Young People’s Bright Ideas for the New Museum Article | Updated 6 years ago KickstART Youth Festival event WA Museum This month our staff attended the Youth Week KickstART Festival in the Perth Cultural Centre to connect with young people. We ran two programs to find out about the issues that are important to them, and to give them a taste of the kinds of programming they might experience in the New Museum. Museum of Us – Our Community, Your Voice During the KickstART market day we asked young people tell us about the issues that are important to them and how they would like to share, discuss and debate these ideas in the Museum. All the ideas were included on comment cards and pinned onto an illumination board making a pixel light globe. This image also highlighted the theme of this year’s festival; Illuminate – the future of young people, bringing light to young people, and shining bright, positive mental health. We took a timelapse of our program with the comments from young people. The comments are being collated and used to inform the development of our exhibitions, events and activities. Revealing the Museum: the people behind the scenes Our second event at KickstART was a speed networking event to look at what Museum staff do behind the scenes. Young people met with staff who work in a range of different museum roles. They asked questions to find out about possible careers in the cultural sector and to understand the work undertaken by the WA Museum. Young people talking with Museum staff at the KickstART networking event. Image copyright WA Museum Each staff member brought along an object or item relevant to their work to illustrate what they do. Some of the surprising collection objects included a packet of ‘Asthma Cigarettes’ from the history collection, a Siamese Bobtail from the terrestrial zoology collection, an aspirator (pooter) used by entomologists to collect insects, stone knapping tools from the archaeology collection and an iPad to show some of our engagement programs. The event was a huge success and both the young people and our staff had a great time networking and talking about the behind the scenes work of the Museum.