• The First Female Director of the Museum

• A new mission and initiative of the Yorkshire Air Museum and Allied Air Forces Memorial

• To Honour, Educate and Inspire

At the beginning of June 2019, The Yorkshire Air Museum welcomed a new Director. Barbara George began her role as the Director of The Yorkshire Air Museum and Allied Air Forces Memorial, as countries across Europe gathered to commemorate the 75th anniversary of the D Day landings.

It was perhaps a poignant moment in time to be assuming the role, as the Museum moves forwards into a new era of development and exciting new initiatives, both locally, regionally and internationally.

Who Is Barbara George?

The First Female Director of the Yorkshire Air Museum and Allied Air Forces Memorial.Barbara has worked for the Museum since 2014, assuming the role of Deputy Director in 2017.

She is a French national and also has Australian citizenship. Barbara has an MA in Applied Languages and Commerce and has lived and worked in the UK, France and Australia with extensive experience in the fields of management, marketing and communications, and a life-long interest in museums and history, volunteering until recently within the prestigious Collections Department of the York Minster.

Along with the Board of Trustees, Barbara is going to be launching a new Museum strategy this month.

This new Museum ethos is ‘To Honour, Educate and Inspire’.

Barbara comments, “Traditionally the role of museums used to be to collect and preserve objects and showcase them to the public. However, current visitors are now demanding a less static and more engaging and fulfilling experience. Our new strategy and ethos will place the visitor journey and learning at the heart of everything we do.”

“We want to empower people to take their own journeys of discovery at the Yorkshire Air Museum. We also want to make our collections and stories relevant to the diverse audiences who visit us.”

“One of the purposes of our strategy has been to rethink our mission as an organisation. We are satisfied that our new mission encompasses the values that our museum and memorial want to stand for. “

About The New Yorkshire Air Museum and Allied Air Forces Director.

Barbara completed a MA in Applied Languages and Commerce at Lille University, France. She is an accredited translator in English and French certified by the Fédération Internationale des Traducteurs.

She worked in London in public relations and financial marketing prior to moving to Australia to join her husband, a FA-18 pilot in the RAAF. In Australia, she was Marketing Communications Manager for the largest recruitment services provider in the country prior to studying immigration law in 2003.

She created a consultancy firm advising people on Australian immigration policy matters and translation services. She joined the Australian Department of Immigration and Citizenship in 2010 where she was Assistant Director and worked on various policy portfolios as well as a Parliamentary Inquiry into Australian immigration detention centres.

Barbara moved back to the UK with her family following an RAAF posting for her husband within BAe Systems. She started work at the Yorkshire Air Museum at the end of 2014 as Museum Manager (Development). She was promoted to Deputy Museum Director in 2017. She’s also been an archiving volunteer within the Collections Department of the York Minster for the past 4 years.

Barbara has been instrumental at Yorkshire Air Museum in creating strategies to bring more families to the museum and develop its educational programme for schools, increasing the school visits to the museum by 300%. Barbara is French with an Australian citizenship and is a member of the Museums Association and the Association of Independent Museums.

“I am very excited about our upcoming summer events, particularly our celebration of 50 years since the moon landing on 21st July which will be so much fun, followed by our family day on 28th July and our new revamped Thunder Day on 18th August. In between, there will be an action-packed summer of activities at the museum and much work to be done on planning new exhibitions”

http://yorkshireairmuseum.org/latest-news/introducing-the-museum-and-memorial-director/

Tags: 2019, June, News, Yorkshire Air Museum