Today I’m talking to Kate Oliver about a critical topic: recognising and tackling burnout and exhaustion in museum education. We’re exploring how the Radical Rest Network provides support and resources, practical tools and a community that encourages individuals and organisations to prioritise rest and well-being.
Kate Oliver (she/her) is a UK-based educator and leader in the cultural and environmental sectors, with over 18 years’ experience delivering creative learning programmes. Kate has led Learning teams at the Horniman Museum and Gardens, London Zoo, and Quentin Blake Centre for Illustration. She now delivers freelance learning projects, studies Psychotherapy, and recently co-founded the Radical Rest Network in response to growing exhaustion in our sector. Kate loves empowering people, and getting muddy knees teaching outdoors. Rest for Kate is a long walk in nature, or a mid-morning coffee with Schnitzel the cat.
The Radical Rest Network is a collective initiative to address the issue of burnout and exhaustion in the cultural sector, particularly in museum education. The network provides a platform for individuals to come together, share their experiences, and explore strategies for making rest a priority in their personal and professional lives. In our chat today we talk about how the Radical Rest Network has grown rapidly since its beginning last December (2022) and currently includes more than 125 members (November 2023) who are passionate about promoting a healthier approach to work and life in the cultural sector.
We talk about why the cultural sector, especially museum education, is particularly prone to exhaustion and the concept of ‘radical rest’.
Kate shares insights into the network’s research, which revealed widespread exhaustion and burnout within our sector.
We explore what individuals and organisations can do to address these issues and make rest a priority.
And Kate shares some simple strategies for rest that you can easily adopt and implement into your working day or week.
Listen to Episode 116 or read the transcript below to find out how you can find out more about the Radical Rest Network and get involved.
Kate was an absolute joy to talk to – and I hope you enjoy our conversation. As you listen, think about what rest looks like for you.
Transcript
Claire Bown: Hello and welcome to The Art Engager podcast with me, Claire Bown. I’m here to share techniques and tools to help you engage with your audience and bring art, objects and ideas to life. So let’s dive into this week’s show.
Claire Bown: Hello and welcome back to The Art Engager podcast. I’m your host, Claire Bown of Thinking Museum, and this is episode 116. So today I’m talking to educator and leader Kate Oliver about radical rest in the cultural sector.
Claire Bown: But before that, last time I was talking to author and journalist Rob Walker about the art of noticing.
Claire Bown: We talked about the value of noticing. And appreciating things that often go unnoticed. So I loved my conversation with Rob. I hope you did too. And if you haven’t heard it yet, don’t forget to listen to episode 115 when you get a moment. And now that the Art Engager has over 100 episodes, this podcast. is a great resource.
Claire Bown: Take your pick from the huge back catalogue of different episodes to brush up on your skills, be inspired and learn new techniques. And if you want to support this show and keep it going from strength to strength, you can do so by treating me to a cup of tea on buymeacoffee. com forward slash Claire.
Claire Bown: Bown. I’ll put a link in the show notes. And finally, if you have a question for the show or want to suggest a guest or a topic, feel free to get in touch. I’d love to hear from you. Okay, now let’s get on with today’s show. Let me introduce my guest today. Kate Oliver is a UK based Educator and leader in the cultural and environmental sectors.
Claire Bown: She has over 18 years experience delivering creative learning programs. Kate led learning teams at the Horniman Museum and Gardens, London Zoo and Quentin Blake Centre for Illustration. She now delivers freelance learning projects, studies psychotherapy and co founded the Radical Rest Network in response to growing exhaustion in our sector.
Claire Bown: Kate loves empowering people and getting muddy knees teaching outdoors. Rest for Kate is a long walk in nature or a mid morning coffee. with Schnitzel the cat. So the Radical Rest Network is a collective initiative to address the issue of burnout and exhaustion in the cultural sector and particularly in museum education.
Claire Bown: The network provides a platform for individuals to come together, share their experiences and explore strategies for making rest a priority in their personal and professional lives. So in our chat today we talk about how the Radical Rest Network has grown rapidly and now includes more than 125 members who are passionate about promoting a healthier approach to work and life.
