The most-read posts on the AAM website this year reflect this focus. Whether discussing innovative approaches to descendant community relationships, accessible exhibition experiences, inclusive volunteer program structures, or excellent label writing, they speak to a will to break from the ways we’ve “always done things” and forge more sincere, committed institutions. Without further ado, here were the ten most-read posts across our digital platforms.

1. A Growing Backlash to DEI

By Elizabeth Merritt

As diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives have accelerated in American institutions, a small group of activists has mounted a backlash movement arguing they discriminate against majority groups, yielding significant legal victories. This post outlines how this movement has exploited minor rifts in public opinion, and how museums can navigate around these rifts while promoting progressive practices.

2. Content Warnings in Museums and Galleries: Taking a Proactive Approach

By Jackie Armstrong

Should museums warn visitors about sensitive content in advance? It’s a matter of frequent debate among staff, according to an advocate for trauma-informed museum practices. This post explains why she believes misconceptions may be getting in the way of action, and her advice on best practices for writing your own content warnings.

3. When the Ancestors Call to You

By Isabel K. Handa & Amy V. Margaris

Through an unexpected set of circumstances, an Oberlin College student and professor teamed up in 2023 to return a skull from the college’s ethnographic collection to the person’s native Hawaiʻi. This post, written as a dialogue between the student and professor, outlines how the emotional repatriation experience reshaped collections protocol at the school.

4. Out of Sight: How Museums Can Harness the Blind Perspective to Enrich Visitor Experiences

By Violet Rose Arma

Blind people enjoy the benefits of a good museum experience as much as anyone else, but they’re often held back from them by the field’s ingrained reliance on visual information. This post explores how museums are harnessing their perspectives to make richer, more multisensory experiences for everyone.

5. Demographics of US Museum-Goers: A 2024 Annual Survey of Museum-Goers Data Story Update

By Jessica Strube

What does the average museum-goer look like? The answer is changing, as new data from this year’s Annual Survey of Museum-Goers shows. This illustrated Data Story shares what the results reveal about trends in educational attainment, race and ethnicity, and age and life stage.

6. How to Transform a Volunteer Program in Six Steps

By Joseph O’Neill

Is your volunteer program suffering from declining participation, stagnant demographics, or confusing reporting structures? If so, it may be time for a major update. This post provides a simple framework for making effective changes, based on the advice of volunteer managers who have navigated transition.

7. Consensual Curation and Our Common Future

By Tamara Serrao-Leiva

As the pendulum has swung on repatriation and restitution, museums have been locked into a binary between holding onto collections and letting them go. But are these really the only options? In this post, one curator shares why she believes the future lies in a middle ground of collaborative agreements, and how she’s worked to develop them with tribal and international governments in recent years.

8. Every Museum Needs a Civic Strategy. Here’s How to Find Yours.

By Sarah Jencks

If you think your museum has nothing to do with civics, you may need to expand your definition of the term. This post shares why you should consider getting into the “democracy business” by connecting the stories you tell to the issues your community cares about.

9. Striving for Excellence in Exhibition Label Writing

By John Russick and Jojo Galvan Mora

Despite all that’s changed in museum work over recent decades, one thing remains the same: We still rely on written labels as our primary method of communicating with visitors. How, then, can we write copy that lives up to this role, instead of being “overly long, unclear, and uninspiring”? In this post, the former organizers of AAM’s label-writing competition share what they’ve learned.

10. Rethinking the Status Quo

By Jenny Woods, Brandi Shawn-Chaparro, and Abbey Earich

Volunteer programs are facing worrying trends, with long-serving volunteers declining to return from COVID closures and few new recruits stepping up to fill their shoes. What’s behind these phenomena, and how can museums adapt? In this Museum magazine article, three seasoned volunteer managers share their strategies.

The most active threads on the platform this year give just a taste of the important, useful, and entertaining conversations to be had:

1. Exploring Best Practices for Accessibility in Museum Exhibits

By Marcos Andrew

“I have been diving deep into the world of museum exhibit design, particularly focusing on accessibility aspects. It’s crucial for us to create inclusive spaces that everyone can enjoy, regardless of their abilities. I wanted to start a discussion here to share insights, best practices, and challenges faced when designing accessible museum exhibits.”

2. The Best Piece of Advice About Museum Work You’ve Gotten

By Rachel Alschuler

“I am wondering what the best piece of advice about museum work you have gotten? I learned that one of the most important things is to leave a job/ museum in better shape than you found it so that the next person it set up well. I think it is something I intend to carry with me always.”

