COMMUNITY
DEFINITION
“Community” – short-hand for racial / ethnic minorities
also low-income (tend to overlap)
other “communities” (gender, age, gay, disabled, labor, religious) –
harder time
HISTORY
1st great wave US museum building: 1880s – 1920s – tycoons, titans, robber barons
Genuine philanthropy
Belief / support for science / arts
Public education
But also…
Ego – perpetual monument to self
Business – civic boosterism
Social control – exalt their lives & taste; get others to be like them (Ford)
Non-elite shut out. Three things started to change that:
I)
Rights movements of 50s-70s – wanted in!
Most keenly felt in history museums
Who’s history? Rich founders – irrelevant
Natural history – ethnographic / cultural – who’s story?
Art – less direct change, more collecting going forward
Science – less effected by stories, but other agendas (below)
II)
2nd wave of museum-building: 1976 – present??
More smaller museums
Small subjects
Small audiences – communities
III)
Changing demographics 1990 -- onward
So, in the last 10-15 years, museums have made greater efforts to engage
community.
WHY? WHAT DOES MUSEUM GET OUT OF IT?
Like robber-barons, good reasons and less-good reasons:
Moral responsibility – treat all people equally; mission to serve all people
Legal responsibility – tax-supported
Intellectual responsibility – no monopoly on truth; more info out there
But also…
Looking good to funders who require diversity
Mining community for collections and connections
Bottom line: attendance (demographic shift)
But: Falk says it’s education, not race
WHAT DOES COMMUNITY GET OUT OF IT?
Make a difference in the museum (important civic institution)
Get to tell their stories (on a big stage)
Recognition (from civic inst., from audience)
Like anyone else, some just love museums
SO, HOW DOES THIS HAPPEN?
SHEDD – lots of examples how NOT to do it
Started at Shedd / new exhibit on Philippine coral reefs
One directives to assemble panel of community advisors
No purpose or function
Marketing: access a new audience
Education: outreach opportunities
several years in the future.
Exhibit Development – no one knew
Our hearts in the right place; we just didn’t have a plan.
First – assemble
The Outreach Coordinator – busy, then left
Luckily, Field Museum just did exhibit; put us in touch
Through happenstance and luck, we got pretty good group
Invite comments on our plans. At first, very little
Not museum people
didn’t know what looking at
didn’t have language
(to some degree) wanted to be polite
first couple of meetings -- uncomfortable silences.
Third meeting much livelier
Ask direct questions rather than general ones
We learned a great deal
issues that concerned us didn’t worry advisors
other issues we never considered were of great importance
Soon, time to wrap up exhibit planning
perfect time to “hand-off” to Education, Marketing
capitalize and carry forward good will and momentum
BUT -- advisors keen to promote / fund-raise
other departments weren’t ready, or didn’t know
COMMON MISTAKES
No purpose, no plan
Ad hoc, rather than on-going
No buy-in from institution
Outreach – museum exports its knowledge
“Inreach” – museum imports knowledge from community
But what is really needed is “cross-reach” – museum needs to change to a
community service organization, serving their needs, not our wishes.
Levels of engagement:
Cooperation
Inst. & Comm. Org remain separate, touch base, help as needed, retain auth.
Coordination
Orgs. Stay separate, but work together long-term on a project
Collaboration
Orgs. Merge; panel becomes permanent part of inst.
Usually project-based (coord at best)
WHO ARE THE STAKEHOLDERS?
Comm. @ large  representatives 
Project 
Inst. @ large 
feed back to comm. / inst.
team members 
Membership is opportunistic – who do you know?
SOME ISSUES
OWNERSHIP
Scary – loss of control, authorship, authority – which many museums see as
their reason to exist!
CONTROVERSY
Telling new stories always threaten the old, if only for monopoly
Museum as safe space – worried it will upset visitors
Upset visitors stay away, dropping attendance
Upset visitors write to mayor, etc. – we need good gov. relations
Upset visitors may scare off funders
AAM INITIATIVE
Long-term relationships