Claire Bown: in the cultural sector. We talk about why museum education is particularly prone to exhaustion and what radical rest is. Kate shares insights into the network’s research which revealed widespread exhaustion and burnout within our sector and we explore what individuals and organizations can do to address these issues and make rest a priority.
Claire Bown: Finally, Kate shares some simple strategies for rest that you can easily adopt and implement into your working day or week, whether you’re a freelancer or a permanent employee. Listen in to find out how you can find out more about the Radical Rest Network and get involved too. Kate was an absolute joy to talk to and I hope you enjoy our conversation.
Claire Bown: As you listen, try to think about what rest looks like for you.
Claire Bown: Hi Kate, welcome to The Art Engager podcast.
Kate Oliver: Hi Claire, thanks so much for having me.
Claire Bown: So can you tell our listeners who you are, what you do and perhaps where you
Kate Oliver: do it? Sure. I’m Kate Oliver. I’m a freelancer in the cultural and environmental sectors. People might know me from being Head of Learning at the Horniman Museum in London, at Quentin Blake Centre for Illustration, London Zoo as well.
Kate Oliver: But now I deliver freelance learning projects across the sector, and I co founded the Radical Rest Network. Excellent.
Claire Bown: So that’s what I’ve brought you here today to discuss. I came across the Radical Rest Network by chance. I think I was scrolling on LinkedIn. Maybe someone in my network had liked your post.
Claire Bown: I saw it and immediately struck a chord. As we were just talking about prior to pressing record. There seems to be an urgent need for rest in our sector. There seems to be an awful lot of exhaustion. I was just saying that every museum I go to, when I’m talking to employees there, everyone’s talking about how tired and exhausted they are, and there’s a lot of burnout as well.
Claire Bown: So could you tell us a little bit about what the Radical Rest Network is, and a bit about how it came about?
Kate Oliver: Yeah, how it came about is exactly as you say there. So we were part of a, me and a few colleagues were part of a program called Space for Change, which is run by a new direction here in London.
Kate Oliver: And it’s a program that allows cultural leaders to have the space to make a change that they think is needed in the sector. And every time we met up for this program, going around the room at the start of it, of how everybody was, it was, Exhausted, tired, overstretched, burnt out. And so me and three colleagues, Michelle McGrath, Tim Fletcher and Ashley Almeida, we formed a project group to see what radical change for rest could look like in that context.
Kate Oliver: So we did some research in the sector about rest, about the barriers, about what works. We ran an amazing event where we made everyone stop and rest for 20 minutes, which was Deeply shocking, people gasped at the idea that they would get to stop for 20 entire minutes. And since then, as you said, i’ve started off the radical rest network.
Kate Oliver: In a very short time in a couple of months It’s grown to there’s more and more than 125 people on it now. And so like you Say it feels like a very live problem in the sector, a live issue in the sector. As soon as I say radical rest to anyone right now they pretty much know exactly what you mean and what’s needed.
Kate Oliver: And the Radical Rest Network is being a place that people can find practical information, practical resources, but also just have that support and that community to acknowledge that this is a priority and to think about what they’d like to do to change it for themselves. Brilliant.
Claire Bown: We will dive into a little bit more about the Radical Rest Network soon, but you mentioned a survey there.
Claire Bown: So I’d love to hear what you found out from the survey, what some of the barriers to rest were and what some of the issues people were bringing up
Kate Oliver: in our sector. It was really interesting and pretty heartbreaking to read the results, to be honest. It was 75 percent of people who said they weren’t getting enough rest of the respondents. We had a good range of respondents from freelancers, big organizations, small organizations. But that 75 percent hides another kind of 10 or 15 percent, who said they sometimes or slightly got enough rest.
Kate Oliver: So it’s definitely a very widespread problem. I keep saying to people just the main thing to know is that you’re not alone. It’s not just you. It’s so many people right now. And there was a lot of very heartbreaking impacts of it. Stress kept coming up. Burnouts kept coming up when we asked people about it in the survey.
