Why Museums Matter for Young People: Lessons from Amsterdam to Singapore

Teenagers are swapping phone numbers at the end of a museum workshop. A young person who barely left home for three years is pitching their own exhibition to journalists. High school students in Los Angeles are teaching their younger siblings breathing exercises they first learned in front of a Van Gogh. Here is why museums matter for young people, and why they matter now more than ever.

Ask most people who museums are for, and young people tend to appear in only two roles: the primary school group on a trip, or the child in a buggy on a family day out. Somewhere between those early visits and adulthood, many of them drift away. The teenage and young adult years are often the point when museums lose them.

Yet these are exactly the years when young people most need what museums quietly offer. Anxiety, loneliness and uncertainty about the future are shaping a generation, and the places that traditionally support young people, from schools to youth services, are under strain. Many young people spend their days being measured, graded and compared, online and off.

Museums can offer something increasingly rare: a public space where there is no right answer. As one youth worker put it at a recent MuseumNext event, art has no scoreboard. Around the world, museums are using that freedom to support young people’s mental health, hand them real power, open doors to future careers and give them somewhere to belong. Here is what that looks like in practice, drawn from programmes featured on the MuseumNext blog.

1. Museums Give Young People Room to Breathe

Few places ask a teenager to simply slow down. Museums do it by design, and a growing number are turning that quiet invitation into structured support for young people’s mental health.

At the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, the Art Impact programme brought a cohort of high school students from partner charity artworxLA into the galleries for eight consecutive weekly sessions. Each followed the same reassuring rhythm: a grounding exercise, mindful looking in front of a single work, then journaling and group discussion. Teens imagined themselves inside Van Gogh’s Irises, feeling the sun and the soil, and walked slowly through Robert Irwin’s Central Garden.

The Getty team reported that participants’ evaluation feedback described lower anxiety and stress, greater comfort expressing themselves and a better ability to manage overwhelming feelings. One teen said they used to scan art quickly, but now slowed down, noticed the small details and let themselves really feel something. Education Specialist Brittany Prieto noted that the tools did not stay in the museum: participants used them at home to calm younger siblings and manage their own difficult moments.

In England, the Oxford University Museums took a similar idea in a different direction. Working with social prescribers from the charity Response, the Museum of Natural History and Pitt Rivers Museum ran an eight-week creative pilot for young people experiencing mild to moderate mental health issues. The brief was deliberately simple. “We realised that if the young people came and enjoyed the session, that was good enough for us,” said Susan Griffiths of the GLAM Community Engagement Team.

For some participants, walking through the museum doors was an achievement in itself. The programme team reported that, by the end, some participants had returned to school after long absences, others had found the confidence to seek work, and the group were swapping phone numbers to meet outside the sessions. Parents, invited to relax in the museum café while the sessions ran, gained a rare break too. As social prescriber Monica Reid put it, being in the museum allowed the young people to show their personalities and be who they are.

Across these programmes, trusted partners help young people get through the door and feel comfortable returning. Predictable sessions, time to talk and room to make their own choices give museum teams a practical starting point for planning similar work.

2. Museums Take Young People Seriously

Young people are used to being talked about, talked at and consulted in ways that change nothing. The museums making the biggest difference are the ones willing to hand over genuine responsibility, and to trust young people with difficult ideas.

Few have gone further than the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam. Since 2008, its Blikopeners programme has hired 15 young people aged 15 to 19 each year, not as guests or volunteers, but as paid co-workers earning minimum wage plus 25 per cent. They are introduced to every department, lead tours, plan public events and meet artists and directors. Several years ago, the museum’s marketing team went a step further and handed over the login to the Stedelijk’s official TikTok account. The teenagers create and publish content with no approval process.

It works because the trust was built first, through training, collaboration and clear shared values. The museum’s own impact study found that former participants took away confidence, career skills, a stronger sense of identity and a lasting connection to the arts. Many alumni say it was the first time they had been taken seriously.

In Iceland, the Reykjavík Art Museum noticed that very few of its school visitors were teenagers, and most of those who did come were art students who already felt at home. So it revived a forgotten 1990s partnership with the Reykjavík School of Work, the city’s long-running summer jobs scheme for 14 to 16-year-olds, and brought 600 teenagers into the museum to explore climate change through contemporary art.

The aim was not to frighten them with a dystopian future, but to invite reflection, dialogue and agency. Sofas and beanbags replaced rigid seating, educators kept the tone informal, and the teenagers were encouraged to form and share their own views. When asked to critique the art, they did so with honesty and often surprising depth. “We rarely ask how young people experience museums,” says Education and Mediation Manager Ariana Katrín Katrínardóttir. “Do they feel welcome? Do they feel seen? Do they feel trusted?”

