13

hundreds right up to present day.

It's primarily European art, but it has the largest collection

of Irish art in the world.

And.

Something I wanted to make clear today when I was speaking about the gallery

was that education has been there from the very beginning, and so when it

opened in 1864, it was really furthering education, both of artists themselves,

but also of the public generally, and so the sharing of knowledge rooted in the

collection was there from the outset, but what shifted, I guess was 110 years

after the gallery opened, the first ever education officer was appointed.

And then we had a change in the culture from imparting knowledge about the

collection, which was very much object led, let's say, to person led programming.

So thinking about the needs of diverse publics, thinking about what

was needed for school children or an elderly person or someone who was

potentially in a healthcare situation.

And this evolved slowly, the department was set up.

Then the education department was formally set up in 1990, and this enabled

really for community outreach to begin.

Then I joined the gallery in 2014, and so in the past 10 years, what I've really

done with the team, which we've grown significantly over that period of time,

what we've done is really harnessed the trust and the relationships that

were built over that 50 year period of someone working consistently in education

at the gallery and using that then.

To further what we're doing to advance that mission of education,

but really to bring it back centrally all the time to that it is a

civic institution for the people.

So something I became increasingly aware of when I was researching for this panel

and thinking about that culture of cares.

This is not achieved overnight.

This is a long, slow process, especially in historical institutions and museums.

And so I wouldn't like anybody to think.

We have just started doing these programs, which are, you know, in some

ways quite radical in terms of especially the space that we're working in.

But they are built on years and years and all the people who came before us

and all the projects we've worked on right up to that moment where we are

establishing not only a position of trust with the people we're working with, but

also that we have the capacity to deliver what we say we're going to deliver.

Also, I think what's been there for so long is partnerships with other

organizations where we have a shared goal.

Actually, we have a shared kind of civic duty or responsibility, but the

gallery can bring something to the table that the other institution can't.

And that's something I think about a lot lately because I'm

not suddenly a social worker.

I'm not suddenly an art psychotherapist, for example, what I am.

Is an art educator and a museum educator, and that's what I bring to the table.

So I don't suddenly cross over into an area where I'm like,

actually, that's not my expertise.

I work instead with the experts in other fields.

And then we create something special that maybe hasn't happened before,

but it means that both of our organizations can benefit from that.

And then the service users or the members of the public that we're supporting

as well can also benefit in that way.

So, as I said, I'm head of education and public programming, and I have

a team now of eight at the gallery.

And now I have a manager who is for core programming and another

manager for special projects.

And the rationale for that is that.

It is so fundamental to our work, and it is a method of avoiding parachute

programming, which I mentioned earlier on today, to ensure that we have a core

welcome, inclusive, regular, flexible program of activity for all audiences.

So the core program manager is essentially responsible and ensures that we are

delivering across the board initiatives that anyone can attend, drop into.

The vast majority are free, but also they don't require booking A lot

of the time these core initiatives.

That we ensure happen so that even when we're delivering a special project or a

program for a particular audience, there's always something happening for others.

That is, like I said, welcoming and flexible, and designed to

be as inclusive as possible.

The special projects manager then is responsible for just that.

It acknowledges that there are areas where we need to really put.

Time into developing.

It really looks at research led practice.

It's an area where we try to, I suppose, push the boundaries a little bit.

We're looking at what's best practice like globally.

Who else is doing things?

Where can art and art education sit that it potentially hasn't before?

What are the new conversations?

And it very much deals with meaty pilot programs that move into core

programming at a later stage when we have run them for a length of time

where we feel very comfortable with it.

And so often we'll have things that may coexist between core programs

and special projects, and this is something that's really important.

So even for example, with health and wellbeing, we have lighter touch

initiatives such as yoga, the gallery, sound baths at the gallery, and also

slow art and kind of mindfulness tours.

And they are core activities that we run.

But then we also have special projects initiatives such as working with

children's hospices or such as our art psychotherapy, which has become core now

with the appointment of the first ever.

Cultural arts, psych therapist and residents in Ireland.

The resident cultural art therapist then is resident at the

gallery on a one day, week basis.

And as I said at the session, if she was there seven days a week, we would

be booked out seven days a week running the programs that we run with her.

But it has changed things completely to have someone every single week.

So we have dedicated our studio for one day a week for our art psychotherapist.

What is wonderful about that is.

She's also in the fabric of the institution then.

So for example, if there's a day where she doesn't have a session,

an art psychotherapy group session, she may instead go to the galleries,

do some research on the collection.

