public programs – American Alliance of Museums

These Museums Helped Welcome Immigrants and Refugees to their Community, and Yours Can Too!

By American Alliance of Museums

Welcoming America’s annual Welcoming Week enlists organizations around the country to welcome new immigrants and refugees into their new communities. This year, AAM is a national partner of Welcoming Week and is calling on museums to get …
Programs for People “Fifty-five and Better”

By Teresa Bonner

In 2018, twenty organizations enrolled in a special museum cohort of Aroha Philanthropies’ Seeding Vitality Arts® program. This is the third cohort of grantees that have received funding from Aroha, and training provided by Lifetime Arts, …
Is History Haunted?: Three museums explain their supernatural programs

By Andrea Malcomb, Mark Nardone, and Kristen Sheldon

Around October, the weather gets cold, the days get shorter, and the spine begins to tingle. People start looking for eerie activities to scratch the itch, whether haunted houses, horror movies, or ghost tours. This is an interesting …
Mystic Chords of Memory: Writing workshops as museum creative aging programs

By Bill Tramposch

Nearly a career ago, I visited a mentor and friend at the historical society he directed on a Saturday afternoon. As we sat in his office chatting, I heard a phone ring in the society’s library a long way down a cavernous hall. It rang and …
Getting Through to Creative Agers

By Bill Tramposch

As we develop creative aging programs for museums, it behooves us to think about how to make our efforts as engaging for the audience as possible. Doing this successfully requires a heightened sensitivity to the needs and interests of …
The Unexpected Joys of Launching a Creative Aging Program

By Elizabeth Merritt

In 2018, 20 organizations enrolled in a special museum cohort of Aroha Philanthropies’ Seeding Vitality Arts program. With funding from Aroha, and training provided by Lifetime Arts, these museums are developing high quality, intensive …
The Memory Café: Creating a museum program for people with dementia

By Norman Burns

At Conner Prairie—a Smithsonian Affiliate living history museum in Fishers, Indiana—we recently debuted a program for people with Dementia and Alzheimer’s. In partnership with the Central Indiana Council on Aging (CICOA) and Dementia …
An After-School Program Gives Refugee Children a Creative Boost

By Aimee Hunt

One of the many things that make Charlottesville, Virginia special is that it serves as a destination city for the International Rescue Committee, which helps refugees settle into their new countries. Since 1998, more than three thousand …
Curator as Catalyst: How an interdisciplinary fellowship inspired “a new way of doing museum”

By Dr. Edith Doron

A few years ago, I had the unique opportunity to work across four fiercely independent and starkly different museums in the fine arts, sciences, and natural history. After being awarded ACLS Public Fellow with the Carnegie Museums of …