My buddy Kusuma Barnett, who has died aged 77, performed a major function in selling the usage of volunteers to assist improve the customer expertise on the British Museum in London.
As head of volunteers and volunteer programmes from 2001 to 2010, Kusuma was in a position to rework each facet of the volunteer provision on the museum, with the assist of the director, Neil MacGregor, and employees proper throughout the establishment.
This included Fingers On desks, the place volunteers have been inspired to have interaction with guests by providing them the possibility to deal with actual in addition to duplicate artefacts and to find out about and really feel the reference to the previous. When Kusuma first started volunteering within the late Eighties, there have been solely a handful of contributors, rising to about 50 or 60 by 1992. On the finish of her time as head of volunteers the full was nearer to 500.
She may by no means have imagined the trajectory her life would take when she arrived in Britain from Sri Lanka (then Ceylon, a British dominion) in 1964. Born in Colombo, she was the one little one of Kaluhath Rajapakse, a publish workplace employee, and Walasingha Gunawardena, a housewife. After attending a Roman Catholic secondary college she determined to journey to Britain on the age of 17, spending a 12 months serving tea on the Ceylon Tea Centre in London earlier than enrolling as a scholar nurse at St Mary’s hospital in Paddington, qualifying in 1968. Nursing was to not be her vocation for lengthy, nonetheless; she left in 1971, taking over numerous workplace jobs till in 1974 she started engaged on telesales for Haymarket publishing firm.
In 1976 she moved to turn out to be an workplace supervisor on the Reliance Service employment bureau, later rising to be an space govt in command of a number of places of work and dealing there till 1988. After leaving that place she grew to become a part-time self-employed marketing consultant to Reliance, utilizing her spare time to take an artwork historical past diploma at Birkbeck, College of London, adopted by a grasp’s on the Courtauld Institute of Artwork in 1998.
By that point she was carefully concerned with the British Museum volunteers, taking on as head in 2001, a full-time job for which she refused any fee. She was made MBE for her work in 2006, stepping down as head in 2010, however continued to volunteer till early in 2022.
The internationalism of the British Museum’s collections and audiences mattered vastly to Kusuma, putting her on the coronary heart of a worldwide neighborhood, epitomised by the museum’s worldwide coaching programme, the place her classes have been drastically valued. Her recommendation was sought by many different museums and historic websites that have been eager to both introduce or broaden their volunteer coaching.
Earlier than her loss of life Kusuma requested a buddy to ensure she got here throughout as “sort, enjoyable and fabulous” in her funeral tackle. What was spoken in jest was certainly the reality; she was a vivid character who lit up many individuals’s lives.
Kusuma is survived by her husband, Michael Barnett, a marketing consultant anaesthetist, whom she met when she was a nurse and married in 1972.