Kate Oliver: It was affecting people’s health and sleep and their home lives and then at work, making their work much less effective. Not having that space to be strategic, to be creative, and that was causing then this vicious cycle of, then they were rushing plans of projects, which then meant the next project didn’t have enough rest as well.
Kate Oliver: And you ask about barriers, so the big things that came up on that one was, of course, just an unachievable workload, feeling like there was much more work
than could possibly be done,
Kate Oliver: a big thing was a lack of staff, and that, of course, is coming a couple of years post pandemic, so a lot of organisations had shrunk their learning teams or their wider teams and hadn’t grown again.
Kate Oliver: And a lot of unrealistic expectations, and those came from ourselves, so a sense of feeling guilty about rest, a sense of feeling lazy or not doing enough. They came from the organisation, so the culture of, Having too much workload or expectations being unrealistic and also a wider sector culture that had unrealistic expectations of us as well.
Kate Oliver: So it’s a sector that feels to a lot of people like a vocation, that feels like a passion. There’s quite a lot. competition in the sector for jobs and also just for funding and resources as well. And so I think all those things together feed into a big sense of need and a sense that we really should be doing more a lot of the time.
Claire Bown: Yeah. And did you find from your research that it affects people in permanent positions and freelancers equally? Was there any data around that
Kate Oliver: yeah, I tried disaggregating the results to see if there was differences between kind of small organization, big organization, freelance. I thought those might have quite different experiences.
Kate Oliver: Largely, basically the same. The things that came out additionally for freelancers were pressures like instability of work and short deadlines and unrealistic expectations from clients in that it was coming last minute, unclear and short deadline. So they had those kind of additional pressures on top of employees.
Claire Bown: Yeah, knowing both sides of the equation, I can say for my work in recent years that there’s also that feeling of that boom or bust cycle, and you’ve got so much work, which is brilliant, but too much and you can’t turn things down. But also the tendency to overcommit, probably coming from times when there isn’t so much work or there isn’t that balance.
Claire Bown: Yeah, I can see how it would, also have an effect on people who are working for themselves as well.
Kate Oliver: Yeah, and when you come off the back of one of those boom cycles, Claire, and you’re like, okay, now I’ve got two weeks where I’m not going to have as much. I’m going to rest. I don’t know about you, but within two days you might be like, oh, but this is a quiet time.
Kate Oliver: I need, maybe I need to start setting up new things. Maybe I need to start booking in the next few weeks. What if this quiet time goes on forever? So yeah, there’s a lot of particular stresses for freelancers
Claire Bown: as well. Yeah, that guilt. Yes, I know that very well. You mentioned as well, something that I’ve been thinking about in our sector, particularly for museum education I shared on social media a link to a recent journal of museum education, special issue about burnout and exhaustion in the sector.
Claire Bown: Why do you think that it is particular to the cultural sector? I mean we’re talking about the cultural sector in general, we’re also talking on this podcast more specifically about museum education, so what is it about this sector that leads to so much exhaustion?
Kate Oliver: Yeah, of course it’s not just our sector and there’s a wider conversation about kind of capitalism and hustle culture that this is all a part of.
Kate Oliver: But there are definitely specific features of our sector that I think make us particularly susceptible to this issue. So I think partly it’s, like I say, people come into it often very passionate about it, feeling like it’s a vocation, feeling like they really care. Lots of people, especially in music and learning really care about what they do.
Kate Oliver: and they’re working in a context where there’s almost unending need and possibility that you could be doing, which can be a pretty toxic combo. So there’s the needs of our museum and often resources are limited, funding’s limited, you’re struggling for the next thing. There’s the needs of our communities and often especially in the last 10 years, we’re often working with people with more needs, whether your museum is focusing more on, say, people from different marginalized groups marginalized by society, or just we’re operating in the UK, certainly a context where our audiences have a lot more needs, there’s a big cost of living crisis, there’s a lot going on that people are dealing with, so I think a combination of those two things is a big issue, the fact that we get really care, and there’s a big need out there.
