Fixing Our Broken Planet: National Programmes
Our scientists are leading the way when it comes to looking for nature-based solutions for a more sustainable planet, but they can’t do this alone.
As part of Fixing Our Broken Planet’s national programmes, we’re working in partnership with museums and organisations across the UK and their communities to help people to take action for nature.
Community of Practice
Our Community of Practice is a space for museum-sector professionals across Wales, Scotland, Northern Ireland and England to develop ways to communicate the climate and nature crises with their audiences.
With a focus on public engagement and dialogue, the community is a space to learn, question and exchange. It’s open to anyone who wants to work with communities to co-create solutions for a more hopeful future.
The community is organised and led by us to enable members across the UK to have conversations with each other and to exchange ideas.
As a community member, you can:
- join an online hub to connect with like-minded peers and access a bank of resources to inspire further action
- access researchers and contemporary science and discover accessible ways to communicate this through your public programmes
- attend monthly online talks, spotlighting innovative approaches to public engagement
- be inspired to take action in your community at regional in-person gatherings
- share your own practice and form partnerships to create greater impact
- apply for funding to deliver programming around the planetary emergency
There’s currently more than 300 members in our Community of Practice. When you join, you’ll be added to our mailing list and receive a link to sign up to our online hub.
To join the community, complete this form.
Sign up now
Register using the form below and we'll send you monthly email newsletters with details of upcoming webinars and events and updates from the network and Our Broken Planet programme.
Interconnected Programme
The Interconnected Programme funds UK museums and cultural practitioners to deliver activities exploring the planetary emergency.
Working both for and with their communities, organisations are empowered to connect people and planet through exhibitions, displays and events.
Participating organisations get designed content from our Fixing Our Broken Planet Gallery as well as access to our scientists and their latest research and resources. They can use and adapt these assets to create activities that are relevant to their local area and audiences. Together, we hope to inspire people to care for nature and protect the planet.
The last funding round closed in September 2024 with 12 grants awarded to organisations across the UK, from Hastings to the Shetlands. Funded activities included quilt-making workshops with young farmers, junior rangers programmes and community-curated displays.
Applications for the next round of funding will open on Tuesday 6 May 2025. Sign up to our Community of Practice to be notified of this and other opportunities.
If you are interested in applying or would like to find out more about the Interconnected programme, we are hosting a Q&A webinar 12.00-12.45 on 13 May 2025.
Find out more about our Interconnected Partners
Generation Hope
Climate Museum UK / Great North Museum: Hancock, Newcastle-upon-Tyne
A partnership to coincide with British Science Week 2025 working with secondary schools to explore how change and adaption unfolds over time. Workshops will use Great North Museum: Hancock’s paleo-contemporary collections to draw links between the past and how we might live in the future.
Global Diversity Foundation, Llandysul
A continuation of the Patchwork of Belonging project which began in Morocco. Patchwork-making workshops, roundtable discussions, quilting and listening sessions, will be spaces for young people to share their own stories of belonging and how they are affected by environmental challenges. The project aims to collaborate with young farmers and migrant and diasporic communities in Wales.
Metronomes Steel Orchestra, London
The North Kensington-based Steel pan group will use instrument and music-making to tell the story of climate change in the Caribbean. Participants will make their own steel pans from scrapped metal before the project culminates in a celebratory performance at Notting Hill Carnival.
World Museum, Liverpool
A series of workshops and events delivered by local practitioners and developed by the museum’s co-production group (National Museums Liverpool Youth Engagement Forum) which will focus on the planetary emergency alongside local environmental issues. The creative day will link with the museum’s exhibition, Bees: A Story of Survival, which explores ways that visitors can take personal action to reduce the existential threat to bees.
Light Touch
Cromarty Courthouse Museum
An exhibition, Changing Tides: Cromarty's Firth will draw on the Fixing Our Broken Planet gallery content while exploring the town’s changing relationship with the sea, its energy, and the impact on the community. Voices of the local community will be brought together through an oral history project, local photography, collaborative research, and a short film.
Hereford Museum & Art Gallery
Young people from Herefordshire will co-produce an exhibition which explores local impacts of climate change and offers solutions for a sustainable future. The exhibition will feed into the gallery’s ambitious redevelopment which will have co-production at its heart.
National Coal Mining Museum for England, Wakefield
In October 2025, the museum will present the Black to Green festival. A youth-led event, activities will encourage visitors to take action towards mitigating the planetary emergency. Alongside workshops and creative responses to the emergency, the festival will include a pop-up Fixing Our Broken Planet display.
Leamington Spa Art Gallery & Museum
Young people will co-curate an exhibition considering how their local area will be impacted by the planetary emergency, and how we can learn from history to find solutions for our future. The museum’s collections will be used as a basis for conversations about reuse and repair, sustainable materials, and our relationship with water.
In Depth
Creswell Crags, Worksop
Site-based research into the Ice Age period at Creswell Crags will be used as the foundation to explore our past relationship with the environment, and look towards a sustainable future. A workshop series spanning mining, litter, ecology, and food will run alongside an exhibition co-created with local young people and developed using Fixing Our Broken Planet content.
Hastings Museum and Art Gallery
The museum’s mineralogy and petrology collections will be used by a curator-in-residence to work with local secondary schools to consider geology and humanity’s reliance on mineral availability. Using materials and ideas generated through these workshops, an exhibition will be developed to share creative ideas for change and action.
Manchester Museum
A pilot learning programme exploring environmental justice, co-created with and for young people (aged 16-25) from marginalised groups across Greater Manchester. This will be hosted within the museum’s Top Floor hub - a community centred space for action, sharing, learning, and dreaming. Youth participants will also be invited to create and curate public interventions across the museum. The project aims to amplify youth voices, equip them with the skills to make change happen, and help to build an intersectional youth climate movement in Manchester.
Shetland Amenity Trust
This project aims to inspire young Shetlanders to take pride in their heritage and pass it onto future generations through the creation of a Junior Rangers Programme. Active engagement with Shetland’s landscape will be core to widening engagement and enhancing a sense of ownership and responsibility for our surrounding environment and its ongoing survival.
Festivals
We share our research and the collections we care for with audiences across the UK at science and community festivals.
Through workshops, talks and activities, we engage families with the science of the planetary emergency. Through active learning and participation, we hope to inspire the next generation to study STEM subjects and to help young people to better understand their place in nature.
Partnering with festivals enables us to share our work with a wider audience and extend our reach outside London. We’re always looking for opportunities to support and add to existing programmes. It’s our aim to make connections with organisations and community groups already working in the towns we visit.
Spotlight: First Light Festival
For five years, we’ve collaborated with First Light Festival – a community festival celebrating the first sunrise of midsummer. The festival takes place on the beach in Lowestoft, the UK’s most eastly town. Over two days our researchers and learning teams share positive actions people can take for the planet with festival goers.
In past years, we’ve explored the highly venomous blue-ringed octopus, weird and wonderful ancient sharks and marine giants, including the colossal squid and the blue whale. We invited festival goers to learn about how these creatures evolved and the actions we can take to protect their habitats. We brought with us real museum specimens for them to investigate and delivered hands-on activities for families to enjoy together.
Throughout the year, a replica of Archie our giant squid is on display in The Battery of Ideas – a creative space at the heart of Lowestoft’s town centre. Made from recycled materials, it’s a reminder of the impact the climate and nature crises are having on coastal communities.
If you have questions about Fixing Our Broken Planet’s national programmes, contact us at nationalprogrammes@nhm.ac.uk.