The lesson for museums: trust is the programme. Pay young people where you can, give them real decisions, and don’t shield them from the complex questions they already care about.

3. Museums Open Doors to Young People’s Futures

It is easy to think of heritage as looking backwards. But for many young people, a museum or historic site can be the first place they are treated as a creative professional, with a brief, a budget and a real audience.

That is the thinking behind Shout Out Loud, English Heritage’s national youth engagement programme. In Animated Histories, a partnership with the Aardman Academy, young people toured heritage sites and learned stop-motion animation, turning historic spaces into miniature film sets. One standout participant aged 18 to 25 went on to receive a paid commission and mentoring from Aardman. In Focal Point, three emerging photographers were given paid research and development time and professional mentoring, and their work was exhibited at Stonehenge.

For Beyond the Plaques, young choreographers and producers were handed the budget, the time and the stories of four pioneering women from London’s Blue Plaque scheme, then left to decide what to make. The resulting film has screened at festivals and won awards in the UK and abroad. The biggest discovery was behind the scenes: the young people didn’t need creative help, they needed project management support. That insight is now built into English Heritage’s wider Young Producer Programme.

In Belgium, Musea Brugge has built careers into its youth strategy from the start. Through an open call, its Young Ambassadors programme recruits young adults interested in working in heritage and embeds them behind the scenes for months, where they challenge blind spots and propose improvements. At least one ambassador has moved into an internship and then a full-time role. “It’s about giving young people real agency to influence our work, not just offering them an experience,” says Lieven De Visch, General Coordinator of Exhibitions.

The Stedelijk’s Blikopeners tell the same story: years later, many alumni are working in museums and cultural institutions across the Netherlands.

The lesson for museums: a youth programme can be a talent pipeline. Paid commissions, mentoring and genuine professional experience give young people a foothold, and give the sector the fresh, diverse workforce it keeps saying it needs.

4. Museums Show Young People They Belong

For some young people, the deepest struggle is not a lack of skills or opportunities, but a feeling that society has no place for them. Museums, with their public platforms and civic status, can send a powerful message in return.

National Gallery Singapore has been running Strength Through Art (stART) since 2021, helping young people name their emotions, connect them to artworks and see their experiences from new perspectives. In 2024 it partnered with Fei Yue Community Services to adapt the programme for so-called hidden youth: young people not in education, employment or training, many of whom have experienced bullying, family instability and repeated rejection. For them, simply showing up was a significant act.

Youth workers co-delivered every session, the focus stayed on process rather than output, and participants worked in polymer clay, a medium that always registers the maker’s imprint. As Fei Yue’s Zoe Tee put it, art has no scoreboard: no right or wrong answers, no winners or losers. After ten sessions, their work was exhibited in January 2026 during the Gallery’s Light To Night festival and animated across the building’s façade as crowds stopped to watch.

One participant had been socially isolated for nearly three years and struggled to accept praise. By the end, they were pitching the exhibition to journalists. “I want people to know that youth like myself can be brave,” they said. “Youths like myself can be powerful, and we’re just doing our best to live our lives.” For Tee, the sight of the public standing and looking sent the message these young people most needed to hear: that society still has space for them.

Belonging can also mean having a stake in the place you live. V&A Dundee’s Streets Ahead challenge invited secondary school students across Scotland to redesign their local high streets for sustainability, accessibility and community wellbeing. Sign-ups came from 64 schools across 22 local authorities. Students interviewed residents, gathered data and built prototypes, and the finalists’ designs were exhibited at the museum. Teachers reported students emailing them during the school holidays, eager to keep working on their ideas.

The lesson for museums: your platform is one of your most valuable assets. Put young people’s work and voices on your walls, your façades and your festival programmes, and let partners who already hold their trust lead the way.

Young People Are Not Just the Future of Museums

The sector often talks about young people as the audience of tomorrow, a pipeline to secure the museum’s future. The programmes above suggest something different. Young people need museums now, and museums need them now too.
From a Los Angeles gallery to an Icelandic art museum, from English Heritage sites to a Singapore façade, these projects share a few common threads. They partner with organisations that young people already trust. They pay, credit and mentor young people rather than simply consulting them. They value process over polished outcomes. And above all, they treat young people as capable, creative and worth listening to.

In an age of anxiety, isolation and uncertain futures, museums can offer young people a calm space, a real voice, a first step into a career and a place to belong. We need museums for young people, now more than ever.

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