Posts
Community Engagement & Impact
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 …
Museums as Disaster Responders: A Q&A with Former FEMA Administrator Craig Fugate
Have you ever wondered what it takes to create a strong, lively community? Recently, this question led me to revisit the work and writings of Ray Oldenburg, who first developed the concept …
A History of Museum Resilience: Q&A with Author Samuel Redman
When the pandemic arrived and made its far-reaching impact on our people and institutions, many wondered if we would ever recover. Few could recall such an existential crisis during their …
Taking a Stand: A Q&A with Micah Parzen, CEO of the Museum of Us
While for some museums the pandemic was a wake-up call to reimagine how they engaged and served their communities, for others it was an opportunity to go deeper. One of those museums, the …
#AAM2023 General Session
The General Session of the 2023 AAM Annual Meeting & MuseumExpo took place on May 19, 2023 with Chevy Humphrey, AAM Board Chair and President and CEO of the Museum of Science and …
4 Ideas to Create Linguistic Accessibility at Museums
Though the word “accessibility” has often been equated with giving access to those with disabilities, it can also mean something broader. Accessibility means looking at everything we create …