Alex takes on Dorset community engagement role

We’re pleased to announce that Alex Briggs has been appointed as Learning and Community Co-ordinator at Dorset Museum. In this important role, she will be helping the museum find exciting ways to engage with underserved communities. Here she explains more about her role, past experience and unusual connection with Dorset Museum!

“I am really excited to be working with the Wessex Museums partnership and about the journey and challenges that lie ahead. Part of my job involves reaching out and working with underserved communities in Dorset. I am currently planning a series of sensory, handling tours and fossil hunting sessions with partially sighted and blind adults in the Natural Dorset Gallery and at Charmouth Heritage Coast Centre. I am also organising an exhibition of artwork created by adults with disabilities which captured their response to climate change through a series of workshops undertaken last year.

“Prior to my new role, I worked within further and secondary education as an art and design teacher and I was also head of pastoral care in my school where I developed a programme for wellbeing and resilience. I also undertook many community projects and I am really looking forward to using this experience for future projects.

“I often visit museums and galleries in my spare time and have an interesting connection to Dorset Museum. Within its collection is a cast of a well-known megalosaurus jaw, now in the Natural History Museum, that was originally found in the garden of my family home in Sherborne! 

“Dorset museum has an incredible collection of art and when the new museum opened in May last year I volunteered as a gallery steward where I was able to help to engage and inspire others. The photograph of me above is in front of my favourite painting in the museum, Landscape Impression, by Anthony Brown.”