The Heritage Partnerships Team, member of The Heritage Alliance, is very pleased to feature this blog post by Fox White about her recent micro-internship. This placement was organised through the Careers Service.
My internship with The Heritage Alliance offered me so many opportunities for insight and learning. My past experience has been focused in heritage communications and education and the opportunity to learn more about heritage policy felt like both a useful grounding for existing knowledge and a totally a new endeavour. Almost everything I did was new to some extent, occasioning new modes of work and thought. Beginning to summarise a call for evidence on Abstraction and Impounding Licenses (a subject I only later discovered was about water use) I was floored to come across a section detailing ‘Appropriate measures to guarantee safe passage to eels’.
The policy concerns of The Heritage Alliance are eye-openingly broad-ranging. When all its member bodies are combined, the Alliance represents the interests of over 7 million volunteers, trustees, members and staff. 1 in every 12 visitors to a Heritage Site in the UK will thus be engaging with an organisation that The Heritage Alliance supports. As such, the policy landscape that the Alliance aims to guide, covers subjects from deforestation to immigration, affecting UK heritage as diverse as historic mills, public housing and vintage cars.
The breadth of work and research that goes into listening to and supporting such diverse interests was something I became increasingly aware of over the course of the internship. For me it was particularly useful to be supported to think beyond castles and country houses in considering how the UK’s cultural heritage might be preserved and used.
Producing a report responding to the Accessibility Survey results was particularly generative as, in trying to give an overview of current practice within the sector and pick out examples of best practice, I myself gained a much clearer sense of where accessibility fits within the industry. Having completed uncountable surveys myself—but never before been on the business end of processing them—I was surprised by how much individual character anonymous responses had. Harder to summarise in my report than trends in the data were the instincts that reading these responses raised—that having a committed advocate for accessibility working directly within a heritage organisation seemed to be doing as much, if not more, than expert consultation services; that sites who were partnered with community groups would reliably surprise me with the creativity of their accommodations and mitigatory offers. Writing copy for Heritage Updatealso proved a great way to familiarise myself with the work of The Heritage Alliance and its member’s policy agendas. Throughout the week I was with the Alliance I was supported to engage in work that felt meaningful.
Mid-way through the week, Polly Martin (Head of Policy and Comms) sat down with me, Saffron Ralphs (Project and Policy Officer) and Daniella Briscoe-Peaple (Advocacy and Comms Officer), and talked us all through the intricate internal workings of the House of Lords and its connections (and disconnections) with the Commons. The background was immediately useful. I was summarising open consultations and calls for evidence at the time and information like the difference between primary and secondary legislation had a direct relevance to me. But Polly’s frustrations with and fondness for a system in which she had, in the past, worked closely, made for an account as evocative as it was informative. After this internship I feel far more able to imagine what pursuing a career in policy might feel like.
I would absolutely recommend The Heritage Alliance as an organisation to intern with. Although the entire internship was digital, the warm welcome I received from Saffron, Daniella, Polly and Lizzie Glithero-West (CEO) felt very real. I was very grateful to be included in meetings and given an opportunity to ask members about their current roles and their professional background. The thoughtful, honest advice I was given about the sector is already directly impacting the applications I am making as I come to the end of my undergraduate degree.
Fox White is a final year English Literature undergraduate at the University of Oxford. She wants to communicate about visual culture in ways that are accessible and is looking to enter a career at the intersection of heritage and social work.
TORCH Heritage Programme
