Center for the Future of Museums

Food: a Recipe for Successful Museums

2012-02-02T11:37:00.000-05:00

I hope you’re planning to get together with colleagues to share “Feeding the Spirit: Museums, Food & Community,” CFM’s free webinar on Feb. 17, and explore food literacy, values-based food service and community building.

If you’re still mulling over the webcast menu,I bet this guest vlog (video blog!) from Eliza Fournier will convince you to join us at the table.

Eliza shares how theChicago Botanic Garden uses its Green Youth Farm and other garden-basedprograms to integrate food into their operations, get visitors excited aboutconservation and mentor the next generation of museum staff. (Which,incidentally, also builds a more diverse staff, thus helping to address thedemographic challenge facing museums.) She also explains why Feeding the Spirit(originally a symposium, now a webinar) is so useful.

Areyou interested in implementing a youth garden at your museum? Eliza shares theChicago Botanic Garden’s “recipe for success” in the webcast’s discussionguide, the “Feeding the Spirit Cookbook.” The Cookbook itself will be madeavailable to registrants before the webcast, but here is a sneak peek, sharingEliza’s recipe

Recipe for Success: Youth Engagement with a Side of Sustainable Farming

Chef: Eliza Fournier, green youth farm manager, Chicago Botanic Garden

Description:

This tasty recipe will yield a holistic youth development program, using sustainable agriculture practices, that includes: cooking, nutrition, leadership development and work-readiness skills mixed in with a little old-fashioned farm work.

The Chicago Botanic Garden has been involved in community gardening outside the walls of its Glencoe site for its entire history. Since 2003, it has deepened its connection with the community through its Urban Agriculture programs, which include the Green Youth Farm initiative for youth and the Windy City Harvest certificate program for adults. Green Youth Farm consists of four off-site sustainable agriculture (small) farms, each of which employs 20+ high school students mid-May through mid-October. Participants experience life on the farm while gaining an appreciation for how their food is produced, harvested and marketed to patrons of the Chicago Botanic Garden and members of their communities.

Ingredients for Success:
Leadership: No substitutions for this ingredient. You must have highly inspired and committed internal leaders to “raise the dough” and provide the institutional support needed to support this effort year after year.

Space: You need fertile soil in which to grow your gardens (and students). This can be on-site or off-site on park/forest preserve, school or purchased land. Important ingredients include access to water, office space and fencing. If your space is on urban land, make sure to utilize raised beds to avoid growing in contaminated soil, which can spoil the recipe.

Staff: At a minimum, one full-time/year-round staff member to run the program. This is a painstaking and complex recipe that takes committed and skilled staff whom you will want to have around for the long term. The best quality staff people for this recipe will have experience in working with youth, farming and team-building/program delivery. To serve 25-30 students on a ¾- to 1-acre site, we recommend one full-time/year-round coordinator, one full-time seasonal grower (six months) and two full-time seasonal interns (three months).

Curriculum/plan: Fortunately, lots of people have made this recipe before, so there is a wealth of information and training available to people who are attempting this dish for the first time.

Instructions:
Raise the dough. This can be done through the institutional budget or through outside fundraising from corporate sponsors, individual donors, family foundations and/or government grants. A diverse mix of these sources will yield the optimal flavor balance.
Hire the staff. The pool of candidates with the right mix of personality, experience and education is ever-growing. There are many on-line resources that can help you recruit quality staff for your recipe, including ATTRA (or National Sustainable Agriculture Information Service) and Slow Food USA.
Gather available curriculum/program materials. Maybe even participate in some training with an experienced “chef” to make sure you understand the steps to this recipe.
Identify the land where you will create this recipe. Is it on or off-site? Does it have the key qualities listed above? Do you have long-term permission to use the space? (Note: Steps 1–4 can be performed simultaneously or in reverse order. Sometimes it’s best if step 4 happens first to avoid future conflicts!) If the land is off-site, identify community partners who may already be doing similar work and who may be able to help you: a) identify staff and/or students from within the community to participate in the program, b) help provide pieces of the recipe you do not feel so confident about, c) procure or share resources such as gardening materials, advice, etc.
Develop a site plan. Make sure to include raised beds if you are planting in urban soils!
Recruit students. Participating in high school career days or just setting up a booth during lunch are great ways to raise interest.
Build your garden. It is great to include high school students in the initial construction of the garden. (Note: Don’t fret about yields in your first year. The most important produce is your students and the built farm.)
Repeat and add your own special ingredients to make the resulting recipe your own unique blend!
Notes on Technique:
Recipe has the tendency to double, triple and quadruple! Sustainable food systems are a very popular topic right now, and if done right, people experiencing your recipe will undoubtedly want more. Consider how much you are willing to undertake before embarking on the adventure that is this recipe.

The key ingredient in this recipe is staff. The right (and enough) staff with the right skill sets will help you avoid having to redo this recipe over and over.

There are great opportunities for institutional synergies in this recipe. Youth participants can grow food for your museum’s café and support your museum’s gift shop through value-added products (food and other products, e.g., cookbooks, etc.). Today’s youth participants are tomorrow’s museum employees. Field trips for discussion with museum staff about careers help make our museums even more accessible to the communities we serve. Youth are advocates for our museums. They help inspire folks who previously may have never heard of our institutions.

More Information:
For the Chicago Botanic Garden’s interpretation of this recipe, visit www.chicagobotanic.org/greenyouthfarm.

For the original recipe (including curriculum and manuals) that we adapted for our use, visit www.thefoodproject.org.

Register for the Feeding the Spirit webinar now to ensure you receive the Feeding the Spirit Cookbook: A Resource and Discussion Guide on Museums, Food and Community. We encourage you to host a potluck at your museum and participate in the webinar as a group, using it as a jumping off point to explore how your museum can help improve food literacy, incorporate mission-related values into your food service and use food to reach new audiences.

This webinar incorporates content presented at the “Feeding the Spirit” symposium hosted at the Phipps Conservatory and Botanical Gardens in Pittsburgh, Penn. on October 13, 2011. The webcast is made possible by the generous support of our host, LearningTimes.

Feeding the Spirit, the symposium and webcast, is the result of collaboration between AAM’s Center for the Future of Museums, the Association of Children’s Museums, the American Public Gardens Association, Phipps Conservatory and Public Garden and the Carnegie Museums of Pittsburgh, with the generous support of presenting sponsor UPMC Health Plan and Sodexo.

IMLS Strategic Plan, 2012 – 2016: Creating a Nation of Learners

2012-01-31T11:59:00.004-05:00

Last month IMLS released the IMLS Strategic Plan, 2012 – 2016: Creating a Nation of Learners. Recently I had the opportunity to sit with director Susan Hildreth and discuss how she sees the plan shaping the future of IMLS and the nation’s museums. Here are some nuggets gleaned from that extensive interview.

On changes in IMLS’ focus embodied in the plan

Our performance improvement model is the most significant difference. We have asked projects for a number of years to develop outcome or output measures, but we haven’t looked broadly at all of our investments—our grant projects—to see what’s really working. Now we will look at how the investments we’ve made are working and use that knowledge to shape the framework of projects that we support in the future. The performance improvement model hopefully will make our investments more meaningful and show our funders that we’re really making an impact.

On the effect the plan may have on museums in 20 years

I think the strategic plan will help move museums into a place in their communities and also on the federal landscape where they’re seen as critical elements. We know that, on the ground, museums are the heart of the community. But at the federal level we have to be able to make the case that museums are integral to the educational ecosystem of a community.

On how the educational system in the U.S. might be changing

IMLS continues to support the evolution of education from a static model—one in which we’re presenting information that the student is supposed to be taking in—to an environment where students are becoming more adept at their own creativity, their own questioning, their own learning path, developing critical thinking skills and forming a relationship with the subject matter, their teacher, with student peers.

On how museums of the future might need to be different in order to meet the needs of their communities

Museums and libraries for many years were seen as repositories for information, for content, for objects, for paintings, and as places to go and experience things in a very non-interactive way. Now we’re in a world where it’s much more about your own experience of the information, the object or the art. I think the staff in museums has to be ready and willing to accept the role of facilitator of the individual or visitor experience. In a way, it’s giving something up—you don’t control the experience anymore. You try to make it useful and helpful but also flexible so that the visitor can really get what they want out of the experience not what you want them to have. It’s being willing to really walk in the visitor’s shoes and create experiences that are meaningful to them and allow them the opportunity to develop their own understanding and their own skills.

On potential collaborations between museums and libraries

It would be interesting if a museum and a library worked together to determine a couple of collections where the museum had a lot of visual content and the library had a lot of print content that they can bring that together virtually so people would get it all in one place. It would be really powerful! People just want to know about a subject, they don’t necessarily want to say, “Well, I have to go to this museum or that library.” How great would it be to have a library with a special local collection about an author or an event, and then for the museum down the street to have pictures and all kinds of information about that same subject? Why couldn’t we mash it all up so somebody would just find out all there is to know about that theme? Doing that virtually would only encourage someone to pursue their interest at the library or the museum.

On rethinking museums’ relationship to and investment in their buildings

I think in order for a museum to really be successful and relevant to its community, it’s got to engage with young people who can begin at an early age to understand what an exciting experience museum-going is—how it enriches their life and what they can learn from being in and experiencing a museum. I know it’s very difficult to afford the buses and the insurance to get kids to museums. Are museums anticipating that ultimately they may have to take materials out from within the confines of a building into the community? That goes on already—museums have traveling shows and exhibits. etc., and many museums are already light years in thinking ahead about that, but it’s something that museums as a whole have to face.

I think it is important for museums to look at their physical assets and how they will use those assets in the next 10 to 20 years. Museums and libraries represent a huge investment in built infrastructure in our communities. If the interest in the museum itself was completely lost, that physical structure could either fall into decay or into the hands of, say, a night club or a big events space—something social but non-cultural. On the other hand, museums could take advantage of their physical assets even if they don’t necessarily have as many visitors or enough support for all their exhibits and collections. What could museums do with their physical asset to make it more of a community convening place? In the long run, they might have to give up some of the space they are using now for the collection. I am strongly suggesting that museum staff be very proactive about thinking how can we use our buildings to become part of our community so we don’t end up in a situation where, if they’re membership goes down or if funding falters, they don’t have a Plan B, and find themselves taken over by some other commercial entity.

On how people view digital assets versus real experiences

There may be individuals who say “I want to go to the Museum of Modern Art. I want to see that stuff face-to-face. I want to have that experience.” But I also think that having material from the museum available digitally could really whet someone’s appetite. I would say it’s not “either/or.” It’s like when people say “There are eBooks. Why do you need a library?” You can have eBooks and you can have a library because in a purely one-dimensional virtual world you’re never going to get kind of added value or curation. Ultimately, there’s really nothing like the real thing.

Drawn Together: Drawing Club convenes at AAM Annual Meeting

2012-01-26T11:05:00.002-05:00

Scott Stulen is the project director for mnartists.org, one of the programmers of the Walker Open Field Program, creators of Drawing Club and a visual artist. Here he gives us a sneak peek of something to look forward to at the AAM Annual Meeting in Minneapolis Saint Paul, April 29–May 2.

The creative process can be a private, solitary experience. Socializing within the art community can be an equally alienating activity, comprised of tedious networking at art openings and other awkward formal encounters. In response to these challenges, mnartists.org, a project of the Walker Art Center, developed Drawing Club. The intent of Drawing Club is to use the simple act of drawing as a connective social platform for sharing and collaboration. Each week throughout the past two summers Drawing Club invites artists and the public to gather under the trees of Walker Open Field. Picnic tables are converted into outdoor drawing stations, outfitted with a generous array of art supplies. Atop the head table lays a working pool of drawings from prior weeks alongside fresh sheets of paper. Each participant is invited to either start a new drawing or choose a piece in progress from the pool to alter, edit and amend. Subject matter and materials are open; the only rule is that every drawing must contain the contributions of at least two people before it can be declared complete. The finished works are collected, documented and uploaded to the Web. While many wonderful drawings are produced, the intent of Drawing Club is to create a comfortable space for artists and non-artists alike to socialize and connect. It is in many ways the backyard bbq or local pub of Open Field—a balanced mix of regulars and new faces making work and hanging out.

The Drawing Club program is overwhelmingly popular attracting local artists and museum patrons, families and tourists. The scalability, openness and simplicity of the program make it an ideal model for recurring platforms. For instance, on busy family day Saturdays, every table is activated with paper and pencils, while the activity can condense to one station on the occasional cold and windy Thursday evening. Another contributing factor to Drawing Club’s sustained success is its roots within the local artist community. The program originated from and is managed by mnartists.org, a division of the Walker that supports the local artist community. Drawing’s Club’s weekly hosts are mnartists.org staff, who themselves are practicing artists. These rooted connections provide validity and comfort for established artists, while the format and anonymity of the process allow for participants of all levels to lose their inhibitions and participate without fear of exposing any artistic shortcomings. In a very simple way Drawing Club embodies one of the core principles of Walker Open Field program by converging the institution, artists and the public at the same picnic table.

Drawing Club at AAM

Drawing Club is bringing social art making to the AAM Annual Meeting this spring. Join fellow conference attendees and Minnesota artists in creative collaboration as part of the MuseumExpo™. Socialize; sketch, converse, debate and most of all enjoy yourself. The Drawing Club Lounge will be a perfect site to spend a few minutes or perhaps a couple hours, meet up with colleagues or just pass time between sessions. Drawing Club facilitators and host artists will be on hand to interact with participants and lead discussions. We are also working on some surprises for this special edition of Drawing Club at AAM which we will announce closer to the event. Drawings will keep evolving during the conference so you can check back on how your contributions were integrated by other artists or view the completed drawings on our Facebook and Twitter feeds. No appointments, materials or talent is required to participate. Hope to see you across the drawing table in late April.        

Horizon Report: Museum Edition

2012-01-19T12:48:00.000-05:00

For this week’s suggested reading we bring you the Horizon Report: Museum Edition. Released at the MCN Conference this past November, this report examines emerging technologies for museum education and interpretation. I encourage everyone to take a moment to read at least the executive summary for this year’s report, it’s an accessible overview of how museums are currently, and can in the future, use these technologies.

What is perhaps most gratifying in reading these trends is seeing how many have been popping up in the blog over the past year. You just need to read Perian Sully’s post on the Balboa Park Online Collaborative’s new image uploader and Elissa Frankle’s post on Citizen History at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum to get a sense of how some museums are using these technologies.

Take a moment to compare the top six to watch over the next five years to what was suggested in last year’s report.

	2010 Horizon Report	2011 Horizon Report
Near-term horizon (within the next 12 months)	Mobiles	Mobile Apps
	Social Media	Tablets
Mid-term horizon (two to three years out)	Augmented Reality	Augmented Reality
	Location-based Services	Electronic Publishing
Far-term horizon (four to five years out)	Gesture-based Computing	Digital Preservation
	The Semantic Web	Smart Objects

It’s interesting to see how technology trends for museums, have shifted and what has come up on top. Mobiles and mobile apps are so closely connected, though now with all the abilities in location awareness (think about programs like Google Latitude where you can track the location of your friends at any moment), museums are able to tailor apps to visitor-specific locations. The Horizon Report uses the Balboa Park’s Mobile Apps and the National September 11th Memorial and Museum as examples of institutions that have begun to take advantage of the possibilities.

Another piece that intrigued me was the shift in the top “significant challenge” facing museums in adopting these technologies.

2010:

Far too few museums are crafting a following a comprehensive strategy to ensure that they can keep pace with even the most proven technologies.

2011:

Content production has failed to keep up with technology in an era when audiences expect to consume information whenever and wherever they want.

It appears that in 2011 it became more about the visitor than specifically about the museum.

My questions to you, readers:
What are your thoughts? Do you agree with the top six technologies to watch over the next five years? What do you think is going to show up in 2012? And finally, do you think that the advisory board chose the correct top challenge facing museums?

-Guzel duChateau, CFM Program Coordinator

Innovation Ignites: Announcing the 2012 Lab Museums

2012-01-17T15:21:00.000-05:00

Cue fanfare! I am so happy to share with you the names of the museums that have been selected to participate in the inaugural round of Innovation Lab for Museums. AAM is bringing Innovation Lab to the museum field through a partnership between the Center for the Future of Museums and EmcArts, generously funded by a $500,000 grant from MetLife Foundation. I will use this post to introduce you to the three funded projects, as well as six others recognized by the panel for their excellence.

However, I want to start by sharing some of my observations from studying all thirty-one applications to the Lab, and listening to the deliberations of the selection panel. Here are a few things leapt that out at me:
It seems that the biggest barrier to museum innovation isn’t financial, or logistic, or any lack of creative ideas: it is our own internal culture. Many of the applications said, in one way or another, “we have to find a way to break through existing mindsets, break down barriers between departmental silos. We have to give people an incentive to change, and get them on board.” There seemed to be a tendency for the proposals to originate in the education departments of the applicants, and often the source of resistance to change was identified as curatorial. Take that as you will.
Many museums either don’t know, or take for granted, their own histories of innovation and experimentation. Our knowledgeable, experienced selection panelists (who are listed in the press release) often seemed to know more about what the applicants had done in the past than was reflected in the narrative of the proposals. Did the applicants not know or not appreciate their own track records of creativity? As we well know, those who ignore the past are doomed to repeat it. Even worse, (if they forget their successes) maybe they won’t repeat it.
Maybe caution and innovation are antithetical. Several interesting projects were set aside by the panel as being too timid, too small to effect real change in the organizational culture. Innovation = risk = willingness to fail. And we, as a field, don’t have a culture of being supportive of failure. Sure it is nice to hear about successes, but wouldn’t you like to avoid the mistakes others have made, as well? I think AAM need to find a way to celebrate great failures. I’m open to suggestions.

It was a struggle for our selection panel to choose among many highly qualified projects, but I am pleased to tell you that the three projects chosen by MetLife Foundation for funding, based on the panel’s recommendations, are:

The Levine Museum of the New South, for their project The Latino New South, which addresses how history museums can play a role in integrating Latino immigrants into community life. The Levine wants to develop a model that can be used in other parts of the country.

The Nelson Atkins Museum of Art for the project Beyond Museum Quality, which asks, how do we move our organizations from overvaluing accuracy and undervaluing populist perspectives to one that values both equally? What does this shift mean for the role of the curator? As the proposal notes, “Art museums in particular, are struggling with moving beyond bursts of participatory acts, to an institutional goal of engagement that values visitor participation as an essential part of the museum experience.”

And the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts’ project Youth Arts: Present/Future will establish a new approach and pathway for youth education, one which goes beyond merely making art to enable young people to become “creative thinkers” and “social changemakers.”

Faced with so many worthy projects, the selection panel recommended that AAM recognize an additional six proposals as “Innovation Projects of Excellence”. These are:
Armand Hammer Museum of Art and Cultural Center: ARTeries: Creatively connecting teenagers and the arts, Los Angeles
Birmingham Museum of Art: Making the Traditional Arts Museum Relevant, Ala.
deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum: deCordova/Lincoln Nursery School Partnership, Lincoln, Mass.
Oakland Museum of California: Applying Participatory Practices to Audience Development, Calif.
Tucson Museum of Art: The Museum as Sanctuary: Expanding Museum Communities with Programming for Refugee Populations
Valentine-Richmond History Center: Community Galleries Exhibit and Program Development, Richmond, Va.

It’s AAM’s hope that these projects may still be implemented in some form, even if that has to be outside the Lab format, and I look forward to telling you more them in future posts!

Watch this Blog, Dispatches from the Future of Museums and AAM’s Aviso for announcements regarding future rounds of Innovation Lab for Museums.

Go forth and innovate…

Questioning Assumptions: Museums in the 21st Century

2012-01-12T10:45:00.000-05:00

I hope you have been following my posts on the Forecast of the Future of Museum Ethics being conducted by CFM and the Institute for Museum Ethics at Seton Hall University. CFM and IME staff are compiling the (copious) input provide by our Oracles and over one hundred public participants. While we wrestle this into a report for Oracular review and subsequent release, I want to share these thoughts from one of our Oracles, Fred Stielow, VP and Dean of Libraries, Course Materials and e-Press at the American Public University System (APUS). Fred recently shot us some observations from his Blackberry while flying at 30,000 feet, pushing us to question our deeper assumptions and (re)start from a radically revised understanding of “museum” in the 21st century.

AAM is currently attempting to forecast some 25 years into the future. The questions in the forecast are rooted in the defining National Standards and Best Practices for U.S. Museums. My experience with the forecast to date reflects a solid exercise. The questions are appropriately phrased and the Likert scaling fits.   

Yet, something is also off-kilter—or at least for someone like me who operates virtual information systems within a fully online university. I think the forecast reflects a vision still rooted in the 19th century. In that century, nationalistic forces (aided by an emerging mass press) enabled new social spaces for public "culture," edification and education. The idea of "museum" was soon split into independent archival, library and museum institutions.

Those creations still exist, but the underlying model and the justifications for it are changing. First-World countries no longer have the same burning need to establish and underwrite their legitimacy through public educational institutions. Equally important, we have entered a communications revolution on par with the introduction of print. The Web is not just another technological tool. It is immersive and all-encompassing.   

To project the future without an (alternate) starting point in the virtual realm simply seems questionable. The assumptions certainly are different if you start there. Applications on the Web are tantamount to publishing. They raise separate sets of ethical questions in terms of access, but also crucial economic and identity matters with ethical implications.   

The triumphal rise of Web 2.0 is similarly hard to ignore. The Web's Long Tail and community-building functions proffer a far different concept of membership than spatially-defined quarters with local identifications.  

On the Information Highway, comfortable walls between archives, libraries and museums vanish. Cultural institutions and massive projects that unite many institutions, like Europeana. There the drive is widespread digitizing and Open Access in the hopes of fostering a new Renaissance. Yet, such altruism can mask a myriad of ethical and identity issues--as well as economic opportunities. Such impacts may also merit review.

The wonk in me cries out for considerations of a near future with augmented reality. Ubiquitous computing is also on the horizon. Everything around you can become a source of interactive information and personalized for the receiver. And all of this has ethical implications.

In sum, I find the present survey adequate for what it is; however, the view from 30,000 feet suggests something more to truly address the future.

Do you have a 30,000 foot view of the future you would like to share with readers? Email me at futureofmuseums@aam-us.org to pitch your idea for a guest post on the blog, and comment on Fred’s vision below.  

