The Context for This Collection

At its heart, strategic foresight consists of four essential steps:

1. Know where you’ve been.
2. Understand where you are now.
3. Decide where you want to go next.
4. Figure out how to get there.

Put that way, it seems simple, yes?

But simple isn’t the same as easy. A lot of my time is spent learning and teaching skillful ways to take these steps. One important thing I’ve learned is that this journey is easier when you recruit others to help us along the way. Historians, elders, scholars, archivists, and lore-keepers can help us remember where we’ve been. People actually doing the hard work of whatever needs to be done can offer a shrewd assessment of where we are now, and how well we are doing.

The next step—deciding where we want to go next—is often an order of magnitude harder. Left to themselves, our brains are wired to extrapolate the future as a straight line from the past through the now and forward—resulting in a more mature (and entrenched) version of the present. One of the most important truths about the future is that it isn’t predetermined. At any given point we face many potential futures, some of which are better, and others worse, than we might assume. To help overcome mental myopathy, we can enlist the help of people with well-developed imaginations—storytellers who can paint pictures not just of how the world is, but how it could be.

This is the approach I’ve taken in applying foresight to museum work, most recently in AAM’s exploration of the arc of history, from past to future, of repatriation, restitution, and reparations. The first report from this Next Horizon of Museum Practice project documented how the relationships between museums and descendants of communities whose culture they steward have changed over the last decade, and where that leaves us now. That report shared stories of how some museums were repatriating some collections not because the law said they had to, but because their values told them that such so-called voluntary repatriation was the right thing to do. And it showed how those shifts are changing how museums think and talk about the collections they steward—talking about belongings, for example, rather than objects, or ancestors, rather than human remains, language that reflects deeper changes in the relationships between museum people and descendant communities, and between the living and the non-living.

To help with step three—envisioning where we, as a field, want to go next—I enlisted the help of an amazing working group (credited below) in recruiting a diverse array of writers to share their visions of what preferable futures might look like with respect to voluntary repatriation, restitution, and reparations. The resulting collection consists of fifteen papers by authors writing from the perspective of their communities, academia, and museums (some from the intersections of these three domains). By sharing these visions of potential futures, AAM hopes to provide museum people with the inspiration that fuels change and the courage to disrupt any current practice that no longer serves its purpose. I encourage you to browse the titles, pick a few that catch your eye, and dive in. Share stories that resonate with your colleagues, students, and friends. What elements of these stories do you find compelling, plausible, useful? Which paint pictures of futures that you would like to inhabit?

A Preview of Some of the Papers

The collection consists of:

• Opinion pieces, such as that contributed by Ernestine Hayes, Professor Emerita at the University of Alaska Southeast, writing, from her perspective as someone belonging to the Wolf House of the Kaagwaantaan clan of the Lingít nation, of a future in which everything that was taken grows old and dies where it belongs.
• Academic foresight, including a paper by Fabio Mariani, Lynn Rother, and Max Koss at the Provenance Lab of Leuphana University Lüneburg, on digital cataloguing as a reparative practice.
• Speculative fiction, like David Zvi Kalman’s mind-bending story that challenges us to consider whether an object’s provenance can have power equal to or exceeding the object itself.

It addresses museums’ relations with descendant communities from various points of view. for example:

• Victoria Phiri Chitungu and Samba Yonga of the Livingstone Museum and Women’s History Museum, Zambia, exploring a future in which digital repatriation can be a means in which African cultural objects in foreign museums are reconnected with their embedded Indigenous knowledge and communities of origin in Africa.
• Marc Masurovsky, co-founder of the Holocaust Art Restitution Project and Director of Research for the Presidential Advisory Commission on Holocaust-Era Assets, on a future in which museums treat the provenance of an object as equally worthy of storytelling as its creation, especially in the case of looted or stolen works.
• Laura Van Broekhoven, drawing on her experience as director of the Pitt Rivers Museum at the University of Oxford to envision how museums can be part of a process of societal healing by enabling community-led work towards reconciliation and prioritizing listening, cultural care, and epistemological equity.
• Jessica Harris, President, Descendants of Enslaved Communities at the University of Virginia, describing a future in which a future in which descendants of enslaved communities have an equitable, reparative seat at the table as we strive toward true repair and stronger museums.

This collection caps the second phase of this Next Horizon project. I’m hoping to tackle the fourth key step in foresight—figuring how to get to our preferred futures—in stage three. Please reach out to cfm (at) aam-us.org if you might be interested in hosting a workshop on this topic at your museum or conference, and please, please share ideas about partners and potential funders for this important work.

Yours from the future,

Elizabeth

Elizabeth Merritt, VP Strategic Foresight & Founding Director, Center for the Future of Museums

Gratitude and Acknowledgements

This project has been made possible by the generous support of the David Berg Foundation.

And by the wise guidance of the Next Horizon Working Group:

• Antonia Bartoli, Curator of Provenance Research, Yale University Art Gallery
• Kalewa Correa, Smithsonian APAC curator of Hawai’i and the Pacific
• Michael Glickman, jMUSE Founder and CEO
• Jane Pickering, William & Muriel Seabury Howells Director of the Peabody Museum, Harvard University, Boston, MA
• Brandie Macdonald, Executive Director, Indiana University Museum of Archeology and Anthropology
• Stephen E. Nash, President and CEO, Archaeology Southwest
• Ashley Rogers, Executive Director, Whitney Plantation
• Noelle Trent, President & CEO of the Museum of African American History, Boston and Nantucket
• Nii O. Quarcoopome, Curator &, Department Head of Africa, Oceania & Indigenous Americas at Detroit Institute of Arts
• Richard West, Founding Director & Director Emeritus Smithsonian NMAI

The program kicks off on October 29 at 1 pm ET with a keynote by one of my favorite futurists. The next day, at 1:30 pm, you’ll have the choice of four fantastic Big Idea talks, one for each of our four session tracks. Today I’m previewing these speakers to encourage you to register (if you haven’t already) and, for those already planning to join us, to help you choose which of the Big Idea talks to attend. (Though not to worry, the recordings will be available to registrants until January 31, 2025, so you can catch up on the ones you missed.)

First, our keynote speaker: Last year Dr. Jane McGonigal launched the Summit with a pep talk on building urgent optimism for the future. This year I’m so happy to introduce you to Rob Hopkins—a futurist, time traveler, and imagination catalyst trainer based in Totnes, England. I fell in love with Rob’s work through his marvelous podcast From What If to What Next, where he shared provocative, optimistic challenges such as “What if we loved politicians?” and “What if we decolonized economics?” (The podcast, alas, came to a close in 2024, but I highly recommend the archived episodes, which you can find on any major podcast app.) Much of Rob’s futures work and his practical activism focus on combating climate change and building resilient futures.

On to our Big Ideas speakers:

You may already know Sree Sreenivasan, former Chief Digital Officer at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and now co-founder and CEO of Digimentors, a social/digital/AI training and consulting company. For the past year, he’s been teaching his “Non-scary Guide to AI” workshops and working with clients on AI policy, strategy, and scenario planning. In writing up his speaker text for the Summit, I was intimidated by the other accomplishments in his bio: In 2015, Fast Company named him one of the hundred most creative people in business. In 2004, Newsweek named him one of the twenty most influential young South Asians in America, along with Kamala Harris, M. Night Shyamalan, and Norah Jones. (I know, right!?!?!) In 2020, the President of Italy awarded Sree the knighthood of the Order of the Star of Italy for his role in promoting US-Italian relations. Sree is going to enrich the AI Adolescence track with his observations on “AI & Museums: Beyond the Hype and the Backlash.”

While most of the sessions in our “Net Zero” track look at practical ways museums can reduce their carbon impact, Dr. Susan Clayton is going to make sure we don’t lose track of the psychological cost of the climate crisis. As the Whitmore-Williams Professor and Chair of Psychology at the College of Wooster in Ohio, Susan’s research explores people’s relationship with the natural environment and how climate change affects mental health and well-being. A fellow of the American Psychological Association and the International Association of Applied Psychology, she was a lead author on the Sixth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. In her talk, Susan will address how climate change affects our psychological well-being, including threats to identity and grief over environmental losses, as well as how museums can help mitigate this damage.

I confess that writing about Culture Wars for TrendsWatch left me feeling pretty discouraged. One thing that lifted me up out of that funk was the work of Mathieu Lefevre, CEO and Co-founder of More in Common. Mathieu’s work at More in Common focuses on understanding the forces driving us apart, finding common ground, and bringing people together to tackle shared challenges. At the Summit, he will deconstruct some of the factors contributing to the “polarization illusion,” including the role of the media, social media, and the “polarization industrial complex.” Mathieu has some ideas about what we can all do to stem the tide of polarization and the critical role museums can play as convening places and community spaces.

If researching topics for TrendsWatch has taught me anything, it is that for any challenge in the world, there are amazing people working to find solutions. The current loneliness epidemic is a case in point. Dr. Jeremy Nobel is an actual doctor—a primary care physician and public health practitioner with faculty appointments at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and the Harvard Medical School. (He’s also an award-winning poet. Not that I’m going to get an inferiority complex or anything. Yikes.) Jeremy is the founder of the Foundation of Art and Healing, and his 2023 book Project UnLonely looks at how we can heal the current “crisis of disconnection.” At the Summit, he’ll draw on his work to offer some insights and strategies for how museums can play a role in that process of healing.

I hope to see you at the Summit next week. If you haven’t snagged tickets yet, register now and start planning your agenda for the day.

Warmest regards from the future,

Elizabeth

Elizabeth Merritt

VP Strategic Foresight and Founding Director, Center for the Future of Museums

American Alliance of Museums

For each Chat, I’ll recruit a guest to help me pick apart a recent signal of change (it might be a news story, a research report, even a photograph), examine its implications for our lives and our work, and create a safe space for museum people to trade thoughts and share experiences.

Which, not incidentally, creates an opportunity to share with you some of the fascinating people inside, around, and outside the museum sector who I meet in the course of my work.

For the first Chat, on Wednesday, August 14, from 3-4 p.m. ET, I’ll be joined by Marcy Rockman to explore a recent signal related to changing climate risk. Marcy is an archaeologist with experience in national and international climate change policy. Her research focuses on “landscape learning,” which explores how humans gather, remember, and share environmental information.

After about 20 minutes of introducing our signal and sharing some thoughts on what it might mean for the world, and museums, we’ll send attendees off into small breakout groups with questions to guide discussion. When you re-enter the main room towards the end of the hour, you’ll be invited to share insights, stories, ideas that struck you as being particularly useful and inspiring.

This event is free and open to all (AAM member and nonmember alike). I hope you will join me both to test the format, and to dive into this critically important topic. Register now for the August 14 event, and I hope to be chatting with you soon.

Yours from the future,

Elizabeth

Elizabeth Merritt, VP Strategic Foresight and Founding Director, Center for the Future of Museums

“Ageism is a prejudice against our own future selves and takes root in denial of the fact that we’re going to get old.”  —Ashton Applewhite, author and age-activist

By 2030, one in five Americans will be over the age of sixty-five, and in some states that figure will top one-quarter. By 2034, older adults will outnum­ber children in the US population. As the AARP has pointed out, in the past seventy years our primary focus, as a society, has been on meeting the needs of families with children. This focus has shaped every aspect of our lives, from the design of buildings, transportation systems, and neighborhoods to the policies behind zoning and human resources. The unintended result has been the creation of physical and social systems that isolate and marginalize peo­ple as they age. This separation is unhealthy for people of all ages. Younger people are deprived of valuable wisdom and expertise, as well as role models for their future selves. Isolating older people from society creates grave risks to their mental and physical health. Museums can play a vital role in creating “age-friendly” communities that support physical activity, social connection, and intellectual stimulation, as well as providing pathways for elders to con­tribute to their communities and to following generations.

The Challenge

A woman born today in the US can expect to live to be eighty-one years old, a man seventy-six, and those averages are rising with time. Though Baby Boomers (born between 1946 and 1964) have long expressed their intent to work until age sixty-eight, the COVID-19 pandemic has impelled a wave of early retirements, meaning many people face a decade or more of “post-work” life, while continuing to want opportunities for meaningful engage­ment and to give back to their communities. This stage of life is not without challenges. Even though the Age Discrimination in Employment Act protects people age forty or older, those who want to remain in or rejoin the workforce often face discrimination in hiring and on the job. Forty percent of people over the age of sixty-five have some kind of disability—whether that involves mobility, cognition, hearing, vision, or barriers to independent living. About 20 to 25 percent of older adults have mild cognitive impairment, and about 10 percent experience dementia (though that rate seems to be falling over time).

