AAM Board of Directors

Museums & Community Resolution

The American Association of Museums urges all museums to embrace their responsibility to be active and collaborative civic institutions and to respond to the aspirations and needs of citizens in their communities.

Prologue

Museums are community cornerstones. They are cultural symbols and contributors to community enterprise, stewards of collections, and providers of educational experiences. They are treasured places where memories are created and shared. But museums can also transform the way people view the world. They cultivate curiosity by revealing and interpreting cultures, ideas, and the discoveries of humankind.  Museums encourage people to examine what endures and to recognize truths that unify all generations and define our common humanity. They foster research and life-long learning and encourage the expression of differing points of view. These strengths accord museums the opportunity to assume an expanded civic role in society.

Therefore, in 1998 the AAM Board of Directors initiated an in-depth exploration of museums and their communities in the 21st century. The Museums & Community Initiative, informed by numerous dialogues between community representatives and their museum colleagues across the nation, resulted in a series of recommendations outlined in the AAM publication Mastering Civic Engagement: A Challenge to Museums (2002). The critical conclusion is that every museum has a unique and essential civic role and a responsibility to contribute to the health and vitality of its community.

Principles

These principles reflect the ongoing work of museums and represent the core ideas informing the Museums & Community Initiative:

• Museums are defining new relationships with communities based upon expanded mutual understanding, recognition of common concerns and interests, and a desire to collaborate for the benefit of the community.
• This process of expanded participation by museums in community life, and by communities in museums, is invigorating but hard work and requires an ability to take risks and entertain new ideas.
• Collaboration between museums and communities requires sharing creativity, vision, responsibility, and resources.
• Museums should strive to achieve diversity among boards, staff, and museum volunteers and reflect the diversity in the community that surrounds them.

AAM’s Commitment

AAM believes that being more engaged in community life presents challenges and offers important rewards.  Because AAM is strongly committed to this belief, it will:

• Provide opportunities for continued dialogue within the field about the role of museums in their communities;
• Provide support, through AAM programs and services, for individual museums to explore their role in civic life;
• Work with the museum field to develop ways to evaluate community involvement and to articulate and disseminate best practices;
• Work to develop relationships with national civic organizations to learn and share what others are doing to build stronger communities.