Jo Higgins

Connected Audiences Conference

Berlin, 21 - 23 May 2025 

In 2025, the biennial Connected Audiences Conference had a focus on young people and their creative and cultural participation in arts organisations, as well as the challenges of supporting this work as programmers, researchers and youth engagement specialists.

With grant funding support from Creative Australia and Create NSW I attended and co-presented at the conference, which enabled me to meet and learn from peers in the sector internationally, to gather new research and hear about innovative program & evaluation frameworks.

There were workshops and presentations from organisations including the Bauhaus Archive Museum, Berlin; Mammalian Diving Reflex, Toronto; London Transport Museum; Grips-Theater Berlin; Bradford Science and Media Museum, UK; National Gallery Ireland; Historic Royal Palaces, London; and the Institute for Learning Innovation, USA, amongst others.

Key learnings, ideas and takeaways for me included:

• The idea of cultural self-care; the importance of third spaces that young people can appropriate for themselves; and the current disconnect for young people when it comes to ideas of ‘culture’ and not feeling represented in our cultural institutions

• The ongoing importance of community guidelines, ethical frameworks and other accountability strategies

• The enduring question to institutions about measuring impact - do you want to reach 1000 young people for an hour or have 10 young people over 100 hours?

• The importance of genuine agency - co-design, collaboration, collective labour, trust, risk-taking, recognising assets and expertise

• The value of playful evaluation tools: Something for your head, your heart, your handbag and the bin

• The need for succession planning and whole-of-institution engagement with young people

• The joy and necessity of finding loopholes (no budget for snacks? Biscuits as “workshop materials”…)

• The idea of an Equity Compass as a tool for embedding reflective practice

• The ongoing impact of the pandemic for young people in terms of mental health, social anxiety, career and education disruption

• The shortcomings of current job recruitment/HR strategies when it comes to reflecting the need for 21st century skills and the possibilities for “Learner” to be a job framework that supports internships and traineeships

• John Falk’s research that revealed that social interactions remain the most impactful and beneficial for museum visitors even up to 10 years later; that visits are never about the institution and always about the needs and aspirations of that particular visitor on that particular day; that there are five different visitor profiles that explain the why but also the what that visitors perceive as the benefit of visiting (Explorer, Facilitator, Experience Seeker, Professional/Hobbyist, Recharger); that Professional/Hobbyists benefit the most from any museum visit but that they only 5-10% of museum goers…

• The challenge in thinking about what it is that museums and galleries can offer young people that they can’t get anywhere else and why this should be a point of focus for museums

“Disruption Roulette”

Our paper was followed by an interactive ‘teen-inspired’ workshop called “Disruption Roulette” that was designed to facilitate conversation, with participants reflecting on their own experiences using provocations from our presentation. Selected prompts included:

• What’s been the biggest risk you’ve taken with young people and what compelled you to take it?

• What’s been your most successful failure?

• How in/visible are young people within your organisation and how does that inform your approach to programming?

• What’s the most constructive piece of criticism or feedback you’ve received from a young person? 

• What’s the biggest roadblock within your organisation preventing you from engaging young people how you’d like? How could it become an opportunity?