What Happens When You Let Citizens Lead?
Post by David Jubb, 31 Jan 2025
The room felt different. Not the usual museum-sector gathering, where the audience nods along to a vision set by senior leaders, or a well-rehearsed consultation where feedback is carefully captured but rarely actioned. This was something else. This was a museum led by its citizens.
On stage, the members of the Birmingham Museums Trust Citizens’ Jury were not visitors or beneficiaries, they were decision-makers. They were not handpicked trustees or a focus group called in at the eleventh hour to validate an existing plan. They had shaped a series of recommendations, deliberated over the direction of the museum, and, perhaps most importantly, claimed ownership over its future. And yet, most began this journey not seeing themselves as museum people.
The agenda for the evening at Birmingham Museums Trust
Why a Citizens’ Jury for a Museum?
Co-CEOs Sara Wajid and Zak Mensah opened last night’s event: Birmingham Museums Trust holds the largest and most significant collection in the UK outside London; it belongs to the people of the city, and yet participation is the lowest of any region in England. They described how the civic museum model, once a radical act of public investment in a shared cultural space, had drifted away from the public it was built to serve. Instead of guessing at solutions from inside the organisation, the idea of the citizens’ jury was to hand power to the people of Birmingham.
A citizens’ jury, selected through sortition to reflect the city’s demographics, met for 30 hours of evidence gathering and deliberation. They toured exhibitions, challenged curators, interrogated finances, heard from guest experts, and debated what museums should be for and who they should be accountable to.
The outcome?
You can read the precise words of the jury members on pages 25 to 37 of the citizens’ jury report. Their recommendations are not a discreet to-do list of incremental tweaks to Birmingham Museums. Their vision is fundamental, urgent, and direct. And unmistakably, beneath the proposals to transform the museums, was the transformation of the jurors themselves. Some arrived expecting museums to be distant, static places. They left as advocates, co-owners, and champions of a cultural space that they had helped to reimagine.
One juror described coming to Birmingham from Cardiff, as a child, decades earlier, describing how they felt like the city’s doors were "always ajar, but never fully open". Taking part in the jury, for the first time they felt like Birmingham’s cultural institutions were theirs and that Birmingham was their true home. Echoes of those civic ties and traditions championed by Sara and Zak: these are our spaces, our institutions, so how can we all work together to strengthen them and connect with each other. This is civic pride.
What could this mean for museums and cultural organisations?
The citizens’ jury in Birmingham is about rethinking how power works in a cultural institution. As someone who led an organisation for 15 years, including a local museum in the last few years of my time at Battersea Arts Centre, I know how leadership teams can struggle with direction. Not often because of a lack of ideas, but because organisations are full of competing internal dynamics. Staff members disagree about priorities. Senior leaders get caught between ambition and pragmatism. Strategic plans stall. In the mix of this, achieving clarity of vision can be a slow process. In Battersea, I felt we like we got there in about 2015, eleven years after I started.
So what happens when an entire organisation invests in a democratic process? What happens when a whole team aligns behind a citizen-led decision-making process, one that is clear, well-supported and so much more representative than any small leadership team? Imagine if museums, arts organisations and theatres didn’t consult their communities but followed their lead. Imagine if staff teams were galvanised by the moral and democratic authority of a citizens’ assembly or jury, a decision-making process that cuts through internal politics and egos.
That’s the radical possibility at Birmingham Museums Trust. Not just that museums will open their doors wider, but that they will become an institution that is led by the people they serve. At the end of the event, Sara Wajid admitted that when they launched the process, they were warned: citizens’ juries create highly motivated people who won’t let you off the hook. True. The jurors had already booked their follow-up meeting with Sara and Zak. They wanted to know what happens next. The lesson for cultural organisations? If you invite citizens into the room, be ready to let them stay and to set the organisation’s direction by them. It could just save you 11 years.
The partners for the Birmingham citizens’ jury are:
If you’re interested in this stuff, look out for a post from Saad and I in February about the Citizens In Power Network; if you want to explore more about citizen-led decision-making in the creative and cultural sectors, the network is open for new associates. Sign-up for updates.