What's next for Gunnersbury Park & Museum? We asked you for your ideas...
The fourth of the Big Conversation focused on how to get involved in Gunnersbury. Below are the main comments from the discussions, followed by answers to some questions posed.
Museum
- Suggested ‘super volunteers’ to help facilitate more volunteer roles where we do not have staff capacity e.g. in the weekends
- Suggested sharing stories from the collections with local news outlets (e.g. NeighbourNet websites, Chiswick Calendar etc) to promote our existence / encourage people to get more involved / donate to Gunnersbury
- Develop a digital strategy for sharing collections online and via other digital platforms / exhibitions / events (potential to create a dedicated volunteering role for this)
- Big dress up days focusing on different eras
- Volunteer opportunities to identify public noticeboards out in the community that we could populate with (relevant to the locality) objects / stories images etc. volunteers would be responsible for obtaining permissions to post on the boards and be responsible for keeping them updated
- Sharing as much of the collections review process as possible to keep people in the loop and flagging any objects that may be of interest to specific communities, using these discoveries as a springboard to look at further ways of working together on co-curation
Park
- Look to increase the number of dog litter bins on the Popes Lane boundary path
- Look to support volunteering in the park at weekends?
- Can we encourage sports pitch users to take their plastic litter (bottles) home?
- People want to help litter picking, but need pickers and sacks – how can we make easier for people to pick these up just to do a few minutes a day
- Inform public about our work with St Mungo’s Charity to refer any homeless person in park to appropriate services.
- The closed gate on A406 at Gunnersbury by the Popes Lane junction is part of the focus for Historic England and London Borough of Hounslow Council. They are working together to secure funds for repairs here and across the park, and we hope the works will begin imminently. We will keep people updated on Gunnersbury’s website.
Community Fundraising
- Local community sharing their expertise - could we pool or crowdsource specialist skills from the local community for specific Gunnersbury projects e.g. a local architect could offer his/her time for developing plans for the Japanese Garden
- Pledges could either be virtual or represented physically - e.g. pledge wall at Gunnersbury. Some confusion around what the word pledge means - time or money.
- Suggestion that we should be using NextDoor to communicate with local people
- Expand the range of pop-up services we have in the park e.g. coffee, bar, food stalls to other areas of the park?
- Ideas around partnering with local dog food companies and breweries to setup pop-up outlets in the park
- On membership - the offer should be very broad i.e. 15% off everything, 48-hour pre-sale on all events as different people have different interests.