Eligible institutions include aquariums, arboreta, art museums, botanical gardens, children/youth museums, general museums (having two or more significant disciplines), historic houses/sites, history museums, natural history/anthropology museums, nature centers, planetariums, science/technology museums, specialized museums (museums with collections limited to one narrowly defined discipline—e.g., textiles, stamps, maritime, ethnic group), and zoos.
An applicant must be a museum that:
is organized on a permanent basis for essentially educational or aesthetic purposes;
cares for and owns or uses tangible objects, whether animate or inanimate, and exhibits these objects on a regular basis through facilities it owns or operates;
is a unit of state or local government or a private nonprofit organization;
has at least one professional staff member or the full-time equivalent, whether paid or unpaid, whose responsibilities relate solely to the museum’s services and operations;
is open and providing museum services to the general public on a regular basis (a museum that exhibits objects to the general public for at least 90 days a year fulfills this requirement);
and is located in one of the fifty states of the U.S., the District of Columbia, the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico, Guam, American Samoa, the Virgin Islands, the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands, the Republic of the Marshall Islands, the Federated States of Micronesia, or the Republic of Palau.
For applicants applying under the Flexible Participation Program:
A museum that does not have a full-time professional staff member needs to demonstrate in the application that it has the full-time equivalent of at least one professional staff member and that, if it is selected to participate in the program, one of the part-time professional staff members will serve as a contact and will oversee program activities. Professional museum activities include those responsibilities that relate to the governance, administration, programming, and collections management of the museum.
If a museum is not scheduled to be open to the public 90 days a year, it is still eligible to participate in MAP if it can demonstrate that, in the year preceding the submission of its application, the combination of days it was routinely scheduled to be open and days it was open by appointment equal at least 90 days.
A museum operated within a multipurpose public or private nonprofit organization such as a municipality, university, historical society, foundation, or cultural center may apply on its own behalf if:
the museum is able to independently fulfill all the requirements for eligibility listed above;
functions as a discrete unit within the parent organization;
has its own fully segregated and itemized operating budget;
and has the authority to apply on its own.
When any of these conditions cannot be met, a museum may apply through its parent organization, and the parent organization may submit an application(s) for one or more of its museums.
If your museum meets the eligibility requirements, apply to MAP. Please feel free to contact the MAP staff with any questions.
