Youth and community engagement at the Amgueddfa Cymru – National Museum Wales

Abstract

Creative and empowering youth engagement can be a vital component of museology and museum education because it can drive forward socially engaged museum practice and help museums have a greater societal impact, which we consider to be an important element of the civic mission of museums. This chapter investigates how youth-led environmental activism at Amgueddfa Cymru – National Museum Wales helped to drive forward and implement change. It focuses on the development and execution of No Môr Plastic (NMP), a youth-designed and youth-led intervention of marine gallery spaces between July 31 and August 12, 2018 to tie in with Maritime Awareness week. For NMP, the young people decided to take on the topic of plastic pollution, which was achieved through working collaboratively with the community-led charity Surfers Against Sewage and the locality of the South Wales beaches where the trash was collected. The chapter explores the work that underpinned the NMP intervention and the co-productive approaches that were used.