Regardless of underlying health or ability, everyone who lives to grow old in the US at some point joins the ranks of people subject to the pervasive, corrosive bias of ageism, a form of discrimination that itself contributes to depression, cognitive decline, ill health, and (perverse­ly) a shorter life span. And ageism combines with other “isms”—racism, sexism, homophobia, and class prejudic­es—to create a toxic brew of intersectional damage.

It is increasingly common for older Americans to face these challenges without a network of family or social support. In the US, 27 percent of adults over the age of sixty live alone (more than double the figure for adults age twenty-five to sixty), and social isolation has a nega­tive impact on health as severe as smoking up to fifteen cigarettes a day. Older Americans are also much less like­ly than their counterparts elsewhere in the world to live in a household without young children, which contributes to generational isolation as well, denying children access to the care, mentoring, and role modeling that can be provided by older adults. The safety net woven by family relationships will fray even more in coming decades, as the US birthrate drops. In 2010, there were, on average, seven potential caregivers for every senior. The AARP expects this number to drop to four by 2030, and to fewer than three by 2050. Nearly 90 percent of Americans over the age of fifty want to “age in place.” However, the lack of family caregivers, and the absence of any nationally funded and organized substitute, will make it difficult for people to remain in their own homes rather than moving to assisted living facilities. In any case, by the end of this decade, 54 percent of seniors will not be able to afford either assist­ed care or independent living, precipitating crises in both housing and health.

Meanwhile, we’ve created communities and environments both online and in real life that seem almost intentionally designed to make it hard for elders to remain actively engaged with the world. Only 1 percent of housing stock in the US features universal design elements such as no-step entrances, single-floor layout, and space designed to accommodate wheelchairs. Some developers create “senior communities” for people over a given age, ranging from housing co-ops to entire suburbs. Though these environments may address challenges of physical accessibility and social isolation, they can become “age bubbles” that isolate residents from a richer spectrum of community assets. The internet can, theoretically, con­nect the housebound to the world, but it comes with its own set of challenges, as digital design often features illegible text, tiny icons, and other age-unfriendly features.

Museums have room for progress in becoming age-friendly as well. Though there is a widespread assumption that older individuals are among the most frequent visitors to museums, research shows the opposite to be true. In the US, fewer than a quarter of people age sixty or older visit a museum in any given year. (Older adults may seem to make up a larger share of the audience because those that do go to museums tend to be frequent visitors.) Many aspects of traditional museum design are age-hostile, including the lack of seating, sensory overload, and barriers to physical accessibility. Even museum programming can add to generational segrega­tion, if older people are funneled only towards offerings (like passive lectures) that museum staff believe they will want.

More than 60 percent of people over the age of fifty-five engage in some sort of volunteer activity, formal or infor­mal, and the opportunity to volunteer is one of the major benefits nonprofits provide to society. Copious research documents that volunteering helps individuals expand their connections, feel good about themselves, improve their physical well-being, combat social isolation, reduce stress, and learn new skills—benefits that are particu­larly helpful in supporting healthy aging. In museums, volunteers typically outnumber staff by a factor of six to one, performing a wide range of work including stocking the gift store, preparing research specimens, working as greeters, planning and running fundraising events, and giving tours. However, the benefits afforded by volun­teering are often not equitably shared with a museum’s community. Historically, the corps of museum volunteers have skewed towards older adults with the time, inclina­tion, and financial resources that enable them to volun­teer. As a result, their demographics typically mirror that of museum personnel (both staff and board)—which is often disproportionately white, well-educated, and rela­tively well-off. Volunteerism can exacerbate inequality if, as in many museums, it is only accessible to people who are already comparatively privileged.

The Response

In Society

There is growing consensus that the most robust solution to the isolation of aging is to bake better design into the landscape and infrastructure of towns and cities. In 2006, the World Health Organization introduced a framework for age-friendly cities that encompasses eight domains: health care, transportation, housing, social participation, outdoor space, respect and social inclusion, civic par­ticipation and employment, and communications and information. As of 2017, over five hundred cities around the world had signed on, pledging to make their com­munities better places to grow older, and AARP has worked with WHO to extend this practice to 207 commu­nities in the US. As is invariably true of inclusive design, creating age-friendly communities is good for every­one—increasing access to employment, arts and culture, critical services, community participation, and affordable housing. As AARP points out, “Age-friendly communities foster economic growth, and make for happier, healthier residents of all ages.”

In Museums

Museums play many roles in making communities age-friendly as places of social connection, employment, mental and physical engagement, and as influential forces in combatting ageist stereotypes. Since the early 2000s, museums have helped fuel the creative aging movement—using the power of arts engagement to foster healthy, active aging and improve the lives of older people. Research from the Seeding Vitality Arts initia­tive of Aroha Philanthropies documents that sustained, meaningful arts engagement supports healthy aging, increases the self-confidence and mental engagement of participants, and fosters social connections.

Museums also step in to meet the needs of the many people experiencing health-related challenges as they age. Programming specifically designed for people with dementia and their caregivers has been shown to reduce levels of depression and improve cognitive functioning and overall quality of life. Engaging with art through viewing, making, and movement can help people coping with Parkinson’s disease or other debilitating illnesses to maintain their mobility and social connections.

Museums are also an important component of age-friendly communities regardless of the specific programs they offer. Recent research shows living in a community with various cultural resources confers a five-year advantage in cognitive age, with museums and similar cultural organizations providing the biggest boost to cognitive health. (However, that benefit is skewed by race, with Black populations experiencing less protective benefit from museums, pointing to the need to improve equitable access to museum space.)

The museum sector is still searching for a good model to reconcile the tensions that sometimes arise between volunteers (often older individuals) and paid staff. Some of the approaches being tried include creating a long runway (even a decade or more) to implement structural changes in volunteer programs, and including volun­teers in the process of addressing DEAI and social justice goals. Others focus on creating an organizational culture, backed up by appropriate procedures, that foster a vol­unteer corps that is diverse with respect to age, race, and other elements of personal identity.

Museum Examples

Fostering Age-Friendly Design

Recently, the Design Museum and the Design Age Institute launched a project to establish a new infrastruc­ture for collaboration and co-creation around design and aging. Designing a World for Everyone will bring together researchers, designers, innovators, and policymakers to share the latest research and insights into how design can be used to transform public spaces, cities, and communi­ties to support the aging population. Associated program­ming includes The Wisdom Hour, a creative storytelling space celebrating positive stories of aging, facilitated by This Age Thing. Over the course of a year, the project will place local community groups at the heart of the deci­sion-making process, respond to the needs and concerns of underrepresented groups, and create social impact by removing and reducing barriers to participation.

Cultivating Social Connection

During the COVID-19 pandemic, the Musical Instrument Museum (MIM) in Phoenix partnered with Arizona State University to create virtual programming for senior com­munities who could not visit the museum in person. The initiative produced two Senior Wellness video series, one for active seniors and one for people in memory care. Teams of music therapy students from ASU developed music therapy interventions that complement virtual tours of MIM’s galleries, with a focus on physical skills (drumming, dancing, and other movement), cognitive skills such as attention and memory, and psychosocial components related to self-expression through music.

Creating Intergenerational Connections

The Museum of Contemporary Art in Tucson’s Stay Gold program supports the intergenerational LGBTQ+ community, connecting generations through creativi­ty and making and using contemporary art to explore relevance and meaning in the lives of the participants. In 2018, older adults from Stay Gold proposed creating an intergenerational version of the teen School of Drag per­formance. Local drag performers taught the workshops and a youth drag performer emceed the show. During the pandemic, museum staff adapted the Stay Gold programming to an online format, offering artmaking prompts inspired by LGBTQ+ artists to maintain the con­nection so badly needed during this time of heightened isolation. This work was supported by a Seeding Vitality Arts in Museums grant from Aroha Philanthropies.

Cultivating Creative Aging

In 2016, Aroha Philanthropies launched a major multi-year initiative, Seeding Vitality Arts, to foster creative aging programs in a variety of settings, including museums. In 2018, the American Alliance of Museums partnered with Aroha Philanthropies to support a museum-specific cohort through Seeding Vitality Arts in Museums (SVA), providing twenty organizations with training and resources to develop and implement high-quality, intensive arts learning opportunities for older adults. The resulting programs included an Expressive Movement workshop at the Anchorage Museum building on Indigenous knowledge and life­ways; “Viva la Vida” artmaking at the National Museum of Mexican Art; and traditional drumming and Mardi Gras beading at the Louisiana State Museum. When the COVID-19 pandemic forced museums to close their doors, leaving elders at even greater risk of isolation, the SVA museums reinvented their work to engage with participants over remote platforms. The Olana State Historic Site, for example, remastered its plans for a place-based eight-session playwriting workshop. Kicking off with a virtual tour of the historic house, participants spent more time on research using digital documents, and seven professional actors read the finished student scripts over Zoom.

Meeting the Needs of Older Audiences

In 2014, noting that only 3 percent of older adults in New York City visit senior centers, the Museum of Modern Art created the Prime Time Collective, a diverse group of adults ranging from sixty-one to ninety-four years old, to help identify and address financial, physical, informa­tional, and attitudinal barriers to participation in museum programs. In the past decade, the museum has part­nered with community organizations to offer specialized programming for LGBTQ+ older adults, individuals and caregivers coping with Parkinson’s or Alzheimer’s dis­ease, and for teens and older adults to come together (for example, the 2016 program Act Your Age). In collabora­tion with the Martha Stewart Center for Living, the muse­um launched a “social prescription” program, in which physicians and social workers can write a prescription for art programming at MoMA. For housebound seniors, the museum offers online programming in partnership with the Virtual Senior Center.

Supporting Older Adults with Dementia

Since 2010, the Frye Art Museum has partnered with the Alzheimer’s Association and the Seattle nonprofit Elderwise to develop and implement participatory arts experiences for people living with dementia and their care partners. In the ensuing decade, the museum has fostered a large community of practice by offering professional development to individuals engaged in similar work, and conducting research that adds to the growing body of literature documenting the contribution of arts engagements to healthy aging. One of the signa­ture programs of this effort is the annual Creative Aging Conference, an interdisciplinary exploration of topics related to art, creativity, and aging.

Explore This Future

Signal of Change:

A “signal of change” is a recent news story, report, or event describing a local innovation or disruption that has the potential to grow in scope and scale. Use this signal to spark your thinking about how museums might support age-friendly communities in the future.

Creating an Age-friendly City

In 2021, the Purposeful Aging Los Angeles Initiative (PALA) issued rec­ommendations to advance its goal of making the Los Angeles region “the most age-friendly in the world.” One of the recommendations is to make all tourist attractions and buildings in the Los Angeles region age-friendly. “As new building construction occurs (and buildings are updated over time), it is critical that they provide welcoming, functional environments for all genera­tions. This is especially important for stadiums, museums, studios, conven­tion centers, major public facilities, and other tourist attractions that draw a high-volume of visitors, including older adults. The County and City will partner with these institutions/facilities, as well as the Los Angeles Tourism and Convention Board, USC School of Gerontology, and other partners to develop a ranking system for major regional tourist attractions. We anticipate generating awareness of, and attention around tourist facilities that have taken steps to become age-friendly.” (Emphasis added.)

Explore the implications of this signal:

Ask yourself, what if there was more of this in the future? What if it became the dominant paradigm? Write and discuss three potential implications of this signal:

1. For yourself, your family, or friends
2. For your museum
3. For the United States

Critical Questions for Museums

• What aspects of conventional museum design and operation pose barriers to access for older audiences?
• How can museums elevate the power, voice, and status of older individuals, helping to create a culture that honors, values, and empowers elders?
• How can museums promote the creation of age-friendly communities and integrate themselves into a seamless network of support?
• How can museums make volunteer opportunities accessible to a broad diversity of older individuals?
• How can museums address ageism in the steps they take to promote diversity, equity, accessibility, and inclusion in their own work cultures?
• How can museums shift older adults from the group least likely to use museums to one of their biggest audiences?
• How might museums bolster their own sustainability by serving older adult audiences better?