3. What Would You Do If a Visitor Asked a Question You Don’t Know the Answer To?

By Rachel Alschuler

“I am wondering what any museum professional would do if a visitor asked a question you don’t know the answer to. I am interested in the response and that it is ok not to know but to always be open to learning.”

4. AI as a Tool for Creating Exhibitions

By Lars Wohlers

“Currently I am trying to get a better handle on what AI means/can do for exhibit design. If you have any experience or you know any interesting article/book regarding this topic, I would love to hear from you.”

5. Audio Description QR Codes

By Maggie Mills

“I’m about to print a large-scale fabric installation and have QR codes linked to audio descriptions of some of the images. I’m wondering if anyone knows what the standard size of the QR codes should be. They are not separate and will be embedded in the imagery. I’m trying to strike a balance between making them big enough to be accessible but not so big that they detract from the installation and make things visually confusing.”

6. Label Standardization

By Hanna McKellar

“I am looking for some resources on museum label standardization – we are hoping to find some sort of template so we can easily create same-size labels without hand cropping each individual label. I would also love to see any label policies/procedures regarding labels if people are willing to share!”

7. Collections Database to the Cloud: Yes or No

By Sherry Peglow

“Please contact me if your institution is AAM accredited and you’ve moved your collections database to cloud storage…or tell me why you haven’t.”

8. iPad Installation Question

By Robin Owen

“We are working with a history museum in New York on two AR experiences with volumetric video, designed for two small spaces. The original plan was for visitors to view the experiences on their own devices triggered by QR codes […] but the plan has serious drawbacks in terms of presenting volumetric video and the amount and quality of WiFi connectivity that will need to be provisioned. So, we’re exploring other options.

One would be to have the museum provide 3-4 tethered touchscreen devices like an iPad, loaded with the AR application, and possibly mounted on a gimbal, that visitors could use to observe the AR experience in each room. For visitor flow and other reasons this would be a better solution.

I’m looking for examples of this kind of installation that we could tell them about, or even better, show them, so they can see for themselves how this could work.”

9. Abandoned Property & Unwanted Donations

By Gretchen Stromberg

“I’m interested in hearing from other institutions if they have experience with unsolicited ‘donations’ being dropped off at their museum (with no documentation) or sent to the museum by mail. Since such items are then technically in the possession of the museum and they are not wanted by the museum, what rights does the museum have to do with the items? Is this a case where abandoned property laws must be followed?”

10. Books: Any Noteworthy Additions in Your Collection?

By Grace Belizario

“I’m interested in learning about any recent or notable books you’ve encountered, whether within your museum’s collection or through your professional or personal explorations. What have you discovered lately that stands out, and why does it hold significance for you or your institution? Whether it’s a rare find, a groundbreaking research publication, or a book that complements your interests or museum’s mission, please share your insights.”

January

One of Charleston’s grandest house museums, Nathaniel Russell House, to be sold

The Post and Courier

The Nathaniel Russell House is among the grandest historic house museums in downtown Charleston, showcasing the vast wealth created in this city following the Revolutionary War, when the cultivation of rice and trade, which included enslaved Africans, had reached a peak. Following a year of strategic planning, Historic Charleston Foundation’s Board of Trustees has decided to divest itself of the Russell House, with protective easements, and use the multimillion-dollar proceeds to: improve its advocacy work regarding development, tourism, and sea level rise; strengthen its Common Cause Loan Fund that helps longtime homeowners remain on the peninsula; and improve outreach and preservation at its other house museum.

February

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

Better Planet

The Phipps Conservatory and Botanical Gardens in Pittsburgh boast 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.

March

Smithsonian moves towards ‘informed consent’ principle for human remains

Museums Association

The Smithsonian Institution in the US is poised to introduce a new policy on human remains that centers around the guiding principle of “informed consent.” The institution has committed to providing resources to proactively trace descendants or communities of origin and empower them to make decisions on what should be done with ancestral remains. The new approach comes after the institution established a taskforce last year to examine its policies on the treatment and care of the more-than 30,000 remains of individuals it currently holds. The taskforce recommended that human remains should not be collected, possessed, or displayed without the “documented and informed consent” of descendants or descendant communities. The report also said that “research on human remains in the custody of the Smithsonian should be restricted to specific purposes, subject to scholarly review and conducted only with the clear, informed consent of the deceased or, in appropriate circumstances, their descendants.”