Advocacy Day 2027: museums fight to regain nonprofit status

2012-01-10T12:15:00.000-05:00

I looked across the table at the poised young woman politely scanning the figures I had pulled up on the airscreen between us. “Ms. Guerrera,” I said, palms sweating, “as you can see, in the ten years since the Federal Government withdrew tax exempt status from museums, the number of museums in America has been reduced by half. Half! The 2015 National Museum Census identified 26,000 museums serving their communities across the country—the latest census found fewer than 13,000. That means 13,000 museums closed in the past decade—putting almost 100,000 people out of work, reducing the number of school visits by 20 million! Not to mention the scientific, historic and artistic heritage that has been lost to the public.”

I straightened up in my seat, looking her confidently in the eye (as I’d practiced in my training session earlier that day.) “I’m here to ask Senator Prahada to vote “yes” on the American Culture and Education Bill, restoring tax-exempt status to any museum that can demonstrate sufficient public value, while meeting the other requirements for 501(c)3 status.”

“But how would they demonstrate ‘sufficient value’?” asked Ms. Guerrera, shrewdly. “As you know, the number of institutions receiving tax-exempt status was sharply reduced in order to help balance the federal budget. Museums are nice—I like them myself! But they aren’t essential services. The hospitals kept their status by documenting the number of patient nights they provide the public. Schools report on student achievement and graduation rates. What impact do museums have?”

“I’m glad you asked,” I said with a broad smile, waving at the airscreen to bring up my next graphic. “Let me walk you quickly through the report just released by the American Association of Museums summarizing the research over the past twenty years that shows how museums contribute to educational achievement, health, the economy and quality of life in the U.S.”

I could see I had her attention…

*******

Think this little scenario of the future is far-fetched? With government at all levels desperately seeking new income sources, museums are being cast as “luxuries” or “amenities” rather than essential public goods. Consider these troubling indicators from just this past year:

Thousands of charities, including museums, lost their tax-exempt status when the IRS cleaned house, scouring their records for organizations that had failed to keep up with the requisite paperwork.

An increasing number of cities instituted or raised the levels of Payments in Lieu of Taxes, essentially charging museums for city services such as water, sewer, and security. The Boston PILOT Taskforce considered a payment that would assign a fee to the city’s museums based on a fixed rate multiplied by the number of museum visitors. Clearly that formula treated museum visitation as a cost, not a benefit, to the community!

New Orleans’ city consultant recommended abolishing tax-exempt status for museums. The legislation currently being considered would settle for requiring a nonprofit (including museums) to prove it “relieves the government of a burden or provides important public benefits.”

How can forecasting help prevent having to make the argument my fictional future self is struggling with in 2027?

Step one, spot the early signals that identify the forces—political, cultural, economic—that will shape legislative policy, and imagine where they might lead us. We take museums’ nonprofit status for granted, right now, but scanning the news shows us that assumptions could easily be overturned.

Step two, identify what we can do in the present to avert dark futures, like that sketched above, and take us on a brighter path.

Here is the important step you can take right now:

Register for Museums Advocacy Day, and join hundreds of colleagues from across the country in Washington on February 27 and 28. The training and networking provided will help you to be an effective advocate for your museum and museums in general on a local, state and national level, and you will have the opportunity to take your message directly to your elected national representatives.

And if you are interested in delving more deeply into the political future of museums, join me at the workshop I will be leading on the morning of Monday, February 27, Forecasting the Future of Policy. I would love your help in exploring the trends and events shaping the national attitude towards museums, and discovering how this can shape what we do now.

Let’s make sure when your museum’s staff attends Museums Advocacy Day in 2027, they have a happier conversation than I have in my dark scenario above.

Museum Food Services: Serving up our Missions and Eating our Words

2012-01-06T08:48:00.000-05:00

What do visitors eat, when they come to your museum, and what messages do they take away from the experience?

We’ve devoted many posts on this blog, over the past year, to celebrating how museums can help their communities improve their health through an exploration of food and healthy eating. And We’ve spent many column inches documenting how museums are tackling issues of conservation and green design. How can we embody our mission and values in those parts of our operations devoted to actually feeding our visitors?

This is one of the themes we will explore in our free webcast “Feeding the Spirit: Museums, Food & Community” on February 17.

Thought leader Elizabeth Meltz, director of food safety and sustainability, Batali/Bastianich Hospitality Group will join us to explore how museums can integrate green design into the way they operate their food services. She’ll help us think about choosing what we serve, how we serve it and how to bring food service staff on board with these changes.

At many museums, this involves working closely with a food service contractor. In this video Chazz Alberti, national director for culinary development, Leisure Division, Sodexo, interviewed by AAM’s Susan Breitkopf, talks about the potential for making the dining room into the “fourth wall” of the museum and integrating it into museum design and mission delivery.

Chazz challenges us to consider: how can museums think about reducing the carbon intensity (carbon foodprint?) and water use of the food we choose to serve? How do we communicate to the visitor what choices we are making, and why? As Chazz points out, “wellness starts at the end of a fork, not at the top of a medicine cabinet,” and museums are in a good position to distribute “prescriptions for health” through their food services.

Register for the webcast now to ensure you receive the fabulous pre-webinar material! We encourage you to host a potluck at your museum and participate in the webinar as a group, using it as a jumping off point to explore how your museum can help improve food literacy, incorporate mission-related values into your food service and use food to reach new audiences.

This webcast incorporates content presented at the “Feeding the Spirit” symposium hosted at the Phipps Conservatory and Botanical Gardens in Pittsburgh, Penn. on October 13, 2011. Feeding the Spirit, the symposium and webcast, is the result of collaboration between AAM’s Center for the Future of Museums, the Association of Children’s Museums, the American Public Gardens Association, Phipps Conservatory and Public Garden and the Carnegie Museums of Pittsburgh, with the generous support of presenting sponsor UPMC Health Plan and Sodexo.

It’s Up 2 You!

2012-01-03T12:51:00.000-05:00

The best way to get your message out is through whatever format your audience is already attuned to. This is not always (big shock) a 200 word exhibit text panel. The most effective medium might be video, a blog, a game, or a graphic novel. This week’s guest blog is by Lisa Falk, director of education at the Arizona State Museum (ASM), University of Arizona, in Tucson, where she is the lead curator and project director for the Through the Eyes of the Eagle: Illustrating Healthy Living installation at ASM and project director and co-writer of the museum’s new comic book It’s Up 2 You!

The Arizona State Museum (ASM) is tackling a very hard assignment: how to talk to teenagers about obesity.

Nearly one-third of adults and children in the United States are overweight or obese and that rate is nearly double among American Indians/Alaskan Natives. Half of Native American children born today will develop type 2 diabetes, and the death rate for Native Americans with diabetes is three times higher than the general U.S. population. At ASM we look for opportunities to connect to contemporary issues, providing perspective, engagement and a safe haven for community members to learn about and reflect on how these issues affect their lives. The epidemic of obesity and attendant health problems afflicting our Native American community is not something we can ignore.

So we wrote a comic book.

This project grew out of Through the Eyes of the Eagle: Illustrating Healthy Living, an exhibit based on a children’s book series of the same name, which deals with diet, physical activity, history and culture with an emphasis on the Native American experience.

But we didn’t want this to be just an exhibit of flat art aimed at young children, so we developed a variety of exhibit elements, programs and activities that broaden the audience and localize the focus of the story. One great spin off is a comic book with messages similar to the original Eagle books but aimed at teens and with more of a Sonoran Desert look to the illustrations. Local Native American educator and artist Ryan Huna Smith worked with me to create the book with funding from the Kresge Foundation. Support from the John and Sophie Ottens Foundation enabled us to develop the PDF comic book into an interactive website and mobile app.

Ryan and I struggled with how to make the comic’s message interesting to youth, especially Native American and Latino youth, two groups hard hit by diabetes. We met with groups of teens to develop our storyline and figure out what information about diabetes and prevention to include. It turns out the teens didn’t know much about diabetes, but they knew what they liked and did not like. They did like Ryan’s Amerimanga/Japanimation style of drawing. But: no talking animals, no glossing over the hard stuff, and no black and white on the issues. They wanted reality, grey area, and to see themselves in the characters. We invited them to create their own comic strips dealing with healthy living and from this came the idea for the comic’s Scrooge-like dream sequence showing the horrors of diabetes and the joys of healthy living based in Native American traditions. The teens also helped generate the title, “It’s Up 2 You!”, expressing the story’s “big” message.

Making the comic accurate and effective, as well as attractive to the teens, required a lot of expert partners. Agnes Attakai at the UA College of Public Health helped to ensure the story reflected the right messages. Alicia Eller of the American Diabetes Association of Southern Arizona helped assemble facts and myths about diabetes and questions for a healthy challenge game in the digital versions. The Ha:san Preparatory and Leadership School recorded youth and elders speaking the parts of the characters Samantha, Brandon, Tomás and an elder in Tohono O’odham, Spanish and English for the digital version.

With funding and encouragement from Pima County Health Department’s (PCHD) Communities Putting Prevention to Work project, we distributed 5,000 copies of It’s Up 2 You! at our multi-cultural health fair A Healthy Celebration and to local Native and Latino organizations and schools. The comic is hosted on PCHD’s new family-oriented website HealthyPima.org and available as a free mobile app on iTunes. The Web version is available as a free download to be added to any website. A traveling exhibit of the comic is also available.

What’s the “big message” of this project for the readers of this blog? When it comes to your personal health or that of your community or your museum—It’s up to you. Will your museum choose to be a community game changer? If so, what’s the right message, what’s the right medium, and what partners do you need to make a difference in the world?

A Recap of 2011

2011-12-27T11:14:00.001-05:00

This week I took a look at the most-read posts of 2011. By “voting with your mouse” you help us identify the trends and developments that you think are most interesting and relevant to your work.

What does it say about us as a field that the most popular story of the year was It’s Not About the Cat Cams from the Philbrook Museum of Art? I’d like to think it stems from the serious attention we are giving to the power of social media and its ability to radically expand the number of people interested in our museums. I suspect it is because the video is so damn funny. (I want to see a sequel in which the cats—carefully escorted, of course—are set loose in the museum. Cat as art critic?)

Given the state of the economy, and the number of newly minted museum studies graduates looking for positions, it’s no surprise that Landing a Job in the Museum of the Future came in a close second after the cats. Another top ten post on that topic was The Workforce of the Future Starts Now. In 2012, we’ll continue to scan for any hints we can pass along regarding how museums will recruit, train and retain staff in coming decades.

Another theme that got a lot of attention from readers was the effect of the economic crisis on museums. The Future of Development: Crowdsourced Funding reviewed how museums are using social media and the web to finance projects via small donations, often from people previously unconnected to the museum. On the other hand, Museum Ethics in a Gilded Age explored the ethical dilemmas that may arise in a future in which museums are even more dependent on wealthy individuals.

Museums are using the internet to solicit input and expertise, as well as funds, from the public. Museums & Wikipedia and More Crowdsourced Scholarship: Citizen History present case studies of the costs and benefits of this approach, and how it can best be managed.

I am please that the Let’s Move! Museums & Gardens campaign, fighting childhood obesity, is getting so much attention. Read about the campaign in Let’s Help America Move! and sign up to be a Let’s Move! museum. Over 500 organizations have joined this effort—our ambition is to swell our ranks to 3000 in 2012.

Saving the Historic House bridged the themes of financial stability and fighting obesity, as Woodlawn shared how it has partnered with Michael Babin’s Neighborhood Restaurant Group to create Arcadia Center for Sustainable Food and Agriculture. I am a total fan of their work!

And readers were clearly intrigued by the Transformative Power of Innovation exemplified by Innovation Lab for Museums, launched in 2011 by AAM and EmcArts with funding from MetLife Foundation. Stand by for an announcement in early 2012 of which three museum projects were selected to participate in this first round of the lab. We look forward to sharing the lessons they learn from their experiments.

Best wishes for 2012 from the Center for the Future of Museums and all of the staff here at AAM. Let’s make it another step along the way to a bright future…

Klaatu barada Santa: Cyper St. Entropy enters museum space

2011-12-22T10:23:00.002-05:00

My co-authors for this year’s Xmas post are John Simmons and Sally Shelton. We firmly maintain that we have not and will never be replaced by cheaply constructed androids.

'Twas the Night before Christmas, a snowy cold night,

While making my rounds I’d just turned off the light.

The exhibits were lovely, with faint dustings of snow―

Oh, wait. That's just arsenic. (at least it’s not blow!)

The loans had been processed, the donations accessioned,

Documents filed, requests re-refreshened.

And, after arranging the hors-d'oeuvres by size,

The curators left early to un-socialize.

(They had not much to do in the way of curation—

Our objects had been through full digitization.

Reality morphed into bits and to bytes—

The managers shifted to researching rights.)

No creature was stirring in any direction—

Our mice were all wireless, no cords there for flexion.

The stockings were hung by the chimney with care

(with good 3D glasses they appeared to be there).

And I, in a case study, studying cases,

Wondered if we had all covered our bases.

If anyone came in to see the real thing,

All we could offer was pixels and bling.

And what if visitors didn’t have smart phones or iPads?

If our fancy-pants apps went the way of all fads?

When, what to my bloodshot eyes suddenly glared

But an actinic light at the top of the stairs.

(It’s a good thing we didn’t use retinal scans

In our high-tech and high-price security plans.)

And then, in an instant, I heard on my phone

Scraping sounds made by a pilot-less drone.

As I turned to find ammo, I heard a strange sound,

As Cyber St. Entropy crashed to the ground.

His eyes, they were lasers. His face, much like Gort’s.

He was shiny and sleek, and just lousy with ports.

Whirring sounds came from his joints and his belly,

Which could have held gallons of holiday jelly.

He had a small bag, nothing much, nothing finer—

It turns out the elves had been outsourced to China.

All of its contents beeped, hummed, glowed, or sparked,

And his sleigh flashed erratically where it was parked.

He spoke not a word at first, then started talking,

Sounding a bit too much like Stephen Hawking.

He reprogrammed our systems, access and entry,

To keep out the riff-raff but let in the gentry

He added great handfuls of memory freely,

So our digital holdings could for once be seen clearly.

He lit up the galleries in LED modes,

And replaced all the labels with new QR-Codes

Making use of the latest Augmented Reality

He programmed our dinos to engage in depravity

While checking our finances’ state of liquidity,

He nuked the AS virus (Artificial Stupidity).

Then, checking his work to see what he’d beget

He pressed down the button labeled “reset.”

And, laying a digital digit to nose,

While blinking all ports, to the ether he rose.

But I heard him exclaim as his drone-sleigh took wing

“Next year I expect you to show the “real thing!””

Steampunk, Crowdfunding and the Power of Social Media

2011-12-20T10:21:00.000-05:00

Or, How One Exhibit Company Pulled A Brass Elephant Out Of A Hat

This week’s guest post is by Peter Overstreet. Pete and his wife, Cat Taylor, founded the exhibit and event design company Aeronaut Productions LLC. Pete was a full-time illustrator with experience in games, theater and film, who entered the world of exhibit design after joining the team that designed and assembled a traveling exhibit on the American space program—NASA: A Human Adventure. Pete is also the director of a Steampunk theatrical company called Legion Fantastique. This unique combination of skills and experience put him in a perfect place to respond to an opportunity presented in a Facebook message from a friend: “Hey, Pete, there is a museum in Anaheim that is interested in doing an exhibit on Steampunk. I thought you might like to talk to them.”

The MUZEO, a small, city-owned exhibit space in downtown Anaheim had recently arranged with a local collector of Victorian art and ephemera to borrow his extensive menagerie for an exhibit. One of the MUZEO’s marketing staff suggested adding a “Steampunk” theme to bring in younger visitors, hence the call for Steampunk help that led them to us. They initially thought of this as a small “supporting” exhibit, but we were so excited by the possibilities that Aeronaut proposed a full exhibit called Steampunk: History Beyond Imagination.

Our ambitions went beyond an exhibition of quirky sculptures made of lamp parts, leather top hats and goggles. We wanted the exhibit to be a journey into the origins, aesthetics and future of the Steampunk phenomenon. We mainstreamed historical elements into the exhibit, including—with the help of several Disney artists who were also members of the Anaheim Historical Society—tying the world of Steampunk in with the history of Anaheim itself. (Did you know that if Walt Disney’s film “20,000 Leagues Under The Sea” had flopped, his company would probably have to auction off the orange groves that were about to be turned into what is now Disneyland?)

But there was a problem. How could we come up with sufficient funds to make our vision a reality? We suggested launching a Kickstarter campaign (Kickstarter is an online crowdfunding site) to raise a portion of the budget, and the MUZEO staff agreed.

First we needed a compelling video to make our pitch on Kickstarter. I made phone calls and frantic emails to rally a crew to help make a small, fanciful appeal for funds. What I thought would be 15–16 people turned out to be a rabid crowd of 60 people all dressed in their finest Steampunk regalia. On a boiling July afternoon, we filmed a madcap commercial that not only helped us raise funds, but also gave potential investors a feel for the wonderful world of Steampunk.

The video was a huge success. We pulled together over $10,000 for the exhibit, and we made contacts with artisans who were willing to loan us their fabulous pieces of Steampunk-themed art! We had tapped into something that we hadn’t thought of initially—going to the community that would chiefly have an interest in the exhibit and allowing them to be a part of the production of the exhibit. We brought our supporters along for the ride by posting a semi-regular video production blog on YouTube, tweeting and updating our Facebook group almost daily.

The exhibit’s chief strength was the amazing pieces of Steampunk art from around the United States. We would never have been able to borrow so many quality pieces of art had we not involved the greater Steampunk community by putting out an open call for submissions.

This social transparency provided us with the opportunity to contact owners of artifacts – including a gentleman who was building a full-scale replica of the Time Machine from the 1960 George Pal film of the same name. We made professional connections with companies like Disney, Warner Bros. and the owner of the Classics Illustrated comic book franchise, aiding us in acquiring licensing and usage rights with some of the items in our show.

We were also able to involve prominent Steampunk enthusiasts in the design process by allowing them to critique our efforts. Many effective changes were made thanks to help of people like the “Steampunk Scholar” Mike Perschon and the crew of the Neverwas Haul.

Our blog entries became more sporadic as we labored on the show to the very last few minutes. Friends and observers, who had kept abreast of our progress through our social media efforts, came to our rescue more than once and chipped in with physical help and or much needed words of encouragement.

On October 23, 2011, Steampunk: History Beyond Imagination opened to the public.

The ribbon cutting ceremony was swamped with hundreds of people who had all come to see both exhibits—many of them had heard of it through Kickstarter, Facebook or Twitter. We and the MUZEO staff learned just how powerful a tool community involvement had become for funding and organizing exhibitions like this!

Futurist Friday: Uglies, Pretties, Specials and Extras

2011-12-16T12:25:00.002-05:00

“The function of science fiction is not always to predict the future but sometimes to prevent it.”—Frank Herbert

This week’s guest post is by Kat Burkhart, executive director and curator of the Carnegie Museum of Montgomery County. Kat is a not-so-closeted sci-fi fan who offered to contribute to Futurist Friday from her reading list of favorites.

In a previous CFM Blog post we were encouraged to read more science fiction. Here is one selection with a new twist on an old theme. If you enjoyed reading the Hunger Games, you should appreciate this series as well. Enjoy some light reading over the holidays.

Good science fiction includes imaginative world building in addition to a quality plot. Scott Westerfeld’s series Uglies, Pretties, Specials and Extras builds a futuristic world we can recognize as not to distant from our own.

Set 300 years in the future, after all oil was violently destroyed by a bio-engineered microbe, this coming-of-age tale conforms to all the standards of traditional dystopian science fiction, with a fresh look at an old tale. Partially inspired by the 1964 Twilight Zone episode Number Twelve Looks Just Like You, the premise of the books is that at age sixteen everyone either undergoes massive plastic surgery to become “pretty”—just like everyone else—or runs away to live in the wild. Those that turn pretty have all their needs met and spend all their time partying and having fun.

In classic science fiction mode, the story showcases new and amazing technology, such as hoverboards, hoverstruts and hovercars and lots of nanotechnology. It also includes interface rings and body sensors which connect the wearer to the electronic world. Without the interface it is as if a person doesn’t exist- doors won’t open and elevators won’t respond. “Smart” cars will run over someone who is not connected to the system.

Something for us all to think about in the era of Reduce, Reuse and Recycle.

Recycling without reuse—everything is completely disposable.

“She turned her gaze to where it had fallen. Discarded, the plastic mask had recycled itself, turning into pink dust, which the carpet in the elevator was already filtering away.”

In Westerfeld’s world everything is recycled; if something drops, the five second rule applies because after that it’s gone. Clothes and accessories are not cleaned or repaired; they are recycled into new ones. Objects are impermanent and little if anything is saved to be shared or passed from one individual to another. Everything is cheap if not free and always instantly available, but almost everything is disposable.

The Smoke, a place of runaways and rebels, has a trading post because outlaws do not have access to the city made items. Here most necessary objects are made by hand and traded or handed down from person to person. Presents are precious because they are not disposable.

Some current real life issues that the first book, Uglies and this series encourage us to consider:

Mandated conformity in a world obsessed with youth and appearance, where plastic surgery is the norm. Currently some children in the United States are having elective plastic surgery to decrease the likelihood of being bullied in school or in the future.

In Extras, a popularity monetary system, where by the more virtual hits and the more people follow your feed; the more you can buy, the more power and influence you have. Is this so different from the wealth and power that accrue to fame in the U.S. today?

A world in which the population is kept fed, clothed and happy enough to not ask questions. (Bread and circuses) Most people are kept in a dependent state with a small percentage of people in charge. This includes extreme safety protocols, including nothing that has real risk; only safety fireworks, bungee jackets and lots of protective items to keep people safe while they are having fun. Nanotechnology can repair almost anything. Imagine the world of the perpetual invincible teenager who believes that nothing really bad can happen. This is purposefully created by the government of each city-state to keep the citizens focused on having fun. Would a little more government-sponsored fun have headed off the Occupy Wall Street movement?

Smart appliances, accessories, furniture, transportation; everything, including bridges, doors, elevators and even buildings, interacts with everything else, so that everyone is monitored, tracked and reported. We may be on the cusp of this now—you can already buy a refrigerator that writes your grocery list for you! In the past year, some citizens in California and across the country are fighting aspects of the smart meters which connect, either wirelessly or through a wired connection, with the system which can tell if residents are at home by the amount of electricity in use at the time and some people are concerned that this information could be a privacy breech.