A Framework for Action

To help create age-friendly communities, museums can:

• Inventory barriers to access or use. This might include physical barriers (including stairs, ramps, handrails, and restrooms), comfort (includ­ing seating, acoustics, lighting, and readability of signage), cultural or social barriers (including attitudes and behavior of staff and ageism reflected in marketing, exhibits, and programming), and transportation (including availability and location of parking and access to public transpor­tation). Ensure that digital design is age-friendly as well.
• Provide age-equitable opportunities for employment and volunteering. Consider training managers and human resources staff on how to avoid ageism in hiring and employment, establishing a working group of paid and volunteer staff to identify how to value and support older volunteers, including age and ageism in the muse­um’s DEAI plans and policies, and addressing age-related stereotypes and assumptions in DEAI training.
• Assess how older adults are repre­sented in your content, from exhibits to marketing, and work to ensure that elders are both seen and valued.
• Identify older adults in your com­munity who are “culture-bearers” and give them platform, power, and authority to transmit the knowledge, experience, skills, and stories that they care for.
• Design programs and services that actively foster intergenerational connections: In addition to creating rewarding relationships, dialogue between older adults and youth has been shown to be an effective tool to reduce ageist attitudes and behaviors.

Additional Resources

• Museums and Creative Aging: A Healthful Partnership (AAM, 2021). This report, authored by Marjorie Schwarzer, opens with an overview of aging and ageism in our country, docu­ments actions being taken to foster positive aging, profiles the work of museums providing creative aging programming, and shares lessons learned from the Seeding Vitality Arts in Museums initiative, fund­ed by Aroha Philanthropies, now known as E.A. Michelson Philanthropy.
• Age-Friendly Standards for Cultural Organizations (The Family Arts Campaign, 2017). These standards are designed to help cultural organizations provide a welcoming and pos­itive experience for everyone, regardless of their age, and to facilitate intergenerational interactions.
• Global report on ageism (World Health Organization, 2021). This report outlines a framework for action to reduce ageism for use by governments, the private sector, and civil society organi­zations, and includes a toolkit for the Global Campaign to Combat Ageism.
• The Old School Anti-Ageism Clearinghouse is an online compendium of free resourc­es to educate people about ageism and help dismantle it. It includes information about and links to blogs, books, articles, videos, speakers, and other tools (workshops, handouts, curricula, etc.) accessible to the general public.

“Given the challenges we face, education doesn’t need to be reformed—it needs to be transformed.”

Twenty years into the new millennium, the US is still struggling to create a P-12 education system that provides each child with the support they need to become a healthy, well-balanced, self-sustaining adult. Copious research suggests that the system we inherited from the last century, with its focus on age-based cohorts and standardized curricula, is poorly suited to foster criti­cal thinking, problem-solving, synthesis, innovation, creativity, teamwork, and collaboration—skills widely seen as essential for thriving in the twenty-first century. The COVID-19 pandemic has added to these challenges by exposing the fragility of our educational infrastructure, widening existing educational disparities and demonstrating that alternate forms of learning can be better, more effective, and more accessible for some. Museums have been living the educational future for decades, providing the kind of self-directed, experien­tial, social, and distributed learning that is proving to be both effective and resilient. Building on these strengths, the museum sector can play a vital role in rebuilding and transforming P-12 education to be better, stronger, and more equitable for all of America’s children.

The Challenge

Like so many US systems, from finance to justice to government, the existing education system is structurally inequitable in its design. As currently consti­tuted, our public and private systems of education reinforce and perpetuate advantages based on race, gender, sexual orientation, culture, ability, and socioeconomic status. This structural inequity exists not only because of zip-code-based allocation of resources (which could theoretically be fixed by giv­ing more and better access to historically marginalized groups), but because the system is fundamentally designed to favor a specific, narrow range of abilities and learning styles. To paraphrase education critic Sir Ken Robinson, the whole system of public education has been created in the image of higher education, and treats primary and secondary school as a protracted university entrance exam. “The consequence,” he explains in a TED talk, is that “many highly talented, brilliant, creative people think they’re not [brilliant and talented], because the thing they were good at at school wasn’t valued, or was actually stigmatized.”

In the past decade, top-down educational reform has largely focused on creating a common set of standards and doubling down on standardized testing. These efforts have been, at best, unsuccessful, and may have actually made things worse for both students and teachers. The Common Core standards, introduced in 2010, have cost billions of dollars without resulting in any measurable improvement in results. Many critics feel that the empha­sis on testing has disempowered and demoralized teach­ers, helping fuel a chronic shortage of qualified, skilled educators, especially in low-income communities and hard-to-staff roles.

We already knew that a one-size-fits-all approach doesn’t work for many children, and the COVID-19 pandemic threw that into stark relief. While prolonged disruption set back student learning overall, the effect was especially severe for Black, Hispanic, and Indigenous communities. Low-income families were less likely to be able to provide the internet access, devices, and dedicated, quiet study space needed for successful online learning. As of spring 2021, nearly one-fifth of households with school-age children did not have consistent access to the internet for education, and this lack of access was highest for Latinx, Black, and mixed-race households, with predictable results. A study by the consulting firm McKinsey sug­gested that students of color lost three to five months of math learning over the 2019-2020 school year, compared to one to three months lost by white students. A metada­ta analysis by the US Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights found that pandemic learning disruptions were also particularly severe for students learning English as a second language, students with disabilities, LGBTQ+ students, and students who are caregivers for their families.

The pandemic was devastating for educators as well, placing them in the role of front-line emergency responders with limited training or support. Teachers found themselves working even longer hours, learning how to teach online, and in many cases juggling both in-person and online teaching simultaneously. While teacher turnover actually declined in 2020 (because, heroes), the pandemic took a heavy toll on morale, with one-third of teachers saying it has made them more likely to leave teaching or retire early. Almost twenty-five thou­sand people quit the public education sector in August 2021, and the Bureau of Labor Statistics forecasts that the annual turnover rate for experienced educators and school principals will rise to 42 percent.

But the pandemic also surfaced important signals of potential positive change. While distance education was a disaster for some children who thrived in traditional schools, it proved to be a superior option for some kids disadvantaged by the established system. A number of students, including some with ADHD, autism, or other neurodivergent conditions, found it easier to concentrate when they were not around classmates. Teachers who work with the online learning platform Edutopia reported that some “shy kids, hyperactive kids, and highly creative kids” are doing better with remote learning than they did in physical classrooms. Others noted that some students who have been the victims of physical or verbal bullying at school found home to be a safer space for learning. (Some of these beneficial aspects of remote learning mirror strategies that promote health and wellbeing in the workplace as well, including being flexible about where, when, and how work gets done, and revisiting what constitutes a reasonable workload.)

How can we take what we learned from pandemic-era innovations and use it to improve education long-term? How can we use this disruption as an opportunity to build back better and stronger, transforming the systems we know to be damaging to so many young people?

The Response

In Society

Pre-pandemic, the US was already shifting away from the top-down, federally driven reform efforts charac­terized by No Child Left Behind (NCLB). Guided by the 2015 successor to NCLB, the Every Student Succeeds Act, states began promoting flexibility in setting goals, making improvements, and supporting students through a wide range of approaches. As the KnowledgeWorks Foundation observed in a 2018 report, “These shifts, some of which have been gaining ground for several years, are creating a more decentralized environment in which changemakers of every stripe have increasing ability to influence public education—and in more ways than before.” The disruptions created by COVID-19 demanded innovation and flexibility, and it is widely recognized that education will not simply reset to pre-pandemic norms. Having been essentially drop-kicked into the future, schools have begun to build the infrastructure they need to support distance learning and online instruction. These efforts were given a boost by funding from the Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2021 and the American Rescue Plan to improve broadband access and close the digital divide. The extended pandemic educational experiment bol­stered teachers’ confidence in trying out new ideas for how to teach, collaborate with their colleagues, communicate with fam­ilies, and use technology to engage with students. Now more than two-thirds of teachers surveyed in 2021 say they intend to incorporate tools they adopted during the pandemic into their ongoing teaching repertoire.

This extended, forced experiment in remote learning accelerat­ed some shifts in education policy that were already underway. In 2012, thirty-six states had already disconnected “seat time” (time spent in the classroom) from the awarding of education­al credit. States are waiving seat time in many different ways (including basing credits on mastery of material and allowing for individual seat-time waivers) and for students with many different needs (including those who have fallen behind, those who excel, those who don’t do well in traditional academ­ic environments, etc.) Asynchronous distance learning can be used to reinforce this trend, empowering students to spend as little or as much time as they need to master the material, and to be evaluated on outcomes rather than facetime.

The pandemic also accelerated parents’ search for edu­cational alternatives. Prior to 2020, the US had already seen a slow but steady growth in homeschooling and in the number of students attending charter schools. The COVID-19 pandemic supercharged this trend. Homeschooling is projected to increase by at least 10 percent, and charter school enrollment rose by over 7 percent. Non-charter public school enrollment dropped 3.3 percent, representing 1.5 million students. As school funding follows students, such shifts in enrollment will create a sizeable drain on the public education system.

In Museums

The seminal AAM report Building the Future of Education: Museums and the Learning Ecosystem (2014) chronicled the steady evolution of museums from “informal” educa­tional extras to critical players in mainstream education. In addition to supporting schools, teachers, and learn­ers with content, field trips, and after-school programs, museums are experimenting with ways to be the prima­ry education provider for some children. The past two decades have seen the creation of a growing number of museum schools of various forms, including schools that operate museums or use museums in their community as classrooms and learning locations, schools co-locating in museum space, and museums founding and operating schools. As we point out in the Building the Future report, museums are preadapted for the next era of education, as they are already expert in the kind of self-directed, experiential, distributed learning that fosters the twen­ty-first century skills of critical thinking, synthesis of information, innovation, creativity, teamwork, and collab­oration. They bring these strengths to museum-school partnerships of all types.

The pandemic gave museums the opportunity to demon­strate their educational expertise by stepping in to fill many of the gaps created by the fragility of tradition­al education systems. Over the past two years, many students lacked critical resources for successful online learning: quiet space, good internet connectivity at home. mentors to help with technology and assignments. Many museums responded by creating study halls and pro­viding learning mentors. When some schools needed more room to practice safe physical distancing, local museums, closed to the public, made their buildings and grounds available as classroom space for months on end. Museum educators turned their time and talent to creating virtual field trips, online classes, curricula, and lesson plans to support teachers and parents who were trying to provide a rich learning experience for children cut off from normal schooling. These efforts introduced many teachers to the wealth of digital resources provided by museums, and taught museums that they can serve educators and students across the country, not just in their geographic communities.

Like teachers, museums may make long-term changes based on what they learned during the pandemic. Many museums found that their digital offerings reached people who were unlikely to visit the museum even in normal times, because of time, distance, or other barriers to accessibility. (These anecdotal reports are bolstered by data from the Culture and Community in a Time of Crisis project, which found museums of all types reached significant numbers of non-museum-goers through dig­ital experiences.) Museums may also decide to continue some of the place-based learning innovations sparked by the pandemic. For example, the Fort Worth Museum of Science and History, which provided space for students engaged in virtual learning, has decided to launch a new museum charter school focusing on STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math). Classroom teach­ers have told the Pacific Science Center that they want virtual field trips implemented during the pandemic to stay, because it is an efficient use of class time, simplifies logistics, and can more easily be customized to teacher and student needs.

Museum Examples

Museums Supporting Pandemic Education

During the pandemic, some museums, closed to the public, have hosted schools needing more space. The Children’s Museum of Fond du Lac housed students from Treffert Way for the Exceptional Mind, a public charter school that “seeks to teach to children’s individual strengths and emphasizes experiential learning.” The Louisiana Children’s Museum in New Orleans gave exclusive access to its building and grounds to pre-K and kindergarten class­es from the Langston Hughes Academy, a FirstLine charter school whose students are 98 percent Black and 74 per­cent eligible for free lunch. Sixth graders from Woodstock Elementary in Vermont found themselves studying at Billings Farm and Museum, in close proximity to the museum’s exhibits and award-winning herd of Jersey cows.

Many schools went virtual, leaving students in need of quiet spaces with good internet connections to support successful virtual learning. Many museums responded by adapting some of their space as in-person learning labs. The Great Lakes Science Center hosted learning camps during the summer of 2020, with museum staff leading STEM-based activities as well as helping students com­plete online work assigned by their schools. The Fort Worth Museum of Science and History’s Little Scholars program allowed first- through fifth-graders to do their virtual classes from inside the exhibit halls. The museum provided laptops and Wi-Fi, and museum facilitators were on hand to answer children’s questions and help them get online. The Phillip and Patricia Frost Museum of Science in Miami created the Pods Program to host kin­dergarten through fifth-grade students accessing virtual school, with museum educators providing homework assistance and technical support.

