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Leeds Museums & Galleries Access Commitment Statement

 

We aim to provide a friendly, accessible, and inclusive welcome for visitors to our buildings, exhibitions, and collections. We know there are barriers to accessing our places and displays and are actively seeking to address them. We will listen to people and change our practices accordingly.

We will work towards this aim by: 

  • Working with the people and communities of Leeds to ensure that everyone is (and feels) represented, heard, and seen within marketing, collections, exhibitions, learning and community programmes, using the principle of ‘nothing about us without us.’  
  • Working with people with lived experience of disability, neurodivergence and sensory processing when adapting and developing our web presence, buildings, and programmes to make them as physically and sensorily accessible as possible.  
  • Working within our civic values to reduce cost related barriers, whilst being sustainable.
  • Working to open up our inclusive recruitment practices to diversify our workforce so that we hear a range of voices within our staff, volunteer and freelance teams.  
  • Working to train all our staff, volunteers and freelancers in inclusive practice, disability and neurodivergent awareness, anti-racism, and basic Makaton, by working with practitioners with lived experience. We will support and look after our staff, volunteer and freelance team’s wellbeing when working with challenging and sensitive histories and contemporary issues that may be personally triggering.  
  • Challenging ourselves to positively change, focusing on what we can do rather than what we can’t.  

Informing our access and inclusion work is Leeds’s Best City Ambition, which contains a commitment to developing compassionate inclusive economic growth. The Leeds City Council People Strategy (2020-25) centres on listening to, and acting on, lived experiences of colleagues; and building inclusive workplaces, practices, and cultures, alongside the Leeds City Council staff networks and being a Disability Confident Leader to support staff with different lived experiences. We actively participate in the Leeds Inclusive Employers Network (LIEN) and work with Leeds City College to make our employment practices more inclusive. Our developments are supported by research and toolkits from: the Social Mobility Commission; the recommendations of the LCC Culture & Economy working group on anti-racism; and by our long-term work with Scope, the Neurodiverse Museum, the Yorkshire Accessible Museums Network, GLAM Cares, Voluntary Action Leeds, and internally through the Colonial Histories Working Group.

For more detailed information about each venue’s accessibility, click through to the venue, then visit, then access.