ABOUT PURPOSEFUL PARTICIPATION
Between 2018 and 2019, New Citizen Project convened a landmark collaborative innovation process with six leading cultural institutions: Tredegar House (National Trust), Royal Pavilion & Museums Brighton & Hove, York Minster, The National Archives, Wellcome Collection, and Studley Royal (National Trust).
Together, using a mixture of collaborative workshops, group coaching and individual consultancy support, we explored how institutions can shift from seeing people as 'consumers' of culture to active participants in shaping heritage. This deep inquiry helped the participating organisations experiment with how to move participation from the organisational fringes to the core, ensuring that participation opportunities are meaningful, purposeful and rooted in impact.
The Legacy: The project resulted in insights which were synthesised into the Purposeful Participation Toolkit: a definitive field guide for "Cultural Intrapreneurs" looking to embed meaningful engagement within their own heritage institutions.
The toolkit's Participatory Strategy Map has also become a foundational tool which NCP uses across all our consultancy work, ensuring that participatory activity is rooted in strategic, meaningful and impactful objectives.
THE PROCESS
What is collaborative innovation?
Collaborative innovation projects are at the core of our approach. We articulate a question which relates the Citizen Shift to a specific sector, then bring together a number of organisations to experiment with new ways of working in response to that question. Finally, we publish the findings (for example, in Membership) to make these new approaches available to others, and ultimately help them take hold faster. Find out more about collaborative innovation in our blog post.