Museums Providing Formal, Credentialed Learning Experiences

Futures-oriented organizations such as KnowledgeWorks, Big Picture Learning, and Ashoka envision the future of education as being distributed across the community, with learning taking place in a variety of organizations that are empowered to grant formal credit to students. In 2013, Vermont launched the Flexible Pathways Initiative (Act 77), giving secondary school students the right to create personalized learning plans that include educa­tional experiences outside the formal school setting. Now some museums in that state, including Shelburne Farms and the Lake Champlain Maritime Museum, are marketing programs as place-based learning that can integrate into personalized learning plans and meet proficiency-based graduation requirements. During the pandemic, The Besser Museum for Northeast Michigan worked with teachers and homeschool parents to award extra credits for free, independent field trips to the museum’s planetarium programs.

Four Kinds of Museum Schools

Schools Using Local Museums as Classrooms

Some examples include the New York City Museum School (a magnet school in Manhattan for grades nine through twelve), Normal Park Museum Magnet School (a magnet school in Chattanooga, Tennessee, for kinder­garten through eighth grade), and The Museum School of Avondale Estates (a public charter school in Decatur, Georgia, for kindergarten through eighth grade). These schools build their curricula around “learning expe­ditions,” using their local museums as extensions of classroom learning, enabling students (either as a full grade level or a single class) to structure learning around in-depth interactions with exhibits and artifacts.

Schools Creating Museums

The John Early Museum Magnet Middle School (a magnet school in Nashville, Tennessee, for grades five through eight) and The Webb Schools (a private school in Claremont, California, for grades nine through twelve) have created full-fledged museums that engage students in the process of creating exhibits, curating collections, and conducting research. The Webb Schools’ Raymond M. Alf Museum of Paleontology is accredited by the American Alliance of Museums.

Schools Hosted on Museum Campuses

The Manchester Academic Charter School middle school is sited on the campus of the Pittsburgh Children’s Museum and makes extensive use of its Museum Lab. The Dr. Charles R. Drew Science Magnet Museum Site houses grades three through eight at the Buffalo Museum of Science. The Lincoln Nursery School is integrated into the deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum, and the Wonder School preschool collabo­ration uses the Columbus Museum of Art as one of its campuses.

Museums Creating or Co-Creating a School

At the Grand Rapids Public Museum High School (GRPMHS), students work with staff of the Grand Rapids Public Museum to catalog and research collections and curate exhibits while using the museum exhibits for place-based learning. GRPMHS, which was one of ten schools internationally to receive the XQ Super School grant in 2016, is an ongoing collaboration between the Grand Rapids Public Museum, Grand Rapids Public Schools, Kendall College of Art and Design of Ferris State University, Grand Valley State University, the City of Grand Rapids, Downtown Grand Rapids, Inc., XQ Super School, and the Parent Teacher Community Council.

The Henry Ford Academy is a public, tuition-free charter high school hosted by The Henry Ford. Founded in 1997 and developed in partnership with The Henry Ford and the Ford Motor Co., it serves five hundred students grades 9-12 split between The Henry Ford’s Museum of American Innovation and historic Greenfield Village.

For a map identifying museum schools across the US, visit the website of the National Association of Museum Schools.

Explore the Future

Signal of Change:

A “signal of change” is a recent news story, report, or event describing a local innova­tion or disruption that has the potential to grow in scope and scale. Use this signal to spark your thinking about how museums might engage with the education system in the future.

Are Microschools the Future of Online Learning?

WGBH, June 28, 2021

The coronavirus pandemic dramatically changed the way tens of millions of kinder­garten through twelfth-grade students “do school,” and for some families, it was the push they needed to find alternative educational models tailored to their students’ unique needs and interests. An Arizona-based company called Prenda is helping parents to set up “microschools” in their homes for small groups of students. During the pandemic, Prenda’s enrollment multiplied by four times, and the company now supports more than four hundred microschools. Starting this fall, the New Hampshire Department of Education will partner with Prenda to provide learning pods, in multi-age small-group settings, to help up to five hundred students who struggled with setbacks during the pandemic.

Explore the implications of this signal:

Ask yourself, what if there was more of this in the future? What if it became the domi­nant paradigm? Write and discuss three potential implications of this signal:

1. For yourself, your family, or friends
2. For your museum
3. For the United States

Critical Questions for Museums

• Working with traditional schools (public and private), how might museums help create better educational experiences for all students?
• How can museums provide alternative educational pathways for learners who aren’t well served by the current system, including homeschooled students?
• How can museums capitalize on their expertise in fostering twenty-first century skills like critical thinking, prob­lem-solving, synthesis, inno­vation, creativity, teamwork, and collaboration?
• How can museums ensure they are recognized, val­ued, and supported for the essential roles they play in education?

A Framework for Action

To embed themselves in the educational infrastructure of their communities, muse­ums may want to:

• Invest in their capacity to work with schools: for example, by dedicating one or more full-time staff positions to developing and sustaining museum-school partnerships.
• Develop resources that help educa­tors, parents, and students integrate museum assets into school curricula (with particular attention to research documenting what educators want from digital museum resources).
• Build learning networks that connect diverse educational nodes: museums, libraries, after-school programs, and schools. These learning organizations can work together to reinforce each other’s efforts, meet the needs of all learners, and provide formal credit for learning that occurs across the community.
• Double down on digital. Museums can help bridge the digital divide in educa­tion by providing internet access and teaching digital skills as well as enrich­ing education with their own digital learning materials and experiences.
• Create permanent “learning labs” to serve diverse learners, including public school, charter school, or homeschool students needing internet access, equipment, quiet, and mentoring to support successful online learning, as well as home-based learners looking for classroom space.
• Consider joining the growing number of “museum schools,” whether by offering a home for an independent school in museum space, helping a school create its own student-run museum, or starting their own schools run by museum staff.

Additional Resources

• Shaping the Future of American Public Education: What’s Next for Changemakers?, Katie King and Katherine Prince (KnowledgeWorks Foundation, 2018). This paper presents four scenarios of educational changemaking to explore how and why education changemakers might influence American public education over the next decade.
• Building the Future of Education: Museums and the Learning Ecosystem (American Alliance of Museums, 2014). This white paper summarizes the content and ideas coming out of a 2013 assembly of over four dozen educational policy experts, practitioners, funders, education innovators, reformers, student activists, and others shaping the conversation about US education, convened by the American Alliance of Museums and hosted by the National Building Museum in Washington, DC.

“I don’t know why people feel unhappy when the curve of a graph fails to keep going up, but they do. Even when we find something we’d like to reduce, such as highway fatalities, it doesn’t always sound as though we had our heart in it.”

—E.B. White, author and editor

One of the greatest threats facing society today is unsustainable growth: the inequities, damage, and instability created by systems fueled by a philoso­phy of “more is better.” To date, museums have largely shaped their behavior around for-profit values of power, productivity, and economic metrics of suc­cess. As a result, success is often measured by increasing attendance, grow­ing collections, and expanding facilities. But as nonprofits, museums have the freedom to experiment with other models. How can they challenge the paradigm of perpetual growth and model what it looks like to build healthy, sustainable systems based on values of public service?

The Challenge

In the past half-century, as the global population broke record after record, the Western world began to grapple with the realization that unconstrained growth—whether of consumption, tourism, communities, or organizations— is unsustainable. This realization was captured in Limits to Growth, a 1972 report commissioned by the Club of Rome, based on computer modeling of five key resources: population, food production, industrialization, pol­lution, and consumption of non-renewable natural resources. The study’s mathematical models generated three scenarios, two of which foresaw civilization burning through all available resources, resulting in the collapse of civilization in the last half of the twenty-first century. Only the third, in which humanity significantly restricted its resource consumption, resulted in a stable state. Now it is becoming clear that the limiting factor to growth might not be any of the specific resources that Limits to Growth examined, but the cumulative effect of human activity on the climate.

On an accounting sheet, growth often seems profitable because many of the underlying costs are offloaded onto ecosystems, vulnerable communities, or society in general. These costs, called “negative externalities,” may be environmental (i.e., waste, pollution, and degradation) or human (i.e., worsened public health and precarity of employment). This formula creates systems that may succeed in the short term as measured by narrow finan­cial metrics, but are in the long term destined to fail, bequeathing the externalized damage they’ve done to future generations.

As the axiom states, you get what you measure, and if the primary measure of success is financial profit, companies are incentivized to minimize costs to improve the bottom line. One of the principal costs is labor, and left to them­selves most businesses, particularly large publicly traded companies beholden to stockholders, will try to minimize wages and maximize the flexibility of their workforce. But subpar wages and precarious work fuel profits while under­mining the economy overall, and local communities in particular. In 2020, the Government Accountability Office issued a study showing that taxpayers effectively subsidize the low wages of major employers including McDonald’s, Amazon, Uber, and CVS through services like Medicaid and food stamps. These companies are in effect relying on society to cover the externalized costs of their labor.

Nonprofits in general, with museums being no excep­tion, generally buy into the dominant for-profit model of success. In the quest for appropriate “KPIs” (Key Performance Indicators), museums have become accustomed to reporting things that are relatively easy to measure: attendance, number of items added to the collections, dollars raised in a capital campaign, and square feet of new space. The assumption, stated or unstated, is that success means making these numbers go up. But museums are beginning to grapple with the realization that success lies not on an increasing trend­line but somewhere on a numeric bell curve. There is actually such a thing as too much: Too many visitors—to the point the press of the crowds degrades the expe­rience, puts undue stress on staff, and in some cases endangers the collection or the site. Too many collec­tions—to the point that the number of objects exceeds the capacity of museums to care for or make use of them. Too big of a building—to the point that the cost, though a powerful lever for fundraising, does not justify the benefits it provides to the community.

Nonprofit museums are especially vulnerable to eco­nomic imperatives that favor outputs at the expense of labor. While there is a clear moral case to be made for prioritizing people over profit, low wages in the nonprof­it sector can be framed as prioritizing mission, and the public good, above all. (This has been variously referred to as “the systematic starvation of those who do good” or the “nonprofit culture of poverty.”) This attitude has been reinforced by a complex mix of history and funder expec­tations. The nonprofit workforce has long been predomi­nantly female, so nonprofits inherit the gender inequities attached to compensation. For many decades, donors and funders were trained to see “overhead” (largely com­prised of staff salaries) as wasteful spending, and to look for a low ratio of overhead to programmatic spending as a measure of a well-run nonprofit. The cumulative result has been pervasively low wages, burnout, and high turn­over. Long term, the field is grappling with how to insti­tute reforms that ensure museums cover the true cost of working in a museum, rather than expecting individuals, families, communities, and society to cover the gap.

The Response

In Society

Here is a brief round-up of some of the social and eco­nomic movements attempting to reframe American atti­tudes towards growth and develop sustainable measures of success:

Circular Economy

More industries are trying to create “circular econo­mies”—systems of production and consumption that repair, reuse, and recycle materials to the greatest extent possible, in the interest of reducing the use of scarce resources and the generation of waste. A growing number of makers and vendors are using recycled or upcycled materials to produce their goods, and in turn to market their brand. In 2021, the UK passed a “right to repair” law that requires manufacturers to provide parts that support the repair of their products (rather than forcing consumers to discard old electronics and buy new). Almost every state in the US is considering similar legis­lation, and President Biden recently signed an executive order directing the Federal Trade Commission to make third-party product repair easier. Responding to pressure from shareholders, Apple recently reversed its long-term policies and will start selling replacement parts and tools to make it easier for consumers to make their digital devices last longer than the average four to five years.

Sustainable Tourism

In the past few years, major tourist destinations such as Venice, Barcelona, and Amsterdam have begun to grap­ple with the downsides of their popularity—overcrowd­ing, unaffordable housing, environmental degradation, and a decline in the quality of life for local residents. In 2018, the mayor of Dubrovnik declared the city would cap the number of cruise ships allowed to dock each day. Venetians have used the pandemic pause in tourism to envision how the city might join the “sustainable tourism” movement by encouraging fewer, longer stays that foster meaningful engagement with art and culture, promote and expand local universities, and build jobs untethered from tourism. In November 2021, the governor of Yucatán signed a collaborative agreement with UNESCO to devel­op tourism that protects, promotes, and safeguards the cultural and natural heritage of the state. These efforts may presage a larger cultural and economic shift toward thoughtful management of tourism that measures its full costs and benefits.

