About Change Minds 2023
Change Minds 2023 was the Museum's third iteration of Change Minds, but the first to take place in person at the Museum. It was also our first iteration created as a programme in coordination with the wider Change Minds Project Hub, a Heritage Lottery funded project, which followed session plans created by the central hub team.
Across four months our participants, guided by David Luck and Amy Moffat, first researched the lives of people we found in the Victorian hospital records and then created artistic responses to what they found. We looked at the Bethlem Casebooks and records to find out about our chosen persons time in the Hospital, and visited Croydon Records Office to help learn how to investigate their wider lives in genealogical records and the census. We also visited the Imperial War Museum to get an idea of what life would have been like in Victorian Bethlem. In creating our artistic response we had sessions with the artist Beth Hopkins and the writer Michelle Porter. We proudly present our participants in the blogs that we post up here.
Our experiences and evaluations have been fed back into the wider Change Minds project, and will inform the next round of Change Mind iterations taking place around the country.
We would like to thank all of our participants, whose input and dedication made the project both a success and a wonderful experience for everyone involved; Rosie Vizor and the team at Croydon Record Office; Sarah Paterson and the team at the Imperial War Museum; all the staff at the Museum of the Mind and the Scaling Up Change Minds team for their help and input.
With thanks to National Lottery players.