About Cultural Spaces Training

Cultural spaces around the world – galleries, museums, libraries – are fulfilling more of a civic role and want to be more than a space for culture. Despite often high levels of homelessness around cultural spaces, there is no shared practice in how to work with people who are, or have been, homeless.

AHI commissioned Open House: Cultural Spaces’ Responses to Homelessness by Phyllida Shaw, containing case studies of 40 cultural spaces and the journeys they have gone through to work more closely with homeless people.

These findings were developed into a Cultural Spaces Homelessness Toolkit and Training Package, in partnership with Museum of Homelessness, and were piloted with Tate Modern and Manchester Museum. Since then, we have delivered to many cultural spaces and a Peer Network of Cultural Spaces particularly interested in working with people who are/have been homeless.

Our training is flexible and can run from half a day to a day or longer. The content of the sessions is based around our Toolkit above and focuses on topics such as:

  • The welcome people get when they enter a building
  • Signposting people to local homelessness services and striking up light-touch partnerships with those services
  • What written commitments do cultural spaces have and how then can help organisational memory
  • Consistency in messaging

If you would like to talk to us about our training, please email katie@artshomelessint.com