Stories of Hope

Projects
Member-designed and UK Young Academy-funded initiatives that investigate and address societal challenges through interdisciplinary collaboration. 

Project aims

Museums play an important role in engaging the public with science, culture, and climate-related issues, but not everyone can easily visit major museum collections.

The Stories of Hope project team is developing a digital decision-support toolkit to help museums design effective, sustainable outreach and public engagement activities beyond their physical galleries. 

Museums regularly take exhibits into schools, festivals, and community venues. But choosing how best to adapt or replicate them can be challenging, as it requires balancing portability, sustainability, storage, cost, accessibility, and audience engagement. 

The toolkit will provide practical, evidence-informed recommendations to support these decisions, helping museums identify the most appropriate exhibit format for a given audience, location, and budget, from physical replicas and 3D-printed models to digital resources and miniaturised displays. 

Working with museums across the UK, the project will co-design, test, and refine the toolkit through workshops and real-world outreach activities.

Why does this matter?

By helping museums to weigh their resources, priorities, and constraints, from transport and environmental impact to cost and storage, better and more informed judgements can be made on how to bring their collections to communities that may otherwise have limited access, such as rural schools.

Meeting people where they are, such as through festivals, pop-up displays, and immersive experiences, has shown real value in making science and culture engaging and accessible in fun, memorable ways. 

This comes at a time when funding pressures are making science outreach harder to sustain, and when opportunities to engage remain concentrated in large cities, leaving those outside urban centres with less access.

The toolkit will also generate evidence on how museums can deliver engaging outreach that balances audience needs with sustainability, creating a resource for museums and public engagement professionals across the UK.