Right-Sizing Cities

At least eighty US cities are shrinking in population, due to shifts in manufacturing, demographics, and eco­nomic decline. In some cities, this means demolishing thousands of buildings—in some cases buying out and shuttering entire neighborhoods. Others, such as New Bedford, Massachusetts, are trying to compensate for the collapse of traditional industries by reinventing them­selves as tourist destinations. For all these communities, the question is how to “right-size” in a way that minimizes damage to people and to heritage and results in a livable, equitable, sustainable urban landscape.

Reshaping For-Profit Culture

We are seeing a slow shift in the attitudes of corpora­tions from a narrow focus on shareholders to a broader responsibility for “stakeholders.” In 2019, the Business Roundtable issued a statement on “the purpose of a corporation” that, overturning thirty years of precedent, argued that companies should be concerned not only about the profit of their shareholders but also the wellbe­ing of their employees, the state of the environment, and the ecology of suppliers who support their work. All this in the interest of creating “a more inclusive prosperity.” (The statement is a pointed refutation of the philosophy articulated by economist Milton Friedman in 1970 that “the social responsibility of business is to increase its profits.”)

Employee Wellbeing as a Metric of Success

One important plank in the Business Roundtable state­ment is a commitment to the wellbeing of employees through fair compensation, training, education, and fostering diversity, inclusion, dignity, and respect. That shift in philosophy may prove to be too little, too late to stave off what is being called the “Great Resignation”— the current swell of people leaving for better jobs, or, in some cases, quitting the workforce entirely. Some of this exodus is the result of people shopping for better wages in a tight labor market, or of stress and burnout during the pandemic, but the Great Resignation is also a ratio­nal response to systems that fail to provide workers with childcare, health care, elder care, and affordable housing within a decent commute range of their workplace. This response may accelerate a trend that existed before the pandemic as well—a reset away from “productivity” of work output being the be-all and end-all measure of a good life or a good worker. Even in Japan, where work cul­ture is so hardcore that “karoshi” (“death from overwork”) is an actual thing, reforms are beginning to germinate, with initiatives ranging from caps on excessive working hours to increased flexibility, as well as a requirement for employers to mandate at least five days off work for staff compiling at least ten days of unused leave.

Questioning “More is Better”

The movements described above tackle specific systems, but proponents of “degrowth” argue that we need a larger paradigm shift, from systems that rely on growth for con­tinued success to more sustainable values, notably envi­ronmental sustainability and social justice. Proponents envision a future in which people in wealthy countries will learn to “live well with less”: less travel, less consumption, and less impact overall on the environment. Degrowth has allied itself with several movements in which museums are already involved, including decoloniality, slow culture, and the “We Are Still In” initiative supporting the goals of the 2015 Paris Climate Accords.

In Museums

Museums, stressed by disruptions to conventional sources of income, are beginning to challenge their own traditional metrics of success, including attendance, size of collections, and new build­ings or expansions fueled by capital campaigns, and to search for meaningful alternatives.

Attendance

Some museums have designed their buildings and experiences around limited attendance in order to provide smaller, more inti­mate experiences for the visitor. Others have experimented with the practice on an ad hoc basis. During pandemic-induced atten­dance caps, some museums found that visitor satisfaction rose as crowding declined. Researchers in the attractions industry have suggested that, post-pandemic, visitors may retain a prefer­ence for lower density, social distancing measures, and even less interaction with museum staff. If this holds true, museums might follow the lead of cities adopting sustainable tourism: fostering fewer, deeper, longer interactions, providing exclusive experienc­es, and supplementing admissions revenue with a wider variety of secondary income streams, including digital programs and online merchandise.

Collections

The accretion of unpruned collections can become the museological equivalent of barnacles—a drag on the organizational ship. The museum sector is finally begin­ning to chip away at the barriers to deaccessioning, not as a source of financial relief, but to rationalize the allocation of resources to produce the greatest good for the pub­lic. Besides the logistical barriers (the time and money it takes to deaccession responsibly), this shift requires a cultural change in museums’ measure of success. Acquisitions are a source of pride, while deaccession­ing offers few rewards, either financial (due to ethical guidelines for use of the resulting funds) or professional. Some museums are tackling these hurdles and down­sizing their holdings; others are slowing growth through joint acquisitions and collections-sharing. Technological advances in the last decade have added an interesting twist to this issue, as museum staff consider how the rapidly expanding universe of accessible digitized collec­tions might influence choices about what to add to the physical collection or archive.

Use of Capital

The cultural sector as a whole is having a moment of reckoning regarding physical growth. In 2012, the University of Chicago’s report Set In Stone: building America’s new generation of arts facilities, 1994-2008 con­firmed what many had long suspected to be true: many of the major cultural facilities projects that marked the turn of the century were, in fact, overbuilt and unsustainable. The researchers found that many of the biggest projects (and notably, some of the least successful), were driven by the ambitions of leaders and donors, not by the needs of the community. But overbuilding is a natural result of museum economics. Traditionally it’s been easier to attract gifts associated with naming rights on a beautiful building than for intangible social goods. Despite that handicap, some museums are beginning to ask how capital campaigns can fund improvements to the well­being of staff and the community. In the absence of such capital, programs are often dependent on grant funding, and even successful programs that produce measurable good are too often terminated when the grant ends.

Labor

Even before the pandemic, labor conditions and low wages had contributed to the pressures leading to a rise in the number of museum staff seeking to join unions.

COVID-19 dramatized the vulnerability of museum staff in the lowest paid, least stable positions. By fall 2020, pandemic impact had led over half of US museums to lay off or furlough staff, with front-of-house positions being most at risk. At some museums, directors and leadership staff took pay cuts to mitigate the impact; at others staff banded together to create mutual aid funds to support out-of-work colleagues. Post-pandemic, many museums factored job security, wages, benefits, and equity into their plans to rebound and rebuild.

Systems-Level Change

Just as with society, real change for museums will require systemic reform, both of how museums define success for themselves and how they are judged by funders and donors. It seems likely that one reason museums uncritically adopt for-profit measures of success is that their boards of trustees are often dominated by people from the business world. Now there is a national effort, led by organizations that include the American Alliance of Museums and the Black Trustee Alliance for Art Museums, to help museums recruit trustees who bring diverse experiences, perspectives, and values to the boardroom. Boards that reflect the community the muse­um serves may be more likely to value metrics that track the good a museum does for that community.

The charitable funding sector is addressing the need for systemic change as well. In 2013, GuideStar, BBB Wise Giving Alliance, and Charity Navigator (all major players in the realm of scoring and reporting on nonprofit perfor­mance) launched the Overhead Myth campaign to com­bat the false conception that financial ratios in general, and overhead “efficiency” in particular, are an appropriate measure of overall nonprofit performance. Museums can accelerate this reform by preemptively adopting better metrics of success, adding to the yardstick of “service to mission” measures that challenge them to maximize community wellbeing.

Museum Examples

Attendance

Even after a major expansion in 2018, the Glenstone museum in Potomac, Maryland, implemented timed ticketing to limit attendance to about four hundred people a day in order to provide a contemplative experience conducive to deep engagement with the art in its building and on its grounds. Starting in 2021, Old Salem Museums & Gardens and The Museum of Early Southern Decorative Arts began limiting school groups visits to three days a week, with a cap of three hundred students per day. The strategy is to spread out the school visitation over many days (with fewer students), which in turn will require less staff all while providing a better visitor experience. Extensive analysis of operational data convinced the museum’s leadership team that directing the visitor engagement to a manageable scale was a far better oper­ations model than the previously held “bigger is better” and “be everything to everyone at all times” model.

Even before the COVID-19 pandemic forced atten­dance limits on museums, the Vatican and the Louvre took steps to limit visitation because over-tourism was degrading the experience, stressing staff, and in some cases damaging historic structures. In 2021, the Uffizi Galleries in Florence, Italy, launched the “Uffizi Diffusi” (“Scattered Uffizi”) initiative to reduce overcrowding in their historic palaces and distribute tourism more broadly in their region by pushing treasures from their collections outside their galleries and into other parts of Tuscany.

Collections

The University of California, Irvine’s recently formed Institute and Museum of California Art (IMCA) is making collections-sharing a core aspect of its operation and mission. In support of this strategy, the museum’s plans include building a “technological, logistic, and collaborative platform” that will facilitate sharing across academic, municipal, and private art museums. The museum’s “founding ambition” document envisioned this platform as a way to to “overcome the traditional protectionist tendencies of most collecting institutions.”

In 2015, the Indianapolis Museum of Art at Newfields embarked on the Collections Ranking Project initiative to assign letter grades to each of the fifty-four thousand items in its collections. Items receiving a rank of “D” (approximately 20 percent of the collection) were flagged for potential sale or donation to another institution. (The alternative would have been to spend about $14 million to double the museum’s storage space.) As of 2019, the museum had deaccessioned 4,615 objects, the vast major­ity through sale, and transferred 124 objects to other insti­tutions. In 2018, History Colorado embarked on a similar project to survey, assess, and refine (i.e., downsize) target areas in the museum’s 225-thousand-artifact collection.

Using Capital for Sustainable Good

In February 2021, the Baltimore Museum of Art announced it had secured $1.46 million in private gifts to fund DEAI initiatives. $110 thousand were dedicated to raising the base salary of fifty workers from 13.50 to fifteen dollars an hour, with a goal of raising base pay for guards and visitor service personnel to twenty dollars per hour by the end of 2023. In November, the Toledo Museum of Art announced it had received two bequests totaling $2.5 million, dedicated to employee professional development and engagement.

In March 2020, the Yale Peabody Museum in New Haven, Connecticut, closed to the public for an extensive renovation of its building. The capital campaign for the project was seeded by a $160 million lead gift from Yale alumnus Edward P. Bass. In November 2021, the univer­sity announced that some of the funds amassed through the campaign would be used to fund free admission for the public in perpetuity.

Building Equity into Employment Practices

In 2017, Old Salem Museums & Gardens and The Museum of Early Southern Decorative Arts in Winston- Salem, North Carolina, began to fundamentally reshape their operations to reverse a decades-long slide towards insolvency. They began by expanding their leadership team to represent every division in the organization, mak­ing it more diverse in terms of race, gender, and econom­ic status, and flattening the organizational chart to reduce the distance between senior and front-line staff. They produced a new balanced application and review process that reduces basic requirements for positions and values lived experiences as well as traditional educational attain­ments. All pay and job discussions now go through a collaborative senior leadership team, and Old Salem has launched an equity initiative that includes commitments to paying above a living wage for the area, implementing a cost-of-living raise for hourly staff, providing mental health benefits, and reducing the pay ratio of the CEO to lowest-paid exempt employees from seven-to-one to four-to-one.

New Metrics of Success

In 2022, the national Measurement of Museum Social Impact (MOMSI) project worked with thirty-eight museums to measure museum impact on health and wellbeing, valuing diverse communities, continued education and engagement, and strengthened relationships. This work built on a pilot project in 2017-2018 headed by the Utah Division of Arts & Museums in partnership with the nonprofit museum complex Thanksgiving Point for a statewide social impact study, collecting data from almost four hundred visitors through eight participating museums. The pilot evaluation showed that 96 percent of the 104 indicators tracked by the project showed a statistically significant positive change. The results from the national MOMSI project were released in 2023, along with a free toolkit with resources to help muse­ums measure their social impact. As of June, 2024, with funding from the Institute of Museum and Library Services, AAM is recruiting a cohort of 30 museums to form the nucleus of a community of practice around metrics of social impact, test and refine the toolkit, compile data, and inform development of new resources museums can use in advocacy efforts.

Explore the Future

Signal of Change:

A “signal of change” is a recent news story, report, or event describing a local innovation or disruption that has the potential to grow in scope and scale. Use this signal to catalyze your thinking about how museums might help society create healthy and sustainable metrics of success.

A King County nonprofit raised all staff salaries to $70,000 minimum. Will more organizations follow?

