Community Champions Celebration Event

Community Champions Celebration Event

Our Community Champions celebration event recently took place to honour the amazing work our volunteers have achieved. Over the last 12 months, they have significantly contributed to the future of the museum through our Level Up project.

Level Up is a Lottery Heritage Funded project. The aim of this project was to work with our local communities to identify areas for improvement. This was to ensure that our museum and collection objects are accessible and appeal to everyone from all backgrounds and ages. We did this through hosting a series of engaging pop up exhibitions throughout Chesterfield, Barnsley, Rotherham and Sheffield.  

How it began

The rationale for this project was based on some research that was carried out in June 2022. It aimed to understand our visitor profile and found that some local audiences were underrepresented. This included people with disabilities, ethnic minority communities and the unemployed. The project would help us redesign our overall visitor strategy with inclusivity, access and community being at the forefront.

To help deliver this project we recruited two very experienced members to help to deliver the project aim. Lauren O’Donoghue (Community Officer) joined to work on the pop up exhibitions alongside Ann Wain (Collections Assistant) to work on a collections accessibility plan. This would enable us to interpret our objects in different ways that are relatable and interesting to potential visitors. 

“When I started this role in September 2022,” Lauren said, “ there was no real blueprint for a project like this. It was our first ever community outreach scheme at the museum, so we were starting completely from scratch.”

We knew that we wanted to invite members of the community to share their opinions, ideas and feedback on the museum. “We wanted to build really long-lasting, meaningful connections with people in the region,” Lauren added, “giving them agency and ownership and allowing their work to have impact on the long-term strategy of the museum as a whole.”

Pop Up Exhibitions

The Level Up pop exhibitions enabled the Museum to visit six locations across the region to achieve these goals. With the guidance of Lauren, our brilliant Community Champions co-curated these exhibitions. They discussed why videogames matter, representation in games, where games are made as well as the opportunities to dissect a Game Boy and beat the hi-score on arcade classic Galaga.

Over the duration of six weeks our volunteers supported the stalls. They developed in-depth conversations with over 400 visitors, of which 90% said they would love to visit the museum.

Shaping The Future

The pop up exhibitions weren’t the only thing our Community Champions have been involved in. They attended monthly meetings with various members of the NVM team including curation, marketing, visitor experience and learning to help shape the future of the museum through informative workshops and activities. They also got to chat with members of the Boneloaf team (developers behind Gang Beasts) in a Q&A session. Many of their tireless contributions have already been implemented into the museum’s practices with more ideas formulating the blueprints of future projects. They helped refigure the locations of the exhibits around the gallery and reach out to diverse groups. They really helped the NVM team think out of the box! 

Our Community Champions played a huge part in supporting our Games Careers Fair in June as part of Games Careers Week and are now in the process of assisting our Collections Officer in cataloguing our entire collection as the second part of the Level Up project. 

Stacey Jubb, Head of Learning said, “We have never done anything on this scale before. To take the Museum on the road was an extremely beneficial experience for us in terms of how we shape the visitor experience and the overall strategy of the museum. We have never had volunteers work with the museum in this capacity.  This has become a great project. The legacy will continue to support and shape the future of the museum to become more inclusive and accessible to all visitors.”

Lauren added, “our Community Champion volunteers have co-curated our community pop-up exhibition. They helped run the pop-up stalls and worked with our collections team on cataloguing. They also provided quotes for press and social media.  Our volunteers really have been incredible ambassadors for the museum as a whole. Their energy, enthusiasm and passion has been so inspiring to us as a team. We’ve really been blown away by their work.” 

Celebrating Our Community Champions

A celebration event took place to highlight their brilliant work. It included food, a new mural to contribute to in our new collections storage, an introduction to cataloguing rare objects and pictures taken with a Game Boy Camera! The celebratory event communicated how their feedback and ideas will be utilised by the NVM. It emphasised how integral they’ve been to the Museum, not just in the last 12 months but the lasting legacy they will continue to have on the museum for many years to come.

This is just the beginning for our amazing Community Champion volunteers. The future is very bright indeed.