If you read this series, or other works of science fiction, try to draw connect the fictive future state with things you observe happening now. The future always as a toehold in the present. And as I read, I always find myself wondering what museums would be like in the worlds created in works like this. For example, if all material goods are transient and everything is instantly recycled, would museums be seen as transgressive, or valued more than ever? —E. Merritt

Forecasting the Future of History Organizations and Their Leaders

2011-12-13T16:46:00.000-05:00

For three weeks every November leaders and practitioners from the field of the public history meet at the Seminar for Historical Administration to discuss challenges and future directions for history organizations. This week’s blog post is by John Durel, who coordinates the seminar, and his partner, Anita Durel. John and Anita work with museum executives nationwide and have written frequently about museums and cultural organizations.

The public history field—history museums, historical societies, historic sites and archives—has reached a tipping point. Driven by the need to develop financially sustainable operating models, the impact of technology how individuals access and share information and most importantly the emergence and favorable reception of new leaders with entrepreneurial acumen, the field is no longer hesitant or resistant to change. Though some organizations are lagging, we see a blossoming of ideas and new approaches that promise to make history relevant, meaningful and useful in today’s world.

This is a time of innovation. Here are ten developments we see coming in the years ahead.

1. A National Purpose
Leaders in the field begin to articulate a purpose for history organizations aligning with a nationally recognized need. Children’s museums are building their case around healthy early childhood development as a fundamental right and an investment in the nation’s future. Science centers, in partnership with schools and universities, have established STEM education as essential for our future prosperity. Both children’s and science museums have built a platform to articulate the importance of these respective fields and their link to a strong America. History organizations must do the same. What is the greater good that public history serves? How will improved knowledge and understanding of the past make us better as a nation? In the long run, what difference will history organizations make? The field needs a single, concise statement of purpose that does not require elaborate explanation.

2. An Integrated Programmatic Approach
History organizations will no longer assume that the best methods to present history are thematic exhibitions, historic site tours and living history “experiences.” Programming, generally seen as supplemental to these primary approaches, will begin to play a central role. Staffs, in collaboration with advisors, will brainstorm ways to tell a particular story, explore a topic and engage the public. Science Gallery in Dublin, Ireland, is a good example. Their innovative work includes a series of integrated, edgy and extremely popular programs, incorporating interactive exhibits, online engagement, onsite happenings and public events. We look forward to the history organization that takes this approach and makes the examination of historical phenomena relevant, edgy and fun.

3. The Value of Historical Objects
We expect to see more innovation in the use of three-dimensional collections. The traditional and expensive development of thematic exhibits, laden with numerous objects and interpretive labels, will give way to more flexible and experimental approaches. An early glimpse of this shift is “Controversy” at the Ohio Historical Society. Constrained by time and money, the staff selected objects that prompt a reaction and discussion. Similar constraints will lead to innovation elsewhere. We are already reading about pop up exhibits. Experimenting with the use of objects will help us understand their true value and educational potential.

4. Sharing Historical Authority
The authority for interpreting the past, which resided with professional historians and curators, is increasingly shared with visitors, program participants, online users and community groups. Digitization of collections is making it easy for anyone to use a computer or hand-held device to read documents, view images, and get information about historical topics, locations, events or artifacts. Over the next several years we expect to see more history organizations embrace this change and find ways to involve the public in presenting and interpreting history.

5. Critical Thinking and Historical Practice
As the field learns to share historical authority, it finds ways to help the public develop a more complex and nuanced understanding of history. Building on educational programs developed for youth, such as National History Day, and spurred by IMLS’s 21st Century skills initiative, history organizations offer tools, resources, and “history labs” for both youth and adults. They engage the public not only in an interpretation of the past, but also in understanding how historians arrive at the interpretation. The public (lay historians) receive guidance and support for finding reliable information, thinking critically about primary evidence, considering alternative and multiple perspectives, thinking historically and not projecting today’s assumptions on the past, and crafting narratives that reveal the subtleties and ambiguities of history. (See “What is the role of the historian in the age of shared authority and radical trust?” for further thoughts on this.)

6. The Power of Historical Places
History organizations will engage people “on site, online, or on the road” (to borrow a phrase from the Kentucky Historical Society.) At the same time they will recognize the power of particular places and settings. Following the lead of Historic New England and the historic sites of the National Trust for Historic Preservation, innovative uses of historic properties will continue, enabling people to experience these places even when the purpose is not an overt or explicit history lesson. Historic properties will be both places to gather and places to learn (this time borrowing a phrase from Strawbery Banke Museum in Portsmouth, N.H.)

7. Contentious History
Some history organizations, in some communities, will be compelled to address contentious history. See the Nov. 8 blog post at Developing History Leaders @SHA for our thoughts on this. This requires leaders who are passionate about history, deeply committed to building stronger communities, and have the fortitude to endure attacks. It will also take skilled facilitation. Exploration of the past can easily divide people rather than unite them.

8. Business Thinking
Through our work with museum CEOs in executive roundtables, we are beginning to see increased understanding of business thinking. More leaders are becoming adept at business planning, market research, data driven change, monetizing assets, strategic investment and disinvestment, disciplined measurement of ROI, diversification of revenue, and capitalization. They are also tuning in to changes in philanthropy and the growth of social entrepreneurship, as described in Nonprofit Finance in Hard Times, by Susan U. Raymond.

9. Governing Boards
In spite of our general optimism, we remain deeply concerned about the performance of governing boards. For every conversation we have with an executive director indicating a strong and engaged board, we have five conversations about boards that are inactive, resistant, or worse, undermining change. Without active board engagement in the fund development process, without their willingness to step up to the challenge of raising money, without their enthusiastic financial support for new approaches to the work, it seems unlikely that the current spate of innovation in the field will be sustained. It does not have to be this way—a courageous and committed executive director can give the board the direction and the support it needs to meet its responsibilities for the financial health of the organization.

10. History Leadership
After a delay caused by the recession, we are starting to see the retirement of executive directors who have led organizations since the 1970s and 80s. Opportunities are opening for younger individuals who are department heads or directors of smaller institutions. These younger leaders are responsible for much of the innovation now underway. Their greatest challenge will be to learn how to lead a board. We use the word “lead” here in the sense that Jim Collins uses it in Good to Great and the Social Sector. The leadership challenge is not to make the right decisions, but to make sure that the right decisions get made, and that will require building boards that are fully supportive and actively engaged in the transformation of history organizations.

Navigating Conservation Futures

2011-12-08T15:57:00.001-05:00

I’m often bemused when I compare the answers to two questions I frequently ask museums:

One of the key functions identified in your mission is preserving collections. What’s your goal? How long do you want them to be around?
What timeframe do you examine when you approach institutional planning?

The answer to 1) (once I stipulate it can’t be “forever”) is usually in a 200–1000 year range. The answer to 2) is usually around 20 years, if that.

This depressing disconnect made me particularly happy to receive a paper from MaryJo Lelyveld, conservator of frames and furniture, National Gallery of Victoria, Australia, titled “Beyond Swabs and Solvent Gels: Using Scenarios to Generate, Evaluate and Navigate Conservation Futures." This is a good read for the staff of any collecting institution. How can we expect to do a good job of preserving scientific, artistic, historic and cultural heritage for future generations if we don’t spend some mental energy considering the impact that trends will have on collections and collecting?

The main text of the paper is a general overview of forecasting and scenario planning, pitched at conservation professionals. For those budding futurists and have read the Futures Studies 101 series on this Blog, or attending the University of Houston’s Certificate intensive Certificate in Strategic Foresight* this will be a review of familiar material.

But I recommend Appendix 2: Scenarios for the Future of Conservation to the attention of all readers. Here Lilyveld summarized pertinent trends in all the STEEP categories (social, technological, economic, environmental and political) and assesses their impact on collections. She also defines a set of key issues and addresses them through presenting the seed (or kernel) of three scenarios—hypothetical stories of the future about 20 years from now. These are set in Australia, but the drivers of change shaping that nation are broadly similar to those facing the U.S., and the scenarios could be adapted for American museums with minor changes.

The Great Release envisions a future in which the rising financial burden of caring for collections, slow economic growth and the collapse of government funding leads many state and regional galleries to close their collections and aggressively deaccession materials. Private and cooperative collectors step in to buy these materials, and conservators (92% of whom are self-employed in this future) band together to form centralized cultural heritage skills centers to care for these distributed collections. The current Maker movement gives rise to the “Thing-kers” movement—people eager to learn lost trades and return to the comfort of tangible artifacts.

In GaME on natural disasters and terrorist attacks have fueled the movement of collections, and conservators, to centralized, secure storage sites. (Hmm, sounds like Louisiana.) “Real” exhibits lose ground to “immersive art experiences.” Not that collections are not longer valued. au contraire—some museums have begun to monetize their collections by selling biological samples to commercial enterprises, others sell accurate 3-D models of their material. Conservators specialize as either Heritage Scientists, focusing on analysis and research, or Cultural Replicators, skilled in 3D documentation, database management and creation of virtual experiences.

Conservation 2030: Museoagora paints a picture of the future in which museum growth and expansion is fueled by increased volunteerism on the part of retiring Boomers and unemployed Millennials. Attendance rises to new heights, and museums expand their activities in a variety of ways, turning their grounds into botanical arks and creating pop-up museums in local businesses. The increased use and transportation of collections demands more conservation support, assisted by advances in nanotechnology and molecular engineering that essentially enable artifacts to heal themselves. (This is what futurists would call a “bright future.” Can you tell?)

As with all scenarios, these stories are starting points for deeper exploration. You might adapt and expand them to apply to your museum and its community, helping your staff to plan for many potential futures, all of which include well-cared for collections.

*Registration is now open for the Jan. 9–13 session of the University of Houston’s Certificate in Strategic Foresight course. Register by Dec. 9 for the early bird rate, and mention you are a CFM follower for a 20% discount! Several museum graduates have documented their experience in the course here on the CFM Blog.

The Next Frontier of Museum Ethics

2011-12-06T12:47:00.001-05:00

Here at CFM, we’re wrapping up Round Three of Forecasting the Future of Museum Ethics. The survey closes Dec. 9 (there’s a link below if you still haven’t participated) and I can hardly wait to compile the input from our Oracles and the public.

Most of the issues that have surfaced during the forecasting exercise are echoes of ongoing arguments from a hundred year or more of the museum literature. I’d lay money that John Cotton Dana (d. 1929) was blogging, I mean writing, about the obligation of museums to be economically accessible to the public; the ethics of making collections accessible; and the perils of conflict of interest when it comes to donors, sponsors and members of the governing authority. Maybe these will play out in new ways in coming decades, but we probably know the arguments and the players already.

But the forecast looks at one issue that may actually be new—or at least so different in degree as to be different in kind as well: the challenge of curatorial authority vs. crowdsourced input/community curation/participatory design.

Really? Community curation might be viewed as unethical?

Actually, this wasn’t a total surprise to me. As I work with various museums on futures forecasting, I’ve noticed that the biggest internal tension is usually on just this point. The curatorial staff often feel not just threatened, but morally outraged at the thought of letting amateur experts or your average woman-on-the street, contribute to (much less control) museum content. But elsewhere in the room, members of the education department, development staff and often the museum leadership are saying “we need to invite the community in. We need to be more than just a place they are welcome to visit. They need to feel this is their museum, that we value their talent, opinions and participation.”

The issue is not entirely new—some museums have long welcomed the input of select amateur experts. But tension is arising from a number of trends that expand and extend the nature of this participation. The growth of social media and the ubiquity of smart, hand-held, internet connected devices have fundamentally shifted the public’s expectations regarding authority and participation. As CFM documented in Museums & Society 2034, the MyCulture trend reflects an increasing desire on the part of audiences to do, not just view. People have grown accustomed to sharing and shaping opinion by Yelp, Facebook, Twitter, FourSquare and a host of other social media. The first reference they turn to is Wikipedia, not an encyclopedia or the academic literature. And they know that they themselves could become Wiki-editors, or set themselves up as authorities with their own blog, Twitter stream or self-published work (even if relatively few of them do).

At the same time, many museum professionals see themselves and their organizations as the last bastions of accuracy and excellence. They believe that the greatest value they bring to the museum and its audiences is the deep knowledge and nuanced insight that come from years of study and experience. They believe the highest and best role of the curator is to be an expert, not a moderator, editor, compiler or convener. Even a little experiment (e.g., experimenting with labels with content provided by public contributors, in addition to the “official” text, in one small gallery) can seem like a profound threat to the ordered workings of the museum universe.

Personally, I think that when the AAM Accreditation Commission wrote the Characteristic of Excellence that reads “the museum’s interpretive content is based on appropriate research,” they meant that museums should be diligent in ensuring the material they present is accurate, and ensure they do not present bad information based on sloppy research. That’s different from saying that a museum can’t decide that “appropriate research,” in some cases, includes asking members of the public what they like, or what they remember, or what they think is important. But evidently, there are a variety of opinions on the issue.

Please weigh in on this issue—either using the comments section below or (even better) using this link to access the public version of Round Three of the ethics forecast, where you can address this and other issues.

If you are just now reading our forecast, you can get up to speed by reading earlier posts about the project.

Tailor your Twitterverse to the Future

2011-12-01T11:10:00.001-05:00

Thanksgiving 2011 marked a CFM milestone—we topped 10,000 followers on Twitter. I was thankful about that—I like to think it means we are sharing information people find useful and informative. And maybe a little fun.

I know some folks thing of Twitter as a morass of inane trivia. But there are a lot savvy, interesting Tweeters, like Neil DeGrasse Tyson, who have developed a clear strategy for sharing thoughtful and informative content. Following a carefully edited list of savvy Tweeters can be a great addition to your scanning.

Here are just a few of the Twitter feeds I find very informative:

@jessemoyer, from KnowledgeWorks Foundation, shares links to articles and reports on the future of education, mobile and online learning learning and STEM education.

@garrygolden, professional futurist and frequent CFM collaborator, shares information on trends in transportation, energy, learning systems and demographics. And occasionally reports on cute baby Noah (who is a fan of MOMA. Starting out right, that kid is.)

@janetcarding monitors a lot of museum research and blog sites, sharing news, reports and projects, as well as glimpses of what’s going on at the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto, where she is the director.

@sebchan brings deep knowledge and a wry and skeptical voice to his observations on media and technology, (Seb’s tweets also document his current move to the Cooper Hewitt in NYC from his former perch at the Powerhouse museum in Sydney. Woot! Maybe Americans will get to see him in person more often, now.)

@mitchbetts was a classmate of mine at the University of Houston’s Certificate in Strategic Foresight course. A technology journalist, Mitch shares his broad reading in trends, innovation and market research, a useful balance to my often museum-centric scanning.

@P2173 (aka Lucy Bernholz) is a self-styled “philanthropy wonk.” If you don’t have time to monitor the tremendously important literature of asking and giving, not to worry, Lucy does a good job on behalf of all of us.

@mgorbis, at The Institute for the Future in Palo Alto, Calif., is my go-to Twitter source on futurist literature and reports, and she also reads (and shares) broadly and imaginatively in a variety of fields. Watching who Marina retweets has helped me expand my Twitter circle into new fields.

Just for fun, I recommend the 140 character musings of my favorite museum spokes-specimen, @SuetheTRex, at the Field Museum of Chicago, as well as the (unsanctioned) tweets of @NatHistoryWhale at the American Museum of Natural History. Also @Hirst_Shark, who, tweeting in the persona of the pickled shark that anchors Damien’s “The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living,” engages in charming and toothy banter with his fans.

I encourage you to use Twitter to share your reading with others—together we can form a powerful scanning network. Here’s my advice for strategic tweeting:

Clarify who your Twitter account represents. Is it personal or on behalf of an organization you work for? In either case, make sure your activities are in line with your employer’s social media policy, if they have one.
Define the focus of your Twitter stream. For example, CFM concentrates on content tied to forecasting/future studies in general, especially issues that CFM/AAM is addressing through forecasting (i.e. workforce diversity, food issues, universal design/accessibility, financial models, ethics).
Tweet links to interesting content (videos, articles, blog posts).
Write catchy text to accompany the link in order to provoke interest. Tweets with humorous lead-ins are retweeted more often than bare links.
Include relevant users or hashtags to attract the attention of people and organizations mentioned in the tweet—they may retweet, and/or start following you.
Retweet or “favorite” interesting tweets from influential people and organizations. Twitter is a platform for networking and building your circle of connections.

Now it’s your turn to help build our shared futurist Twitterverse. Use the comments section below to share your favorite Tweeters, and explain why you follow them. Or (of course) Tweet about your favorites and tag the tweet with @futureofmuseums—follow the CFM Twitter stream over the next few days to see who turns up!

The Third Rail of Museum Ethics: Selling Collections to Pay for…What?

2011-11-29T09:29:00.001-05:00

Is it ethical for a museum to use the money it gets from selling collections to fund general operations?

How about using the proceeds from the sale for “preservation” (the term used by AASLH’s Statement of Professional Standards and Ethics) or “direct care” (cf. AAM’s Code of Ethics for Museums)? Does preservation or direct care include fixing the roof? Hiring a conservator? Paying the salary of your collections manager?

According to Financial Accounting Standards Board regulations (and those of its government counterpart, GASB), using the funds from deaccessioning for anything other than buying more collections means the museum has to capitalize the whole collection, an action that some parts of the field believes to be unethical in and of itself.

Of the six issues CFM and the Institute for Museum Ethics are exploring in Round Three of Forecasting the Future of Museum Ethics, the question of what ethical constraints should be placed on the use of funds resulting from deaccessioning is far and away the most contentious. Museums have been arguing about this issue for decades. Is anything different now? Perhaps yes. The unprecedented financial pressure facing museums is apparently leading more boards and directors to ask, “What good does it do to firewall the collection if the museum itself is going broke?”

So maybe the national fiscal meltdown will transform the constraints we, as a field, have placed on the use of funds resulting from deaccessioning collections. This change could go either way—faced with increased pressure to raise money whatever way possible, the field might tighten its standards, closing the loopholes left by nebulous words like “preservation” and “direct care,” or it might abandon the existing standards as unaffordable luxuries in the face of economic necessity.

So, in Round Three we cut to the chase and ask:

In the next 25 years, are the restrictions placed on the use of funds resulting from deaccessioning likely to become more or less restrictive? How and why will the restrictions change?

In other words, is there now—or will there be in the future—enough consensus of opinion on the topic for the field to revisit the standards and reexamine how all “good” museums should behave regarding deaccessioning?

Please weigh in on this issue—either using the comments section below or (even better) using this link to access the public version of Round Three of the ethics forecast, where you can address this and other issues.

If you are just now reading our forecast, you can get up to speed by reading earlier posts about the project.

Forecasting the Future of Accessibility: Please Touch or Don’t Touch?

2011-11-22T11:28:00.001-05:00

I wish I could preview my Inbox from 2036. How come Outlook doesn’t have an option for that?

As a member of AAM’s staff Ethics Taskforce, I help answer plaintive, irate, indignant and panicked questions that come over our email. So I have a pretty good handle on what people grapple with, day to day, in their organizations. Forecasting the Future of Museum Ethics, CFM’s joint project with the Institute for Museum Ethics, is trying to determine what museums will be grappling with 25 years from now. How can the field provide backup and support for colleagues if we lag five or ten years behind the issues? This is our chance to gear up for the ethical future. And this is my pitch for you to help by weighing in on the public version of the forecast.

Our expert and public forecasters have identified accessibility as an important ethics issue that will change significantly, in some way, in the coming decades. Reading through their (copious) comments on the forecast’s early rounds, it became clear that “accessibility,” as used by the forecasters, encompasses at least four different things:

Physical and intellectual access to museums, their exhibits, programs and services
Economic access to museums, their exhibits, programs and services
Accessibility of collections and data
Balancing access to collections against a responsibility to preserve collections

Forecasters raised some interesting questions. Is there an ethical obligation to make museums economically accessible (i.e., affordable), paralleling the obligation (aside from the legal requirements) that museums provide physical access to people with disabilities? Has technology, by making it feasible for museums to provide public access to huge amounts of data, created an ethical imperative for them to do so?

Some of the most heated comments that surfaced in earlier rounds of the forecast were about: access v. preservation. “Many visitors express a desire for increased access—a chance to touch objects, behind the scenes tours, etc.” commented one forecaster. “Has the pendulum swung too far toward preservation, and is it in the process of swinging back?”

Access always compromises preservation to some extent. The safest storage environment is the proverbial black box. But if no one ever accesses a collections object, how is that different from the object never existing? (Someone should modify Schrödinger’s cat dilemma to apply to museum storage.)

That’s an exaggeration, of course. No object is going to last forever, and no sane museum is going to let an object be torn to pieces by ravening fans. But where, in between, is a reasonable compromise? Has preservation historically been privileged over access (as our forecaster observed) and is our position as a field on that balance of power on the verge of changing?

To test whether the pendulum is about to reverse its arc, the current round of the forecast asks:

“Thinking about the ethics of balancing a responsibility to make collections physically accessible with a responsibility to preserve collections, do you feel that in the next twenty five (25) years museum standards will tilt more towards access or preservation?”

(Respondents select an answer on a scale that runs from Favoring more access through to Favoring Preservation.)

I hope you will weigh in on this issue—either using the comments section below or (even better) using this link to access the public version of round 3 of the ethics forecast, where you can answer this and other questions.

If you are just now reading our forecast, you can get up to speed by reading earlier posts about the project.

Ethics Forecast Round 3 & the Future of Museum Standards

2011-11-17T09:14:00.001-05:00

This week we launch Round 3 of Forecasting the Future of Museum Ethics.As with previous rounds, the public is invited to weigh in at the same time (ona parallel track) as our recruited “Oracles.”

This round delves into six issues selected on the basis oftheir rankings in round two, exploring where the Oracles and the public think theseissues are headed in the future. They are:

Accessibility: providing access to collections and institutions; economic accessibility; balancing accessibility to collections with preservation responsibilities; economic accessibility; balancing accessibility with preservation
Conflicts of Interest: development and fundraising, governance, personal collecting
Control of content: curatorial independence and scholarship by staff and academic experts versus community curation; public participation in content creation (e.g., crowdsourcing, participatory design); censorship
Collecting and deaccessioning: including the use of funds resulting from deaccessioning, retention of material the museum does not use or make accessible, choice of what to collect
Diversity: diversity of representation in governance, staff and audience; affirmative action in recruiting staff and board members
Transparency & accountability: governance, operations, finance

Many of the questions in the round 3 survey instrument areframed around museum standards—asking whether the existing standards will besufficient to address these issues in the future, and if not, how they mightchange.

Why did we frame the questions about ethics aroundstandards? After all, not everything in museum standards is about ethics, and conversely,many ethical issues about which museum people feel passionately are notaddressed, or are barely addressed, by current standards.

