By Kinshasha Holman Conwill and Alexandra Marmion Roosa

This article was published in Museum News May/June 2003.  

The environment that museums and other nonprofits operate in has changed a great deal over the past decade. Today, museums deal with a multitude of information sources and new technological applications, greater cultural diversity, and increased competition for talented and qualified staff. In addition, their constituents now demand that museums play a greater role in their communities.

“Museums are facing a tide of social change in which building social capital and social networks is critical,” says Diane Frankel, program director for children, youth, and families at the James Irvine Foundation, San Francisco. “This has led to increasing efforts for finding ways for people to come together. This change also presents enormous opportunities to engage both specific communities and entirely new communities.”

Since 1998, AAM has worked to help museums fulfill those opportunities through its Museums & Community Initiative (M&C). M&C was initiated with a series of dialogues—convened in late 2000 and early 2001 with community and museum representatives around the country—that provided AAM with data from the field. During the dialogues, we learned that some museums already were playing an expanded role in their communities. But many others lacked the organizational capacity to build stronger community partnerships—i.e., adequate time and money, a strong leadership commitment, an organizational culture that embraces change, and staff skilled at listening to community voices and establishing community relationships. We discovered that without the support of their directors and boards, it was extremely difficult for institutions to sustain an expanded civic role. And we found that the most successful organizations had made a substantial commitment to nurture staff, board, and volunteer growth. The next step was to share these lessons with the field.

With that in mind, AAM produced two publications, Mastering Civic Engagement: A Challenge to Museums and A Museums & Community Toolkit, which incorporate the lessons from the dialogues and encourage museums to pursue their potential as active, visible players in community life. On Dec. 20, 2002, the AAM Board of Directors passed the Museums & Community Resolution, urging all museums to embrace their responsibility to be active and collaborative institutions and respond to the aspirations and needs of the citizens in their communities. (See “AAM Board Approves Museums & Community Resolution,” Museum News, March/April 2003, page 69; the resolution is posted on the AAM Web site at www.aam-us.org.)

Recognizing that museum professionals benefit when they can share with and learn from their colleagues, AAM developed the “Building Community Connections” seminar. Launched in January 2003 in Los Angeles and Philadelphia, the seminar gathered diverse groups of participants—from directors and trustees to curators and educators—to share stories, work plans, and strategies on how museums can become more community-conscious and civically engaged. In Los Angeles and Philadelphia, attendees heard a variety of perspectives—including those of community representatives, funders, and museum staff—about how to improve the relationship between museums and their communities. The seminar will be offered again in Chicago in September and New Orleans in May 2004. (Editor’s note: The comments in this article were made by participants at the January seminars.)

Coming to Terms with Civic Engagement

Participants at the January seminars discussed such terms as “civic engagement”—individual and collective actions designed to identify and address issues of public concern—and “social capital”—a set of informal values or norms shared among members of a group that permit them to cooperate with one another. These terms are new to many people in the museum field. Participants also came to understand that the word “community” can hold different meanings for different institutions. The community of a large museum in Detroit, for example, will look very different from that of a rural museum in Minnesota. As Robert D. Putnam writes in Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community, “We speak of the community of nations, the community of Jamaica Plain, the gay community, the IBM community, the Catholic community, the ‘virtual’ community of cyberspace, and so on. Each derives some sense of belonging among the various communities to which we might, in principle, belong.”

But what is common to all museums is the fact that staff, board, and volunteers can greatly benefit by efforts to understand and convey the institution’s civic role. Adopting the principles of Museums & Community, says Robert R. Archibald, chair of the M&C National Task Force, is less about new business and more about different ways of doing business.

Community Engagement in Practice

Museums can enhance their community relationships in a variety of ways, from an expansion of existing programs to cross-institutional or community partnerships to a full-scale, institution-wide exploration of their civic role. For example, the Japanese American National Museum (JANM) in Los Angeles organized “The Power of Place: The Boyle Heights Project,” a multi-year collaboration that documents the diverse history of the “Ellis Island of the West Coast.” It includes an exhibition, a broad array of public programming, and a free outdoor concert. Says Executive Director and President Irene Hirano: “This cultural history project involved organizational partners [the International Institute of Los Angeles, the Jewish Historical Society, Self-Help Graphics, and Theodore Roosevelt High School] that were not necessarily museums or cultural organizations.” The exhibition, which ran from Sept. 8, 2002, to Feb. 23, 2003, displayed photographs, artifacts, artwork, moving images, and oral histories, collected over two years in community forums, object collection days, and interviews. “This project has had incredible results,” says Hirano. “We’ve achieved the most diverse visitorship we’ve ever had. We’ve also witnessed a great sense of ownership and pride from the participants.”

The California Science Center’s (CSC) master plan helped that museum expand and deepen its community relationships. CSC is the principal landowner of the 160-acre Exposition Park in south-central Los Angeles. In the late 1980s it began a 25-year plan to reinvent the institution and its surrounding space. As a result, “we’re changing the culture and the whole approach to the organization,” says President and CEO Jeff Rudolph.