She may go to our exceptional library and archive and look into

the records of the gallery as well.

She may go and meet with some of the other staff and get a sense of something else

that we may want to root into her work.

She's now part of us.

Absolutely see her as a member of the team.

We factor her into what we're doing, but through that, then when she's meeting

these people and welcoming them to the gallery and creating a safe space for

them, she's very much doing it, knowing the institution all the better because

we're three years into the program now, but now she has access to things that

she wouldn't have had access previously.

It's always been important for me over the last 10 years that as a team, we

commit to working onsite, offsite, and online to ensure that we have.

That push always for us not to just get complacent with the people

who come in, but also go out and meet people where they're at.

The programs we're doing are of such value, but again, once we go beyond

the walls, anyone we're working with who may be vulnerable or anyone who.

That we're working with that requires that really committed support.

That has a huge knock on on a team.

And actually it was really interesting because someone from the floor asked

the question of what are you doing for your team and what are the strategies?

And there's a couple of things for me that this is long-term solve as well.

In the same way that getting to do these programs takes a long.

Period of time.

It's only through doing them that you realize what the impact is going to

be, and it's only through realizing that impact and having come through

with that, then you can start.

I suppose putting preventative measures in place.

So one thing that I think is really important is that people are really

honest about it, that they're honest about their workload or the impact

of doing the work they're doing.

I couldn't say hand on heart that this work that's addressing

health and wellbeing or working with vulnerable communities or

underserved audiences, of course it's going to take more, not just time.

A bit of yourself as well, and there are measures I have had to learn

to put in place for that as well because you feel so committed to it.

And there has to be a point also where you either need to outsource or resource

or like I said, you work with an expert in the field and that expert will

guide you on where it can go as well.

Another thing that we do definitely, well, we take care of each other,

so within the department, we properly look out for each other.

We feel.

I hope anyway, we have a space that is safe to say, I'm not doing good.

I'm gonna need to take a break.

I need someone else to pick this up for me.

And that nobody feels judged on that because then we can put measures

in place to ensure that absolutely we're still delivering for the

public that we've committed to, but equally that the staff member is

going to be taken care of as well.

You can build resilience, but you're still human.

You know, so these things hit home.

There's a lot of audiences we're working with where it does hit

home, but recognizing that museum work has changed exponentially, I

think is one of the biggest things.

And for me as a head of department and working with senior management in the

gallery, that is something that I strive to bring to the table all the time.

That we are not running schools programs like we did 20 years ago.

Because what a school looks like, what a classroom looks

like has changed exponentially.

To what it looked like 20 years ago.

And it's not that things are new, it's that we now know we have children

coming in and they have trauma.

Maybe they've come from a different country or a period

where they were completely unsafe.

We have the biggest housing crisis we've ever had in Ireland, and we have the

highest numbers registered as homeless, and that's only those that are registered.

So.

All of this plus services that are at absolute capacity, health services,

educational services, all of that impacts because we're working with the public that

are utilizing the services all the time.

So I think recognizing that what we're doing doesn't look like it did years ago,

and it shouldn't look like it year did.

It did years ago.

Because it should be responsive and it should be iterative.

It should be able to change as well.

And honestly, the third piece for me that I'm trying to work towards

now is programming below capacity.

Because if we program to what we can deliver, we leave no

space for the unexpected.

And that is something I've learned very much in the last couple

of years in leading programs around health and wellbeing.

Or some of our deep work initiatives is that if I need to give that

my time, I can't also then deal with the unexpected that comes in.

And if you're in a public service, the unexpected will come in.

So with the team as well, trying to recognize that only a percentage of the

work should already be defined because we need to leave space for the unexpected.

And I guess that's the kind of strategy I'm trying to take now as well to.

Try and mitigate the burnout that can come from running these programs as well.

So while Sinead spoke about embedding a culture

of care within a well established institution, our next conversation

takes us to a very different context.

One where culture is being built under extraordinary circumstances.

The National Museum of the History of Ukraine in the Second World War has

undergone a profound transformation during Russia's full scale invasion.

In 2024, the museum launched a cultural rehabilitation program

for veterans defense personnel and their families using art therapy

to support recovery and resilience.

Deputy Director General Yurii Horpynych told me how this work

began and how it has become both personal and profoundly meaningful.

As I told on the panel we opened in August, 2024, exhibition

War Inverse Perspective, it was dedicated to events of World War II and events

of modern war by eyes of artists.

