31 October, 2023
The Migration Museum has been awarded Museum of Sanctuary status.
The Museums of Sanctuary initiative celebrates organisations who go above and beyond to welcome people seeking sanctuary into their communities and promote a culture of inclusion for all.
To be awarded this status, organisations must demonstrate an existing commitment to welcoming and supporting sanctuary seekers and then pledge to develop this even further over the next three years.
Announcing the award, Ashley Beckett, London Co-ordinator and Arts and Libraries Lead, said: “The Migration Museum has a history of championing stories of people on the move and how important they are to British society. It is a great honour to give them a Museum of Sanctuary Award for all the stories they have told and the work they continue to do to put people with lived experience of seeking sanctuary at the heart of their work.”
Mona Jamil, Museum Manager at the Migration Museum, said: “We are delighted to be recognised for our commitment to sanctuary seekers in Britain today. Through the themes we cover in our creative outputs, the partnerships we forge, and the people we work with, the Migration Museum has demonstrated an ongoing engagement with people seeking sanctuary. Our incredible team have worked on projects that platform and celebrate the experiences of sanctuary seekers, and we look forward to developing our activities following guidance from the City of Sanctuary UK awarding team.”
These recommendations included:
- More formalised training with all staff around some of the sensitivities of people with lived experience in seeking sanctuary.
- Using the Migration Network to foster best practices for museums and galleries in the Sanctuary Network.
- Sharing a toolkit for how to do effective co-production when planning programming and values for a museum and gallery.
Mona Jamil added: “We look forward to further developing our work and practice in line with these recommendations and to working closely with our fellow museums, galleries and organisations within the Sanctuary Network to further welcome and support people seeking sanctuary and promote a culture of inclusion for all.”
Find out more about City of Sanctuary UK and the Sanctuary Awards
25 September, 2023
PLEASE NOTE: The deadline for applications for this role has now passed and we are no longer accepting applications.
The Migration Museum is seeking a Freelance Engagement Lead to oversee our touring exhibition Heart of the Nation: Migration and the Making of the NHS in Trinity Leeds Shopping Centre from November 2023 until February 2024.
The role will involve helping to coordinate the launch event and supervising the exhibition and hosting diverse audiences 5 days a week, with support from the Migration Museum team on weekdays, as well as a Gallery Supervisor over the weekends.
This is an outstanding opportunity for a creative, self-directed and organised person who is passionate about delivering an important and timely exhibition for diverse audiences.
Key responsibilities:
- Public engagement – Taking the lead on supervising the Migration Museum’s space in Leeds, proactively engaging with visitors such that it is a welcoming place for all, including pre-organised and walk-up group visits. Become well versed with the exhibition content and technical aspects. Open up the museum at the beginning of the day and close it down at the end, ensuring that all lights and AV equipment are switched off. This might involve overseeing and coordinating placement students and volunteers.
- Support with event planning and delivery – there will be at least 2 events during the 3 months that the Migration Museum team will need support to deliver: the launch event on November 10th and a gathering of the Migration Network in February 2024.
- Shop and donations: Supervise the exhibition’s shop offer in Leeds, in collaboration with our Retail Manager in London. Encourage visitors to make purchases and donations where appropriate.
- Marketing and promotion – Supported by our marketing and communications team, you will help promote the exhibition via marketing materials and social media.
- Evaluation – Supported by our Director of Communications and Engagement, you will gather visitor evaluations to help us understand who we are reaching and their feedback on their experience.
This role is full time, Wednesdays to Sundays – and therefore requires availability and willingness to work weekends.
Please click here to view the full job description and person specification for this role
How to apply
To apply for this position, please e-mail a copy of your CV and a covering letter of no more than 800 words to info@migrationmuseum.org.
Please also complete our Equal Opportunities Monitoring Form. These monitoring forms will be stored and assessed separately and will not be linked to your application.
The deadline for applications is Sunday 8th October 2023, 23:59
Shortlisted applicants will be invited to interview online week commencing Monday 16th October 2023.
If you have any questions about the role, please contact info@migrationmuseum.org
25 July, 2023
We are heartbroken that our trustee George Alagiah OBE has passed away. George was a passionate supporter, a remarkable trustee and a true friend and champion.