AAM defines standards as “generally accepted levels ofattainment that all museums are expected to achieve.” In plain English, thatmeans standards are practices that all good museums are expected to adopt. Museums can expect to be criticized bytheir colleagues, or their supporters, or the press, if they don’t. As National Standards and Best Practices in U.S. Museums states, “Standards are not lofty goals that only a few will achieve, they arefundamental to being a good museum, a responsible non-profit, and a well-runbusiness.” This means museums had better be pretty darn careful when declaringsomething to be a standard—because they might have to live with the resultingcoverage of their actions, as judged by this standard, in the local press thenext day.

For this reason, thinking about how an issue is addressed ormight be addressed by a standard is a good test of whether an issue isimportant, and whether there is sufficient consensus in the field to describethe appropriate way for museum practitioners to behave. You could writea standard about the ethics of gender equity regarding setting the thermostatin your meeting rooms—but do most people care enough to bother? And even if theydo care passionately, could you broker an agreement between men and womenregarding the appropriate setting?

In fact, we found all six of the issues selected for furtherinvestigation are addressed to some extent in the current standards, but some onlyvaguely or tangentially. Regarding accessibility, for example, the standardsstate

The museum demonstrates a commitment to providing the public with physical and intellectual access to the museum and its resources.

One issue related to accessibility raised on round one wasthat of economic accessibility: as one Oracle put it, “keeping museumsaffordable (free or low cost) for the broader public in future scenarios ofdiminished public/private support.” Do you think that in the future, museumpractitioners might decide that economic accessibility of museums issufficiently important it should be addressed in a standard, and will there besufficient consensus to determine what that new standard might be?

The other reason to tie the ethics forecast to standards isthat one practical outcome of our forecast might be a decision, on the part ofthe museum field and the AAM leadership, to revisit the standards and revisethem to reflect the challenges museums & society will face in the next 25years. If our forecasters overwhelmingly say “the current standards about issueX are not sufficient to accommodate the changes we see in coming decades,” thatwould be a clear call to action.

That, in turn, is why we hope you'll weigh in on this round.It might be your museum looking to the national standards for guidancein 2025, or answering an awkward question from a journalist who knows “what allgood museums should be expected to live up to.”

Follow this link to contribute to round three of Forecasting the Future of Museum Ethics. [Oracles,make sure you follow the link in your personal email.] And then stay tuned forthe results…

Museums Innovating in Businesslike Ways

2011-11-15T10:08:00.001-05:00

Many people tell us that, in the future, museums need to bemore entrepreneurial. It’s hard to find written case studies, however, ofmuseums innovating in businesslike ways.Today’s guest post helps fill that gap, as Karen Coltrane, president and CEO ofthe Children’s Museum of Richmond, blogs about how CMOR became the firstchildren’s museum in the county to open a satellite location.They’ve been fielding calls from other children’s museums considering a similarmodel—some hoping to fend off competition, others to reach new audiences.

This week the Children’s Museum of Richmond is announcingplans to open a second satellite location. We started experimenting with satellites for severalreasons, chief among them financial survival. Our first satellite location helped us achieve that goal,but it brought other significant benefits, too—expansion of our mission byincreasing the numbers we serve (attendance is up 56%), strengthening of ourcommunity partnerships and enhanced relevance of our institution within our community.

Being good at what you offer at your main museum is aprerequisite for opening more locations. We had raised and spent nearly $1,000,000 over three years to improveour exhibit areas, revamp our education programming and develop a full calendarof well-marketed events (on average, one major event every two weeks) to insure CMOR was visible and top of mind with young families. A pre-satellite marketing studyconfirmed that those efforts were successful—we had 98% brand awareness in ourmarket (defined as area families with children under the age of eight) with 90% ofrespondents rating our offerings as high or very high in quality.

The same study noted that despite our extremely positiveperception, most of the families in our region only visited us once per year,citing lack of convenience associated with our location. In our market, young families don’twant to drive more than 20 minutes for a visit. Many parents commented that by the time they wrestle thelittle ones into the car seats and drive for a half hour, the children havefallen asleep and waking them for the visit posed challenges. Also, our location in the city’s museumdistrict, away from shopping and family-friendly restaurants, made a trip toour museum a special destination that couldn’t be combined easily with otherregular activities. So while ourmuseum enjoyed strong goodwill, the majority of our market only visitedoccasionally for exceptional events.

Once we understood that convenience was the only thingkeeping us from serving more visitors, we started to explore our options. We included the satellite locationconcept in our strategic plan. The special committee convened to consider theissue included a group of our current and past board members and othercommunity leaders, led by the community’s most forward thinking volunteer, awell respected former corporate CEO who is now a business school professor andnonprofit advisor.

Several pertinent questions came to light. First, we werevery surprised – and a bit concerned – that there were not satellite models inthe children’s museum world to follow. Second, we wondered if a satellite in a more vibrant area would“cannibalize” the attendance at our main location. Third, while the staff wasconfident, the board rightly asked if we could manage another location withcurrent management. And last but certainly not least,everybody was concerned that we might appear to be “abandoning” our mission byfocusing on wealthier suburbs to the exclusion of lower income, urbanneighborhoods.

The committee’s discussions were probably the most rigorousand thoughtful in the museum’s recent history. They resulted in a recommendation to the Board to look notonly at one branch in the region’s western suburbs, but to consider an entirebranching strategy that would bring 12–15,000 square foot versions of the 40,000square foot main museum to densely populated areas not strongly represented inour current attendance. The Boardadopted the strategy in October 2009 and the initial satellite opened in June2010. In its first full year ofoperation, 130,000 people visited the new location, while attendance stayed thesame, 230,000, at our main museum.

Operationally, we learned—and are still learning—important lessons. Staffing hasbeen much easier than we expected. We initially sent a member of the management team to run the day to dayoperations, but she was bored quickly and we were able to bring her back totake on a bigger role, replacing her with an assistant director of guest services who reports to a director of guest services at our main location. In fact, the satellite runs so smoothlythat we decided to hold our weekly management team meetings there just to makesure our key staff are in the facility once a week. Our ticketing/finance/development/shop software company,Explorer, happily worked with us to adapt their program to support multiplelocations. And while we keep aneye on the satellite’s revenues and expenses, we are careful to roll thenumbers up to reinforce the culture that we are one museum—we just happen tohave two (or more) locations.

The best outcome of our satellite strategy, thus far, hasbeen the ability to move from daily worry about making this week’s payroll tothe freedom to explore pathways to greater impact throughout ourcommunity. In just the first yearof operation we were able to:

provide free and low cost field trip programmingto thousands of young students from under-resourced area schools
engage area school superintendents in real,regular dialog with the museum’s leadership about early childhood education
create a new position dedicated to parenteducation and engagement

We can now proactively pursue relationships and ideas thatfurther our mission in ways we could barely dream about before. For us, a branching strategy servesmore visitors, while providing the resources to do more good in our community.

Civic Duty Calls

2011-11-10T12:36:00.000-05:00

In this blog post, AAMDirector of Government Relations and Advocacy Gail Ravnitzky Silbergliedexplores why advocacy—like voting, jury service, and paying taxes—is acivic duty that furthers our nation’s democracy and prepares us and our leadersfor the future. Gail joined AAM in 2008 and is the author of Speak Up For Museums,published by The AAM Press and available through AAM’s bookstore.

Civic Duty is defined as “the responsibility of a citizen”and recently I fulfilled one of our nation’s great civic responsibilities: servingon a jury. It was my first time serving, and while it took me away from workand family responsibilities, I really didn’t mind. It was actually interesting,both the subject matter and the process (so different from Law & Order!). But more importantly, I knew I was performing animportant civic duty.

For me, awareness of civic duty started very early. My veryfirst memory is from age three when I went to vote with my mom (I remember that myolder brothers had to wait outside because they were for the other guy!). Andwhile I don’t enjoy every single civic duty (paying taxes comes to mind) I knowthat these civic duties are the foundation of our nation’s democracy.

Museums work every day to educate and inspire the public. Wehelp people to learn and be inspired, to stretch their imaginations, and tointerpret information in new ways. This is the heart of a museum’s publicservice mission. Why then don’t museums step out, front and center, whenopportunities arise to educate their elected officials? Perhaps we need toreframe advocacy as a fundamental civic responsibility.

Here’s some civic-minded (and future-minded) food forthought:

Ournation’s founders included advocacy in the Bill of Rights (“the right of thepeople...to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”) And isn’t there plenty to be aggrievedabout?
Electedofficials actually appreciate hearing directly from constituents—it helpsthem build stronger ties to their community and understand the future needs oftheir community. (I worked for several members of Congress so I know this fromexperience.)
Ifyou are not making your case, your viewpoint will often get overlooked when itdoes (or doesn’t) come up in future policy debates or budget battles.

If I haven’t convinced you yet, ask yourself the followingquestions:

Howmuch buy-in do you have from the community about the future of yourmuseum? Are your community“success stories” helping to make the case for your museum? Are your volunteers and members awareof advocacy opportunities in support of museums? You have powerful, inspiring stories about your work in thecommunity, something elected officials need to know about in order to shape—and invest in—the future of their community.
Doyour elected officials know how your museum educates and inspires theirconstituents, how your museum spurs local economic activity and creates jobs,or how your museum partners with local schools to educate futuregenerations? Even if they lovemuseums, your community leaders may not realize how many school children orseniors or veterans you serve. And if you are securing the future for others,in other ways, for example by hosting food banks or blood banks, let them knowthis, too.
Docivic leaders know your museum’s future plans? Consider planting a seed about future exhibits, neededrepairs, desired expansions, or special events or milestones. Elected officialscan often help to publicize or otherwise support these endeavors.

Advocacy sure sounds like a civic duty to me. And it’s nevertoo late to get started. AAM makes it easy to advocate for museums. Forstarters:

Visit the AAM Advocacy website to find information and inspiration, including how to get involved with advocacy at all levels, what’s at stake, who represents you, and why it all matters.
Sign up to receive AAM’s Advocacy Alerts.

And (most important):

Join your colleagues in D.C. for Museums Advocacy Day, Feb. 27–28, 2012,or send a board member. Museums Advocacy Day is your chance to join withadvocates and colleagues from around the country and Speak Up for Museums! Weprovide training and support—you do your civic duty to tell legislators aboutthe good work museums do. And it’s way more fun than jury duty.

This year, for thefirst time, the Museums Advocacy Day agenda includes a half-day session, run byCFM, on forecasting the political future. Learn more about the agenda andregister to attend here.

Questioning Assumptions: The Ideal Employee:Volunteer Ratio

2011-11-08T11:51:00.005-05:00

Today’s thought experiment: what if, in the future, museumsasked not “how many volunteers do we need” but rather “how can we structure ouroperations to engage as many volunteers as possible in meaningful work?”

Volunteers are already essential to the work of museums.Typically, volunteers outnumber paid staff 6:1. In history museums that ratioclimbs to 9:1, and in museums with budgets under a quarter million it soars to18:1*.

Historically this arrangement has been driven mostly byutility: museums don’t have enough money to hire all the staff they need. As itis, salaries constitute about half of the typical operating budget.

Volunteers aren’t free, mind you. A good volunteer programneeds policies, procedures, background checks, training and supervision (oftenprovided by a paid staff member dedicated to volunteers). And the morevolunteers a museum has, the greater the costs. This is one reason that museumstend towards efficiency in volunteer recruitment—using just enough free help toget the job done.

But the spin-off value of volunteers, over and above justgetting the work done, can be extraordinary. Here are three compelling reasonsthe museum of the future might structure its work around volunteers:

1) “MyCulture”—the increasing desire of people to do as wellas view, to be actively engaged with the museum rather than just being passiveconsumers of content. The more meaningful this participation is, the more“real” the engagement, the more compelling the experience. Thirty years ago anedgy “interactive” experience at a museum meant lifting a flap to read a label.Now it might mean providing the content for an exhibit.Volunteering is the ultimate participatory experience.

2) The education revolution. Reformers envisioning the future of education emphasize that the new educational paradigm will provide self-directed learnerswith the opportunity to do real work and supplement or replace standardizedtests with portfolios of meaningful accomplishments. The Institute for theFuture’s Jamais Cascio acts out this scenario here,demonstrating that one crucial role of learning agents (educators of thefuture) will be matching learners up with real-world projects that supporttheir educational goals. Projects like ArtLab+ at the Hirshhorn Museum already support students creating exhibit content—cansuch integrated learning-work be a normal aspect of every museum? Volunteeringcan be the ultimate educational experience.

3) Hearts and minds. Museums are threatened by theperception that they serve primarily “the 1%” (to use OWS jargon)—the wealthy,educated elite who frankly are the ones best able, right now, to fund museums.This, in turn, could create a spiral in which museums, by serving the interestsof the few, become disconnected from the many and are increasingly seen asprivate, rather than public, goods and unworthy of public tax support.Can we counterbalance this by fostering stronger practical and emotional tieswith large numbers of people, making them see museums as “their place?” NinaSimon has written about the power of museums creating the feeling that peoplehave access to a secret, exclusive place.Volunteering is the ultimate “insider” experience.

How would museums have to change to radically increase theiruse of volunteers? Technology is vastly expanding the ways that museums canprovide volunteer opportunities as people can contribute over the Web, tagging,organizing, transcribing and researching digital data. However, nothingwill ever replace the thrill of working in a physical (often beautiful) spacewith real objects.

Unfortunately, museums often aren’t structured toaccommodate the diversity of people who would like to volunteer in physicalmuseum. People with nine-to-five jobs might jump at the chance to do free workif only the museum could accommodate them in the evening (which some, but farfrom all, museums do.) As it happens, many museums are experimenting with alternate hours anyway, as they discover that visitors might like to come at 6 or 9 p.m., or 1a.m., rather than during banker’s hours.

A recent paper from the Arts Consulting Group points out the vast potential for recruiting more volunteers to the work ofmuseums. But they also note that the volunteers of the present (much less thefuture) have high expectations. They want support, rather than supervision, andthey want a large degree of autonomy. Staff positions would have to bere-tooled to meet these expectations, with training, supporting andcoordinating the work of volunteers playing a greater role in every staffmember’s work.

Volunteerism is not without negative side effects. The hugenumber of people eager to work in museums in a paid or unpaid capacity probablycontributes to the relatively low pay of the profession. Museum studiesgraduates already bitterly resent the fact that the entry path to paidprofessional positions has become the unpaid internship—they leave school withsignificant educational debt only to find they are expected to volunteer to becompetitive. But really, aren’t there worse things in the world than havinglots of people so interested in what your museum does that they are eager todonate their time, attention and skills?

So maybe in the future the ratio of volunteers to paid staffwill be more like 25:1, 50:1, even 100:1. Do you think that future liessomewhere in the Cone of Plausibility?Is it a desirable future and, if so, how do museums need to shift course to getthere? Please weigh in.

* stats on volunteers and staffingfrom AAM’s 2009 Museum Financial Information,unless otherwise noted.

The Workforce of the Future Starts Now

2011-11-03T08:45:00.001-04:00

We get a lot of questions about who will be working, or should be working, in the museum of the future, and how museums should be finding, recruiting and training these future staff members.

Any exploration of the future of the museum workforce has to start with an accurate snapshot of what we have now. So CFM commissioned an analysis based on U.S. Census data.

These numbers are based on the American Community Survey (ACS) conducted in 2009 (the most recent public dataset available in September). They will probably shift a bit when we get access to the 2010 ACS and the 2010 decennial Census. Also note that there are different ways of counting museum workers (such as by occupation) that yield different results—and the Census numbers never quite balance with numbers from other federal agencies like the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

For now, this is probably the best reflection of the current museum workforce as a whole. The workforce is:

80% white
52% male
full of people who attended college (70%), but only11% have a master’s degree or doctorate.

We take a broad view of the “museum workforce,” so these numbers include everyone who draws a museum paycheck—from the director of the Met to the custodian at your local historical society—and not just the professional staff. For a useful point of comparison, 87% of museum studies graduates in 2009 were women and 70% were white.

Some items for your discussion:

What other data do we need about the current museum workforce to inform our planning?
What do you think the workforce of the museum of the future needs to “look like”?
If the future workforce needs to be different in its composition from the current workforce, what needs to change?
What do we, as trainers and employers, need to do to make those changes come about?

Please weigh in using the comments section below.

Futures Studies 101: Implications Wheel

2011-11-01T11:49:00.001-04:00

What wouldhappen if a space craft full of weak, disoriented insectoid aliens parked itselfin orbit over South Africa?

The implications of that (highly) improbable event are exploredthe 2009 film District 9. The director posits humans would confine the aliensto a ghetto outside Johannesburg, scornfully dub them “prawns”, and exploit themfor military research. This plot, as with so much good science fiction,explores our actual history and culture, but it applies a useful forecastingtechnique—looking at a trend or event, thinking about the implications, andseeing where in the cone of plausibility those ripple effects might take us.

So maybe aliens aren’t going to park above your museum. Picksomething more plausible that may profoundly affect your current plans. Forexample:

Your community is aging: within 10 years, 60% of the population will be over the age of 65, and fewer than 20% of families will have school age children.
Your local government decides to implement Payment in Lieu of Taxes, and slaps you with a bill for city services equal to 5% of your current annual operating expenses.
Your museum decides to merge with another organization in your community.

How do you begin to get a handle on all the ways in whichthese changes (good or bad) will affect your organization? How do you begin to planyour response?

One very useful tool is the Implication Wheel—a method ofvisual mapping that leads staff, board members and other stakeholders through aprocess of wrapping their brains around a change, and planning effectiveresponses.

Start by putting your trend or event at the middle of yourwheel.

Then ask yourself:

What is likely to happen next?
How would my (our) life change?
What would we need to decide?

So, for the merger, you might add:

Then, choosing one item from this first circle ofimplications, ask the same questions and build out from there.

Push participants to explore implications of the centralevent in all the “STEEP” categories—social (cultural), technological, economic,ecological, political. And consider both small and large frames of reference.Social/cultural implications might be institutional (staff with very differentbackgrounds and training have to learn to work together) or local (the distinctcommunities that used the two museums need to get comfortable with each other).Same for political implications—you need a communications plan both internally(for staff and volunteers) and externally (for members, funders, communitystakeholders).

Implications wheels are great for a number of reasons:

They are accessible. People who don’t feelcomfortable writing memos or position papers usually feel ok contributing athought on a sticky note and putting it on the wheel.

It feels messy and provisional, which canencourage people to free associate. Sometimes this is the best way to flush outtouchy topics or fringe possibilities. (To foster this approach, I recommenddrawing freehand on a white board or flip chart, and/or using sticky notes.)

It has high visual impact, and illustrates thedecision making process in a way that easy to share with other stakeholders.(If you want to create an electronic document to share, you can use mindmapping or flowchart software to transcribe the wheel.)

The method tends to do a very good job spottingmajor negative implication of a decision or event, and identifyingopportunities.

You can find a brief introduction to Implications Wheelshere,and a longer exploration showing how it was used to model the implications ofpandemic flu here.

If you have done an Implications Wheel for a decision orevent facing your museum, I would love to see it. Are you willing to share? Please do!

Can Disasters Help Us Build a Better Future?

2011-10-27T09:06:00.000-04:00

The best that can be said of a disaster is that sometimes wecan learn something, if we are wise and attentive, that will make for a betteroutcome in the future.

I just finished reading a great essay, Lost and Found in Japan,on the World Futures Society website. The author, Patrick Tucker, reports onhis travels to several villages in Japan that were devastated by thetsunami that struck on March 11, 2011.

Tucker notes “Events like the March 11 earthquake andtsunami in Japan illustrate just how little control we have over the future,despite our actions. Contrary to common hubris, you cannot plan for theunthinkable. You can only pay attention, listen, and learn in order to buildstronger, react smarter, survive better when the unforeseeable occurs.”

Japan isan interesting model for the USin many ways. We share the challenges of:

An aging society (In thetsunami-affected prefectures of Iwate, Fukushima,and Miyagi, an average of one in four people is over the age of 65. Today, 1 in8 Americans are older than 65. In 2034, the ratio will jump to 1 in 5.)

Growing disparity in wealth (in Japan, “kakusa sakai”—the society without evenness). See this article on the US Congressional Budget Office report released this week documenting that the top 1 percent of earners more than doubled their share of the nation’s income over the last three decades.

Rising unemployment (especiallynotable among relatively well-educated youth—which is known in Japan as theLost Generation).

Increasing distrust in government(though that is kind of perpetual in the

Watching how the consequences of this natural disaster playout in Japan—demographically, technologically, culturally, politically—shedslight on what the US might face in the future from natural and man-madecatastrophes.

Some things that jump out at me, when I read Tucker’sobservations:

1) The way that large numbers of volunteers, largely youngpeople, many from the ranks of the under- or unemployed, flocked to help afterthe tsunami. This dramatizes the potential in both our populations of peopleready and able to do good and necessary work, if only we can provide productivechannels for their energy, altruism and discontent. Contrast the focused,organized and productive response of volunteers to disaster relief in Japan with general dissatisfaction in the US that hasgiven rise to still unfocused rage at social inequality expressed through OccupyWall Street and its sister protests.

3) The huge difference that a single nonprofit can make.Tucker highlights the work of Peace Boat, a Japanese NGO founded by students inthe 1980s to promote world peace through cultural tourism. In the aftermath ofthe tsunami, Peace Boat directed its fleet and its staff towards reliefefforts—bringing in and coordinating volunteers, and evacuating local youth to “summerin a healthy, dynamic and creative environment, where they can learn newskills, enjoy new experiences and gain a fresh perspective on the future, whileenabling their parents to focus on rebuilding their community.” Tucker notesthat Peace Boat may well bankrupt itself in the process, but what a gloriousway to go!

4) The scale of the response required for a disaster of this scope, and the dauntinggap between needs and resources. Tucker reports that the Ishinomaki authoritiesplan to build 150 government-subsidized housing units. However, 8,000 familieshave applied for temporary housing, and that number is expected to reach 10,000.What role can the NGO and private sector play in filling that gap? Tucker mentionsthe work of David Lopez, a Baltimorearchitect who’s promoting new approaches to emergency housing. His focus: “sheltersolutions that allow communities to stay together, as close to their originaldwellings as possible, after disasters,” enabling people to stay in theirneighborhoods and house themselves by making low-cost, adaptive use of debris.

5) The hyper-local approach to disaster relief taken in Japan, in which communities make most of the key decisions about how to deploy government resources, from how to group neighborstogether in emergency shelters, to how to rebuild. Contrast this with the oftenham-handed federally-driven approach taken to relief in New Orleans post-Katrina. “If there isanything to be learned from the events that played out in Japan after thetsunami,” notes Tucker, “it is that our public response to disaster mustaccommodate and encourage this vital urge to keep community physically intact.”

