What is Renaissance in the Regions?

Renaissance in the Regions is the Museums, Libraries and Archives Council's groundbreaking programme to transform England’s regional museums and galleries. The Department of Culture Media and Sport and the Department for Education and Skills provide the funding.

What does Renaissance do?

Renaissance unites museums in a network of nine regional hubs. These were established to raise standards and promote good practice in the sector. They will deliver results in support of education, learning and community development.

What is the West Midlands Hub?

The West Midlands Hub is a partnership between five regional museum services. The partners are Coventry, Birmingham, Ironbridge, Stoke-on-Trent and Wolverhampton.

How does Renaissance work in the West Midlands?

The vision of the Hub is to provide excellent museums and galleries which celebrate creativity and diversity, and inspire people to take part, enjoy and learn.

Ten key areas are helping to realise this vision:

1. Delivering a comprehensive services to schools
2. Marketing across the region
3. Reaching out to non-traditional audiences
4. Building capacity and sustainability across the region
5. Increasing access to collections
6. Developing regional conservation resources
7. Sharing and building on-line resources
8. Developing the workforce
9. Supporting Accreditation
10. Modernising museums

What difference is Renaissance making in Coventry?

At The Herbert in Coventry, Renaissance has had a major impact on the work we deliver.

Schools and Lifelong Learning

Renaissance has transformed the educational service of The Herbert. We are now able to work directly with local and regional schools. We offer a wide range of curriculum driven workshops and hands-on sessions.

Renaissance has also enabled us to increase the opportunities for children and families to learn in an out of school environment after school, at weekends and in the school holidays. This is achieved through simple child-friendly family activities. We are also involved in more complex, long-term partnership projects with other agencies such as Children and Family Education Services.

Renaissance funding has been important in allowing us to create and run innovative museum theatre projects based on our World War Two collections. The most recent project, called "Coventry Kids in the Blitz", is an award-winning example of this.

The Herbert redevelopment

Renaissance is helping to develop our new exhibitions. It will also improve both conservation of and access to our collections.

Workshops have been held with target audiences to develop the content and approach for the Elements gallery. There will be more work to develop exhibits for the other galleries. We have appointed a Project Officer to work on the new Peace and Reconciliation gallery.

We have employed 2 members of staff to help move the collections out of the building and into temporary storage. They are also improving the level of information we have about the collections.

Inclusion and Diversity

Renaissance has allowed us to carry out more, and better, outreach and audience development work. We now employ four inclusion and diversity staff.

This team has already carried out a number of projects with people who have not been regular visitors to The Herbert in the past. Team members are also making an impact on the wider work of The Herbert. This is especially true in creative programming and the creation of new exhibitions using our collections.

Money from Renaissance has allowed us to produce high quality work and to engage specialists who can bring additional skills to our project delivery.

Increasing Access to Collections

Through Renaissance, we have been able to develop a wide range of projects to increase access to our collections. We have employed a dedicated member of staff to work on these. The projects are this new website, and the development of the collections database. This will include online access to the collections.

Alongside these projects in Coventry, Renaissance funding is also allowing The Herbert to contribute fully to a West Midlands project to provide online learning resources. This project will also allow museums across the region to share their skills and expertise.

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