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Handbooks are marvellous and essential reading for those setting up and running Friends groups, organising volunteers and rallying supporters, writes Carol Bunbury. They provide distilled wisdom from hours of research and years of experience, answer many questions, prompt many more that every group needs to consider, and remind us of those obvious questions that are so easily forgotten. However, there is nothing quite like talking to people with similar interests to encourage and inspire us when we begin to falter and wonder why on earth we ever began! After all, people are the inspiration behind our cultural organisations, and it is love of the gardens, art, architecture, and everyday objects that people have created, and interest in the lives they have led, that is the foundation of Friends groups throughout the world.

The British Association of Friends of Museums (BAFM) is dedicated to helping Friends and volunteers to understand, and work effectively to support, the professionals. BAFM is run by volunteers representing Friends groups throughout the UK, and our membership is drawn from Friends groups supporting a range of cultural institutions ? from the British Museum and British Library, to local museums and museums of specialist interest.

BAFM publishes handbooks and information sheets and provides a model constitution approved by the Charity Commission and a newsletter, but the most valuable support we give is in bringing groups of Friends and volunteers together. Every year BAFM organises meetings in Northern Ireland, Scotland, Wales and each of the English regions, as well as an annual conference, which moves to a different part of the country each year. These meetings focus on a particular topic and bring together Friends and professionals from different areas, different backgrounds, and with an amazing range of experience in their working lives. What they all share is a passionate interest in their museum or gallery, and it is often surprising how a thread of interest can run through a wide variety of museums, so that a common interest is discovered and friendships are forged. Like all good friends, when Friends get together there is much chat and many ideas are exchanged, and problems seem less daunting when the realisation comes that they are not unique.

Some Friends have nothing to support! The Friends of Harrow Museum developed out of the Harrow Historical Society and became a pressure group urging the formation of a museum of local history. Years of effort were sustained and energies renewed by membership of BAFM, meeting those whose museums were well established and picking brains, not to mention visiting a good many museums. Harrow Museum, which opened in 1986, was initially run by volunteers from the Friends, and now has a paid curator who works with the help of volunteers.

Another benefit that follows from Friends getting together is publicity. Good Friends are good ambassadors. Talking to a Friend, hearing snippets of interest, picking up a leaflet ? all these things encourage a visit. Harrow is not a place most of us readily associate with a moated manor house and a tithe barn, but the Harrow Museum is housed in a tithe barn and plans are afoot to refurbish the manor house.

BAFM is also a member of the World Federation of Friends and through their meetings world-wide is able to learn from, and to assist, Friends in their support of museums in countries where conditions are often much more difficult than in our own.

Meeting up with Friends from other museums has many benefits, some of them tangible, many of them intangible, but it is worthwhile and enjoyable and helps to keep the Friends role in perspective so that the institutions we support reap the benefit.

Carol Bunbury is Secretary of The British Association of Friends of Museums.
t: 0870 2248 904;
e: secretary@bafm.org.uk