The coming decades will inevitably challenge the US with floods, fire, tornados andearthquakes as well as creeping threats such as drought or rising sea levels,and wildcard events such as terrorist attacks. What role can and will museumsplay in preparing their communities to respond to these challenges, and inuniting and preserving communities in the aftermath of disasters?

Please share your museum's experiences in helping communities deal with disaster. Email stories to futureofmuseums@aam-us.org or post in comments, below.

Building a Better Fishing Pole: how technology-focused organizations can help their museum community

2011-10-25T10:33:00.000-04:00

Many museums are struggling to navigate theexpanding universes of social media and digital content with the slim resourcesavailable to them in constrained budgets. Fortunately, some entrepreneurialmuseums are breaking trail—pooling resources to develop shared tools, investingin free and open source software that can be adopted by the rest of the field. Intoday’s guest post, Perian Sully, project manager: online access and digital asset management at the Balboa Park Online Collaborative, reports on some ofthese projects.

Balboa Park Online Collaborative is anunconventional organization. BPOC was founded two years ago to provide a hostof technology services and support for 27 (and growing) organizations in SanDiego’s Balboa Park. We provide IT support, build new websites, help with iPadkiosks, digitize collection items and video archives, and act as a resource formuseum staff with various technology questions. BPOC’s partners includeorganizations that represent natural history, science, history, anthropology,craft, fine art, performing arts, locomotion, a zoo, archives and libraries;yearly budgets range anywhere from $500K to over $200 million.

Because of the diversityof partners, BPOC strives to develop tools that allow organizations toduplicate our efforts, with or without our direct assistance. This alsoreflects the belief in collaboration and sharing that the BPOC staff hold dear.We are an organization that has the knowledge and ability to promote technologyuse in the museum field, and we have been hard at work developing at least twoDrupal website modules (not yet ready for prime time, butwe’re polishing them now), as well as an image uploader that takes metadataexports from collection management systems and matches the records to theirimages and uploads to Flickr. We’ve called this uploader Sammu:Synchronized Automated Metadata and Media Uploader.

San Diego Air and Space Museum images preparing to be uploaded.

For many organizationslooking to put their collections online, the options are either confusing,expensive, labor intensive or a combination of all three. And even if themuseum already has their collection available on their website, they may wishto share their images on social media sites to encourage awareness of thecollection and drive traffic back to their website. Here at Balboa Park, weencourage our partners to put their collections on Flickr because it’sinexpensive, easy to use, has a very large and active user community and it’seasy to use Flickr’s built-in tools to display the collection back on themuseum’s website. People are much more likely to stumble upon the images viaFlickr because of its robust tagging and search tools.

One BPOC partner, the San Diego Air and Space Museum, has released over 170,000 images into the Public Domain through the Flickr Commons, and has garnered nearly 4 millions views in 18months. The Museum of Photographic Arts, joined the Commons in May of 2011—as of thiswriting MPA has only 585 images online, but nearly 200,000 views. Last year, the SDASM andMPA websites had 768,124 and 385,788 pageviews, respectively. Clearly, theseorganizations are gaining broader exposure among the community that uses theFlickr website.

However, we also know howdifficult it can be for organizations to get their images and descriptive text into Flickr. It was important to BPOC to developa tool that we could use and also share with our community in order toduplicate these successes. We hired a developer, John Fox (maker of the MemoryMiner software some museums are using), to create Sammu. He created an elegant toolthat takes tab-delimited text files exported from collection managementsystems, looks for the image filename, matches the record information, andsmushes the record fields together into Flickr’s description field beforeuploading.

Sammu in action

Developing freeware likeSammu takes a fair amount of care and feeding by thedevelopers and clients alike, and at some point the software needs to be testedby the community at large. We’re at that point now, and (if you’re runningMacOS 10.6 and up) we could use your help with testing Sammu and providing feedback.

The Indianapolis Museum of Art Lab, the Center for History and New Media and the New Media Consortium regularly release new open source or free softwaretools to the community. Other museums offer their collection data and images informats appropriate for hacking, research or remixing via API or download (like the Powerhouse Museum’s Electronic Swatchbook and the Brooklyn Museum’s images in the Wikimedia Commons) or provide standards and other resources (ex.the Getty Research Institute’s vocabularies).

The institutions I’veprovided as examples here are large, it’s true, as it does take a fair amountof resources to create these tools. But as our culture of sharing andcollaboration becomes the norm, small institutions can join in, too. By usingthese tools, and offering their images and data to each other and to thepublic, we can capitalize on access to these materials and make even better tools.

Perian and CFM would like to know how successfulyour museum’s Flickr efforts have been. Please use the comment section below toshare links to your Flickr stream and tell us how it has worked for you.

Futurist Friday: Agenda 2026

2011-10-20T10:04:00.000-04:00

To paraphrase Churchy,from Pogo, “Futurist Fridaycomes on a Thursday this week.”

I am delighted to find that our museum associationcolleagues in the Netherlands—the Nederlandse Museumvereniging—produced a report last year that parallels CFM’s Museums & Society 2034: Trends and Potential Futures.They were kindly responded to our request that they translate Agenda 2026: Study on the Future of the Dutch Museum Sector into English, sowe can share it with you.

It’s a good read, and provides a trans-Atlantic opportunityto explore some important questions. Is the future universal, or will theforces shaping the coming decades play out in significantly different waysacross the globe?

The 2026 authors recruited experts from many sectors to ranka multitude of issues on predictability (though I think this is a wonkytranslation, and they really mean probability)and relevance to museums. This might have played out differently in the U.S.Water, for example, which they rank low on both counts, will be of greatrelevance in our country as scarcity affects the rate of growth and developmentof many major metropolitan areas and concerns about water quality and safetyaffect the exploitation of energy resources. The “tight labor market” would indubitablyhave made our short list, while European-specific issues would drop out.

In the end the authors focused on six major areas:

Retirement of babyboomers
Growth ofinternational cultural tourism
Cuts in [government]subsidies
Development of the Randstad metropolitan area (Randstadis an area in the Netherlands that includes four major cities:Amsterdam,Rotterdam, Utrecht and The Hague.)
Digitized society
Greater European influence

Numbers 1, 2, 3, and 5 (bold) are very relevant to U.S.museums, though these forces may play out in different ways in American thanfor our European colleagues.

Some points of similarity: our Dutch colleagues also face anaging population. We are intensely interested in the large cadre of babyboomers whose behavior (with respect to cultural consumption, philanthropy,volunteerism) is hard to predict yet critically important. The report also includessome interesting speculation on the effects of boomer nostalgia on collectionsand exhibits, and the risk of alienating younger audiences.

Even the section that on the face of it seems least relevantfor the U.S. (on the Randstad metropolitan area) raises interesting questions.Are there comparable “mega-cities” in the U.S., like the Boston-New York-D.C. corridor,which may blend into one big metro area? Should these separate cities startcooperating with each other now on cultural tourism and global marketing, asthe 2026 report suggests?

I encourage you to read, compare its observations withMuseum & Society 2034 and with your own reading and think about theimplications. Use the comment section below to weigh in with your observations.

Feeding the Spirit Symposium: A Fresh Frame of Reference for Museums-Community-Food

2011-10-18T13:50:00.003-04:00

This guest post is by David R. Curry, a member of the CFM Council.

As someone who has refined a set of strategies to survive symposiums and conferences (which all too often seem like they could be half as long and twice as substantive) I was disarmed by the quality and impact of CFM’s Feeding the Spirit: Museums, Food and Community last week in Pittsburgh.

The meeting was hosted by the Phipps Conservatory and Botanical Garden, and convened in collaboration with the Carnegie Museums of Pittsburgh, the Association of Children’s Museums, the American Public Gardens Association and the Association of African American Museums, with support from presenting sponsor UPMC Health Plan and from Sodexo.

I say disarmed because I did not anticipate that the meeting would have the effect of changing my frame of reference about museums and the role that food—broadly speaking—could play to energize, refresh and align mission, programs and people.

The précis for the meeting on the CFM website addresses the opportunity as follows:

Feeding the Spirit” will recruit museums and public gardens to…help their communities explore our collective values about food, our bodies, our environment and society. It will unify the field around key messages about food critical to transforming the health of the country, and challenge museums and public gardens to integrate these messages into their exhibits, programs and operations. It will lead the field to examine the food choices we provide in our facilities and how these choices align with health and nutrition. [Further, it]…will help museums and public gardens prepare for the future as they re-examine their own attitudes and relationships towards food and explore how food can play a key role in fostering relationships and building new audiences.

But the proof was in the pudding [note food metaphor] as some 150 participants from a range of museum types, as well as food service companies and collaborating organizations, actively participated in thought leader-led panels and workshop-level exercises.

Well…it did recruit, unify, lead and help prepare!

During the day, organizations as diverse as the Yale Peabody Museum, the Children’s Museum of Manhattan, the Newark Museum, National Museum of the American Indian, the Jane Addams Hull-House Museum, the Chicago Botanic Garden, Growing Power (Chicago) and others all reported on unique and powerful exhibits, programs and initiatives themed to “food.”

My key observation (which I am still reflecting on) is about how rich the collaborative networks were that underpinned all these projects.

Clearly, they each depend on building and nurturing collaborations between museums, but, more important, with non-museums institutions and organizations—governmental, academic, commercial and community.

My open question involves how we develop and refine the collaborative skill sets in our museum staffs and leadership to make such projects and their new kinds of goals and outcomes a possibility….and a success.

The day included a good dose of brainstorming and ideation which will be analyzed and disseminated through the “Feeding the Spirit Cookbook” a resource and discussion guide to follow.

Please watch this space as CFM will post video of the thought leader segments of the meeting as well as the annual CFM Lecture which closed the day: Serve It Up Proudly! Some Food for Thought on the Intersections of Food Studies and Museums delivered by Jessica Harris, culinary historian and Queens College, CUNY and the Ray Charles Program at Dillard University.

The Backward ABC’s of Museum Data

2011-10-13T08:52:00.000-04:00

This week’s blog post comes from Philip M. Katz,assistant director for research at AAM.

This was going to be anessay about the power of museum financial and operating data—robust, reliablenumbers that can help museums plan for the future and help the museum fieldmake a better case right now for all museums. I even had a clever hook: thebackward ABC’s of Collecting, Benchmarking and Advocatingwith data.

I was going to write about“the folly of prediction” using data (the subject of a great episode of Freakonomics Radio).I was going to remind you that CFM typically urges museums to take a long-termview of planning. Our standard warning is that “traditional short-term, small scale planning methodologies usually donot prepare a museum for radical changes in the future, or foster realinnovation.” As a result, we tryto provide museums with tools for looking 5, 10, 25 or more years down theline. But our assumption is always that good long-term planning builds on solid knowledge about a museum’s currentsituation. And that requires good tools, like AAM’s new Museum Benchmarking Online (MBO)system, which features instant comparisons and detailed reports forsubscribers.

Finally, I was going totalk about how AAM needs as many museums as possible to share their vital statistics,so we can make informed arguments about the state of the museum field and itsimpact on American society. (Especially important when policymakers starttalking, again, about cutting support for museums.) In the past, museumsacross the nation generously contributed their data to AAM’s periodic Museum Financial Information surveys; now we’re using MBO to collect the same information. It’s free, but itdoes take time. subscribers get access to a suite of comparison and reportingtools.

But I couldn’t find a wayto make any of this exciting or compelling. So I drew you a comic stripinstead. Please share it with you friends and colleagues.

SmartSteps at the Senator John Heinz History Center

2011-10-12T15:35:00.000-04:00

Today’s guest post is from Lisa Dundon, manager of multimedia communications at the Senator John Heinz History Center. Lisa introduces a new video showcasing the History Center’s SmartSteps exhibit, demonstrating yet another way museums can help their community tackle challenges of health and fitness.

The Senator John Heinz History Center, “the Smithsonian’s home in Pittsburgh,” and UPMC Health Plan have partnered to encourage museum visitors to climb the stairs and blend health and history with the new SmartSteps exhibition.

Visitors who take the steps to explore the History Center’s six floors of exhibition space will be treated to unique facts about Pittsburgh history and colorful murals with health and wellness tips.

As far as we know, the History Center is the first museum in the nation with an exhibit in its stairwell.

The SmartSteps exhibit is part of the museum’s “Health & Fitness” initiatives, which includes healthier eating options at MixStirs Café, a Health and The Body section inside the Western Pennsylvania Sports Museum, and the nation’s first curator of food and fitness.

Visitors who climb all 123 steps of the SmartSteps exhibit will be rewarded with a complimentary Heinz pickle pin.

The Let’s Move! Museums & Gardens initiative brings the fight for childhood health in America to museums and gardens of all types. By signing up for the program, museums are part of a partnership not only with the White House, but also with a larger network of national associations and museums. For more information on the initiative, visit the IMLS website.

Can Museums Step Up?

2011-10-11T10:44:00.000-04:00

Today’s guest post is by Jesse Moyer, manager of organizational learning and innovation at KnowledgeWorks. KnowledgeWorks is dedicated to “transformingeducation in the U.S. from a world of schooling to a world of learning.” As anonprofit that has spent over a decade helping society envision a betterfuture, it has been a model for CFM from our inception. You can followJesse’s exploration of the future at Welcome to the World of Learning blog.

When people talk about the future of education, youinvariably hear about PersonalLearning Environments (PLEs) and/or PersonalLearning Networks (PLNs). Fromwhat I have read and understand about the concepts, the difference between PLEsand PLNs is that environments involve taking advantage of different technologieswhile networks leverage person-to-person relationships. Instead of arguing over vocabulary,let’s just call them personal learning ecologies.

The 2020Forecast: Creating the Future of Learning defines personal learningecologies as, “families looking outside the traditional ‘system’ to createecologies of learning experiences.” Put another way, families do not wait for the traditional education systemto change in order to meet currently unmet needs; they takeresponsibility for their own learning and find their own solutions. Obviously, this has huge implications forthe learner, educators, and for institutions inside and outside the“traditional system.”

For the learner, it means they can take control of their owneducational destiny. Some peoplecall it anytime, anywhere learning; some call it any place, any pace learning;and some call it differentiated instruction. Whatever you want to call it, personal learning ecologies empowerthe learner because they are created by the learner, for the learner. Below is a video that contrasts thecurrent system with a learning ecology:

There are also implications for educators. In our current system, teachers have tobe everything to everyone: instructor, counselor, social worker and sometimesthe only positive influence a child has in their life. In a network of content providers whereinstruction is differentiated to meet the needs of each and every student, itseems logical that learning agents (educators of the future) would have differentiatedroles too: a learningjourney mentor, a learningfitness instructor, a communityintelligence cartographer, or an eduvator, explained in the video below:

Finally, thereare major implications for institutions inside and outside the education system. For those inside the system; schools,districts, boards of education, etc.; the repercussions are too vast to discusshere. It’s the changes for organizationsoutside the traditional system that are relevant to museums.

Places like museums,libraries and theaters have all sort of interesting knowledge to share, butare often thought of as one-day field trips, at best, instead of legitimateeducational providers. What wouldit look like for museums to take the lead on becoming important contributors tothe future education landscape? Well, it is already happening. The Children’sMuseum of Indianapolis has established a preschool with the mission of, “creating extraordinary learning experiencesacross the arts, sciences, and humanities that have the power to transform thelives of children and families.” The New York Public Library (I know it’s not a museum, but the conceptstill applies) hosted a “Findthe Future Game” as part of their centennial celebration.

My challenge tomuseums is this: follow the examples above and step up to thisopportunity. As Personal LearningEcologies erase the boundaries distinguishing “inside” from “outside” theeducational system, how can museums, how will museums become a vital part ofthe new ecology? How will museum staff integrate the role of learningagent into their work?

There are very fewthings, if any, more important to our society than the education of ourchildren. Take this opportunity toinnovate, shift the role museums play in our society, and become an importantpart of the most crucial experience in children’s lives: their education.

Futures Studies 101: How to Read the Newspaper

2011-10-06T11:08:00.003-04:00

I joke that the biggest change in my life since becomingdirector of CFM is that now I read the financial section of the New York Times.

Except it isn’t a joke.

Once future studies gave me a framework for my reading, Istarted reading more broadly and strategically. It has improved my education inmany areas in which I was woefully ignorant (economics, global politics. Popculture). It uncovers news items we share via Dispatches from the Future ofMuseums and inspires posts on this blog.

So, silly as it may sound, I will devote this post todescribing how I, as a futurist, now read the newspaper, based on yesterday’sedition of the NYT (Oct. 5, 2011). I encourage you to add your savvy tips onreading in the comment section at the end of the post.

First. I skim headlines, mentally dropping stories into thegeneral STEEP categories of futurism (Social, Technological, Economic,Environmental and Political).This helps keep my scan wide, and ensures I don’t just fixate on bright shinyobjects. (Ooo look!Apple released the iPhone 4S. No transformative changes.)

I also look for stories relating to trends in areas wefollow regularly at CFM: anything related to museums, of course, but alsoethics, education, energy, transportation, green design,accessibility, mobile tech, gaming, demographic change, philanthropy, food and crowdsourcing. Also (of course) 3D printing and yarnbombing.

Some stories seem directly applicable to the museum field: theLos Angeles Philharmonic’s Take a Stand project is an effort to train the next generation of teachers who will “bring classicalmusic to populations that normally wouldn’t have it.” How can museumscontribute to training the next generation to appreciate and use our resources?

But many important stories have indirect, but profound, implications for society and our field. I watch the unfolding news about the presidential campaign with acute awareness that a Republican victoryin 2012 would be a disruptive event creating a very different political futurefor museums. Funding for NEA, NEH, NSF and IMLS might be drastically cut.Tax-exempt status might be under greater threaten from political leadershipthat seeks a balanced national (or state) budget without tax increases onbusinesses or “ordinary” Americans.

I think about the future implications of any given story—a Japanese reactor shut down yesterday, dealing another blow to public confidence in nuclear powernot only locally but, potentially, internationally. Japan’s power strategy wasbased on nuclear; in the aftermath of damage from the earthquake and tsunami inMarch, it will almost certainly rethink this strategy. If Japan turns itsattention and money to alternate energy research, could this kickstart progressglobally?

The most interesting story about the iPhone actually wasn’tabout the phone per se, it was about the effect it might have on products andservices it may drive closer to the brink of obsolescence. The writer points out that its improved features pose (further) threats to makers of video cameras,telephone providers and makers of digital greeting cards. How will the everincreasing sophistication of smart handheld devices like the iPhone effect theAmerican economy overall? How will it shape how visitors consume and sharemuseum content? (This was before the announcement of Steve Jobs’s death, whichmay change everything!)

Beyond the serious stuff, I look for stories that providecolor and detail for potential scenarios of the future, like this story on squatters in Britain who simply take over vacant properties (and areapparently, under current law, very difficult to evict). In a contracting citylike Detroit, where conventional museums are closing, what would happen ifpeople occupied vacant buildings and opened “squatter museums,” to protest thedecaying urban infrastructure, and tell their own stories?

Finally, I try to talk about one or two interesting articleswith someone else, to test my understanding of the content and to get theirtake on it. And I listen to what they found interesting—often a differentreader will focus on things I completely missed.

Overall, reading with a futurist focus has expanded therange of things I know at least a little about. (Even if I still don’t reallyunderstand derivatives.) It helps me think about museums, and the world in which we operate, in a richercontext. And it expands my mental rolodex of interesting people in all sectorsthat AAM might want to involve in future projects.

Now excuse me while I go buy the ingredients for Pork Katsu.The recipe looks delicious.

Connecting with Nature and Staying Fit at Lincoln Park Zoo

2011-10-04T13:29:00.000-04:00

As Let’s Move! Museums & Gardens continues to roll out, the campaign has engendered some interesting discussionsabout potential tensions between a museum’s mission and health relatedactivities. Nutrition and exercise may be a natural fit for a science museum,health museum, or children’s museum, but maybe it is a harder stretch forothers. Many art museums, for example, are offering yoga in the galleries, butis this mission related, or just something good but peripheral to how themuseum serves its community? This debate is going to come up again and again,in various guises, as museums grapple with whether, and how, to help theircommunities deal with challenging issues in coming decades. Today’s guest postis from Jaclyn Peterson, manager of public programs explaining how Lincoln Park Zoo decided that in their case yoga is, in fact, a natural fit to mission aswell as being good for their audience.

Lincoln ParkZoo recently joined the ranks of cultural institutions that are expandingbeyond traditional programming to create new mission-driven opportunities thatalso encourage children and adults to be physically active. A new outdoor exhibit space, coupledwith a community affinity for yoga classes at neighboring locations led to thecreation of Yoga at the Zoo.

Each weekduring the summer, Lincoln Park Zoo hosts outdoor yoga classes adjacent to the NatureBoardwalk exhibit, a 14-acre urban ecosystem complete with a large pond andnative wildlife. When theboardwalk opened in June 2010, local joggers, hikers and dog-walkersimmediately embraced the opportunity to blend enjoyment of nature with theirown fitness goals, while helping the zoo achieve our goal of connecting peopleto nature. Visitors come to spot wildlife, from painted turtles toblack-crowned night herons and use the Nature Boardwalk as a unique space forexercising.

Weimmediately recognized our new Peoples Gas Education Pavilion—a new partiallyenclosed education space on the banks of the pond—as an ideal location for yogaclasses. Since the zoo’s core audience is families, we began creating yogaopportunities for parents and caregivers to enjoy with their children. Westarted by offering Parent & Baby classes as well as adults-onlyclasses. However, we quicklyshifted to classes geared to parents with toddlers ages 2–5, an audience thatis a better fit for our membership base and better able to enjoy yoga classes.These classes are right in line with the goals of the Let’s Move! Museums & Gardens initiative. They encourage children to be physically active at a youngage, and they require parents to engage in exercising along with theirtoddlers—an important factor in forming long-lasting exercise habits. Instructors lead fun yoga poses, targeted stretching, together with otherage-appropriate activities, like reading a storybook, doing a simple craft orexploring the natural surroundings.