Kate Oliver: I think also, particularly for museum learning, I was reading something about this, probably in that journal link you’re mentioning as well, museum learning has become more fundamental to museums in the last decade, two decades, which is fantastic, which is really important, but it also means a bigger sense of responsibility for museum learning employees potentially influencing more things and being expected to contribute to more things. Being responsible for visitor numbers going up, visitor diversity going up, being responsible for incomes, being responsible for reaching those marginalized groups. The more learning has become important, the more likely feeling of responsibility and need that museum workers are experiencing too.
Kate Oliver: Yeah, I get
Claire Bown: it. And also now that museum learning is so central to museum definition, central to, to so many organisations, but the role is so precarious, it’s so uncertain. And we saw, particularly during the pandemic, The first jobs to go were those in the learning department.
Claire Bown: So I think added to that, that feeling of being passion led, having very strong feelings about the work that we do. There’s also this uncertainty that underlies everything, that all of this could stop tomorrow, which I don’t think helps the situation either.
Kate Oliver: Absolutely.
Kate Oliver: And even if you do have a stable role, it’s likely to have fairly low pay and like potentially poor conditions, which means that your, maybe your home life is a real challenge outside of that because you’re working long hours, you’re working weekends and you’re not earning enough to cover everything you need to.
Claire Bown: Yeah. I’d like to talk a little bit about rest because I think that what struck me about the Radical Rest Network is that the focus is on rest rather than a sort of general sense of well being. So could we perhaps… dive into what rest is and what it might look like for different people.
Kate Oliver: Yeah, I think that’s a really good question. I’m glad you picked up that it’s different for different people. So rest doesn’t need to mean, sleep rest can mean just any activity that gives you rest, the feeling of rest, of relaxation of rebuilding your strength.
Kate Oliver: So it looks. different for everyone and it also looks different for everyone at different times. So for me, rest today might actually be going for a run because I feel it really feel like I need to move my body and clear my head in that way. Or it might be lying down and having a nap or doing some mindfulness.
Kate Oliver: It might be quite often for me rest involves silence. I need to have kind of a absence of sensory stimulation to have a really good rest, but equally one day it might be connecting with another person. Like this conversation feels quite restful because I’m feeling a nice connection. So it’s different for everyone.
Kate Oliver: I often say to people to think about what rest, what good rest looks like for you today and try to meet that need, whatever it might be. But in terms of the survey, we definitely found some real themes that were very common between people of what worked for us. Hilariously what doesn’t work is, according to our research, is those kind of wellness seminars that are put on by organizations because they very much are all kind of yoga at lunch things, because though people appreciated them they, in the survey, they very much came across as disingenuous when the bigger systemic issues that we were just talking about aren’t getting addressed at the same time.
Kate Oliver: But in terms of things that did work people pretty split on… Working from home and that flexibility really worked for some people to get additional rest. Other people were feeling that idea of being always on, of never really being able to turn off, which I know resonates with a lot of people. Lots of personal things, so the things I mentioned of going for a walk at lunchtime, doing mindfulness, those personal things that people identified as worked for them.
Kate Oliver: But the really big things that made a difference were boundaries at work, and having especially a cultural norm of those boundaries, so if your organisation, everyone finishes on time, at 5. 30pm the office is empty, there was a lovely quote in it that said I’d work somewhere like that, and, I felt really silly still being there at 5.
Kate Oliver: 45. So I was the only one left in the office. So those things really help people work, help people rest. And the big things that came across was that rest needed to be mandatory and it needed to be collective. So things like four day weeks work. Because everyone’s gone. Things like closing for two weeks in December or August work, or sending everyone home on a Friday afternoon.
Kate Oliver: Because otherwise, I’m sure you’ve felt this too, if you take a holiday day or a time in lieu day, there’s always a feeling of… There’s still things building up in the background or other work going on that you’re going to have to catch up with when you get back. That idea of being mandatory and collective came across as really powerful.
Kate Oliver: And from that we then started exploring this idea of permission to rest and that you need to feel that permission. to be able to let yourself go and actually enjoy the rest. I
Claire Bown: love that idea of it being mandatory, it being collective, but also giving ourselves permission. I think that’s one of the hardest things about this.
