Community Engagement & Impact

Non-Traditional Internships Provide New Perspectives, New Educational Tools

By Annie Thomas-Bubel

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 period by the legacy Mr. duPont left after his …
Why Museum Store Sunday Matters and What’s New for This Year

By Tia Bianchini, Stuart Hata, and Susan Tudor

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 as museums and other cultural institutions embrace …
Lessons in Co-Locating: A Q&A with the Denver Public Library and Denver Zine Library

By Adam Rozan

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 Zine Library. My host for the visit was volunteer …
Asset-Based Community Development: Shifting Museums’ Center of Gravity

By Susan Longhenry

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” department, we had worded nearly all of our intended …
A Toolkit to Measure Your Museum’s Social Impact

By Michelle Mileham & Emily Johnson

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 impact with a reliable and valid tool has been a …
Museums as Disaster Responders: A Q&A with Former FEMA Administrator Craig Fugate

By Adam Rozan

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 of the “third place,” and a conversation I had …
A History of Museum Resilience: Q&A with Author Samuel Redman

By Adam Rozan

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 careers, where the work of museums was so …
Taking a Stand: A Q&A with Micah Parzen, CEO of the Museum of Us

By Adam Rozan

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 Museum of Us, had been on a trajectory for several …
#AAM2023 General Session

By American Alliance of Museums

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 Industry Chicago; Laura Lott, AAM President & CEO; …
4 Ideas to Create Linguistic Accessibility at Museums

By Irma Cedeno Verdon

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 through the lens of inclusivity and diversity and …