Launchingthis new program presented challenges. We were careful to work with certifiedyoga experts during both the pre-planning and program development phase. We hadto consider: How do people sign up for classes? What if it rains? Are the yoga instructors on the zoo’s payroll? What if a flock of geese comes through the day before classand leaves droppings all over the outdoor “yoga studio”? Will local yogis forego the comforts ofan indoor studio to combat the potential challenges of attending classesoutdoors? Not surprisingly, it waselements we did not consider that ended up being the hurdles we had to workhardest to overcome. We found that our registration set up was not nearlyflexible enough. While we hopedpeople would purchase passes for a set number of classes per month,participants wanted the capability to pick and choose when they attended. Additionally, some attendees werefrustrated that there was not a better protocol for moving to a rain locationand then communicating location changes. More than once, participants showed up for class on a rainy day, wereunable to find the yoga class, and had to go home. Not a good thing!

2011 is oursecond year of Yoga at the Zoo, and we’ve made great strides in streamliningthe management of yoga classes and making registration more flexible forparticipants. We committed to areliable rain location and communication plan. We created a whole menu of class pass options, from anunlimited summer pass to a monthly 2-class pass to a single class drop-in pass.In 2012, we hope to further expand our Yoga at the Zoo offerings, andincorporate yoga into some of our established programs, such as summercamp.

Sometraditionalists may not immediately see the connection between yoga and thezoo’s usual education topics, like animal adaptations and zoo careers. However, we believe that there is astrong tie. A healthy lifestyle iscommonly linked to a healthy environment. Organic farming, active forms of transportation and local production offoods are all beneficial for human health as well as the environment. Educating children about healthylifestyles is one way of bringing environmental consciousness to their ownexperience.

Yoga at theZoo has been a great learning experience and has inspired us to continuethinking innovatively about future programming. Who would have thought that a zoo exhibit turned outdooryoga studio would work so well? And in case you were wondering… yes… the geese do still leave ‘gifts’ inthe yoga studio but that hasn’t derailed a class yet.

The Let’s Move! Museums & Gardensinitiative brings the fight for childhood health in America to museums andgardens of all types. By signing up for the program, museums are part of apartnership not only with the White House, but also with a larger network ofnational associations and museums. For more information on the initiative, visitthe IMLS website.

Innovation Lab: nurturing nonconformity and half-baked ideas

2011-09-29T08:43:00.000-04:00

“Make no little plans.They have no magic to stir men's blood and probably will not themselves berealized."—Daniel Burnham

When I previewed CFM’s plans for 2011, I said we would “establish mechanisms to fosterinnovation and experimentation in museum operations, in order to discovermethods and strategies that will help museums thrive in the future.”

True confession: I was makingthat up. I didn’t know, at the time, how we would actually do it.

But I knew it had to happen! The AAM board assigned CFM“fostering innovation” as one of its mandates because they realized that operatingenvironment of the 21st century will be a very different operatingenvironment than that of the 20th century. Most of AAM’s programsand services (e.g., Accreditation, the Museum Assessment Program) encourageconformity to standards and best practices that evolved in the last 100 years. Notthat these are bad operating guidelines—but they may not be the framework thatwill ensure success in the future.

So how do we recognize, encourage, reward thenon-conformists—the museums that say “heck with the standard way of doingthings, we think we have a better way”? Especially since, (as with any risktaking) many of these ventures will fail. How do we celebrate risk taking andfailure while helping to minimize risks and maximize the chances of success?

One small start: Innovation Lab for Museums.

Innovation Lab was originally developed for performing arts organizationsby a nonprofit organization called EmcArts,with support from the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation. The Duke Foundationdoesn’t fund museums, but, over time, EmcArts worked with some museums inCalifornia with the support of the Irvine Foundation. Richard Evans, whodirects EmcArts’ programs and strategic partnerships, approached AAM aboutbroadening the program, and the funding, to serve more museums. Recognizingthis as an opportunity to innovate within AAM (while minimizing risk) I’veworked with Richard over the past year to ensure the program is suitable formuseums of all kinds and to find funding.

We were very happy to announce, last week, that generoussupport from the MetLife Foundation has enabled AAM and EmcArts to open thefirst round of Innovation Lab for Museums for proposals.

The Lab is designed for museums that already have whatRichard calls “half-baked ideas”—promising dreams they would like to implement,but haven’t quite worked out how. Building on EmcArts’ observation that most institutionalculture is fatal to budding innovations, the Lab will take teams of staff outof the museum, to join teams from the other participating museums for anfive-day, residential intensive retreat. The program also provides coachingbefore and after the retreat, input from outside experts selected inconsultation with the museums, and $40,000 in implementation support.

Participating museums will benefit in two ways: implementinga specific innovation in their institution, and modifying their organizationalculture to be more supportive of innovation in general.

This is a small start—three museums will be accepted in thefirst round—but my hope is it will grow over time and will have ripple effectsfar beyond the participating institutions. Successful innovations developedthrough the Lab may be mainstreamed into other museums, and we will share whatwe learn about creating innovative cultures with the field, helping counterbalanceour field’s emphasis on conformity with a greater tolerance for risk andexperimentation.

The deadline for proposals is Oct. 31. You can read moreabout Innovation Lab for Museums and the nature of innovation in Richard’sguest post for the CFM Blog. You can direct inquiries about the Lab (questions about eligibility,suitable projects, nature of the program) to EmcArt’s national programs manager, Liz Dreyer.

I am psyched to read the applications that come in, and lookforward to sharing stories of the awardee’s innovative projects in the comingyear!

Museums Can Change the World: Improving the Nation’s Health

2011-09-27T10:18:00.000-04:00

A projection for the U.S., by 2030: Obesity prevalence will rise to ~50% in men between 45% and 52% in women. There will be: 7.8 million extra cases of diabetes; 6.8 million more cases of coronary heart disease and stroke; 539,000 additional cases of cancer. Annual spending on obesity-related diseases will rise by 13-16%, leading to 2.6% increase in national health spending. Total medical costs associated with treatment of these preventable diseases are estimated to increase by $48-66 billion/year. Can we do anything as a society to stem the tide? Maybe. Can museums help? The B.B. King Museum says “yes,” as reported by AAM intern Ella Mitchell.

The state of Mississippi is marked by an alarming distinction: it is the most obese state in the nation where 44% of children are obese or overweight. To much of the country, the statistics on obesity, as well as hypertension and diabetes, are just numbers, but Ann Shackelford, communications and development director at the B.B. King Museum and Delta Interpretive Center, explains that in Indianola, MS, and the entire Mississippi Delta, “We are living with these statistics every day, seeing them as people walking down the street.”

Where some may just see a problem, the B.B. King Museum instead found a natural way to be part of the solution to this obesity epidemic and other local issues by starting The Art of Living Smart, a seven-week summer day camp for children ages 6–15. During this time the kids engage in a variety of activities designed to teach them about healthy habits while also exposing them to the rich arts culture of the Mississippi Delta area. On any given day they might be playing traditional blues instruments, writing acrostic poems about music, practicing a new dance, making healthy smoothies, or exploring the history of their community through the museum’s exhibits.

As evidenced by these activities, the camp isn’t just about the physical health of the children; their overall well-being and the health of their community are also critical to the goals of The Art of Living Smart. To do this, the B.B. King Museum has capitalized on a strong local network including a national corporation, local non-profits and several regional universities. In this way the museum’s work benefits not only the campers, but also the surrounding communities. A grant from the Delta Health Alliance (DHA), made it possible for the camp to forge multiple local partnerships to support their work with the children. DHA is a nonprofit dedicated to community-based healthcare solutions, part of the Indianola Promise Community (an initiative connected with President Obama’s Promise Neighborhood program).

One of the most fruitful connections the museum made was with a dietetics professor and her students from Delta State University who helped design several aspects of the program. After planning nutrition lessons, the students, as well as some from Mississippi Valley State University, served as knowledgeable counselors. In the first year of the camp, all of the counselors had actually gone to high school in Indianola and thus served as great role models for the campers. The DHA grant made it possible for the museum to pay them. “That’s one of the things we were really proud of: that we were not only giving jobs to local young people, but they also had this opportunity to be mentors,” said Shackelford.

The camp’s program underwent numerous developments between its first and second years. “Last year when we started the program it didn’t have as big a connection to the exhibit as we would’ve liked, and we realized that we have some really natural ties between the camp and the museum,” said Shackelford. The museum decided to emphasize connections between the musical traditions the museum explores and corresponding dances, such as gospel music and praise dancing or the blues and juke joint dancing. The size of the program also dramatically increased. In 2010, the museum served 58 children but had over 200 on the waiting list. Shackelford remembers, “It just broke our hearts that there was this much interest and need and we couldn’t serve them.” Fortunately the camp was able to host both a morning and afternoon session this summer, enrolling over 125 children with hopes to expand even more in the summer of 2012.

The Art of Living Smart is not just a health boot camp, as evidenced by the variety of arts- as well as nutrition-focused activities. Nonetheless the kids are practicing healthy habits that carry over into their daily lives, even if it’s just in small ways like reading nutrition labels with their parents. The B.B. King Museum hopes the kids learn that taking care of their bodies is the only way they can live to be 86 years old just like Mr. King himself.

Interested in exploring what your museum can do to help your community with issues of food, health and nutrition? Join us for Feeding the Spirit, a national symposium being held in Pittsburgh on Oct. 13.

And consider joining the Let’s Move! Museums and Gardens initiative, which brings the fight against obesity in America to museums and gardens of all types. By signing up for the program, museums are part of a partnership not only with the White House, but also with a larger network of national associations and museums.

Do Museums Need to Care about Foodies?

2011-09-22T10:49:00.000-04:00

This guest post is by SusieWilkening, senior consultant and curator of museum audiences, Reach Advisors. We’ve been blogging a lot about food,leading up to the symposium Feeding the Spirit: Museums, Food & Community in Pittsburgh on Oct. 13. Susie shares data demonstrating why museums shouldcare about food, and foodies, when planning how to expand audiences and improvethe bottom line.

Turns out, there are a fair number of museum goers who enjoyfood.

This makes intuitive sense to me! When my husband, Jeremy,and I recently traveled to Turkey, Jeremy was prepared. He thoroughly researched all the mostinteresting restaurants and local dives and coded them on a map. As we explored Istanbul, whenever wegot hungry, Jeremy pulled out his handy map and presto! we had a convenient(and typically delicious) meal. For us, food is a gateway to learning about a new place, adifferent culture, even a different time. Back home in the Boston area we also seek out interesting foods, bothtraditional to the area we live in and authentic fare served by, and primarilyfor, the many ethnicities of our multi-cultural region.

In some of our recent client work at Reach Advisors we havegathered data on interest in food-related activities, such as: learning about the past or differentcultures through food; seeking out interesting restaurants, markets and foodfestivals; and getting creative in the kitchen via cooking or baking. When we examine the responses of food-oriented individuals,we find that these individuals are curious museum-goers who would love formuseums to engage them via food. Ourwork with the Atlanta History Center is representative of our food findings for museums to date. Michael Rose of AHC graciously allowedus to share these findings with you because, as Michael puts it, “foodways isone of our favorite things.”

About the Research

Our work in Atlanta began with a cultural consumers surveydisseminated via the email lists of cultural organizations throughout theAtlanta metro area; nearly 7,500 individuals responded.

A third of the sample (37 percent) said either they enjoyed cookingor baking at home in their leisure time orthat eating authentic or ethnic foods from the past was a favorite way ofexperiencing history. Anadditional 14 percent, who we are calling Super Foodies, chose both responses, for a total of 51 percent of the sample having someexplicit interest in food. I’ll befocusing on the smaller group of Super Foodies, though the additional 37 percent offood-motivated visitors are more like the Super Foodies than the remainder ofthe non-Foodie sample.

Super Foodies, Museums andFood

SuperFoodies are younger than average museum visitors, being much more likely to beunder 40. In particular, youngwomen without children and mothers of children five and younger, seem to beparticularly attuned to food in their lives.

Happily,Super Foodies are committed, curious museum goers visiting a wider variety ofmuseums more often than regular museum goers with less interest in food. Their strong interest in food does notget checked at the door when they visit museums, however, and Super Foodies areattuned to opportunities to learn about food, where it comes from and how itreflects different cultures and the past. As one of our respondents noted:

“Okay, at the risk of sounding gluttonous, I would saythat I enjoy any history experience where I get to ’taste’ the past! I LOVE food (and most everyone elsedoes too, but some won’t admit it). . . . I have a very strong association withfood and memory.”

Additionally,Super Foodies are hands-on individuals. While they are more likely than other respondents to enjoy hands-onactivities at museums, they are also much more likely to enjoy crafting and DIYprojects as well as gardening. Inour continued work with AHC we met young mothers who were planting their ownvegetable plots and even tending chickens and other farm animals. Our research from within and outsidethe museum field indicates that younger adults and parents are giving morethought to food, where it comes from, how it is grown and how it tastes, aswell as the cultural significance of food.

Food and Museums. So what?

Giventhat just over half of regular museum goers have an explicit interest in food, foodrepresents a very powerful, sensory method of engaging museum goers at museumsof all types. Additionally, foodis a great venue for participating in Let’s Move! Museums and Gardens,the initiative in which IMLS is working with the First Lady’s office to developprogramming around healthy eating. How could your museum go about incorporating food in yourprogramming? Here are some of ourideas:

sparking debate on the pros and cons of industrialagriculture versus organic farming at a science center

getting dirty at a botanical garden with young adults learninghow to tend their own gardens

time traveling at history-based museum by sharing authenticfoods of the past

expeditions via food, exploring the significance of food in sustaining cultural identity, atan art, anthropology or even a children’s museum

Thepossibilities of incorporating food into traditional museum experiences areendless, and given the high interest many museum goers have in food, and theintensity of a tasting experience, food is a, ahem, tasteful and fillingaddition to the offerings a museums has to offer visitors, and could well be adraw for bringing in younger and more diverse audiences.

Interested in exploring how food can help yourmuseum connect to new audiences? Join colleagues from the museum and foodcommunities in Pittsburgh on Oct. 13 for Feeding the Spirit.

The Transformative Power of Innovation

2011-09-20T09:46:00.000-04:00

This guest post is by Richard Evans, president,EmcArts Inc. AAM ispartnering with EmcArts, with the generous support of MetLife Foundation, tooffer Innovation Lab for Museums. The Request for Proposals for the Lab has just been released, proposals are due Oct. 31.

At EmcArts, we work withsome of the most courageous and forward-looking cultural organizations in thecountry. They are all responding positively to the demand for new practices,and making space to challenge and depart from “business-as-usual.” Through the remarkable participants inour programs that incubate organizational innovation, we have learned a gooddeal about how organizations do this crucial work well. On the occasion of thepublic launch of the new national InnovationLab for Museums, in collaboration with CFM, here are some of the thingswe’ve learned that may be of use as you consider this new program opportunity.

Innovationis different from creativity

Don’t confuse innovation with “creativity” (or “ideas”) and thinkthat innovation is like lightning striking—rarely, and never in the sameplace twice—so it cannot be relied upon or regularly repeated. These are twoquite different qualities. Creativityis a characteristic of individuals, where innovationis a group, or corporate, activity. It requires people to work together to turnideas into practical projects that can feasibly be implemented. Innovation changes things by applying ideas topractice.

Innovationis a means to an end

In our programs, the purpose of innovating is to achievenew public value and advance the organization’s mission. To put it bluntly, weneed to do things differently than in the past because established strategiesare not producing the returns they used to, our perceived value to ourcommunities is not on an upward trajectory, and other organizations, orsectors, are seen to be delivering more vital services. If we do not shift ourorganizational assumptions, and develop new approaches that leverage currentsocial dynamics rather than rely on cherished principles from the past, then wewill drift toward inconsequence—or grind painfully toward dissolution.

Innovating needs a process framework to sustain it

Without a well-researchedincubation structure, green shoots of innovation tend either to wither underthe glare of established practices, or become excessively wacky so as tojustify their existence, regardless of mission. The Innovation Lab for Museums provides a formal structure to supportyour work, because innovation won’t be something you’re used to, or practicedat, so you won’t be able to rely on the processes you already know. The Lab frameworkprotects the work of your innovation team from the fatal attraction of businessas usual, so the team has the freedom to open up new pathways.

Innovationis a learned organizational behavior

It would be nice if museumscould innovate easily by just trying new things. But it’s not just a matter of debating the possibilities, selectingone and saying “Go forth and innovate…..” To be consistently innovativeas an organization is a difficult learned behavior, the result of making consciouschoices (in personnel, in structures and systems, in definitions of success)and taking imaginative risks. The Lab will help museums learn how to achieve andsustain those conditions—what Kathleen Cerveny calls “an internal culture ofself-awareness, attention to the environment and willingness to change.”

Treat innovationas a vital new management discipline

“Can you reallypursue innovation?” I am glad to say the answer from the field to this questionis a resounding “Yes.” The more difficult question is: “Can we systematizeinnovating?” Our work at EmcArts suggests we can, using incubation frameworksand carefully designed facilitation to build innovation “muscles” for thelonger term. A 2008 report from the W.K. Kellogg Foundation, Intentional Innovation,encourages not-for-profit organizations to embrace innovation as a permanentpart of their core competencies, calling it “a rational management disciplinewith its own distinct set of processes, practices, and tools.”

I hope these thoughtshelp clear the undergrowth around that slippery word, “innovation,” andencourage you to think about doing things differently in response to theradical changes happening around us. We know there are lots of museum leaderswho could take advantage of this opportunity, so I encourage you to learn aboutthe Innovation Lab for Museums, andseize the opportunity to apply!

The Innovation Lab for Museums is an 18–24 monthprogram in which EmcArts facilitators work with “Innovation Teams” comprisedof senior managers and board representatives in combination with museum staff,artists and scientists, educationalists and/or externalvoices from inside and outside the cultural sector. The Lab provides individualcoaching, group facilitation, an Intensive Retreat and a variety of extendedsupport systems tailored to the needs of each organization, including support grantsof $40,000 toward project prototyping.

Agriculture Training Symposium for Historic Site and Museum Professionals

2011-09-19T14:01:00.001-04:00

Proving yet againthat this is the year of all things food, for museums, Kristin Hagar, developmentand communications coordinator at The Wyck Association shares the following opportunity to explorehow food can help museums build community while nurturing their own financialsustainability.

This Friday, Sept. 23, Wyck HistoricHouse & Garden will host anagriculture training symposium for historic site and museum professionals, in which we will discuss how agriculturecan function as an impetus for growth in fund-raising, visitorship, andcommunity relations, for both large and small organizations. Case presenters will include the JaneAddams Hull-House Museum, the Wyck Association, Awbury Arboretum, the WeaversWay Food Co-op and Grumblethorpe Museum & Farmstand. The Temple University Fox School ofBusiness will conduct an Innovative and Entrepreneurial Thinking workshop to stimulateideas about developing and implementing successful agricultural programming, asthey have with numerous conservation and food organizations in the greater Philadelphiaregion.

Wyck Historic House & Garden has a history ascolorful as the Rouge Vif d'Etampespumpkins, red yard-long beans,and Concord grapes that our Home Farm Manager harvested earliertoday. Blessed with a reputationas the most “quirky” among the numerous preserved sites in Philadelphia’seminently historical Germantown neighborhood, Wyck’s programming over the pastfour decades focused on the site’s 250 years’ worth of possessions andcollections accumulated by the innovators, educators, horticulturalists, andsocial reformers that lived here. Since 2007, however, Wyck’s Home Farm has been attracting more and moreattention out back—including the attention of individuals otherwiseuninterested in this National Historic Landmark.

Wyck’s ventureinto the nexus of agricultural programming and heritage stewardship began withsupport from the Samuel S. Fels Fund to develop a farm that serves severaldistinct but interconnected purposes. The farm grows food for a weekly on-site farmers market; it stands as aninteractive, outdoor classroom for local children and adults; it perpetuatesWyck's 300 year-old agricultural traditions; and it enhances the bucoliclandscape that visitors to Wyck have long enjoyed. The result is a place that attracts a broader public thanbefore. The Home Farm and relatedprograms have caused Wyck’s audience tomore than double in the three years since the farm began.

Urban farming,put simply, is farming with neighbors. And so the cultivation of food becomes a way to cultivaterelationships. The multiplefunctions of the Wyck Home Farm allow us to develop multiple types ofrelationships and to fulfill, in a real way, our mission to enrich local communitylife.

NorthwestPhiladelphia is a bastion of the locavore movement; from urban farming, togastronomes, to urban homesteading, food is a top interest among many of ourneighbors, and it’s no mere trend. At the same time, Northwest Philadelphia is a socioeconomically mixed,and many other of our neighbors struggle to find decent produce in subpargroceries. Both Wyck and ourpartner farmers explicitly aim to offer affordable chemical-free foods to theneighborhood, and customers can use food stamps as well as the vouchersdistributed through the federally-funded Farmers Market Nutrition Program. The Home Farm also functions as alearning environment for elementary through adult levels. And it’s not hard for anybody who comesby, whether new visitors or family descendants, to feel a sense of satisfactionthat this historic site is not only preserved but also enlivened.

In a nutshell,Wyck’s Home Farm provides a safe, beautiful, historic space in which diverseconstituents come together for both pleasures and practicalities, and throughwhich Wyck management can harness an unprecedented range of community outreachopportunities. Let’s talk about thisfurther!

Please join Wyck Historic House &Garden for

An Agricultural Training Symposiumfor Historic Site and Museum Professionals

Friday, Sept. 23

9 a.m.–4 p.m.

$65/person; $25/additionalpersons in group registration

Visit www.wyck.org/programs for the symposium brochureand registration information. Toregister, call Kristin Hagar at 215-848-1690 or mail your information andpayment to her attention, Wyck Historic House & Garden, 6026 GermantownAvenue, Philadelphia, PA 19144.

Futurist Friday: Exploring the Cone of Plausibility

2011-09-16T13:42:00.001-04:00

Clarke’s Third Law:Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

—Arthur C. Clarke, "Profiles of The Future", 1961

Today’s recommendation: spare two minutes to watch a mind expandingvideo:

The Floating University presents a clip of Dr. Michio Kaku talking about “the difference between ideasthat are beyond our technical capabilities today but will be available withinthe next century, ideas that will be doable 1000 years from now, and ideas thatviolate the known laws of physics.” “Surprisingly,” he observes, “very littlefalls into the third category.” Most of what we see in science fiction ispossible within the next 100 years.

Kaku’s talk illustrates the principle depicted in myfavorite futurist diagram: the Cone of Plausibility.

The boundaries of what is plausible/possible expand outwardover time. Hand-held mobile technology—which would have seemed magical ahundred years ago—is now ubiquitous. “Stargate” technology is science fictionnow—but maybe our great grandchildren will step through a gate to a differentuniverse in 2100.

