The number of articles I have posted on the American Association of Museum Conference is indicative of the merit I found in much that went on there. This one, reporting about the panel on which I served, will (I think) be the last one.
The panelists included Prerana Reddy (a contributor to Building Communities, Not Audiences), José Rodriguez from the Queens Museum of Art, and Michael Christiano (former Director of Education at SECCA and now Director of Education and Interpretation for the Smart Museum of Art at the University of Chicago). Our topic was It Takes a Community: Lessons Learned from Engagement Practices. I provided a frame for thinking about engagement while Prerana, José, and Michael did the heavy lifting in discussing their examples of engagement and the lessons learned from it.
I’m not going to repeat their presentations here. The point of this post is to introduce another tool for highlighting community engagement work. In the process of developing the panel, we concluded that it would be worthwhile to attempt a project to capture examples of museum community engagement work. To that end, Prerana constructed a website where anyone can list information about such projects. The results will be visible in map form.
The data entry is easy: a simple program description, location information (inside or outside the museum), nature of audience involvement (participant or observer), target audiences (if identified), what worked/what didn’t, lessons learned, and a rating of success (from “Abject Failure” to “Beyond our wildest dreams”).
It is our hope that compiling such a dynamic listing will be helpful to museums and communities. This is in some ways new work and we need to pool the lessons we have learned as soon and as well as possible.
Here is the URL for the project: https://museumsengage.crowdmap.com/. All four of us hope you will take a few minutes to include your project(s) in the database. I’m confident it will prove helpful to others interested in or struggling with this work.
Engage!
Doug
This post reminds me of a project that the AAMD did a few years ago to map community engagement. At the Saint Louis Art Museum, we were delighted to document our efforts to reach beyond our walls and into the community. While it’s difficult to claim success beyond our wildest dreams, the sustainability of our efforts is easily unnoticed by all but those who our most affected, i.e. the community members. I applaud my colleagues work to do this frequently unacknowledged work. We presented a session at the 2011 AAM called Beyond Program: Making a Commitment to Audience Development which is available on the AAM Conference web site.
Bill, sounds like a great project. You should submit it as a report to https://museumsengage.crowdmap.com/ !