Community Engagement & Impact

Making Space for Community Partners

By Ravon Ruffin

The 2019 AAM Annual Meeting was hosted in Louisiana—a state known for its rich culinary and musical traditions that attract droves of tourists. But another notable, though less touristy, aspect of Louisiana is that it has historically had …
Serving Broader Audiences, Museums Engage Communities with Public Space

By Erin Flynn & Andrew Barwick

Many of today’s museum leaders recognize a need to engage more closely with the public, and a related desire to make their facilities and programs more flexible and valuable. In order to achieve these goals, it can be useful to explore new …
What Kind of Ancestor Will You Be?

By Omar Eaton-Martínez

As Facing Change Senior Diversity Fellows, I and my associate fellows have been tasked with supporting museums as they address the lack of racial diversity in the governances of their institutions. In this journey, I’ve been reminded of a …
Museums and the Census: How can you help?

By American Alliance of Museums

The 2020 United States Census is right around the corner, with National Census Day taking place on April 1, and it’s time for museums to start thinking about how they’ll be involved. This once-a-decade process of counting the country’s …
A Welcoming Week Celebration on the US-Mexico Border

By Ann Fortescue and Claudia Martinez

This fall, AAM partnered with Welcoming America to encourage museums to participate in its annual Welcoming Week, in which organizations around the country welcome new immigrants and refugees into their new communities. For one AAM member, …
Belonging: Co-creating welcoming and equitable museums

By Sandra Bonnici

“Can you describe a time you felt unwelcome or like you didn’t belong in a museum?” This question was posed during a recent conference call for the Facing Change Senior Diversity Fellows. As I listened to my distinguished colleagues …
It Takes a Village: How community partnerships made for a winning summer camp formula

By Jeff Ludwig & Zachary Finn

For museums with the resources and opportunities to do so, offering a summer camp is a great way to open up the doors to students whose guardians might need the structured daytime hours a camp provides, and to offer students an interactive …
Leveraging MAP for Capacity Building: The Sierra Mono Museum experience

By Sam Shogren, MPA

The Sierra Mono Museum and Cultural Center—a small, rural, nonprofit museum set in the California foothills just south of Yosemite National Park—is today undergoing a one-million-dollar renovation thanks, in large part, to its recent …
Sites of Healing: The Michigan State University Museum turned to community co-curation to tell survivors’ stories of sexual violence.

By Mark Auslander and Amanda Thomashow

This article originally appeared in the November/December 2019 issue of Museum magazine, a benefit of AAM membership. Michigan State University (MSU) has been ground zero of the largest crisis of sexual abuse in the history of North …
The Advantages of Being a Small Museum

By Carissa Pfeiffer

Despite visiting only rarely, I have a strong affinity for New Orleans, the “big sister” of my own hometown: Savannah, Georgia. Both were historically port cities, sites for the global movement of goods, ideas, and people (willingly and …