So, when doing forecasting and scenario development for yourmuseum’s planning process, question assumptions.Don’t be too quick to dismiss a new technology as “impossible.” Ask, “does thisviolate the laws of the known universe?” And, if not, ask instead “when will it be possible?”

Technology: A Tool for Storytelling

2011-09-15T13:40:00.000-04:00

Michael Balderrama, programs coordinator at AAM, shares news about next week’s Technology, Interpretation and Education online conference—anopportunity for readers to glimpse of how an organic approach to technology cantransform the future of learning in museums.

When Isat down to reflect on this guest post, I had a whirlwind of ideas—"oh!Wouldn't it be cool if I did a video podcast?" And "let me see if Ihave my mini microphone. I'll do a regular podcast, but mix in some tech musicwith it!"

Notice you'rereading this; in my case, using technology didn't work. I sat at mylaptop for about two hours, listening to my voice over and over again—mutingout the ums and ahs, cutting and pasting audio—but it still didn't feel right.I realized I was trying technology for technology's sake—for the novelty ofit—which ultimately misses the point.

NikHoneysett, head of administration, J. Paul Getty Museum in L.A., made this very point atlast year's Technology, Interpretation and Education (TIE) online conferenceduring his plenary talk with Nancy Proctor—"Doing Stuff That Matters: Using Limited Resources to Create Meaningful Museum Experiences"

"Todo less with less is to focus on the things that are core to our institutionalmission, things that are being done for the right reasons which everybody isclear about, and are done in a way that maximizes resources and finances. Weshould plan for flexibility because we don’t know where this “thing” is going;we should plan for scalability because we don’t know how big this “thing” mightget; we should use standards because we want to play and share in a much biggerarena; we should collaborate and stop trying to re-invent the wheel. And mostimportantly, we should address the long term—the sustainability of the thingswe’ve created for our institutions after we’ve moved on."

So whatis this core we need to be thinking about? When my colleague Greg Stevens and Isat down with the chairs of AAM's Media and Technology professional network lastmonth—Suzy Sarraf and Jack Ludden—we agreed thattechnology is a vehicle for storytelling. I strongly believe that technologyserves a transformative purpose in peoples' lives, a role that can support themission of the museum field.

Nextweek, at this year's TIE online conference, we will be trying something alittle different. We have challenged presenters representing ten Muse award-winning projects to make the conference experience interactive. They will devote half of theirtime to conversing with you, the audience. It's an opportunity to learn fromothers' experiences, and take away a little inspiration for yourself.Most importantly, it will demonstrate that products such as video podcasts, alternatereality cell phone games, or interactive websites are merely the outputsof a project, and should not be confused with the desired outcomes. Thesetechnologies are tools for storytelling, not the stories themselves. We asmuseum professionals need to look at the long-tail effects of how technologytransforms the storytelling capabilities of the museum, and how our audience’s reactionto our work will build and change how the institution may use the technology.In a way, we need to look at technology as an organic process (I know, it's astrange phrase to type).

I see TIEas a chance to prove a very important point about museums' use of technology:it does not (and cannot) exist in a vacuum. I’ve worked with a unique blend ofmuseum professionals, technology vendors, writers, and designers over the lastfour months. Drawing on a wide spectrum of experience from outside the museumfield makes the use of technology so much more robust and worthwhile. The Muse projectshave fostered long term partnerships that will grow for years to come. It isclear to me that collaborative partnerships are essential in charting thetechnology path in the coming years.

Inpreparing for the conference, I've reflected on the conference’s own history. Whatbegan as a one-day face-to-face program has transformed into an onlineinteractive multi-day experience. We as storytellers—maybe even story sharers(?)—want our voices to beheard by everyone who wants to listen; technology helps to do that--if doneright. Take me for example: two hours ago, I had an audience of one. When Iplanned my technology poorly, I still had an audience of one. But now Ihave you. I find that so unbelievably cool.

I inviteall of you to join us next week to hear some fascinating technology stories, andshare your own, as we chart a path to the future of museums.

Visit the AAM website tofind out more on the Technology, Interpretation and Education online conferencethis coming Tuesday and Wednesday, Sept. 20–21.

Don't Just Stir It, Shake It!

2011-09-13T10:17:00.001-04:00

Today's guest post is by Richard V. Piacentini, executive director of Phipps Conservatory and Botanical Gardens. Richard previews one of the themes we will explore next month at Feeding the Spirit: Museums, Food & Community—how museums can bring the operation of their food services into alignment with their mission-related values while still attending to the financial bottom line.

photo credit: Alexander Denmarsh

Soda: It's about as unhealthy as you can get but, boy can you make money on it. Twelve cents' worth of syrup mixed with inexpensive carbonated tap water and sold at $1.75 a cup turns a good profit.

And yet, in less than a month soda will be gone from Phipps. By then our new "Splash" Bar will be open and we will be serving filtered and sparkling water with a splash of fresh fruit juice. At less than 40 calories per serving, these new offerings fit nicely with the recommendations of the Harvard School of Public Health.

Like many museums and gardens, Phipps didn't start out with a health focus when we opened our cafe. Initially, we were only looking to align our food service practices with our green building philosophy by featuring organic and local foods, and eliminating plastic disposables. Ultimately we realized that despite the risks of lost profits, it just wasn't consistent with our mission to ignore the environmental and health effects of the types of food we offered; we felt we had to change. We wanted our café to reflect the same high standards we hold ourselves to in everything else we do.

After eliminating bottled water several years ago, and shifting our focus to more sustainably-produced fruits and vegetables, and minimally processed foods, Phipps upped the ante by increasing the number of vegetarian and vegan options we offered and, even started to feature vegetarian specials on Meatless Mondays. We also developed a series of programs to engage urban kids in healthy foods and gardening.

Even after all those changes, we realized that the types of food we were serving kids were contributing to the obesity epidemic. We decided to eliminate sugary, flavored milks, fried foods and hot dogs. Next, we added fresh, organic fruits and vegetables, and whole grains to our kid's meals, switching to healthier menu items like whole wheat pasta with turkey meatballs. We even came up with a café mission statement to get all our staff on the same page, bringing us to the present day and the soda machine.

There were skeptics at first, but we persisted. We conceived and tested our "Splash" Bar—and, so far, people like it. While we don't make as much money on beverages as we used to, the goodwill, press and reputation we are generating as a result is great. It has even led to our role as an initiator and leader in Let's Move Pittsburgh to help promote healthy lifestyles for children in our region. I also expect that we will soon surpass our old café sales numbers.

When you face choices about configuring your food service, you have to guide decisions with considerations of both mission and money. For us it was easy to connect the dots. Our mission at Phipps is to connect people to the important role that plants play in our lives and to promote environmentally-responsible lifestyles and practices. The most important ways that people and plants interact is through the food we eat and the biggest impact on our health and the environment is made through the way that interaction is currently taking place. Our industrialized, factory farm and highly processed food system is destructive to the environment and our bodies while disconnecting us from nature. In this respect, promoting healthy and responsibly produced foods is right up our alley and ties in seamlessly with all of our other greening efforts up to and including our constructing a Living Building. Not every museum will have as clear a mandate, but certainly any institution with a mission that encompasses concern for the environment and people can make the same case.

Unfortunately, the current economics of most food service contracts cause difficulty in making mission-based decisions. Museums usually find a vendor that will absorb the losses from a food service in exchange for exclusive catering rights and an agreement to pay a guaranteed percentage of catering revenues. This model is a recipe for failure, since the food service vendor has every incentive to serve as inexpensive a product as they can in order to mitigate their losses, making it hard to implement dramatic changes in your café. Usually, you are then limited to little tweaks here and there, stirring the same old pot when what you really need to do is shake things up and start from scratch. The field needs a new economic model for food services that helps us make values-based operational decisions. At Phipps, we pay an outside vendor a management fee, and we make the profits and absorb the losses. It is riskier, but it gives us the control we desire.

Can we change the way we run our cafés? Is the Phipps model relatable to other museums? Are there other ways to accomplish similar goals? I hope these are topics we can explore further at the upcoming Feeding the Spirit conference on Oct. 13 as we examine our future relationship with food.

Musarians: The bastard children of museums and libraries.

2011-09-08T10:02:00.000-04:00

In today’s guest post, AAM staffer Lauren Silberman, continues her exploration of the entwined futures of libraries and museums. Her first, massively popular post, speculated on what museums can learn from librarians of the future.

What would you get if you crossed a museum professional with a librarian?

Would the baby be locked in an eternal struggle of touch/don’t touch the materials—unsure if they should let other kids take the toys out of the toy chest or not? As a teen, would the child rebel and do some sort of massive “information cleansing” to release all the stories, histories and provenance collected from their predecessors from their memory? Or would the kid, being a child of our quick change, techno-magic society, become something far different than what we imagine someone working in a museum or library today? As Elizabeth points out in this video, the iPhone doesn’t have much in common with its Alexander Graham Bell ancestor. Many people don’t even use it as a phone anymore. In the future, what we now call museums, libraries, community centers, studios and schools could all be bundled into one thing called a museum. Or a library. Or a librarium. Maybe even a schoorarium center. Would it be anything like the original institutions? What would the musarians who work in these institutions be like?

I imagine that a musarian would be one-part security guard, one-part receptionist with a good chunk of information wizard thrown in. A cheery, welcoming but ultimately reserved Doctor Who-ish figure that helps others navigate our precious, collective heritage while opening the doors to new ideas. In a world where more and more content is born-digital, they would be the gatekeepers of our tangible history and tour guides of the technological frontier. While they may work in a good ole fashioned brick-and-mortar institution, they would be instantly available in anyone’s home, office or school, whether in some sort of holographic device or, more likely, through an avatar that blends their individual characteristics with their institution’s brand. I imagine they would provide personalized, customized services, born out of the considerable research they’ve undertaken. A visitor or group could still tour a historic structure or view actual artwork, but their experience might be hyperlinked with layers and layers of information provided by the musarians—as well as by the general public. I think this would make people value “actual” items in community-based digital centers even more highly. Maybe the public’s experiences with the materials would be supplemented with technology, such as gloves that replicate the feeling of touching the object—enabling us to issue the directives “touch” and “don’t touch” at the same time.

So, what do you think? Who will be the museum professionals of tomorrow? Will they be musarians as described above or something completely different? Contribute your descriptions below.

Food: the Universal Communicator

2011-09-06T10:56:00.000-04:00

Today’s guest post is by Jennifer Rothman, associate vice president for children’s and public education at the New York Botanical Garden. Jennifer contributes to our ongoing exploration of museums,food and community. Interested? Join colleagues from the museum and foodcommunities in Pittsburgh on Oct. 13 for Feeding the Spirit,a symposium exploring how museums can use food to grow audiences (and improvetheir own financial health).

As someone who works at a Botanical Garden I don’t like to admit this but...I have never had a garden of my own. I never grew my own tomatoes, harvested lettuces for dinner, or pickedstrawberries for desert. Living in a small apartment in New York City, I was afraid my daughter Ella might follow in my footsteps. So, as soon as she was eligible (3 years old), I signed us up for a program I oversee at the New York Botanical Garden, theChildren’s Gardening Program. Every week this spring and summer, she and I planted beans,tended to radishes, harvested strawberries, watered, weeded and preparedweekly snacks like tomato bruschetta and herbed cream cheese.

I enrolled Ella in the program because I knew that she would benefit from seeing where her food came from. I knew she would be proud of the plants she tended and that she would grow from experiencing the many benefits of gardening that I talk of daily to funders, visitors, and other stakeholders. I was less prepared for the impact it would have on me. I now understand seasonality more intuitively than I did before and I find myself choosing vegetables at the market that I may have shied away from previously. More than that though, there is an intangible joy and pleasure that comes from growing your own food which I learned right alongside my three year old.

As associate vice president for children’s and public education at the New York Botanical Garden, I oversee all of the gardening programs for children and families along with all public programming for special exhibits—which increasingly includes food related programming. The Children’s Gardening program is one that I was lucky enough to inherit—it has been in existence at the New York Botanical Garden for over 50 years.

Every spring, summer and fall children maintain their own plots filled with vegetables and fruits that they weed, water, harvest and prepare. Our overarching goal for the program isto help children and adults understand where their food comes from and to make a connection that might change their eating or lifestyle behaviors.

As an educator, the biggest "aha moment" I've seen is watching a child harvest broccoli that they grew themselves and see a huge smile grow on their face. This of course is followed by the child eagerly eating the broccoli, something that most of their parents assure me that they have not done before. I remember thinking: If growing vegetables could have this sort of impact on children, why couldn’t it have the same effect on adults?

Lidia Bastianich
Photo: Ivo M. Vermeulen. Courtesy of The New York Botanical Garden

So, two years ago I created the Edible Garden program—a series of cooking demonstrations, talks and tours—to help adults make healthy choices at home and be inspired to growand prepare garden fresh meals. On the kitchen stage we built in front of our landmark Enid A. Haupt Conservatory, chefs like Mario Batali, Martha Stewart, Todd English and Lidia Bastianich demonstrated everything from sautéed kale with ricotta to beet risotto to herbal cocktails. Mario Batali has become a friend and partner—thisyear helping us to create the Mario Batali’s Edible Garden.

Through my experiences, I have come to believe food is the universal communicator. It helps me bring to life the stories of our exhibits. Most recently for the Spanish Paradise: TheGarden’s of the Alhambra exhibit, we created a series called the Food and Culture of Spain. Through programs like these we can use food to help a visitor get a sense of place or time in history and to understand the themes of the exhibit in a deeper way.

I am also seeing that many of our food programs are bringing in a younger demographic than we typicallysee. This is exciting because I think these are the real change makers in the food conversation and they are also audiences we can build on for the future of the New York Botanical Garden. With all of our food programming, we are reaching new audiences but we are also reaching old audiences with new information. As an educator, administrator, mom and newly minted amateur gardener, it’s pretty exciting.

What are Ethics? A Brief Essay in Plain English

2011-09-01T08:53:00.000-04:00

This essay introducesRound Two of the Forecasting the Future of Museum Ethicsexercise. Follow this link,to vote on which of which of the issues identified in Round One will be mostimportant to museums in the next quarter century, determining what we willexamine in more depth in subsequent rounds.

The more I ponder “ethics,” the more it seems like JusticePotter Stewart’s definition of pornography: “I’ll know it when I see it.” It isjust as blindingly clear, and just as hard to nail down.

Many years of handling ethics inquiries at AAM has convincedme I am not alone in my confusion. There is deep and persistent lack ofagreement in the field about what ethics are (and aren’t). Other than referringto the subset of ethics issues formally addressed in Standards and Best Practices for U.S. Museums,how can we draw boundaries about what is, and isn’t an ethical issue? How do wedistinguish decisions that are, first and foremost, ethical from those that canlegitimately driven by consideration of business, finance, strategy and other practicalconcerns?

Here is my attempt to explain, in simplest terms possible,why some of the “ethical” concerns lobbed to staff at AAM don’t, for me, passthe Potter Test. I encourage you to use the comment section of the blog toagree, disagree or expand on this list.

“Unethical” is not the same as:

Illegal. Lot’s of things are ethical but illegal (think civil disobedience, or feeding the homeless in places where that act of compassion violates local ordinances). There are plenty of things that are legal but not ethical (else there wouldn’t be so many lawyer jokes).

Upsetting. Years of fielding complaints against accredited museums taught me that people often say “unethical” when they mean “this really ticks me off.” As in, “it’s unethical for that museum to hire a curator who hasn’t got a PhD. (…instead of me),” “it’s unethical for the museum to lay off staff,” “it’s unethical for the museum not to buy the important artifact I am trying to sell them.” (Really. Not making that one up.)

Important. Though many important issues that are not in and of themselves about ethics may spawn ethical dilemmas down the line: e.g., museums merging, convergence of institutions like libraries museums and archives, wealthy people founding nonprofit museums, people founding for-profit museums, globalization.

Conversely, there are “green flags” marking an issue as verylikely about ethics, notably related to obligation imposed by a nonprofitmuseum’s tax-exempt status. Caring for and using its assets in trust for thepublic imposes a set of obligations not shared by for-profit organizations. Manyethics issues for nonprofits are about honoring the responsibilities that comewith that relationship: accessibility, transparency, acting in a trustworthymanner and avoiding conflicts of interest. Many ethics issues for museums arisefrom the characteristic that usually distinguishes them from other nonprofits:the collections they hold in trust for the public.

Guided by this reasoning, my colleagues and I recently compiledand culled the contributions from Round One of the Forecasting the Future ofMuseum Ethics project, resulting a list of twenty-four ethics issues that willtrend (emerge, die away become more or less important) in the next quartercentury. While our Delphic Oracles ponder which of these issues should beexamined in more depth in Round Two, you can weigh in via a public version ofthe survey.

Read about Forecasting the Future of Museum Ethics,and access earlier postsabout the forecast on the blog. This project is a collaboration between AAM’sCenter for the Future of Museums and Seton Hall University’s Institute ofMuseum Ethics, with support from the Institute of Museum and Library Services.

Starting a Museum: Advice from the Trenches

2011-08-30T11:15:00.001-04:00

Today’s guest post is by Liz Williams, president of the Southern Food and Beverage Museum in New Orleans (SoFAB). SoFAB “celebrates, interprets, investigates, entertains and preserves”—and in this museum, preservation means jam as well as conservation! Because I get so many questions about starting, and funding, future museums, I invited Liz to share her experiences and advice.

I have had the pleasure of being involved in the opening of three museums, the D-Day Museum (now the National World War II Museum), the Ogden Museum of Southern Art and, most recently, the Southern Food and Beverage Museum. The first two museums opened while I was at the University of New Orleans Foundation—they were great on-the-job training in opening a museum. I was fortunate that, as projects of a state university, these museums had the power of the state of Louisiana behind them, as well as large staffs of talented and interested people working on the start-ups.

In 2004, armed with the knowledge I acquired from these two projects, but without the power of the state, I joined with two other New Orleanians to open a food museum. We were not typical “blog and photo” foodies. We were interested in exploring cultural, historical and other aspects of food, drink and eating. I was the one most motivated and able to spend time working on the project. One of my partners was experienced in design and internet, the other in politics and advocacy. None of us was the “angel” investor that so many projects seek.

Although opening this museum proved very different from opening a state-sponsored institution, I found that the basic principles were the same: establish a well-articulated, focused mission; decide whether and what to collect and exhibit; define a target visitorship; establish a point of view; create a budget; create a fundraising plan; identify volunteers and supporters; create a timeline. And identify the leader—although creating a museum cannot be done alone, it cannot be done by committee either. Someone has to be the point person, and willing to carry the load.

Opening a museum about food presented unique problems, the most important of which was that no one knew what a food museum might look like! There aren’t enough of them to make it easy to explain or to find a parallel reference. So in 2004 we began by mounting exhibits in borrowed space that illustrated the idea of a food museum, while we kept planning and started to raise funds.

We began by concentrating on small gifts, going to restaurants and bars in town and asking for small, $500 donations. There were occasional larger windfalls. Through the work of volunteers we created a logo and a website and began to look as though we existed—though we had no slick marketing materials. With a solicitation packet tweaked for each “ask,” we began to collect checks. Having already received 501(c)(3) status from the IRS gave us the advantage of tax deductibility, and the ability to spotlight those who supported us. Our pot began to grow.

Though we hoped to eventually obtain grants from traditional funders, we also knew that that would not happen until we were actually open. Many funders, such as the Institute for Museum and Library Services, require a museum to be open and operating for two years before they will consider funding you. In the interim, we planned to sustain ourselves by creating a board that would make personal donations, and through the revenue of the gift shop and entrance fees.

We experienced a number of false starts and setbacks, notably the flooding after Hurricane Katrina. Finally we realized that if we waited until everything was perfect—enough money, perfect artifacts, and the perfect location —what had at first seemed like a good idea would become an idle promise. So we opened our first small permanent space in June, 2008, with the idea that we would remain stable financially and grow gradually. We wanted our museum to be a gem, but accepted that it might be a small jewel, for now! Now we have been growing for 3 years, and have an annual operating budget of around $250,000 with 4 paid staff (director, business manager/shop manager, editor and operations manager). We have a full-time VISTA volunteer, many serious interns who work full time on various projects, and we bring in guest curators, accountants, and others as needed. Our space is about 14,000 square feet (1,000 SF museum store, 9,000 SF exhibit space, the rest “back of the house”—prep space, offices and storage).

We have been creative in ways that only arose from financial necessity, but perhaps are better than more conventional solutions. We have avoided museum cabinetry in favor of furniture, which is cheaper, and solicited cast-off cabinets from two of the established museums in town. We have found the exact same display supports—such as manikins- in store supply catalogs for much less than in museum supply catalogs. And we have learned that paint can create a harmony when furniture is mismatched and otherwise unrelated. An ethic of thrift permeates the staff: often we call to alert each other to opportunities: “There’s an old refrigerator on the side of the road. Do we want it? I’ll guard it until you get here.”

When we opened the galleries seemed a bit empty. Since then we’ve acquired a 32 foot mid-nineteenth century bar, a collection of 12,500 beer bottles, many large signs, equipment and artifacts—far beyond what we imagined when we first began dreaming. We haven’t yet organized ourselves to have exhibits scheduled out into the future. That is a dream for later. Right now we just work a few months ahead. But we do program a demonstration or tasting every Saturday.

What is my advice to anyone who wants to start a museum? Have a focused mission. Start small. And work hard, smart and with imagination. Although it’s not about the money, it is about the money. Trying to find the balance between opportunism, begging and integrity is the most difficult part of creating a great museum. That applies no matter how big you become.

All you museum founders out there, or staff of new museums—particularly small museums—what is your advice to people intending to start future museums? Please use the comment section below to share your best advice.

When Trends Collide: The New Gilded Age Meets the Rise of the Amateur Expert

2011-08-25T10:00:00.003-04:00

Museums have long struggled to resist pressure from wealthy donors or sponsors who want to call the shots. How might this play out in a future in which museums loosen their grip on curatorial authority and actively encourage participation in content creation?

Earlier this week, Erik Ledbetter blogged about the possibility that we are entering a New Gilded Age—an era in which museums are funded (or not funded) by the richest 1% of Americans who control as much wealth as the bottom 90% combined. CFM’s Museums & Society 2034: Trends and Potential Futures identified the increasing disparity in the distribution of U.S. wealth as a trend that will have big impact on museums in coming decades. Another trend discussed in that report is the erosion of authority. We live in an age shaped by Wikipedia, when the content of the Web is available via search in an instant and anyone can contribute to this searchable content via their own blog or website. How will this affect the authority traditionally ceded to museums by their audience? Will we continue to be one of the most trusted sources of information, or only one source among many? And how can we respond to the desire, on the part of audiences, to be involved in shaping content?