April

AI-powered Salvador Dalí answering visitor questions at the Dalí Museum

Blooloop

Florida’s Dalí Museum has launched the Ask Dalí experience, allowing visitors to ask the Spanish Surrealist artist questions and receive replies through artificial intelligence (AI). The models have been trained using Salvador Dalí’s writings and archival interviews, resulting in a voice that sounds like the artist’s, and a dialogue that reflects his ideas, imagination and humour. To start a conversation with Dalí, visitors at the museum can simply pick up a phone inspired by the artist’s ‘Lobster Telephone’ (1938) and begin asking questions. The Dalí Museum previously worked with Goodby Silverstein & Partners (GS&P) on ‘Dalí Lives‘, which used AI and machine learning to create a lookalike of the artist. Later, the museum worked with GS&P and OpenAI on the ‘Dream Tapestry’ experience, which allowed visitors to generate images of their dreams through an AI system called DALL-E.

May

The temperature inside these L.A. museums is changing. Why that’s a win for climate action

The LA Times

Museums have historically maintained strict, narrow ranges of temperatures and relative humidity since the British Museum created the standards around 100 years ago. New research and international art conservation guidelines suggest that a wider range of climate controls can be safe for artwork and would significantly cut energy use. The Hammer will pilot expanded temperature and humidity ranges in the PST exhibition “Breath(e): Toward Climate and Social Justice,” which opens in late summer and will feature the work of more than 20 commissioned artists. Michael Nock, the director of exhibitions and publication management at the museum, said the Hammer can establish these new temperature and humidity levels because the art on display is contemporary and because each artist agreed to the conditions.

June

Watching the Future Hatch in the New Museum Incubator

The New York Times

New Inc bills itself as the first cultural incubator to be led by a museum. By the end of this year, New Inc will have graduated 653 people and helped create or sustain 324 businesses since it was formed a decade ago, [as] the brainchild of the New Museum director Lisa Phillips and then-deputy director Karen Wong. It takes its cue from the tech industry, which for the better part of 20 years has had incubators for nascent businesses and accelerators for those that are past the idea-scribbled-on-a-napkin phase. As with tech incubators, the goal is to help people develop a sustainable business model. Applicants are told that, at a minimum, they should come out with basic tools for success: a plan, a purpose, a pitch deck, a mission statement, a website, and a way to make money. These are not things you get from an M.F.A. program, where the focus is on making art.

July

Auschwitz museum working with AI startup to stop hate speech on social media

Blooloop

The Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum in Poland has partnered with an AI startup company to tackle hate speech and antisemitism on social media. The startup, TrollWall AI, specialises in the automatic moderation of comments on social media, based on artificial intelligence (AI) models. The museum is followed on social media by nearly 2.5 million people, receiving and receives between 4,000 and 5,000 comments each day. [The museum reports that they] experience daily waves of spam, trolling, phishing bots, or disinformation campaigns. “Appropriate moderation is a priority for us. We strive to protect our virtual community of remembrance from hate speech.” The TrollWall AI tool is currently available on Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and TikTok. It can moderate comments in many different languages.

August

‘Would a world run by women be a better place?’: Athens museum hosts a bold female takeover

The Guardian

An all-female cabinet faces nuclear crisis. What do they do? Take their threatened country into confrontation, stick with their anti-war principles or give in to the [authoritarian] figure threatening to press the button? These are some of the questions that audiences of Greece’s national museum of contemporary art, EMST, are asked to contemplate. In a global first, EMST’s floors and halls were handed over in their entirety to an all-female cast of artists last month. In such a world, would there have been so much war and conflict, or less chest-beating, more compromise and considered discussion [asks Katerina Gregos, the museum’s artistic director]? Previously just 37% of artists represented in the museum’s permanent collection were women. EMST has been on a mission to break boundaries since Gregos took over three years ago with a determination to use the institution’s public role to tackle issues “that matter”.

September

A museum of formerly incarcerated people opens in Germantown

WHYY

Since being released from prison more than two decades ago for crimes related to drug addiction, Rev. Michelle Simmons has turned her formidable energies into helping other formerly incarcerated women transition back into society. She founded Why Not Prosper, a nonprofit based in a rowhome in [Philadelphia’s] Germantown neighborhood. Since 2001, it has offered support and services to about 1,700 people. Now art and artifacts from those women are on permanent display in a converted storage building behind the rowhome, christened last Friday as the Formerly Incarcerated Renaissance Museum (F.I.R.M.). Some objects on display were used or made by people while incarcerated, as the wall text says, to “help individuals retain their identity.” The collection of materials—hung in a dense salon-style floor-to-ceiling on the museum walls—also features artwork and poetry made by people while incarcerated, and documentation for people who were pardoned and released.