“As there were many competing interests involved—our museum, the park, the local community, and other museums—we felt it was crucial to put together a community advisory group, to be sure everyone had a say in the plan,” he continues. “We then worked together to develop a plan that really recognized the competing needs for green space, parking, and institutional issues.” The project also was part of an extensive effort to change the way CSC’s staff, board, and volunteers approach their work. One example of this change: during a planning exercise last year, the staff was asked what the institution’s core values were, and “accessibility and inclusiveness came out on top.”

At the San Diego Museum of Contemporary Art, a change in the institution’s definition of “community” led to a change in the way it serves that community. “While our institution’s original facility, founded in 1941, is located in the small, wealthy, primarily Caucasian community of La Jolla,” says Director of External Affairs Anne Farrell, “a conscious decision was made to define our community more broadly. Thus it not only encompasses the 1.3 million individuals who reside in San Diego but also the 2 million individuals who live just 20 miles away, across the border in Tijuana, Mexico.” To reflect this shift in institutional commitment, the museum began to acquire and exhibit work by Latino artists and translated brochure and label text into Spanish, making it “a much more welcoming place.” Much of what the organization does, including a significant expansion of its ancillary downtown site, is about building community connections, says Farrell.

Sustaining Community

For community collaboration to be successful, it “must have institution-wide support,” says Schroeder Cherry, deputy director of museums at the federal Institute of Museum and Library Services, Washington, D.C. “The director, board, and staff need to understand the collaboration’s nature, and be supportive.” Diane Frankel of the Irvine Foundation concurs: “For community partnerships to be authentic and sustainable, the desire to be civically engaged must be part of a museum’s DNA.”

To fully pursue their civic role, some museums have organized into teams that include staff from the entire institution. In this way, ideas for long-range planning, exhibitions, and programs don’t just come from “program staff but from other parts of the organization,” says JANM’s Hirano. “We are modeling the process we use in our external partnerships . . . to create opportunities for staff at different levels.”

“Having a board, staff, and volunteers that reflect your community is important,” says Rudolph of the CSC, who often asks people in the community to review his museum’s values and vision. “As we develop partnerships and programs with others, we can find the common areas of interest . . . and that makes for a stronger relationship.”

Strong community partnerships can be reactivated when it is mutually desirable, says Jessica Arcand, director of education at Pittsburgh’s Andy Warhol Museum. But they must be based on trust and reciprocity and more than just the museum’s agenda, she adds.

Like other types of relationships, museum-community partnerships must be nurtured. “Collaborations are relationships based on trust,” says Cherry. “They take time to develop. . . . They require ongoing dialogue.” Says Claudine K. Brown, program director, arts and culture, Nathan Cummings Foundation, New York: “Resources should be shared on both sides. Each partner should be in a better position for having participated in the process.”

The key to a successful partnership lies in “finding the right community organization, being willing to listen,” and not presuming the community’s needs, says Nancy D. Kolb, president and CEO of Philadelphia’s Please Touch Museum. “Get to know potential partners beforehand,” says Cherry. “What are their real assets? Do they visit the museum already? What’s in it for them? What does the museum stand to gain?” But first museums must ensure that their processes, decision-making, and actions are open, available, and understandable to the public.

Please Touch “got started by hiring a part-time social worker, Elaine Vaughn, who is now a museum vice-president,” says Kolb. “This is hard work, [so museums should] hire the right expertise—people who have been trained to work in the community.” Nancy Torres-Bedoya, department director of Home Visiting Education and Outreach Programs at Congreso de Latinos Unidos, describes her organization’s partnership with the museum as a great success: “Our motto is ‘Mi casa es su casa.’ That’s the feeling we got when working with Please Touch, and it’s the sentiment I wish we could feel when entering every museum.”

A Work in Progress

Civic engagement is an ongoing process, and AAM is committed to providing more tools to help museums with this work—including seminars and annual meeting sessions; publications; dialogues with the Councils of Standing Professional Committees, Regions, and Affiliates; and updates on the Web (www.aam-us.org).

AAM also is forming partnerships so it can learn from and share with other organizations working to build stronger communities. One example is the Nonprofit Listening Post Project, a multi-year partnership with the Center for Civil Society Studies at Johns Hopkins University. The project will explore how fiscal pressures, competition with for-profits, and new demands for accountability are affecting nonprofits, and the creative ways organizations are responding to these challenges. AAM has recruited 100 museums to participate with more than 1,000 other nonprofits; these organizations will serve as “listening posts” by providing data on national trends within the nonprofit sector.

There is much more that needs to be discussed and shared about the role of museums in their communities, and AAM will work to provide opportunities for continued conversations on the topic. In conjunction with the museum field, the association also plans to develop new ways to evaluate community involvement and articulate and disseminate models of best practice.

The work that lies ahead may be hard at times, but it is certain to be worthwhile. In learning more about its community, the museum also may learn a great deal about its value to the public, and in the process discovernew strategies for sustainability and success.

Kinshasha Holman Conwill is a senior policy advisor and Alexandra Marmion Roosa is project manager of AAM’s Museums & Community Initiative.