Claire Bown: The fact that there’s always something that we can turn our attention to, other than rest. It’s very easy for me to sit in my office and work for eight hours straight without going outside and seeing any daylight, without taking a walk. I know that I work better if I take a break halfway through the day and I get outside and I go for a walk or I go and have lunch downstairs or do something different.
Claire Bown: However, I don’t always do it. So permission to rest, I think is such an important phrase that we could perhaps keep in our heads to remind ourselves every day that this is a really important part of
Kate Oliver: it. Absolutely. We ran a brilliant rest intervention at the end of this project in March, where we had 30 creative learning professionals.
Kate Oliver: And as I say, we made them rest for 20 minutes. And we used things that we dubbed ”permission objects. We gave people blankets, eye masks. We had an outdoor space you could walk around. We had an indoor space that was nice and dark you could go into, and fairy lights going on. So it gave people real permission to rest.
Kate Oliver: And that sense of collective resting really allowed people to do it. And people’s reactions to rest. And I’ve run this exercise lots of times since with less kind of bells and whistles, but still just as powerful. Very powerful reactions it brings up to people, like you say, there’s a real resistance to rest for lots of people and there’s really good reasons for that.
Kate Oliver: Some people find it quite emotional, like finally allowing themselves to rest or realizing that they haven’t allowed themselves to rest until now or that they don’t switch off. So it can bring up a lot of things for people. I remember Two months before the event I was talking to a friend about it.
Kate Oliver: I was really excited. I was like, oh, we’re gonna do this, it’s gonna feel really radical. It’s gonna be exciting and she said to me Just to be clear Are you excited about running this event or are you excited that in eight weeks you get to stop for 20 minutes? And I felt deeply seen! And
Claire Bown: I’ve experienced one of your interventions because we had we had an online meetup for the Radical Rest Network and we did this on Zoom, and I felt some of those things you were talking about.
Claire Bown: We had, we did it for five minutes, so a relatively short period of time, but there was that moment when we got started and everybody was resting. And I thought, oh, I’m not sure I know how to do this online. And it took me, I think probably about the first minute to think, okay what could I do here?
Claire Bown: I’ve got five, four minutes now to rest. So I remember I took my shoes off. Which for me was like, okay, it’s a sign I’m home. I’ve got my feet on the ground. And then I thought I’ll get out of my chair and I’ll sit on the floor because that’s something else I don’t do. And it was two really simple acts, but in themselves, they were incredibly restful for those four or five minutes.
Claire Bown: So could you perhaps share some simple strategies for rest that listeners could easily adopt and implement into their working day or their working
Kate Oliver: week? Sure, we shared a lot of tips in the network, and I think exactly what you said, anything that feels like permission, so taking off your shoes.
Kate Oliver: Someone at the network was saying they used to go for a walk around the office, which didn’t really help, but as soon as they left, literally went through the front doors. looped around and came back, that suddenly felt like rest because it was giving that permission to them. So there’s lots of tips that we were sharing about little things you can build into your day.
Kate Oliver: So a lot of it was just about acknowledging it as a priority. So maybe booking in 20 minutes for a rest, going for a walk at lunchtime, identifying that thing that you need. But I think also just to, I really want to name the fact that it’s uncomfortable. And that’s okay. We need to acknowledge that addressing this is uncomfortable in our sector.
Kate Oliver: It involves a lot of you might need to address the fact that your organization, if you’re working with an organization, consciously or unconsciously, might be taking advantage of workers, and that’s an uncomfortable thing to sit with. You might need to address the fact that rest historically disenfranchises the people least, most marginalized by society, and if anyone hasn’t looked at the Knapp ministry Tricia Hersey looks brilliantly into the idea of rest as resistance, and it’s something that we deserve as human beings, and it’s an act of resistance to do it.
Kate Oliver: But also, like you say, Those personal things that come up for you about rest of maybe you feel lazy, or you’ve had messages about that through your life, or it’s, it connects to a feeling of not good enough, and so it’s very valid to feel uncomfortable, especially when you first start or first try to do this.
Kate Oliver: So I’d say for everyone, basically, There’s lots of kind of ideas of things you can do, and lots of things will resonate with people of oh, I like going for a walk. I don’t like yoga kind of thing. But. For yourself, I think, just give yourself permission to do whatever feels right for you right then.
