Regular round-up of news for Museums in Cambridgeshire from Gordon Chancellor, Museums Partnership Officer.

There’s lots of interesting stuff this week:

1. On 2nd July SHARE will be launching a brand new network, the Volunteer Co-ordinators Forum (VCF), at the National Horseracing Museum in Newmarket on 2 July. The VCF is for anyone whose role involves co-ordinating a volunteer programme and managing volunteers at a museum or heritage site in the East of England. The Forum will meet quarterly and events will include a mix of national and local speakers, peer support and networking opportunities. The Launch Event is your opportunity to shape the forum and suggest key topics for future meetings so that the forum meets your needs, and will include a keynote from Rob Jackson, who has written, spoken and trained on volunteer programme management internationally for over twenty years. Find out more and book your place on the SHARE website.

2. The next SHARE Front of House Forum will take place on 11 June at Chelmsford Museum, with a focus on reaching and engaging audiences. There will be a keynote from John Orna-Ornstein (Director of Museums with Arts Council England) on attracting wider audiences, plus sessions from local and national speakers. View the full programme and book your place online.  View all upcoming SHARE events on the SHARE website.

3. The Museum of Cambridge are advertising two posts, both with closing dates on 26 May: ‘Capturing Cambridge Project Manager’ and ‘Learning and Community Engagement Officer’.

4. The two Cambridgeshire Museum Volunteer Co-ordinator posts which I announced last week.

5. The South and East Museums Federation’s next study day is on 13 May: Join them for a behind the scenes visit to the Museum and Gallery at the birthplace of Thomas Gainsborough in Sudbury. With galleries, historic garden, current exhibition ‘Artists at Home and at Work’ and working print workshop they’ll be plenty to see and discuss. Full details and booking here.

6. Over the coming months I will be keen to hear what your training needs for the coming year might be, so that I can feed this information into SHARE’s plans. If you have any strong views about this, please do drop me a line.

7. SHARED Enterprise has an excellent training event on ‘Developing Your Friends Group’ on 4 June at Cambridge Museum of Technology.This training is for any museums and museum friends groups wishing to develop their working relationship. The day should ideally be attended by the Chair of the Friends Group and the Museum Manager together, in order to fully benefit from the training. Museums wanting to start a new friends group will also benefit from attending this course. Click here to book.

8. Finally, you might want to check out these online Leicester courses.