Above is a family photo of George, his mother Therese and siblings taken in Ghana in the early 1960s. George contributed this photo to our very first exhibition, 100 Images of Migration. We send our heartfelt thoughts and condolences to his family.
Below is a tribute to George written by our CEO, Sophie Henderson:
“It was just so sad hearing that George Alagiah had died, and such a shock though we knew full well that his cancer had recently taken an irreversible turn for the worse. The thing that always first springs to mind about George is just how much we – and everybody – really loved him. He had an extraordinary warmth and an ability instantly to connect with people.
The first time I met George was when I’d invited him to chair one of the Migration Museum’s early events in 2013 – a panel discussion at the Science Museum about what our DNA can (and more importantly cannot) tell us about our migration roots – and he opened this serious discussion with a hilarious reflection on his own migration story, his early desire as a schoolboy newly arrived in Britain to fit in, and the embarrassment he felt at his difficulty with pronouncing ‘V’ and ‘W’ words. Even now, he said, as a fluent English speaker who had lived in Britain for 40 years, he still dreaded the day when, on the 6 O’clock News, he might be asked to report on the fortunes of a certain German car manufacturer or that a US politician had performed ‘very well in West Virginia’.
Years later, in 2017 when the Migration Museum proudly opened the doors to its first temporary home in Lambeth, by which time George had become a steadfast supporter, he once again took to the stage, spellbinding his audience with a passionate, eloquent justification for the existence of a permanent Migration Museum. He reflected on how his own father’s death had left him bereft, no longer with the ability to point to the man himself, hear his stories, see the sarong that he wore, or hear the Tamil that he spoke. In particular, it was now so much more difficult to explain to his own two sons – ‘as British as they come’ – where their family’s journey had started. George said that he planned a trip to Sri Lanka to show his family, not how different they were, but that this was where the Alagiahs had set out from, bringing with them their talents, their hopes, and their sheer hard work. In essence, George said, this is what the Migration Museum could represent for all of us: a place where Britain’s story could be told in all its colour and varieties and where people who are born here and people born there, people British by choice and British by birth could come together, take ownership of this story and call it ours. George said that he was often described (when not as a ‘veteran news presenter’) as an ‘immigrant success story’ and that, yes, though talent and hard work had something to do with it, that wasn’t the whole story. George also felt that he had received the great gift of opportunity and he was therefore not just an ‘immigrant success story’ but a ‘British success story.’ My story, he said, is possible when Britain is true to itself.
Having read George’s warm and witty memoir A Home from Home: From Immigrant Boy to English Man, I felt that George would support the idea of creating a permanent Migration Museum for Britain in principle – indeed he called for such an institution in terms in his book, asking why on earth we didn’t already have a high profile, permanent institution to put stories like his right at centre stage – a place where we could recognise and value the contribution that migrants have always made to building Britain, shaping all aspects of our lives from the food we eat and the clothes we wear to the language we speak, the sporting heroes that we cheer and the institutions – such as the NHS – that we cherish and sometimes take for granted. But what I couldn’t know at first was just what a passionate and committed supporter George would become. Through his devastating diagnosis, operations and seemingly endless rounds of treatment George remained close to us, consistently encouraging and supportive and absolutely convinced that we would succeed in achieving our goal. Latterly George joined us as a trustee of the most active and committed kind. Obviously, he sprinkled stardust on our Board, but he also brought that most that most brilliant combination of qualities: passion and optimism together with real attention to detail and robust critical challenge.
The Migration Museum has recently started a new chapter. In February 2023, planning consent was granted by the Corporation of London for a new development that will afford the Migration Museum a permanent home in the City of London in three years’ time. George was always unbelievably generous towards us with his time and energies, and we are moved beyond words that, with the terrible illness that he was facing, he chose to give us his support. It is in no small measure thanks to George that we are now so close to achieving our goal of delivering a permanent home for the Migration Museum that Britain so richly deserves, and we will treasure and honour his memory by doing so.”
– Sophie Henderson, CEO of the Migration Museum
18 July, 2023
Agence France Presse wrote a feature on our Taking Care of Business exhibition, picked up by global outlets including France 24 and Yahoo! News, including interviews with the Migration Museum’s Matthew Plowright and Angela Hui, guest curator of the Chinese Takeaway installation in the exhibition.