Professional and non-professional painters and sculptures.

And it was one of the most successful collection, uh, exhibits, uh,

that year and after we opened the exhibition, I met one of chiefs of

police in our museum and they were surprised that historical museum made.

Art exhibition and they ask if they can bring some guys who

are on the rehabilitation in hospitals in Kyiv to our museum.

And in this moment, my head was fool by idea, maybe we can do something more.

And I propose them art therapy because we have 39 artists,

why we shouldn't try to do it.

And we started to think about what we can do.

And the first group we met in January, 2025.

Our pilot program was named, uh, rehabilitation Through the Culture,

and it was only in our free time.

From our main job in museum, but it was from our heart and

we believe that we can do it.

And this program, the main idea was to work with artists and psychologists.

We are working with physical and cultural.

Uh, programs.

We invite a lot of interesting persons, a lot of interesting organizations.

One of them is Doco Club.

It's Ukrainian Documentary Festival.

And uh, the other event was the, uh, watching of movie, uh.

They soldiers from hospital choose the movie.

There was a list, uh, we chat with psychologists if it's allowed if's Okay.

To show them.

And there was about, uh, 30 persons on this movie show

and it was very interesting.

They, uh, they guys are watching a movie and then they are speaking.

Chatting what, what touches them in this field mode or what they're

thinking in their perspective, and it's very effective.

And other side is work with museum stuff.

It was one of my ideas for strategy to work with staff because in our museum

works, uh, about 300 persons, not all of them are involved in work with

veterans and guys in rehabilitation, and girls in rehabilitation, but

in some way everyone should knew, should know how to work with such a.

People, what they can do for them and what they can propose

or not allow the topics to talk.

And we made a few events and also educational and research direction.

Now we are in the process of collecting our experience and method,

which we are working with and in as a result, maybe in a half year.

We want to make some manuals or maybe it'll be articles by our

psychologists about how to work with veterans, with people in Ukraine,

in, in such a way and in future.

As I told on the panel, I want to organize conference because it'll be

very helpful for us to understand how people work in Europe all over the world.

What really stayed with me from Yurii's story and from his colleague

Maryna Bohush, was their determination to use culture as a tool for healing.

What began as a small, voluntary effort by museum staff has developed

into a growing initiative supporting veterans and others in rehabilitation.

The team are now documenting what they've learned.

Developing training materials and hoping to plan a conference to share

their experiences much more widely.

It's a remarkable commitment in the middle of so much uncertainty in Ukraine.

That idea of using culture to support recovery and connection took a very

different form in another presentation at the conference in Italy, Roberto Casarotto

has been exploring how movement and dance can help people reconnect with their

bodies and with one another from young people to cancer patients to older adults.

So it all started 15 years ago when together with some dance

organization we'd explored through a project called Dance Museums supported

by the European Union dance in museums.

So we were host.

Stayed by Louvre, the National Gallery Gemalde Gallery in

Vienna, and the Boijmans Museum in Rotterdam and many other museums.

We were exploring how dancing or the moving body of visitors could somehow

bring new forms of dialogue with the.

Artworks that are exhibited, and we soon discovered that we were actually

generating some forms of wellbeing for the visitors that were coming at the museum.

In that frame, we started to meet some people that deal with science, and the

next step was of course, digging into.

Programs that research, dance, and the impacts that dance can

have on wellbeing, on health for certain groups of people in museums.

So what I've been exploring together with some neuro.

Aesthetic scientists and neurologists is to give language to these impacts,

to start to identify together the multi-layered benefits that dancing

in a museum can create for societies, and in many case, to verbalize

things that are quite implicit and obvious for dance artists, but

they're never invited to share.

So.

It was through building these kind of multidisciplinary groups where

you have the expertise of people that work in museums, next to people that

deal with science next to people, The Engager, the body in those spaces

and the voices of the participants, the actual people that dance.

In the museums that we started a long journey that brought us to work with

people living with Parkinson's, people living with and beyond cancer, and lately

teenagers dealing with psychological vulnerability and depression.

Dancing is a very multi-layer practice.

When we move, we activate simultaneously more than 21 senses.

At the same time, we activate what we call the soft skills.

And then there is of course, the possibility to develop a civic sense of

ownership of the heritage, the historical artworks that are held in a museum, and

to perceive in a different way our role.

In relation to a museum, our role in relation to the heritage, our part in

building processes of change through the arts in these institutions and

what we have experienced with Future Move, which is a program for teenagers.

Develops in partnership with AM municipality in the

north of Italy called Ensa.

