Posts
Community Engagement & Impact
Partnering for Community Healing and Change at the John Michael Kohler Arts Center
Museums can play a role in destigmatizing addiction disorder. This article originally appeared in Museum magazine’s May/June 2024 issue, a benefit of AAM membership. What inspires a …
Toward Equity in Metadata: How Sandy Spring Museum Is Going beyond Reparative Cataloging
Equity: freedom from bias or favoritism Metadata: data that describes and provides context for digital items, which in turn helps users find and discover these resources. Though Black and …
Extending the Invitation: Strategies for Welcoming Visitors and Reducing Barriers to Access
In the aftermath of the pandemic and amidst ongoing calls for museums to become more inclusive and attuned to community needs, many institutions are still seeking ways to recover from …
You, Me, We: Tackling Identity and Discrimination with Young Audiences
In February 2023, Boston Children’s Museum opened a new exhibition called You, Me, We, which encourages families to connect with each other around questions of fairness in the world, …
Identity, Choice, and Emotion: New Approaches to Touring
As Learning staff at the Minneapolis Institute of Art (Mia), we regularly assess our tour offerings to understand what’s working well or where we may need to find new approaches. Over the …
Seizing the Moment: How Museum Outreach and Programming Can Champion Overlooked Communities
Sometimes, instead of waiting for an invitation, overlooked communities will come knocking at your door. If so, is your museum ready to be fearless, seize the moment, collaborate, share …
A Journey of Healing: Creating Co-Stewardship with Tribal Communities
What’s in a name? The language we use tells us who is speaking, from what perspective, and (implicitly), who controls the narrative. Names, in short, have power. Today on the blog, Caitlin …
Non-Traditional Internships Provide New Perspectives, New Educational Tools
Nemours Estate is not your typical historic site. The two-hundred-acre estate, home to Mr. Alfred I. duPont and his family from 1910 until 1970, is set apart from other stately homes of the …
Why Museum Store Sunday Matters and What’s New for This Year
Enter through the museum store! Much more than a gift shop, the museum store has become a major earned revenue stream for parent institutions as they continue to recover post-pandemic. And …
Lessons in Co-Locating: A Q&A with the Denver Public Library and Denver Zine Library
While attending this year’s AAM Annual Meeting in Denver, I stopped by Denver Public Library’s Bob Ragland Branch to visit another, smaller library located within this branch: the Denver …
Asset-Based Community Development: Shifting Museums’ Center of Gravity
Twenty-two years ago, I was leading the strategic planning process for a museum education department when I noticed something interesting. Even though we called ourselves the “education” …
A Toolkit to Measure Your Museum’s Social Impact
While social and community impact is increasingly viewed as central to museums’ missions as acknowledged in the Alliance’s most recent strategic framework, the issue of measuring that …