Center for the Future of Museums Blog

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Cultivating AI: Developing AI Guidelines and Literacy Resources at the Carter

By Michelle Padilla & Jane Thaler

Each year, AAM’s TrendsWatch serves as the launch pad for a longer, deeper exploration of the forces shaping our world. In the following months following the release of the forecasting report, I look forward to emails from museums …
Announcing the Museum Playful Learning Collective: Shaping the Future of Early Childhood Education

By Deborah Spiegelman

I’m a huge believer in museums as essential educational infrastructure. Not just as providers of supplemental out-of-school experiences, but as organizations that excel in place-based, hands-on, experiential learning. This blog has …
Reviving Roots: Clyfford Still Museum and the Colville Confederated Tribes Partner for the Future

By Bailey Placzek & Michael Holloman

As part of the Alliance’s current Next Horizon of Museum Practice project, CFM has been highlighting stories of museums trying to redress the cumulative historical effects of harm to Indigenous communities, including damage to mental and …
Museum Apprenticeships as Entry Points for Future Leaders

By Margaret Koch, Samantha Garza, and Minsu Kwon

Earlier this year, the National Council of Nonprofits released a report documenting that workforce shortages continue to be a major problem for US nonprofits. The report also identified strategies being successfully deployed to recruit and …
Join Me for a New Series to Chat About the Future

By Elizabeth Merritt

Starting in August, AAM is piloting Future Chats, a series of short dives into some of the latest news. These one hour, online sessions will be dedicated to informal, interactive conversations about trends and events that are changing our …
Mental Health for All

By Elizabeth Merritt

This is an excerpt from TrendsWatch: Museums as Community Infrastructure. The full report is available as a free PDF download. “What mental health needs is more sunlight, more candor, and more unashamed conversation.” — Glenn Close, …
Livable Communities for Our Elders

By Elizabeth Merritt

This is an excerpt from TrendsWatch: Museums as Community Infrastructure. The full report is available as a free PDF download. “Ageism is a prejudice against our own future selves and takes root in denial of the fact that we’re going to …
Education for Our Children

By Elizabeth Merritt

This is an excerpt from TrendsWatch: Museums as Community Infrastructure. The full report is available as a free PDF download. “Given the challenges we face, education doesn’t need to be reformed—it needs to be transformed.” —Sir Ken …
Right-Sizing the World

By Elizabeth Merritt

This excerpt is adapted from TrendsWatch: Museums as Community Infrastructure. The full report is available as a free PDF download. “I don’t know why people feel unhappy when the curve of a graph fails to keep going up, but they do. Even …
Help Pioneer Better Measures of Museum Performance

By Elizabeth Merritt

What’s the best way to measure a museum’s success? And by “best,” I mean meaningful and sustainable. “Meaningful” in the form of metrics that will make a community feel it has been well served by the museum and demonstrate to funders and …