Kate Oliver: And I think no matter what it looks like, the main thing is prioritising it and allowing yourself to think it’s important. Because it is, and we’ve got the evidence to show the kind of impacts it’s having on people and on our whole sector. We need to acknowledge that it’s… It’s allowed to be a priority, and I think what’s been really powerful about the Radical Risk Network, and what a lot of people have got from it, is just being able to say that to each other and talk about it.
Kate Oliver: It gives you that permission to prioritize it. So we ran that session at, I think it was like 4 to 5 p. m. UK time, and I know lots of people were saying afterwards, turned off their computer after that, whereas they would have, carried on working till six or seven after that. So it, by sharing those feelings and those issues and by resting together, it gave them the idea that they could switch off at the end of the day.
Kate Oliver: And
Claire Bown: I think it gives you that accountability as well. So if you’re working, if you’re working on your own, or even if you’re working with others in a team, in an organization the network gave us that accountability to rest together and say, we’re going to do this at this time. The only way you’re going to get out of it is by leaving the Zoom..
Claire Bown: And I think that accountability works as well, because it is all too easy to carry on. There’s a lot of museum educators probably listening to this who may be working with groups in the museum back to back, three or four or even five times a day, back to back tours or programs. And that’s incredibly exhausting, incredibly tiring.
Claire Bown: So even thinking about what strategies people could bring in that maybe take a minute, two minutes, three minutes, just to have that headspace and that rest between programs. is going to be beneficial for people. And I know you go into organizations, don’t you? And you give talks and workshops about this.
Claire Bown: Yeah,
Kate Oliver: absolutely which feels like quite a treat going in and giving people that permission, that they’re unspokenly asking for, a lot of people are crying out for, to be told that permission, and I it’s sad that they need to hear it from me, but they do
Kate Oliver: so yeah, I go in, we kick our shoes off, we do what we need to do and have some rest and talk through these strategies that you can use in yourself, but also the radical changes that, that can occur. And there’s some things which we maybe shouldn’t call radical now because there’s so many organizations doing it.
Kate Oliver: Things like shifting to four day week, things like doing long term closures and there’s loads of brilliant success stories. And that’s been another really. useful thing that I think people have got out of the network and of the workshops is just hearing this organization made huge changes for REST and nobody died, or this person is RESTing and just living their life and no one is calling them lazy, no one’s telling them they’re not good enough. So I think a really important part of it is sharing our success stories with REST or just RESTing and talking about the fact you’re RESTing, naming the fact you’re RESTing, letting it be.
Kate Oliver: Letting us radically change our culture in the sector into one that prioritizes rest and in which that rest can be a priority for us all.
Claire Bown: Yeah, and I’m thinking about the word radical now, the more you say it. So why did you pick that particular phrasing?
Kate Oliver: We absolutely love that name when we first started talking about it last December.
Kate Oliver: I think because when you say rest, it feels chill and it feels quiet and it maybe feels small and it maybe feels individual. And I think, the fact that we shouldn’t blame individuals, or put the responsibility on individuals to change this problem.
Kate Oliver: Because you going for a walk at lunchtime or taking off your shoes every day, Claire, is going to be delightful for you, but isn’t going to change our sector. So we need to… Think about what radical change looks like. When we did the research survey, we asked what are your ideas for radical rest? And we got some fantastic, off the wall ideas.
Kate Oliver: evErything from nap rooms were quite popular. There was computers that automatically shut down after eight hours so you can’t do anything else. Yeah. We had no ban on desk lunches, freelancers getting paid holiday times. Affordable childcare, which I’m just going to leave there.
Kate Oliver: But the most popular things when we asked about radical change were actually these things that organizations are doing successfully. So looking at four day week and there’s a whole, if you google the four day week trials, there’s a whole load of evidence for how and why that can work and organizations supporting each other to do it.
Kate Oliver: So many organizations now have tried just closing down for a day, two weeks .64 million Artists now closes for the whole of August every year, and their director has written beautifully about the effects that’s had on the organization. So these, thinking about rest, I think thinking about the change we need for rest as radical, I think, puts it in a different space in your mind.
