About Us

Curious Roots was founded by Clare Meakin, a heritage learning, engagement and evaluation practitioner with over a decade of experience across museums, science centres, community programmes and funded heritage projects.

About Clare

Clare began her career at the Science Museum before moving into senior engagement roles at National Museums Scotland, where she led major funded public programmes, secured and managed significant funding, and, crucially, sat on the client side of the evaluation relationship. She knows what it feels like to design a project, report to funders, commission an external evaluator, and wish in hindsight she'd built evaluation in earlier. That experience shapes everything about how Curious Roots works.

Clare brings the same rigour and curiosity to every commission, whether a two-hour sprint workshop or an 18-month embedded evaluation, with particular expertise in reaching diverse and seldom-heard audiences, from Year 2 pupils to retired community participants to students who stayed through their lunch break because they wanted to keep talking.

A 2019 Churchill Fellow, Clare researched international approaches to STEM participation and gender equity across the United States, Canada, South Korea and Japan. She holds a BSc in Biological Sciences and a Postgraduate Diploma in Organisational Behaviour, and her wider background includes work as a Research Manager delivering evaluation and research projects for national science organisations, professional institutes and universities.

Current projects

Curious Roots is currently delivering long-term National Lottery Heritage Fund evaluation projects for clients across the North West and North East of England, alongside bespoke evaluation and insight projects for organisations throughout the UK.

Previous projects

A recent Curious Roots commission supported a food justice charity on a National Lottery Heritage Fund project celebrating its area's agricultural heritage. The project ran community craft and skills workshops and gathered oral histories from local farmers, bringing them together in a community exhibition that honoured the area's past, looked to its future, and championed healthy eating in a part of the country classed as a food desert. Curious Roots designed a proportionate approach to capturing evidence of impact and produced clear findings the team could use.