In that constellation, we invite the teenagers to choose the artworks

that will inspire the dance and to share their interpretation of that

work, of what triggers their choices.

And what happens in those museum rooms when they start this kind of conversation

is that the teenagers don't leave the room at the end of the session.

They're so engaged that they would like to stay longer.

And again, this is quite exceptional in a time when it's difficult to engage the

teenagers and the younger generations in dialogues with our heritage.

And listening to Roberto, it's clear that care in museums can

be embodied, felt through movement, connection, and shared experience.

But there's another side to this work.

The people who are making it happen, the museum staff and the educators who

hold space for others, often carrying the emotional weight of care themselves.

To explore this, I spoke with Dr. Nuala Morse, associate professor at

the University of Leicester, whose research examines the care work of

museum professionals, the ethics of care in museum practice, and the role of

museums and galleries in public health.

We talked about the emotional labor involved in delivering wellbeing programs,

the risks of burnout and vicarious trauma, and how museums can better care

for the people who care for others.

Dr Nuala Morse: So I think what we are seeing in the context of

museum's health and wellbeing work is a huge spectrum of work.

So some work might be about inviting people living with dementia and their

care partners in the museum, and that might be quite contained and that.

Is often really profoundly meaningful work for everyone

who's involved and joyful work.

And that can happen without really any risks to anyone involved.

And museum workers and arts educators are really skilled at making those connections

between people and their collections and doing that in, in a joyful manner.

And I think that's where we derive the impact of museum experiences.

But the programs also run all of the gambit to working in hospices.

To working in care homes, to working with people with long histories

of mental health challenges.

And so there's, across that diversity, there's a range of different skills

and competencies and museum workers without necessarily the training

or the awareness or really the time to reflect on the work that they're

doing, are coming into really close.

Contact and quite sometimes quite intimate relationships with different individuals

who might have long-term ill health, and they may, in that context be exposed and

exposed quite often in a sustained way to quite traumatic experiences or difficult

stories of illness and disability.

And we don't quite yet have, I don't think, in the museum sector, the space

to be able to debrief about all of this, all of these experiences and

what we know from other formal caring professions such as nurses or doctors

or social workers, because that is understood as part of the caring labor.

There are far more support systems and and organizational structures that support

the health and wellbeing of care workers.

'cause we know from the literature that people who are involved in

caregiving, there is a cost to that care.

It takes an emotional toll.

It can take a physical toll.

So we might talk about things such as vicarious trauma or burnout.

There's lots of studies for evidence this across caring professions and nurses.

We don't know really what impact it's having on museum workers.

So in the UK we don't quite know how many people are working in this area,

but what we've seen from this conference is there's a huge enthusiasm and a

willingness to take this work on.

And what's been really great about this conference is that we also have

this panel where we're taking a moment to stop and to think, okay, well.

What does that mean?

How do we prepare ourselves in order to deliver this work in

an effective but also safe way?

Safe for our participants, but also safe for ourselves and

for the museum practitioners?

So that's the area of work that I'm interested in, but I would say.

Yeah, we don't quite know.

So I don't wanna throw all of these words like vicarious trauma or

burnout, because I won't be able to evidence that for you today.

But anecdotally, and from all of the networks and conversations that I'm

having with practitioners on the ground, people are telling me about this kind of

emotional toll and just not always having a place to, okay, where do I take this?

Where can I debrief?

Where can we talk about this and work through it?

So one of the things that we've heard throughout this conference,

which I would completely agree with, is the importance of collaboration.

So what's great about these conversations that are happening everywhere in

Europe is that it's not the museum sector going, we're gonna go out there

and solve a big health challenge.

It's more about what is the conversation between culture and

health, and how do we integrate systems and how do we work together?

So I think talking to those.

Health professionals or social professionals about how do they, what

are their kind of systems of support?

There will be things that you can adopt, so that might be about training.

So we've been talking about trauma-informed practice,

and it is possible to train in trauma-informed practice.

So that might be something.

It might also be possible to train in dementia awareness,

mental health first aid.

Those are the opportunities in terms of upskilling a workforce.

And then I think it's also about thinking what kind of internal

cultures of care can you create?

So I've been talking about debriefing and that might be a formal way of, you know,

talking about a session, talking about what was difficult about that session.

That might be with your line manager, but it might also be with peers.

Or a wider community of practice within and outside of your museums.

So one of the things that's developed in the UK in order to address that need is

an organization called GLAM Cares, which is a sector support peer support network.