Kate Oliver: You’re not just thinking about your part in it, about, I’m going to go for a walk today, though that obviously is a part of it, and might feel very radical to you, because it is uncomfortable, but it’s also making you think about your colleagues and the wider sector and how we’re all trying to change to a different space, because this can’t just be the same as we are now, but everyone goes for a walk at lunchtime that’s not change, we need radical change in the sector, so we need to really, see a bigger shift in our cultural norms around risk.
Claire Bown: Yeah, and I think that’s a really good point to make as well, that it’s not an issue that should be solved by individuals. It’s something that needs that collective action, as you’ve said. I think that’s a really good point to wrap up. Perhaps you could tell people about how they could find out more about the Radical Rest Network and join, and maybe how people can find out more about you and book you for an intervention, or a talk, or
Kate Oliver: a workshop.
Kate Oliver: Absolutely, so if you google Radical Rest Kate Oliver, one of the first things will come up is an article I wrote for A New Direction, which is a great place to start on this. It talks about some of the research that we’ve talked about today, and there’s also loads of links to really useful resources If this is a topic that’s striking a chord with listeners, which I hope it will.
Kate Oliver: You can get the sign up link to join the Radical Ref Network there or in the show notes for this podcast. And if you’d like to get in touch with me again, if you look on LinkedIn, if you Look for Kate Oliver, Radical Rest, I should come right up. And or you can email me, I’ve got a very old school email, it’s cr underscore oliver at hotmail dot com.
Kate Oliver: And anyone’s welcome to get in touch, either to book me, or just to talk more about this issue, because, as you’ve seen from this, it’s a topic I can talk endlessly about, and I think it’s really important to talk about.
Claire Bown: Absolutely. We’ll put links for everything in the show notes for the Radical Rest Network, the articles you’ve mentioned, also the Journal of Museum Education, a special issue as well, and links to your LinkedIn and your email as well.
Claire Bown: But thank you, Kate. Thank you so much for coming on to the podcast and for talking about this. It’s been an absolute
Kate Oliver: pleasure. Thanks Claire,
Claire Bown: thanks so much for having me. So a massive thank you to Kate for being on the podcast today. I hope you enjoyed our chat. Go to the show notes to find out more about Kate’s work and sign up for the Radical Rest Network so that you can join in their next online meetup.
Claire Bown: And if you’re interested in participating in some gentle and restful slow looking, come and join us in the Slow Looking Club. We have monthly themes and regular get togethers All based around the idea of slowing down and noticing more. I’ll put a link in the show notes too. That’s it for this episode.
Claire Bown: Thank you for listening. I’ll see you next time. Bye.
Claire Bown: If you’ve enjoyed this episode, please share with others and subscribe to the show on your podcast Player of Choice. Thank you so much for listening, and I’ll see you next time.
Useful Links
Article summarising the Radical Rest project & research:
https://www.anewdirection.org.uk/blog/radical-rest-for-the-cultural-sector
Sign up for the Radical Rest Network: https://forms.gle/kaLvPzRRQmgbyQaS7
Connect with Kate Oliver on LinkedIn
Email Kate Oliver
Other great places to learn more:
The fabulous Nap Ministry’s “Rest as Resistance“: https://www.instagram.com/thenapministry/
GLAM Cares – wellbeing support for museum community engagement professionals: https://glamcaresnetwork.wordpress.com/
Four-day-week global trial results & how to advocate for: https://www.4dayweek.com/
How to unionise to improve working conditions: https://www.vice.com/en/article/v7gm4j/how-to-unionise-your-workplace
Low-cost counselling service for individuals who work in the Arts: https://www.wellbeinginthearts.org.uk/how-we-help-individuals/
Journal of Museum Education 2023 Special Virtual Issue: I QUIT!: ACKNOWLEDGING BURNOUT AND THE NEED FOR EMPATHY AND SELF-CARE IN MUSEUM EDUCATION https://www.museumedu.org/vsi/i-quit-acknowledging-burnout-and-the-need-for-empathy-and-self-care-in-museum-education/