The Seattle Times, November 15, 2021

In November 2021, Choose 180, a youth diversion nonprofit, raised all its staff salaries to a minimum of seventy thousand dollars a year. For some of the organization’s twenty-four staff, the pay hikes amounted to a twenty-thou­sand-dollar annual raise in an instant, using existing funds. (According to MIT’s Living Wage Calculator, a parent would need to make just shy of seventy-six thousand dollars to live in King County.) The increases added about four hundred thousand dollars to Choose 180’s 2022 budget, an amount the board supported unanimously. Executive Director Sean Goode said that when staff first suggested changing the pay structure, he initially balked. But one director reminded him that the philosophy of Choose 180 was that the living conditions of the young people they worked with needed to change in order for them to have a fighting chance to live beyond what he called “the disease of violence and the stress of poverty.” Could it be that they were paying their own team members to live in the same conditions? Goode said the conversation was a “gut punch” that sparked a transformation, and that he is confident he can fundraise to support the change going forward.

Explore the implications of this signal:

Ask yourself, what if paying a living wage became the norm for American non­profits (perhaps even a metric of excellence valued by donors and funders)? Discuss three potential implications of this signal:

1. For yourself, your family, or friends
2. For your museum
3. For the United States

Critical Questions for Museums

• What are the limits of tradi­tional metrics of museum success such as growth in attendance, collections, and endowment?
• What metrics would foster more equitable and sustain­able outcomes?
• How can museums contribute to healthy, equitable econo­mies through the jobs they create?
• How can museums help their communities foster sustain­able tourism?
• How can museums in shrink­ing cities “right-size” in a way that prioritizes equity and preserves heritage?

Framework for Action

Inward Action

To create systems that foster healthy, sus­tainable practice, museums can:

• Engage the governing authority and staff in a thoughtful exploration of what values the museum wants to embody in its work and what constitutes “success.”
• As part of this discussion, explicitly consider the “right size” for the muse­um in terms of optimizing benefits for the community, including both visitors and staff.
• Choose metrics that support these values and goals, and educate funders and donors about these measures.
• Create the capacity to collect the data needed to support these metrics, through staffing (in-house or contract), training, and integrating evaluation into program design.
• Examine the museum’s labor and compensation policies to ensure the museum is supporting the true costs of working for the organization.

Outward

To help their communities achieve the right size for success, museums can:

• As tourist destinations, help cities that are tackling “over-tourism” to craft strategies that benefit residents eco­nomically, preserve quality of life, and distribute tourism to underappreciated destinations.
• If located in communities that are shrinking due to economic and demo­graphic forces, help create plans to manage that downsizing in a way that results in livable, right-sized commu­nities, while preserving public heritage such as historic structures, districts, and public art.

Additional Resources

• Active Collections, edited by Elizabeth Wood, Rainey Tisdale, and Trevor Jones (2017). This collection of essays critically examines traditional approaches to museum collections, and explores new paradigms of stewardship, including “quality over quantity.” The corresponding Active Collections website (activecollections.org) shares “A Manifesto for Active History Museum Collections” (which states “we believe collections must either advance the mission or they must go”), case studies on right-sizing collections, and a section on crazy ideas, including the cre­ation of a “deaccession special ops” team, and creating a “usefulness meter” for collections.
• Putting the Right In Right Sizing: A historic preserva­tion case study (Michigan Historic Preservation Network, National Trust for Historic Preservation, 2021). This case study offers a number of obser­vations for preservation and planning profes­sionals about the role of preservation in cities undergoing right-sizing.

Many of the traditional metrics of museum performance fail both these tests. Growing attendance means more people are exposed to what your museum has to offer—but what is the quality of that experience? How does it change what they know, think, and feel, either in that moment or months or years later? At what point do more visitors begin to have a negative impact, overall? When do collections begin to exceed the ability of the museum to appropriately house and care for them, much less make them accessible in a meaningful way? How often do museums expand because major donors are willing to pay for new buildings, not because there is a documented need for the space? We, as a sector, need to value and measure other, better things.

Now your organization can apply to join a cohort of thirty museums exploring ways to implement one set of more meaningful and sustainable metrics of success. Led by AAM and funded by the Institute of Museum and Library Services, Museum Social Impact in Practice (MSIIP) is on a three-year mission to help museums measure and report on the beneficial effects they have on health and wellbeing, education and engagement, social connection, and awareness of diverse cultures and ways of life.

Participating museums will receive training on how to use a museum social impact toolkit that provides best practices, assignments, language guides, materials and tips for success; participate in focus groups and meetings around application of the tools; and participate in formative and summative evaluation of their work.

In addition to developing your own system for measuring and reporting on meaningful, sustainable metrics of success, by participating in this project your museum will help improve the toolkit, form the nucleus of a community of practice around metrics of social impact, help compile data, and inform development of new resources museums can use in advocacy efforts.

Read more about the project and decide whether this might be a good fit for your organization. But act fast—applications are due by one minute to midnight on Monday, July 15 [UPDATE: Now extended to August 15.] Make sure you leave ample time to fill out the application have your CEO/director write a letter of support. If you have questions about the project and the application process, contact my colleague Megan Lantz, Director of Social Impact, at mlantz (at) aam-us.org

If this project isn’t a great fit for your organization, for whatever reason, you can still advance the discussion of better metrics of success inside your organization.

• Download the free Museums and Social Impact Toolkit and explore how you can integrate it into your work.
• Use TrendsWatch: Museums as Community Infrastructure to support discussions around how museums can contribute to education, support for our elders, mental health, and emergency response, as well as a general discussion of sustainable measures of success.
• Take a deep dive into happiness as one meaningful metric that has been integrated into the work of some museums, through experiences for the public and through internal happiness audits.

As a culture and a country, too many of our current measures of attainment hinge on growth: Gross Domestic Product, net worth, revenue, units sold. Over the past two hundred years this growth has raised the standard of living across the globe (even if those benefits are unequally distributed). But the byproducts of that growth—waste, pollution, exhaustion of scarce resources—make these metrics unsustainable in the long term. If we are to create a sustainable future, we need to find better measures of success for all of our endeavors, including museums.

Yours from the future,

Elizabeth

Elizabeth Merritt, VP Strategic Foresight and Founding Director, Center for the Future of Museums

“There’s nothing like a jolly good disaster to get people to start doing something.”
—Prince Charles

America’s communities face a multitude of threats in coming decades, includ­ing severe storms, cold and heat emergencies, power outages, civil unrest, and resulting disruptions to essential services and supply chains. The systems we’ve created to respond to these emergencies are fragmented and fragile, and often prioritize the protection and repair of privileged communities. It will take a “whole-of-society” approach, integrating for-profit, nonprofit, and government entities, to create a robust and equitable system to prepare for and respond to disasters and take steps to reduce future risk. Many of these risks are driven by climate change, and museums can use their nonpartisan credibility and their communications skills to build consensus on climate pol­icy. Through how they do their work and deploy their resources, museums can be an integral part of a collective approach to minimizing the risk of disasters and aiding their communities when disaster does strike.

The Challenge

Communities have always been at risk from natural and man-made disasters, but we are entering an era in which many of these risks will be radically ampli­fied. Much of this shift is being driven by climate change, which is intensifying temperature extremes, thereby causing flood and drought and making severe weather events more frequent. Heat waves are already the leading cause of weather-related deaths in the US, and extreme heat events could increase substantially by the end of the century. Warmer, drier conditions and a longer fire season are projected to result in a 30 percent increase in the areas burned by lightning-sparked wildfires between 2011 and 2060. Climate change also brings climate instability, with some states experiencing extreme precipitation while others bake in drought. Given the global lack of progress in slowing the climate crisis, climate risk is going to continue to rise in the coming century.

Because climate change is driven by anthropogenic forces, it seems misleading to call flood, storm, and fire “natural,” in contrast to “man-made,” disasters. Be that as it may, the US is experiencing a rise in civil disruptions as well, with 2020 marking record levels of violent mass demonstrations and rioting. Given our country’s level of political polarization, and the fact that a third or more of citizens regardless of political identity believe that violence is justified to achieve political goals, this trend is unlikely to slow or reverse anytime soon.

In fact, the rising risks of climate events and civil violence are intertwined. The damage from climate disasters falls disproportionately on poor communities and communi­ties of color, while federal disaster spending favors the wealthy and white. (Indeed, disasters have been shown to exacerbate wealth inequality.) Cities are notorious heat islands, which in turn contributes to heat-related illness and death. Communities of color experience the highest temperatures because they have fewer public ameni­ties that lower temperatures, such as trees, landscaped medians, and parks, and are less likely to have air condi­tioning. The correlation between race and temperature is so strong that historic maps of redlined neighborhoods mirror contemporary urban heat maps. These inequi­ties, the social movements they spark, and the backlash against calls for reform add fuel to cultural and political tensions that can lead to violence.

Over the next century, climate change will threaten the very existence of some communities. The residents of Isle de Jean Charles, a largely Native American commu­nity in the bayous of Louisiana, were tagged as the “first US climate refugees” when the tribe lost 98 percent of its land to rising sea levels. They will not be the last. Climatologists project that, due to flooding and extreme heat, some major cities, including Miami, New Orleans, and Chicago, may become “unbearable for humans” by 2100. That doesn’t mean humans, being both resilient and stubborn, will abandon their homes, but it does dramatize the level of risk communities face, especially vulnerable communities without sufficient access to pro­tection, relief, or ability to evacuate.

The Response

In Society

In 2020, the US experienced twenty-two separate bil­lion-dollar weather and climate disasters, shattering pre­vious annual records. This roster of destruction included seven disasters linked to tropical cyclones, thirteen linked to severe storms, one linked to drought, and one linked to wildfires. Together, these events inflicted $95 billion in damages. We don’t, and arguably can’t, maintain a large enough cadre of government workers devoted to disas­ter response to cope with this level of impact. Instead, the US relies on networks of response, using reservoirs of paid and volunteer labor to supplement the standing workforce of emergency responders. The American Red Cross draws on a network of three hundred thousand vol­unteers to respond to more than sixty thousand disasters every year. In California, which ranks second in the list of states most likely to experience natural disasters, all state employees can be called up and reassigned for emergen­cy response.

Planners increasingly look to systems-level efforts to buffer the risks of climate disasters, integrating protection into the design of neighborhoods and cities. Over time the focus of flood control has expanded from hard engi­neering (i.e., levees, dams, and reservoirs) to encompass “soft” strategies such as zoning, forestation, and con­trolled flooding. Cities are setting goals for tree canopy coverage and green space, including parks and gardens, to lower city temperatures. State and local governments are encouraging or mandating xeriscaping (landscaping with plants that need little or no water), even paying residents to rip out their lawns, to adapt to drought. More and more often, mitigation is being seamlessly inte­grated into urban design, for example, in the form of a skate-park-cum-urban-sculpture in Denver that doubles as a “bioswale” that soaks up stormwater and prevents flooding.

The sheer cost, both human and financial, of respond­ing to climate disasters underscores the wisdom of investing in the largest scale of prevention—slowing the pace of climate change and hopefully staving off the worst-case projections. The US recently committed to cutting its greenhouse gas emissions by 50 percent or more (compared to 2005 levels) by 2030, and reaching a net-zero emissions economy no later than 2050. While federal action lagged under the previous administration, state and tribal governments stepped in to take action. Currently fifteen states and territories are implementing plans for a 100 percent clean energy future, and more than fifty tribal climate action plans are in place in North America. Pushed by investors, consumers, employees, activists, and in some cases the courts, a growing number of for-profit companies have pledged to reduce their emissions (though it can be difficult to parse which commitments are real and which are “carbonwashing”). And while focusing on climate-friendly steps individuals can take diverts attention from the critical responsibility of govern­ment and industry, it is certainly true that individ­uals, companies, industry, and government need to be “all-in” together if we are to slow the pace of climate disaster.

Even if our united climate action does succeed in steering us towards the best outcome that is still possible, we need to plan for what we can’t change in the face of escalating natural disasters, up to and including managed retreat from areas that are no longer habitable. States, cities, and communities are making plans for how to adapt to a future of drought, heat, and rising sea levels. Governments and insurance providers are reexamining the policies and subsidies that have masked the risk of living in floodplains and on seaside properties. Many coastal communities are using federal and state funding to raise homes up above flood level, buy out homeowners entirely, or swap public open spaces in the interior for private land on the shore. In the future, more communities may follow the lead of Valmeyer, Illinois, which moved the whole town two miles farther away from the flood risk posed by the Mississippi River. The residents of Valmeyer were overwhelmingly white and well-off. How can we ensure that communities that are less white and less wealthy are able to “manage retreat” as well, while keeping their culture and identities intact?

