Volunteering at a museum

Victoria Poppins, a postgraduate history student who volunteers at London’s Imperial War Museum, talks about the benefits to young people of voluntary work.

As government cuts to the arts continue to put pressure on galleries and museums, there has an increasing reliance upon private investors to support our cultural institutions. Another integral pillar of support for them is volunteers.

With less funding available to spend on a paid workforce, volunteers have become instrumental in keeping these museums operational, and free for visitors. What many do not know about volunteering at the museum, particularly younger skilled volunteers, is its use as a stepping stone towards future employment in the industry.

At the Imperial War Museum in south London, there are a total of 200 volunteers involved in tasks such as the running and maintenance of the building and the conservation of its exhibits, and working on historic vehicles and aircraft. Front of house teams greet visitors and provide tours, and there are skilled volunteer vacancies advertised for researchers who are able to help to support curators for an upcoming gallery or exhibition.

Vikki Hawkins, a museum curator at the IWM, explained: “The trend tends to happen that most of the younger volunteers are at IWM London. We have got a lot of people who work at our front of house teams so they are very much the meeters and greeters of visitors who come into the museum, and they help with way-finding.

“We also have volunteers who are specific to a role like Victoria, so we would put out a job description like a role description explaining in detail what we are looking for in terms of specific skills. So in Victoria’s case, she is our Second World War empire audio-visual researcher.”

Volunteering statistics for the Imperial War Museum (November 2018- November 2019)

• Across the Imperial war museum branches, there are a total of 623 volunteers
• In the London branch, there are over 200 volunteers. 
• Collectively, this year volunteers have worked a total of 64412 hours 

Funding at museums ( stats as per Museum Association for 2018)

•  There is continued pressure on local authority museum funding: local authority museums (39%) and independent museums formerly run by local authorities (54%) were the most likely to report reduced overall funds.

• Large proportions of these types of the museum also experienced a decrease in regular public income (51% of local authority museums, and 58% of independent former local authority museums).

Victoria Poppins is a Masters student of history who volunteers at the museum during her free time. “I am doing research for AV within the permanent galleries, just trying to incorporate the contributions of all of the empire countries and how that supported and interacted with the British war effort. So a lot of photo research, but also in newspaper archives and in books to try and get official troop numbers. But also talking about food, about production, about fundraising.”

Vikki Hawkins said: “Victoria comes in minimum once a week sometimes twice a week, which is obviously amazing for us because its so useful for us to have someone who can really dedicate their time to doing some in-depth research. Victoria might go a whole day with only finding one or two pieces of content that we can actually usefully use, but that is amazing because that is a whole day not being used by a curator or another project officer or someone else, so it’s really invaluable.”

Victoria said: “I’m definitely interested in going into curation. I think it was mostly the project that really interested me: a lot of museums don’t do empire representation particularly well, and it is something I’m really passionate about. “

She added that her volunteering experience can definitely serve as a stepping stone into employment as a curator in the future.

“I want to work as a curator for the rest of my life…there are official courses such as a Masters in Museum Studies; even just a couple of years ago, these were quite mandatory to get into the profession, but now are less so.

“If you’re trying to get into curation, there is a strong expectation that you have a lot of experience so [I would tell other people to volunteer] for those reasons.”

Photo courtesy of the Imperial War Museum