Our mission

The Fitzwilliam Museum aims to:

• touch people’s lives by engaging powerfully, thoughtfully and pleasurably with as wide a public as possible
• produce and promote innovative, relevant, and interdisciplinary research of the highest quality around our collection

We will achieve our aims by

• providing a place, physical and virtual, that takes people out of their daily lives and gives space to think, wonder, find inspiration and question the world around them
• promoting dialogues around works of art and material culture, and the many cultural, political and social issues they represent and embody
• exploring and developing our collection collaboratively, placing objects in their historical, artistic and cultural contexts, and demonstrating why they matter today
• building, preserving and documenting our collection for the future, ensuring it is fully accessible now and for centuries to come.

Our Values

The Museum and our projects will always be inclusive, thoughtful, distinctive, welcoming, rigorous, challenging, unexpected, uplifting and entertaining.

All our decision-making will be guided by these values

Our Strategic Priorities

1. Developing our methods for ensuring access to culture for all
2. Ensuring a multiplicity of voices and approaches in our research
3. Embracing a global history of art and material culture
4. Creating immersive and interactive exhibitions and displays
5. Providing a distinctive, sector-leading digital museum experience
6. Fully supporting the collective ambitions of the University of CambridgeMuseums (UCM)
7. Building, maintaining and improving the care of the collection
8. Developing an extraordinary building that unites and realises these aims

To ensure our success, we will need:

9. A work and management culture for the Fitzwilliam that fulfils our mission
10. An organisational structure that sustains our priorities
11. A happy, diverse, inclusive and open-minded working community
12. Appropriate and sustainable resourcing and revenue