Equity and Disaster Preparedness

As the country strengthens its disaster response, we also need to reduce inequity and address some of the concerns that underlie social unrest. Some strategies for mustering emergency responders create their own harm. For instance, many states depend on prisoners to supplement their professional firefighting crews, paying them nominal wages and, because Black people are incarcerated in disproportionate numbers, adding to the racial inequity of climate-related risk. (In California, pre-pandemic, inmates made up a third of the wildfire-fighting personnel.) Nationally, we’ve created a perverse system of incentives that lead agencies charged with protecting property and providing relief to maximize their economic impact by prioritizing high-value properties. The Federal Emergency Management Agency’s (FEMA) National Advisory Council has called on the agency to reform programs that favor victims who are wealthy and own property (and are more likely to be white). However, FEMA has yet to implement any of the council’s recommendations.

In Museums

As public-facing organizations, many of which are devoted to the long-term care of heritage, museums are uniquely positioned to help the public in times of emergency. By expanding their attention from inside the organization to the outside world, museums’ disaster response can encompass their community as well. Most museums devote considerable resources to climate con­trol, preadapting them to act as cooling stations for their neighbors during heat emergencies. Many museums in high-risk areas have armored their buildings and property to withstand earthquakes, fire, and flood. Through their own disaster planning, they may have formed connec­tions with local emergency responders. These prepara­tions put them in an excellent position to offer refuge and assistance to their community when disaster strikes— whether that takes the form of opening their galleries and classrooms to provide safe space, serving as a staging area for emergency responders, or helping to distribute relief.

Some museums are, by virtue of their governance, part of a larger network of response, for example, within a uni­versity or a state. Others voluntarily integrate themselves into local systems, sharing staff whose knowledge, train­ing, and skills can be adapted to disaster response. Even more step in as need arises, in response to local disasters ranging from fire and flood to tragedies resulting from violence and hate.

A growing number of museums are reshaping their properties to function as part of a larger buffer of protec­tion for their community’s green infrastructure: creating plantings that slow runoff, cache water, and reduce flood­ing; designing green, cooling areas in urban landscapes; or xeriscaping their grounds to reduce water use. The impact of these efforts is magnified through museum education, showing individuals and other businesses how they can follow suit.

One of the most powerful things museums can do to help society tackle systems-level change is to foster public understanding about climate science and risk. As has been widely recognized at the international level, museums are key sites for climate education, engage­ment, action, and research. Though climate change has become a highly partisan issue in the US, museums enjoy strong, nonpartisan trust on the part of the American public and can use that trust, together with their skills at communicating science and fostering conversation, to create a common basis for a national consensus on climate policy.

Museum Examples

Responding to Immediate Needs

In the early morning hours of Sunday, February 18, 2018, a four-alarm fire broke out in an apartment build­ing across the street from the newly opened Museum of the American Revolution in Philadelphia. As the blaze escalated, residents and guests from an adjacent hotel evacuated into freezing cold temperatures. At the request of the fire chief, the museum’s operations team opened the museum to dozens of displaced neighbors, offering warmth, restrooms, and water. When it became clear the museum would be closed to the public that day, the catering team provided evacuees with a sumptu­ous brunch, prepared for a now-cancelled event. In the following weeks, the museum collected donations from visitors eager to provide aid, as well as supplying work­space for emergency personnel and staff of the shuttered hotel.

In February 2021, oscillating pressure patterns in the Arctic created a record-breaking “deep freeze” in Texas and plunged the state into darkness. As the power grid faltered, nearly three million families were left without heat, and as pipes burst, many lacked water as well. In McAllen, the International Museum of Art and Culture quickly turned itself into a daytime warming center, waiving admission for three days and setting up socially distanced stations for people to work, study, and charge their electronic devices. Staff treated visitors to hot cocoa, led tours, and trotted out the museum’s Animal Ambassadors to entertain the children.

Resilient Design as Part of Community Buffering

Following Hurricane Katrina, the Louisiana Children’s Museum in New Orleans reimagined its mission and purpose to meeting the needs of its recovering com­munity. Its new campus, which opened in 2019, models resilient design and contributes to community flood control. The site includes a lagoon edged with native plantings that can retain up to three feet of water from a storm event, reducing flooding in the surrounding neighborhood. In 2018, the Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History in Detroit partnered with the Michigan Science Center to launch the Ripple of Impact: Museum Stormwater Initiative to manage stormwater diversion in the neighborhood that unites their campuses. Through the use of bioswales, urban garden space, and permeable paving, the project reduces runoff, mitigates flooding, and prevents pollution of the Detroit River.

Integrating with Networks of Response

In California, the state government code stipulates that all public employees—including staff of state or county museums—can be called up as disaster service work­ers in response to “natural, man-made, or war-caused emergencies.” During the COVID-19 pandemic, much of the staff of the San Bernardino County Museum was reassigned to temporary roles in the community, while the museum itself was closed to the public. Their assign­ments included working at a regional medical center as contact tracers and supporting the November 2020 election as poll workers and drivers.

The Wisconsin Historical Society (WHS) set a voluntary goal of supporting agencies at the forefront of the state’s pandemic response. Together with employees of the Wisconsin Department of Workforce Development and the Department of Health Services, more than fifty WHS staff—including archivists, registrars, curators, cartogra­phers, and librarians—formed a joint COVID Response Team. One staff member applied her logistics skills to helping coordinate the distribution of supplies for testing. The director of one WHS site co-led an Equity in Testing workgroup dedicated to ensuring that Indigenous communities had access to testing and support. WHS’s Cultural Cartographer used his training to build a data model and mapping system to track COVID hotspots for the state.

Public Education

Communities across Florida are at risk from hurricanes from June through November each year, and these storms are growing in frequency and intensity. In 2020, the state experienced a record high of thirty named storms. With a large proportion of the population at risk, it is essential to provide accurate, timely, and trusted information about how to prepare for hurricanes. The Museum of Discovery and Science in Ft. Lauderdale works with the International Hurricane Research Center at Florida International University, Broward County Emergency Management Division, and the City of Fort Lauderdale Domestic Preparedness and Emergency Management Bureau to present an annual “Eye of the Storm” hurricane preparedness program, free to the public. In 2020, during pandemic shutdown, the event went virtual, resulting in a twelve-episode video series available on YouTube, Facebook, and the museum’s own website.

Promoting Long-Term Thinking

From 2009 to 2010, MoMA PS1 in New York City hosted an architects-in-residence program to re-envision the coastlines surrounding New York Harbor, prioritizing “soft” resilient infrastructure to mitigate the risk from sea level rise. In 2010, the Museum of Modern Art present­ed the resulting designs from five interdisciplinary teams in an associated exhibition, Rising Currents: Projects for New York’s Waterfront. The proposed solutions encom­passed building spongelike sidewalks, suspending hous­ing over the water, and turning the Gowanus canal into an oyster hatchery.

In 2016, Catalyzing Newport, guided by cultural orga­nizations including the Newport Art Museum, Rhode Island Historical Society, the International Tennis Hall of Fame, and the Preservation Society of Newport County, commissioned Mayor’s Office 2061, a pop-up installation imagining what it might be like to live and work in Newport, Rhode Island, in the future. Working from a scenario written by futurist Jake Dunagan, designers worked with local museum staff, artists, and students to help the public envision the effects of rising sea levels on their community.

Explore the Future

Signal of Change:

A “signal of change” is a recent news story, report, or event describing a local innovation or disruption that has the potential to grow in scope and scale. Use this signal to catalyze your thinking about how museums might play a role in a whole-of-society approach to mitigating risk for their communities.

Phoenix establishes ‘heat office’

Santa Fe New Mexican, November 13, 2021

David Hondula recently got a job he never dreamed of—director of Phoenix’s Office of Heat Response and Mitigation, the first publicly funded municipal office of its kind. Heat is the No. 1 weather-related killer in the US, killing an average of 138 people a year from 1990 to 2019, and in 2020, heat killed 313 people in Arizona alone. Phoenix has committed to stopping that trend. The City Council in May approved a budget that included $2.8 million focused on climate change and heat readiness. Hondula’s staff of four will collaborate with other city departments, such as Parks and Recreation and Street Transportation. One project will focus on increasing the tree canopy throughout Phoenix, with a goal of reaching 25 percent tree canopy cover in the city by 2030. Another will focus on built infrastructure—increasing shade structures and developing ways to cool structures and streets, partic­ularly at night. Miami-Dade County (Florida); Athens, Greece; and Freetown, Sierra Leone, are the only other places with city officials in charge of man­aging heat. In Miami-Dade County, the position is funded by the Extreme Heat Resilience Alliance, which aims to reduce extreme heat risk for the most vulnerable populations.

Explore the implications of this signal:

Ask yourself, what if it became common for cities or regions to have ded­icated departments tasked with creating an integrated response to heat risk? Or, more broadly, for city or state officials to work with a variety of government agencies and for-profit and nonprofit organizations to mitigate the impacts of climate stress? Discuss three potential implications of this signal:

1. For yourself, your family, or friends
2. For your museum
3. For the United States

Critical Questions for Museums

• How can museums prepare themselves for an era of rising risk?
• How can museums, having secured their own safety in the face of these threats, extend this protection to their community, particularly groups that are neglected by current systems of disaster management?
• How can museums combat climate change and reduce its effect as a threat multiplier before, during, and after disasters?
• How can museums weave themselves into an integrated network of resilience and response?
• What role can museums play in helping their communities understand the changing landscape of risk and create long-term

A Framework for Action

Inward Action

To incorporate community risk mitigation and disaster response into their internal planning, museums can:

• Identify existing assessments of local climate risk, or if there are none, advocate for their development.
• Create risk management and disaster response relationships before the next disaster strikes and maintain them between crises.
• Incorporate design elements into renovations or master planning that help the museum’s property buffer the community against risks such as flood, heat, and fire.
• Include community needs in disaster planning and emergency response plans.
• Create policies and procedures for deploying staff as needed (at the level of community, city, or state) as part of larger relief and response efforts.

Outward Action

To become a formal part of our infrastructure of disaster response, museums can:

• Integrate the museum into a larger network of responders, for example by connecting with local and state emergency managers to incorporate the museum and its resources into government or agency response plans.
• Identify the biggest risks to the museum’s com­munity and assess how the museum can help with mitigation and relief. In particular, consider how the museum might make disaster preparedness and response more equitable by addressing the needs of communities marginalized by current systems.
• Create and disseminate educational materials that raise public awareness of risk and train people on how to prepare for disasters.
• Help community leaders and residents engage in long-term thinking about how they will respond to a changing landscape of risk. Collaborate with city planners, architects, artists, scientists, and policy­makers to create scenarios, bring them to life via design charrettes and exhibits, and invite the public to use these designs to help envision the future they want to build for their community.

Additional Resources

• The National Association of Counties’ Resilient Counties Initiative strengthens the ability of local government to prepare for and recover from hurricanes, wildfires, economic collapse, and other disasters, natural or man-made. Its reports and tool­kits include resources on public health, flood protection, national data on county emergency man­agement, and use of technology in managing disasters.
• The Role of Culture in Climate Resilient Development (United Cities and Local Governments, 2021). This report documents the initiatives of cities and local or regional governments from all continents on cultural policies, sustainable cities, and climate resilient development. It includes a diverse pack of case studies from across the world and addressing the whole set of the 2030 Agenda Sustainable Development Goals.
• The Environmental Protection Agency’s Climate Change Adaptation Resource Center (ARC-X) is an interactive resource to help local governments create integrated information packages tailored to their local needs: risks, adaptation strategies, and case studies. Users of the site can tailor their search for information by region, and by area of interest (air, water, waste, public health, or adaptation planning).

Starting last year, AAM members and subscribers receive the report first, three months before the public release, as the Jan/Feb issue of Museum magazine. The new PDF complements the magazine by:

• Including hundreds of embedded links and sources for the facts, figures, and stories I reference in the report.
• Being compatible with screen readers.
• Providing an easy way to share the content with others, including colleagues, board members, funders, students, and planning partners.
• Making it possible to save the report to your digital files for future reference.

Because this report covers rapidly moving trends, we continue to update our coverage of each issue’s topics via news stories in the weekly e-newsletter Dispatches from the Future of Museums, in posts on the CFM Blog, and during sessions at the virtual  Future of Museums Summit (October 29-30).

Here’s a round up of some recent news related to each of this year’s trends, with encouragement to submit related session proposals for the Summit.