Often they meet on Zoom and it's about we have these common experiences and

challenges, how can we troubleshoot them?

But also how can we support each other as museum professionals to think

about those particular challenges.

I think there's a lot of, there's different ways to approach

wellbeing in organizations and every organization is thinking about this.

I know on the panel later we're hearing from the Lego group, so you know, a

big multinational com organization and thinking about their wellbeing practices.

So there, there are lots of different practices that we could seek to adopt.

I think those have to work for your organizational culture and they have

to work for the individual 'cause no, no kind of wellbeing support is

necessarily gonna work for you in the same way as it as it will work.

For someone else.

And I think one of the challenges that I perceive it, and what I am speaking

about on the panel is that we also need a greater and deeper understanding about

what is this museum labor of care that is specific and that is different to social

work or nursing and free understanding what the work is, what practices we

can then start to better understand.

Okay, well what kinds of wellbeing support can we wrap around that?

So I wrote a book a few years ago called A Museum as a Space of Social

Care, and the book is a way to introduce the idea of care thinking

to all aspects of museum work.

So it starts with a very in-depth case study of time and weir

archives and museums, which is now called Northeast Museums.

Their work through their outreach team around museum's, health and wellbeing.

And it looks at as, at their practice as, as a form of care work.

And it's about part of kind of understanding and giving it a language,

but then towards the end of the book it expands out to say, okay,

so what would happen if we applied care thinking to different parts of

the organizations, including manage.

And so what would a culture of care look like in that context?

How do we create caring institutions?

And there are feminist theorists that write about care ethics

and caring organizations.

And I think one of the common points is looking towards

organizations that are probably less.

Hierarchical where there is a more distributed sense of leadership and

where people have kind of autonomy over parts of their work and that

they're working in kind of values based organizations where everyone is

agreed on what the common purpose is.

So this could look differently in different museums, but I think the kind

of, yeah, something about flattening those hierarchies seems to be important

about creating those cultures of care.

And another thing is about.

The kind of support that's there being the appropriate kind of support.

And so that might be about collective support, but it might also be about

recognizing what individual support is needed for different staff members.

So as I think back over the conversations you've heard in this

episode, I keep returning to the question that framed this Year's NEMO conference.

Who cares?

It's a simple question, but one that sits at the heart of

everything we've discussed.

We've heard how museums care for their communities as civic

infrastructures of belonging and support.

We've heard how they care for their people, building cultures

that sustain staff and teams, and we've heard how they care through

their programs, creating spaces for wellbeing, reflection, and connection.

So from veterans rebuilding their sense of self in Ukraine to visitors

experiencing care through movement and dance to museum professionals navigating

the emotional labor of supporting others.

All of these stories remind us that care can take many forms, care can be embodied.

Institutional, emotional, or social.

It can happen through conversation, through creativity, or through

the quiet act of holding space.

And as we've heard, it also has a cost.

Those who care for others also need time, so support and space to rest.

So who cares?

The answer perhaps is that we all do, each of us has a part to play in

creating museums that are not only resilient, but also compassionate, where

care flows in all directions between colleagues, communities, and collections.

It is also worth noting that at the end of the conference, Nemo's executive

Board released an official statement on museums and wellbeing developed

and endorsed during the event.

It affirms museums as vital parts of Europe's civic care systems and calls

for their integration into health and social policy across the continent.

The statement highlights collaboration between culture, health, and social

sectors, and an evidence-based approach, recognizing that museums

play an essential role in supporting wellbeing and resilience in society.

You can find a link to the full statement in the show notes.

So a huge thank you to all of today's contributions and to the NEMO team

for bringing us together in Horsens for such an inspiring conference.

You can find out more about the speakers and the event in the show notes.

If you've enjoyed this special episode, or if any of The Art Engager episodes

have helped you in your work, please consider supporting the podcast.

You can become a friend of The Art Engager on Patreon or pick up a copy

of my book, The Art Engager Reimagining Guided Experiences in Museums Available

now, wherever you buy your books.

I'm Claire Bown, and this has been The Art Engager.

This episode was created in collaboration with nemo, the network

of European museum organizations.

That's it for today.

That's it for today.

Thank you so much for listening and see you next time.

Thank you for listening to The Art Engager podcast with me, Claire Bown.

You can find more art engagement resources by visiting my website,

thinking museum.com, and you can also find me on Instagram at Thinking

Museum, where I regularly share tips and tools on how to bring art

to life and engage your audience.

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