About The Imagination Museum
What is The Imagination Museum?
The Imagination Museum is a national network for dance, community and heritage sector professionals.
Through online and in-person events and resources, we share extensive knowledge and experiences and facilitate opportunities for future collaboration across the country, making the case for the benefits of dancing in museums and heritage sites.
“brilliant, energising and important conversations, networking, inspiration and encouragement!” (participant feedback, 2024)
Originally piloted from 2018 using Strategic Touring funding secured through our current managing organisation Made By Katie Green (MBKG), we received funding from the National Lottery through Arts Council England to enable our development from 2024, offering in-person Advocacy Events that took us to four different museums around the country. With this support, we constituted The Imagination Museum separately from MBKG and put in place a distinct Core Team of practitioners/consultants to oversee the day to day running of the network. We also receive guidance from an Executive Committee of experts from across dance and heritage and have received support from representatives of Advisory Organisations (outlined below). We are currently trying to secure funding for continuation of our work from 2025 onwards.
Consultation
We receive regular requests from individuals and organisations who are looking for advice about a new project, some ideas for potential partners and how to approach them, or mentoring linked to a specific collaboration for example. Most of these are dealt with by Strategic Lead (Katie Green) in the first instance but we may redirect you to one of our Executive Committee or another contact where there is someone else who can give you better advice that is more suited to your particular project.
In order to be transparent about how we can support your project, to protect our partners’ time and to be able to feed back financially into the work we do for the network, we have decided to formalise our consultation offer as follows. We are going to keep this under review as we continue to find out more about the ways in which we can help individuals and organisations.
| Description of offer | |
|---|---|
| Chemistry call | A 30 minute discussion to identify some of the ways we might be able to help, but with no development of ideas or follow-up. Individuals/small organisations: free Larger organisations/those with regular funding: free |
| First steps | For individuals and small organisations only, an initial one-off meeting to talk about projects that are not currently in receipt of funding. We offer 2 of these per month. Individuals/small organisations: £150 Larger organisations/those with regular funding: n/a |
| Project development | Project development, management, mentoring time for example. Depending on exactly what is entailed, we expect a day to include 2 shorter meetings online or a full day in person for example, with some follow-up as needed. Individuals/small organisations: £350/day Larger organisations/those with regular funding: £550/day |
| Strategic thinking | Time spent on fundraising, evaluation or organisational change Depending on exactly what is entailed, we expect a day to include 2 shorter meetings online or a full day in person for example, and any follow-up research or writing will need to be covered additionally. Individuals/small organisations: £550/day Larger organisations/those with regular funding: £550/day |
| Where any of the above work includes travel, any costs of travel, accommodation, expenses will need to be covered additionally. |
These figures are intended to give an indication of costs and an idea of what we could contribute before/after you have funding in place, but we are happy to finalise terms on a case-by-case basis, as you might require something more bespoke than what we are suggesting here. Therefore please get in touch even if you have a different budget in mind and we will see what we can offer.
We can provide a letter of support for your funding application as evidence of the way in which we will advocate for your dance/heritage project (as long as your application is in line with the kind of work that the network exists to support). However, we would then ask that you include at least one £350 development day for us in your budget to cover a conversation and the time taken to add your case study to the website and share your project with the network.
We aspire to building a network that is:
Inclusive – for everyone who wants to participate, working with heritage in all its possible forms.
Inspiring – imagining memorable ways that dance can open up, challenge, offer new perspectives on heritage, sparking creativity and curiosity.
Collaborative – engaging in a collaborative process in which we work cooperatively with other individuals and organisations to amplify what we’re doing.
Meaningful – listening and responding to our network members to provide professional development opportunities that feel nurturing, relevant and useful.
Socially engaged – supporting local collaborations between artists, venues and communities to open up sites, stories, collections in new ways for new people.
Sustainable – promoting longer term collaboration and embedding environmental sustainability within our practice.
Honest and critically reflective – a place to ask questions; engaging fully in learning new things and finding ways to build on that and take discoveries forward.