Either of these trends could be disruptive in their own right. When you consider how they might interact to shape the future, things get downright scary. This was dramatized for me recently when, while travelling, I attended a lecture at a museum.

It was billed, innocuously enough, as a talk about the Egyptian Book of the Dead, a topic in which I am somewhat interested, having absorbed, second-hand an older brother’s infatuation with all things related to ancient Egypt. (Being a little unclear, at that age, on the timeline of history I remember mummifying several of my toy dinosaurs, complete with accompanying canopic jars.)

The lecture began with a very brief introduction—I missed hearing the speaker’s credentials, but assumed it was the usual academic hood waving. Further distraction ensued as some friends arrived late. As they settled in, I pricked up my ears as the speaker introduced some points that seemed a little unorthodox, based on my basic liberal-arts-plus-hefty-dose-of-science education (supplemented by childhood memories of fraternal lectures on Egyptology).

It started with a statement about the Sphinx—I’d never heard that it used to be a figure of Anubis, surrounded by a giant lake, but that sounded plausible. However, the speaker’s points became progressively stranger. Did any credible scholar really believe that the pharaoh Akhenaton (even given his religious unorthodoxy) was, in fact, Moses, and led the Jews out of slavery? Or that laser levels created from rubies were a crucial technology in the construction of the pyramids? Or that the reason mummies are rarely found in pyramids is that they had been teleported out (as replicated, apparently, with recent experiments on rabbits)? I was pretty darn sure that Ancient Egyptians didn’t really ingest precious metals to produce superconductors inside their bodies that conferred extended life and the ability to levitate the Ark of the Covenant.

By this time my friends and I were furiously pecking away at our mobile devices, trying to find sources for some of these bizarre pronouncements (which led us to some interesting and fringy websites). At last, we Googled the speaker himself to find that he was a very wealthy man, in fact a major donor to the museum.

That felt exceedingly awkward. Maybe I missed something in the museum staff’s introduction of the lecturer, but I don’t remember anyone mentioning the connection. I had presumed the speaker was invited based on his expertise and credentials. Did the other members of the audience go away thinking that his statements about lasers and superconductors and teleporting bunnies were endorsed by the museum? That the speaker was, in fact, a trusted source of information? And if they did catch the connection between the speaker and his status as a donor, how did that affect their opinion of the museum’s credibility?

For decades, museums have relied on systems of credentialing and rules of engagement to create firewalls against undue influence. Development of the current national museum standards regarding donor support were prompted by the 1999 "Sensation" exhibit at the Brooklyn Museum (which consisted entirely of works from Charles Saatchi’s private collection), and the attendant accusation that Saatchi wielded undue influence on the content of the exhibit, as well as benefiting personally from the resulting increase in value of the works that were exhibited. The systems and rules many museums erected to guard against such situations may have excluded many valid amateur experts, or discouraged forms of participation that would have won some hearts and minds. But these systems made it easier to say “no” to the subtle or not so subtle pressure from donors to let them call the shots in addition to paying the bills.

Maybe our standards will change over the coming decades, adapting to a new ethical, financial and cultural environment. How can we maintain appropriate boundaries once we admit that boundaries are inherently fluid? Museums are increasingly welcoming Citizen Scientists and Citizen Historians to participate in content creation. We are discussing the need for curators to be moderators, aggregators and mentors, in addition to being content experts. We are experimenting with participatory design, finding ways for people to help us shape the way we present exhibits and programs. There has already been copious debate about how to vet, filter, edit or validate such amateur content. It only gets harder if the amateur being vetted is, in effect, paying your salary.

How can a museum be fair and even-handed about welcoming amateur input, while applying appropriate standards and transparency? Are the wealthy exempt from this avenue of participation? And if not, how can museums ensure that they are not more equal than others? Your thoughts welcome…

Museum Ethics in a Gilded Age

2011-08-23T09:19:00.003-04:00

This week’s guest post by Erik Ledbetter, principal of Heritage Management Solutions and special adviser to the Forecasting the Future of Museum Ethics project currently underway in partnership with Seton Hall University’s Institute of Museum Ethics.

We are living in a new Gilded Age. Like the 1870s and 1880s before them, the 2000s and 2010s are marked by a vast increase in concentration of wealth and a yawning gap between the top one percent of society and the rest. In the September 2011 issue of The Atlantic, journalist Don Peck notes that as early as 2005

“the richest 1 percent of households earned as much each year as the bottom 60 percent put together; they possessed as much wealth as the bottom 90 percent; and with each passing year, a greater share of the nation’s treasure was flowing through their hands and into their pockets.”

Since then, the Great Recession has only accelerated the hollowing out of the American middle class. “Median incomes declined outright from 1999 to 2009,” Peck reminds us. “For most of the aughts, that trend was masked by the housing bubble, which allowed working-class and middle-class families to raise their standard of living despite income stagnation or downward job mobility. But that fig leaf has since blown away. And the recession has pressed hard on the broad center of American society.”

Source: Emmanuel Saez

The decline of the middle class and the reemergence of a true American plutocracy will have, I predict, some interesting consequences for museums. In an era when public budgets and private household wealth are both contracting, museums’ business models will be increasingly upset. For decades we have worked hard to diversify our funding sources. As the Great Recession grinds on, however, it is ratcheting down nearly all of our supposedly diverse income streams at once. Declining household wealth puts pressure on admissions and membership revenue; tight federal, state and municipal budgets crimp grant income.

Increasingly, the last remaining source of income growth for museums will be that special one percent—the plutocrats of our new Gilded Age. But are the new super-wealthy going to be interested in funding existing museums? History and present trends alike suggest not. In the first Gilded Age, the plutocracy preferred establishing its own museums to funding those which were already there. New institutions with names like Frick, Clay, Walters, Huntingdon, and Freer were founded right and left. We see the same behavior emerging today. After playing the art museums of Los Angeles off of one another in a bidding frenzy for his collection of modern art, Eli Broad fooled them all by electing to establish his own museum. Alice Walton is bringing the finest American art to come on the market in the last two decades to her new museum in Bentonville. Ron Lauder’s outstanding collection of German and Austrian expressionists can be seen not at the Met or MoMA, but at his own Neue Gallerie museum in New York.

Nor is this trend limited to art museums. In Ohio, an entrepreneur is building a new private railroad museum complete with a purpose-build roundhouse and turntable to house, restore, and display his collection of historic steam locomotives. When complete, his facility will be superior to the majority of public railroad museums in the country. Yet it is strictly a private venture, and the terms, if any, on which it will be accessible to the public remain unknown.

What does all this have to do with museum ethics? Not to put too fine a point on it, I suspect that as our existing museums vie for attention and funds for the new plutocracy, some of our current fussiness about curatorial independence will go discreetly overboard. Current AAM ethical guidance places a premium on maintaining an arm’s-length relationship between museums and donors to avoid even the appearance of conflict of interest. But how can an existing museum compete when the donor could as easily found her own museum, and become effectively curator in chief, director, and chair of the acquisitions committee all in one? Answer: it can’t—unless, that is, it is willing to give donors considerably more sway over acquisitions and exhibit decisions than they presently enjoy. The same goes for loans—our present guidance is designed to create a total firewall between the lender of an object and/or financial donor to the show and the museum staff working on the content. When a handful of individuals control both the collections and the economic resources museums will need to thrive, however, will such guidance come to seem mere needless pearl-clutching?

Museums thrived in the former Gilded Age, and they may yet thrive in this new one—but if so, it is likely to be by setting some of their nicer scruples to the side, and learning again how to give a plutocracy its droits du seignior.

What do you think? In the coming decades, will pragmatism trump principle when it comes to donor relations? Should it? Will selective pressure favor museums founded and funded by the new economic elite? Read the next post in this series for a real-world illustration of this conundrum.

Museums Shaping Cities

2011-08-18T15:20:00.000-04:00

One crucial way museums can change the world is to help people in their communities improve their own environments. I want to spotlight a few notable examples that have crossed my radar recently.

The National Building Museum’s Intelligent Cities, developed in partnership with TIME and IBM and funded by The Rockefeller Foundation, explores “the intersection of information technology and urban design to understand where we are, where we want to be, and how to get there.” It prods people to think about the environment they live in, on a scale encompassing homes, cities, regions and the nation, posing questions such as “what do you like best about your neighborhood,” and “what makes a city a city?” Their current poll is on the issues of density, and you can answer it here. NBM hosted the Intelligent Cities Forum this past June and I am eagerly awaiting the release of the companion book this fall. The NBM’s award-winning CityVision program, now in its seventeenth year, uses design as a framework to teach District of Columbia public school students how to become active participants in shaping their communities. Operated in partnership with the D.C. Public Schools and Public Charter Schools, CityVision helps students identify needs and propose solutions designed to help local neighborhoods. Projects have resulted in design proposals for redevelopment of areas scarred by vacant homes and lots; rehabilitating an abandoned building as a community center; and an underwater library for the Anacostia River. (I particularly want to see that one come to fruition. Scuba librarians? That would rock.)

True to its operating style, the Guggenheim is going global with the process of crowdsourced civic input. The BMW Guggenheim Lab recently launched a mobile, pop-up site that will travel the world addressing issues of contemporary urban life through programs and public discourse. Its goal is to explore new ideas, experiment, and ultimately create forward-thinking solutions for city life. The current version offers the Urbanology Game, (in which visitors role play scenarios for city transformation), and free events such as lectures, walking tours and facilitated discussions. You can visit the Lab in NYC, on Houston Street, until Oct. 16, when it pulls up stakes and moves on to Berlin and then Mumbai. (Regular readers of this blog know I’m a fan of the mobile museums, and the Urban Curation Lab is the uber-pop up exhibit. Check out this video of the lab being assembled.

You can find more videos of the lab here.

Lest these examples imply that issues of city design can only be tackled on a international scale with huge projects, check out the Museum of Vancouver. MOV exemplifies museums of average resources helping their local communities with civic issues. The MOVments blog “explores the living history of Vancouver, examining contemporary concerns in relation to the past.” Museum staff and guest bloggers follow, share and comment on issues and news related to local civic life: architecture, transportation, homelessness, physical infrastructure, public art and the emotional relationship between Vancouverites and their home. MOV is also partnering with the Royal Architectural Institute of Canada (RAIC) to launch a Built City @MOV lecture series, starting with a look at the Living Building Challenge. (Photosynthesis—nature’s own renewable energy source!)

I would love to beef up my portfolio of examples of museums helping tackle civic issues and city planning. If you know of projects fitting the bill, please use the comments section below to share!

Creating your own Arcadia: Where do you start?

2011-08-16T09:35:00.000-04:00

I’m often asked, “What will be the financial model be for museums in the future?” That model may well combine the idealism and mission-driven focus of nonprofits with strategies adapted from the for-profit realm. This week’s guest post is from Diana Peacock, director of Community Wealth Ventures, a for-profit subsidiary of the nonprofit anti-hunger and anti-poverty organization Share Our Strength. CWV is a management consulting firm that helps nonprofits achieve their goals for growth, sustainability and impact through a variety of strategies including business model assessment, business planning, strategy implementation and social enterprise. I’ve invited Diana to share some ideas on how museums bolster their financial sustainability while magnifying their impact. Here is the first installment of her response.

When I learned about Arcadia Center for Food and Sustainable Agriculture—the partnership between Woodlawn and the Neighborhood Restaurant Group, my eyes lit up and my heart beat a little faster. You see, this partnership not only exemplifies the kind of Community Wealth that is at the core of my firm’s work, but also demonstrates how arts and culture institutions can make a tangible impact toward solving some of society’s most pressing challenges—a personal passion of mine! (More to come on that concept in a later post.)

Community Wealth is created as people from varied backgrounds share their strengths to advance worthy causes that lift up our communities. These strengths not only have the potential to generate monetary wealth and positive change in the world around us, but also to create relationships that yield new perspectives and enrich lives.

Historically, CWV’s work has focused on helping nonprofit organizations leverage their assets to help financially sustain their mission and deepen their impact on the community. This kind of Community Wealth can only occur where three essential elements intersect:

the organization has unique assets upon which to build
the product/service/venture fills a market need
the organization has or can acquire the capacity to deliver.

Herein lies the brilliance of the partnership that became Arcadia—it meets all three criteria, articulated most eloquently by Laurie Ossman, director of Woodlawn, in her original post about the partnership.

“Rather than invest in a vision based on a stakeholder and staff-driven process and then see if anyone out there is interested, we can also start by identifying the needs and opportunities in the community, and determine what role we can play in fulfilling them. Then we can begin to reposition ourselves as multivalent resources, working with partners who have the talent, knowledge and resources to help us to reach new audiences—even when it falls outside our usual conception of ourselves.”

So while launching a farm is certainly not an appropriate strategy to generate Community Wealth for every museum or historic trust property, the example prompts me to ask the reader to ponder these three questions:

What are the needs and opportunities in your community? By meeting real needs, you can build new audiences and attract new resources.

What unique assets do you have that can help you meet those needs? Assets range from money, to facilities, to networks/relationships, to expertise, etc.

What internal capacity is needed to deliver on this idea? Consider the strengths can you bring to the venture and those you can acquire through partnership or other means.

Please the comments section below, to share your examples of new ways to positively impact your community while generating income and building audiences.

Who Oversees the Future? Introducing the Council

2011-08-11T08:59:00.001-04:00

When the AAM board green-lighted the concept of CFM back in 2006, they took an important step in making sure this AAM skunkworks would operate in truly new ways, helping museums see things from a fresh perspective.

They handed over the reins to a bunch of folks who, for the most part, don’t work in museums: the CFM Council.

Councilors serve as:

Connectors. Helping CFM develop relationships with creative, innovative thinkers in other sectors, content-sharers, potential partners, and funders

Entrepreneurs. Helping staff generate and vet ideas for sustainable projects (ongoing or time-bounded)

Ambassadors. Making the case in their own circles of influence for museums and their potential to help society tackle important issues. Helping to bring museum representatives into forums, discussions, decision making where they may not have traditionally had a seat

In alignment with CFM’s mandate to be” outward looking, receptive and responsive to the needs of society,” the board decided this initiative should be guided by a group drawn from many different sectors. To this end, they directed staff to go forth and recruit Council members from the ranks of:

Systematic Thinkers (demographers, sociologists, futurists, theologians, innovators and academic researchers)

Creatives (artists, architects, novelists and essayists)

Philanthropists (foundations, donors and other cultural investors)

Civic Partners (business, religious, community and political leaders, senior legislative and executive officials and the media)

Allied Service Providers, (librarians, archivists and officers of government agencies involved in funding museums)

Entertainment Providers (film, television, video game, sports and other entertainment industries)

Museum Professionals (representatives of the diverse disciplines and professional practices contained within the museum world)

While some of the people we’ve tried to recruit have still not returned our calls (*ahem,* Steve Martin, Oprah, I’m so disappointed in you) we have assembled an impressive, high powered and creative team. At the AAM annual meeting in Houston this spring, half of the founding Council rotated off—I’d like to introduce our current roster so you can get to know the men and women “behind the curtain” helping to direct CFM’s work (members of the founding Council are marked with *):

Day Al-Mohamed*, senior policy advisory, United States Department of Labor

Peter Bishop*, associate professor of strategic foresight, University of Houston

David Curry, managing principal, davidrcurryAssociates

Jim Hackney, managing partner, Alexander Haas

Carroll Joynes, executive director, Cultural Policy Center

Angie Kim, director of programs and member services, Southern California Grantmakers

Timothy Rub, George D. Widener Director and Chief Executive Officer, Philadelphia Museum of Art

Nina Simon*, executive director, Museum of Art & History, Santa Cruz, Calif.

You can read more about the Councilors here.

This begs the question: why would someone with a perfectly good (not to mention all-consuming) day job care want to devote time and energy to angsting about the future of museums? I’ll let a few of our Council members address that first-hand.

“I think we’re in the nascent stages of a great transformation that will re-set what we expect out of our nonprofit institutions. While the Great Recession illuminates the stresses on cultural institutions, the decreasing role of government in providing social services, the increasing needs (and competition) of the nonprofit sector, and changing demographics (e.g., ethnically and generationally) indicate that institutions must work harder to anticipate the changes that are sure to come. I have been interested in how changing conditions may impact the philanthropic sector and am excited to focus on these questions for the museum field. Few nonprofit sectors have had the foresight to create a program, such as CFM, that specifically focuses on the future, surfacing the issues and questions that will help us plan today for tomorrow's opportunities and pressures.”—Angie Kim

“I think CFM’s vision returns the idea of the museum to its origins—a place of not just education and enlightenment, but also entertainment; a vibrant and exciting part of the community, not apart from the community. Through the fostering of innovation, CFM can ensure that museums serve not only as a curator, but a driver of the American cultural landscape and remind us that they are the descendants of P. T. Barnum's “Grand Traveling Museum, Menagerie, Caravan & Hippodrome.”—Day al-Mohamed

"As museums are challenged from within to refine (and often re-invent) their missions and how those missions might be achieved, and from without to come to grips with demographic shifts, funding and sustainability, governance leadership and courage will make a crucial difference. I hope to translate my experience in nonprofit governance—both in the museum space and beyond—to help address such challenges and the important work of CFM overall."—David Curry

Please join me in welcoming our new Council members and thanking them for their work!

I’ve been asked several times, “how does someone get to be on the Council? Can I nominate myself?” Here’s what I tell them: if you are in the museum sector, the best way to line yourself up for a Council appointment is to help with the work of CFM. Come to our lectures and workshops or help create new opportunities to share our content. Introduce us to interesting and influential folk. Demonstrate you already are a Connector, an Entrepreneur, an Ambassador for CFM’s work. And if you know someone fascinating from outside the museum sector who would be a great addition to the Council, especially from sectors not yet representing in the Council’s ranks, please make an introduction! (I, personally, would love to meet Steve or Ms. O.)

Big Food: Health, Culture and the Evolution of Eating

2011-08-09T09:49:00.005-04:00

Ella Mitchell, an intern in AAM’s Government Relations and Advocacy department, reports on an innovative collaboration between the Yale Peabody Museum of Natural History, Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity, and CARE—Community Alliance for Research & Engagement and its relation to Let’s Move! Museums & Gardens. This post is part of a continuing series documenting how museums are helping to combat the trends of increasing childhood obesity and decreasing fitness, contributing to a healthier future.

Natural history museums tend to conjure up gargantuan images: a towering Stegosaurus, enormous slabs of petrified wood and half-ton meteorites. The Peabody Museum has all of these, and on its way is a more unusual giant: Big Food.

Next year, “Big Food: Health, Culture and the Evolution of Eating,” a collaboration between the Yale Peabody Museum of Natural History, the Yale Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity and CARE—Community Alliance for Research and Engagement (a health initiative at the Yale School of Public Health) opens at the Peabody. This exhibit takes the Peabody’s mission to “advance our understanding of earth’s history” and applies it to obesity—one of the largest problems, both literally and figuratively, facing the Earth’s population today.

Marlene Schwartz, deputy director of the Rudd Center, explains her colleagues’ interest in the project, “Our mission at the Rudd Center is to take what academics study and translate it into something that’s useful to the general public.” One major way they do this is by working at the state and federal level to improve America’s food policies by advocating for optimal nutrition standards in schools, reduced food marketing to kids and correlating healthy food with affordable prices (and vice-versa)

For Jane Pickering, deputy director and assistant director for public programs at the Peabody Museum, and her colleagues at the Peabody, the major challenge with “Big Food” is how to make the topic fit in a museum setting. They have to consider, as Pickering says, “How can we design the exhibit so the average person says to himself, ‘I should really go see that.’”

As it so happens, the Peabody is particularly good at doing just that. Some recent shows, including “Invasion of the Bloodsuckers: Bedbugs and Beyond” and “Solving the Puzzle: Lyme Disease, West Nile, and You,” not only demonstrate their creativity (Check out the “Spot the Bloodsuckers” game on their website!) in making health topics into engaging exhibits, but also their commitment to teaching about pertinent issues. This doesn’t come easily, however, as Pickering points out the dangers of working with these topics, “We have to think about how to make it work without getting too heavy,” she said without irony. This is an aspect that the museum must constantly consider as Big Food continues to develop.

Jeannette Ickovics, professor of public health and director of CARE, conceived of the project and is the lead curator. As a professor of public health and mother of two young children, she was thrilled that the Peabody Museum was addressing health issues. She said to a staff member last fall, “It is great that the Peabody is addressing health, but acute infections aren’t driving human health in the 21st century—it is chronic disease. You should do an exhibition on ‘the evolution of obesity.’” And the rest, as they say, will soon be history. She reminds us that the World Health Organization estimates that more than 1 billion adults worldwide are overweight—at least 300 million of them clinically obese. The dramatic increase in obesity has contributed to an increased burden of chronic diseases, including type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular disease, hypertension, stroke, and certain forms of cancer.

The exhibit will include state-of-the-art and state-of-the-science approaches to understand the complex challenges associated with food, obesity and health. It will include a wide range of perspectives from the anthropology of hunter-gatherer societies to the culture of food marketing. All three partners are working to shed light on such diverse topics such as the neuroscience of appetite, impact of food and obesity on health, food deserts, modern agricultural subsidies, school lunches, the importance of energy balance via physical activity, and weight bias, among others. “Big Food” has the challenging task of teaching the public that bigger is not always better—especially when it comes to portion sizes and waistlines. The resulting exhibit should not only provide adults and children alike with an enjoyable afternoon, but also hopefully inspire them to become advocates for a healthier world.

Big Food opens Feb. 11, 2012, and run through Nov. 30 at the Yale Peabody Museum of Natural History in New Haven, Conn.

Jane Pickering from the Peabody Museum and Jeannette Ickovics from the Yale School of Public Health will share lessons learned from their experiences in designing Big Food when they present at Feeding the Spirit, AAM’s symposium on museums, food and community. Join us in Pittsburgh on Oct. 13, as attendees and speakers from the leading edge of the Let’s Move! Museums & Gardens initiative work together to build a compendium of best practices for museums addressing food issues to help their communities and strengthen their own sustainability.

Feeding the Spirit is convened in collaboration with Phipps Conservatory and Botanical Gardens, Carnegie Museums of Pittsburgh, Association of Children’s Museums and American Public Gardens Association.

The Let’s Move! Museums & Gardens initiative brings the fight against obesity in America to museums and gardens of all types. By signing up for the program, museums are part of a partnership not only with the White House, but also with a larger network of national associations and museums. For more information on the initiative, visit the IMLS website.