Culture Wars 2.0

The latest trend within the current round of culture wars is the growing backlash to diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts—read this essay on the CFM blog for a summary of those developments. Meanwhile, there are some bright spots on the horizon as researchers and groups working to bolster civil civic conversations explore how we can dial down the heat.

The dignity mirror effect

Axios, February 6, 2024

A stunning 85% of Americans say the tone and nature of political debate has gotten worse over the last several years, according to Pew Research Center. The rising power and prominence of the nation’s loudest, meanest voices obscures what most of us personally experience: Most people are sane and generous — and too busy to tweet. UNITE, an organization of activists, professors and consultants, is appealing to that majority by leaning into a disappearing quality — treating others with dignity. [The group] is getting buzz with its “Dignity Index,” which scores tweets, cable news segments, debates, and speeches on a scale of 1 to 8. Those who used the index reported a “mirror effect.” Scoring others’ speech with dignity in mind pushe[s] them to consider their own speech.

If you are already using UNITE’s resources (e.g., Dignity Index, Dignity Principles, and Conversation Guide), or tools from other sources, to support civil conversations among staff and members of the public, I hope you submit a session proposal for the Future of Museums Summit sharing what you have learned from that work.

Meanwhile, we continue to see a push for legislation that restricts the activities of libraries and museums.

State Senate passes bill aimed at American Library Association

Capitol Beat March 1, 2024

The Republican-controlled Georgia Senate has passed legislation that would prohibit city, county, and regional libraries from using either tax dollars or private funds on any materials offered by the American Library Association (ALA). Senate Bill 390 cleared the upper chamber in the General Assembly 33-20 along party lines Thursday on Crossover Day, the deadline legislation had to pass either the state House or Senate to remain alive for the year. The ALA has become controversial in right-wing circles in recent years for promoting diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) in the selection of library materials and for opposing book banning and other forms of censorship.”

That particular bill died later in March, but it is a signal of sentiments driving attacks on whole cultural sectors and the nonprofit associations that support their work. Is your museum being affected by such legislation? Such impact might be direct (e.g., restricting museum content or programs) or indirect (e.g., via constraints on what local school districts can teach or what students can see or do on field trips). If so, that would be another very helpful set of learnings to share via a session.

AI Adolescence

While much of the coverage of generative Artificial Intelligence focuses on the marvelous things it can (or can almost) do, a growing number of thought leaders are drawing attention to harmful externalities of this technology, notable is its massive consumption of energy, and water, and its growing impact on the environment.

Generative AI’s environmental costs are soaring — and mostly secret

Nature, February 20, 2024

The artificial intelligence (AI) industry is heading for an energy crisis. It’s estimated that a search driven by generative AI uses four to five times the energy of a conventional web search. Within years, large AI systems are likely to need as much energy as entire nations. AI systems [also] need enormous amounts of fresh water to cool their processors and generate electricity. Legislators are taking notice. On 1 February, US Democrats led by Senator Ed Markey of Massachusetts introduced the Artificial Intelligence Environmental Impacts Act of 2024. The bill directs the National Institute for Standards and Technology to collaborate with academia, industry and civil society to establish standards for assessing AI’s environmental impact, and to create a voluntary reporting framework for AI developers and operators.

While legislators grapple with the impacts of AI, including its impact on privacy, intellectual property, and the environment, organizations and individuals can make informed choices about whether and how to use this emerging tech. I’m hoping to see proposals for the Future of Museum Summit addressing how museums are creating policies regarding the use of AI that take into account not only how it can help museums but also its impact on society, museum workers, and climate. Speaking of which, the third major trends we are focusing on this year is the urgent need to make progress towards…

Decarbonizing the Future

Even as I struggle to maintain my own optimism in the face of near term climate projections for this summer (record heat, massive hail, destructive storms, wildfires), I am heartened by a growing collection of stories documenting how museums are rising to the challenge of curbing climate change.

How Museums, Zoos and Public Gardens Lead by Example on Climate Change

Better Planet, February 26, 2024

The Phipps Conservatory and Botanical Gardens in Pittsburgh boasts some of the world’s greenest buildings. Their star is the Center for Sustainable Landscapes building, which generates all its own energy and captures and treats all its wastewater. To help [other museums] turn their facilities into showcases for environmental action, The Phipps developed a Climate Toolkit with practical advice on everything from energy use to environmentally friendly café meals. Working with partner organizations, the Phipps hosts workshops and facilitates an exchange of ideas among people who run gardens, zoos and museums. There are now 150 cultural institutions using the Climate Toolkit. [The Phipps’] youth climate initiative links young people in Pittsburgh with other groups of young people via museums around the country.

Utah museum’s ‘A Climate of Hope’ exhibit lets visitors explore solutions

The Salt Lake Tribune, March 24, 2024

“A Climate of Hope” —the Natural History Museum of Utah’s first new permanent exhibition in 12 years — is designed to inspire optimism and action for a better future in the face of climate change. The interactive exhibit shows how climate change impacts Utah, and how people around the state are implementing solutions. Visitors are shown volunteer opportunities in which they can take part to combat climate change at the local level. Jason Cryan, NHMU’s executive director, said the exhibit is a part of the museum’s larger climate initiative. “The ‘Climate of Hope’ initiative also includes large-scale sustainability measures,” he said. “We’re trying to see what it’s going to take to make this a net-zero carbon neutral operation. We have several research programs that are kind of aimed at sustainability, biodiversity and those kinds of things, so all of this wraps up under a very big umbrella.”

If your museum is doing good work like this—reducing its own carbon emissions, implementing a sustainability plan, fostering public awareness and cultivating hope for the future—please put together a panel and submit a proposal sharing that good work.

Loneliness

One of the shorter essays in TrendsWatch has struck a chord with readers, many of whom tell us that they feel that their lives and work have been affected by what Surgeon General Vivek Murthy has dubbed the Loneliness Epidemic. While some quibble that appellation is misleading (after all, loneliness isn’t catching, is it?) the evidence continues to mount that social isolation is a growing problem for all ages.

America’s happiness score drops amid a youth ‘midlife crisis’

The Washington Post, March 20, 2024

The United States fell from 15th in 2023 to 23rd in this year’s World Happiness Report, which was released [last week] to mark the United Nations’ International Day of Happiness. The country’s results varied dramatically among different age groups, however, with young people under age 30 ranking 62nd out of 143 countries for happiness, while U.S. adults age 60 and above ranked 10th. This is the first time the United States has slipped out of the top 20 since the report was first launched in 2012. Issues such as polarization, social media use and growing health and income disparities could play a role. The study found that “social support” and “social interactions of all kinds” are important for happiness and reducing loneliness.

Parents are feeling lonely. Here’s why it matters

CNN, April 24, 2024

A new national survey published by the Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center in Columbus [found that] 66% of 1,005 parents felt the demands of parenthood sometimes or frequently left them feeling isolated and lonely, while nearly 40% felt as if they have no one to support them in their parenting role. Nearly 4 in 5 parents would value a way to connect with other parents outside of work and home — that was 82% of moms and 74% of dads, according to the survey. Even then, however, many parents may not want to admit to their feelings of isolation and loneliness for fear of sounding like they do not care about their children.

Does your museum fill the need for various groups, including young people and parents, to network and form social connections? Do you have any replicable models you might share at the Summit?

Send us your session proposals!

The Future of Museums Summit Call for Proposals closes on July 12. Please send your pitches for the news, tools, advice and inspiration you would like to share with the field on these difficult and important topics.

Those are the themes of this year’s TrendsWatch report, and now AAM is in search of museum people eager to share what they know, and think, about this year’s topics, as well as contributing examples of museums engaging with the trends. The call for proposals for our second annual Future of Museums Summit is now live, inviting pitches for sessions to populate the program for that virtual event, scheduled for October 29-30.

In today’s post I’m sharing the outline of that call, together with my not-so-secret hopes and dreams about what may come over the transom.

Our Themes

Culture Wars 2.0

Here’s a capsule description of the trend:

Pressure is building along fault lines that segment communities, funders, policy makers, and museums’ own staffs, boards, and volunteers. How can museums defuse this tension before it causes more damage? What choices do they face in avoiding or engaging in the current conflict, and how will these choices shape the future of museums and society?

I’m hoping to see proposals that address:

• How attacks on DEI, including legislation and criticism on social media or in the press, are affecting museums, the impact on museum operations, and tips on how to avoid or respond to these pressures.
• Practical advice on how to lead productive, civil conversations—with the community and inside museums—on contentious topics.
• How to prepare staff to anticipate and respond to organized protests.
• Emerging legislation that may impact museum content, policies, and operations.

AI Adolescence

In the past decade, artificial intelligence (AI) has leapt from the realm of science fiction and tech culture into our everyday lives. Most recently, generative AI is disrupting the work of creators, upending education, and performing key tasks in white-collar work. Some feel AI poses an existential threat to humanity—others forecast that it will quickly retreat into specific, narrow applications. What is AI, is the hype justified, and how can museums make informed judgements about this or any other emerging technology? What are the practical applications and implications for museums in the short and long term?

I’d especially like to hear from museums that have:

• Created policies, including an ethics framework, guiding their use of artificial intelligence.
• Integrated AI-powered text and image generators into their work—How is that going? What have you learned?
• Created exhibits or programs to help the public understand AI, and make informed choices for society and for their own lives.

Decarbonizing the Future

The climate crisis poses an overwhelming threat to museums, the communities museums serve, and the material legacy of all humans have accomplished. Museums’ collections constitute a vast seedbank of human civilization, creativity, and accomplishments. Protecting those seeds will entail a commitment to decarbonizing the future—replacing our dependence on fossil fuels with sustainable systems. How can museums decarbonize their own operations? How can they inspire people to take meaningful action in response to the climate crisis, even as they prepare to live in a profoundly disrupted future?

I’d like to hear from museums that are:

• Reducing their own climate impact, with actions from monitoring and controlling carbon emissions to implementing climate-friendly policies and procedures.
• Exploring what “degrowth” might look like. Are you finding ways to replace “bigger is better” with “less is more” as a metric of success?
• Adapting standards (e.g., climate control) to be more environmentally sustainable. And, has that caused any problems with loan agreements for objects or for travelling exhibits?
• Creating and sharing tools and resources to help other museums to reduce their climate impact.

Combating the Loneliness Crisis

In May 2023, Dr. Vivek Murthy released Our Epidemic of Loneliness and Isolation: The U.S. Surgeon General’s Advisory on the Healing Effects of Social Connection and Community. Such advisories are issued to address “significant health challenges that require the nation’s immediate awareness and action.” The report also offered recommendations for how cultural organizations can help combat this epidemic.

It would be great to feature the work of museums that are:

• Creating programs, and experiences, designed to foster social connection and combat loneliness.
• Partnering with other community organizations to create broader community networks of support.
• Advancing public education and awareness on the topic of loneliness and its impact on mental health.

Format

Based on feedback from last year’s attendees, we’ve established the following parameters for sessions:

• The virtual sessions are one hour long.
• Dedicated time for audience Q&A is strongly encouraged.
• Sessions should include no more than three presenters.
• Within those constraints, creativity is encouraged. Go wild! Do you want to stage a debate? (Attendees could cast virtual votes for the most persuasive argument.) Can you unleash your inner thespian with a dramatic enactment of a conversation, confrontation, or collaboration that takes explores the future of these trends?

How to prepare an awesome proposal

Here’s some inside tips on wowing the members of the Content Advisory Committee who will be reviewing the session pitches:

• Read TrendsWatch: Navigating a Volatile Future to familiarize yourself with the conference themes and consider how you might expand on this exploration of these issues.
• Identify up to three speakers for your session (But no more than three! Attendees at last year’s summit were very clear on that point in their feedback.)
• Assess your proposal against the following key questions:
  • Does this build on the themes in this year’s TrendsWatch, exploring the topics more deeply, challenging the report’s conclusions, or asking provocative questions?
  • Does the proposal provide examples of how museums are responding to a given trend?
  • Does it provide concrete, actionable recommendations for what other museums might do in response to these challenges?

What’s next?

The call for proposals closes on July 12, at which point the session pitches will be reviewed by a subset of the Alliance’s Content Advisory Committee, who will select a total of sixteen sessions to be featured in the virtual 2024 Future of Museums Summit. Meanwhile, I’m on the hunt for our keynote and big ideas speakers—use the comment section below to let me know if you have recommendations about that!

–Yours from the future,

Elizabeth

Elizabeth Merritt, VP Strategic Foresight and Founding Director, Center for the Future of Museums