Birmingham Museums Citizens' Jury (2024)

TL;DR. In late 2024, Birmingham Museums Trust — running nine museums in a city whose council had effectively declared bankruptcy — did something museums almost never do: it handed the question of its own future to 26 randomly-selected residents. The first citizens’ jury in a UK museum, it produced 20 recommendations and a striking rebuild of trust between the institution and its public.

At a glance

When	September–November 2024 (30 hours over three full days + three evenings)
Where	Birmingham, UK
Who	26 jurors, recruited by civic lottery from 5,000 randomly-selected households to reflect the city’s diversity
Question	”What does Birmingham need and want from its museums now and in the future, and what should Birmingham Museums Trust do to make it happen?”
Run by	Shared Future (facilitation), with DemocracyNext and the Sortition Foundation; an independent oversight panel set the question
Funding	National Lottery Heritage Fund (~£65k for the jury)
Outcome	20 recommendations + 11 “roles” for the museum, now being acted on

What happened

The backdrop was a “deep crisis”: Birmingham City Council, the largest in Europe, had declared itself effectively bankrupt, and central-government commissioners were imposing cuts — including to the museums, whose largest funder is the council. At the same time the Trust’s co-CEOs were writing a five-year plan amid the “culture wars” over heritage, and, as co-CEO Sara Wajid put it with rare candour, “we didn’t know quite what to do.” Rather than the usual small advisory panel — which, they’d found, could recommend things but had no grip on the actual decisions — they decided to “go to the people of Birmingham for the answers.”

Recruitment, run with the Sortition Foundation, deliberately weighted toward people underserved by museums (using education level as a proxy for likely attendance). The jury heard from 14 “commentators” (their word for experts, to keep the jurors’ own expertise central), visited exhibitions, weighed real trade-offs (free vs paid entry; new vs established audiences), and wrote their recommendations. Recommendations are adopted by a 75–80% super-majority, and jurors were paid for their time.

Impact and trust

An independent evaluation — itself rare (under 10% of deliberative processes get one, per the OECD database) — focused on three-way trust: institution↔citizen and citizen↔citizen. It found 100% of jurors felt the final recommendations represented their views, and that the commissioners genuinely held the question open (“totally open-ended, uncertain and uncontrollable… a bit anxiety-making”), guarding against participation-washing. The Trust keeps meeting the jurors to report progress, is co-creating an exhibition about the jury with them, and says future capital-funding bids will have to embed this kind of deliberative practice. Jurors describe a shift from “I’d not set foot in a museum since I was a kid” to “I feel part of Birmingham now.”

How it went

The honest lessons were about readiness: museums are hierarchical and protective of curatorial authority, and a jury is fundamentally “about power and who decides” — so a commissioner has to actually mean to share it. Birmingham was helped by unusually civic-minded staff and an oversight panel “watching like a hawk” for any hint of democracy-washing. The harder frontier they flag is melding the “software” of a jury with the “hardware” of a capital redevelopment — something, Wajid admits, no one has yet done well at scale.

Sources

• “Stories from behind the scenes of the first citizens’ jury in a UK museum” — DemocracyNext, 2025: youtube.com/watch?v=POLwnybqUrY
• Birmingham Museums Trust × Shared Future — Birmingham Museums Citizens’ Jury (report and evaluation, 2025).