October

World’s first AI art museum to explore ‘creative potential of machines’ in LA

The Guardian

A prominent AI artist has announced he will open the world’s first AI art museum in Los Angeles, which will highlight the “intersection of human imagination and the creative potential of machines”. Dataland co-founder Refik Anadol, 38, is a media artist whose “crowd-pleasing – and controversial” works using artificial intelligence have been displayed around the world. The museum will highlight “ethically collected” datasets, Anadol said, like his Large Nature Model, an open-source, generative AI tool built with data shared by the Smithsonian, the UK’s Natural History Museum, and other prominent institutions. And, as the AI industry faces major scrutiny over the immense amount of energy it requires, Anadol said he aims to be transparent about the energy usage behind the museum’s new tools and technologies. He said he worked with Google to find a sustainable energy park in Oregon to power its AI tools without using fossil fuels, even if that means the process is slower.

November

History Colorado reimagines museum experience through new art

CPR News

History Colorado is transforming how visitors experience the past by integrating work from living artists throughout its exhibitions. A Black mother paints her toddler son, worried about his future. A New Mexican artist’s religious-inspired work hangs next to century-old pieces. These contemporary voices are helping reshape how we understand our shared history. This approach spans all 11 of the museum system’s facilities and historic sites across Colorado. Rather than treating art as mere decoration, History Colorado incorporates it as an essential storytelling tool, particularly when addressing challenging subjects. This integration of contemporary art is also helping rebuild trust with communities historically excluded from museum spaces. The museum’s approach has shifted from interpretation to amplification of community voices. As History Colorado continues this transformation, both artists and museum leadership see art as a bridge between past and present, making historical narratives more accessible and emotionally resonant for visitors.

December

Rijksmuseum launches AI tool to help make connections in 800,000-strong collection

The Art Newspaper

The Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam has launched an AI-powered site combining its art, objects, and research. In 2012, the Dutch national museum was the first major institution to put online its entire collection, spanning 800 years. It now aims to lead the way with artificial intelligence. The Rijksmuseum believes that its Kunstverkenner or “art explorer” project has huge potential, not just to interest people in a real-life visit but to further cultural knowledge. The “art explorer” site asks questions (in Dutch) such as “what do you love?” or “what is your favourite memory?” and allows visitors to collect and compare pieces, or hang them in a virtual gallery. Alexander Klöpping, a Dutch internet entrepreneur who spoke at the presentation, says that the museum’s algorithms are based on sharing knowledge rather than the “strange economic stimuli” of popular video sites, so it has a very different learning potential.

So, this year we thought we’d dig a little deeper into the fascinating objects for purchase at museums and go straight to the most knowledgeable source: museum people themselves. We polled our audience of Field Notes, Facebook, and LinkedIn readers and asked them to tell us their favorite things they’ve found in museum stores, whether their own or another’s. Here were some of the highlights:

For Those Whose Hearts Are at Sea

Marlinspike with Monkey’s Fist Knot from the Maine Maritime Museum Store

$29.95

“The coolest item in the Maine Maritime Museum Store is our collection of hand-forged marlinspikes, made on site by volunteers in our active blacksmith forge. Both a tangible reminder of a visit to our historic Percy & Small Shipyard, and a practical tool for today’s sailors!”

For Those Who Need Some Inspiration

“What You Do Matters” Key Tag from the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Deanie and Jay Stein Museum Shop

$6.00

“My favorite item that I ever purchased at a museum gift shop was a keychain at the US Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. The keychain read, “What you do matters.” Whenever I have a rough day, I look at the keychain and it helps me get through the day.”

For Those Who Love Animals and Ecology

ISM Logo Sea Otter Plush from the Independence Seaport Museum Store

$13.95

“One of my favorite items in the Independence Seaport Museum store relates to our award-winning exhibit called River Alive!, where guests get to learn not only how vital the Delaware River Watershed is and how many people depend on it but also what type of animals call this waterway home. To connect with the exhibit, our store sells plush animals like those who live around the Delaware River, plus they are wearing a branded Independence Seaport Museum shirt (it’s super cute).”

For Those Who Take Afternoon Tea

TMA Exclusive Specialty Teas from the Toledo Museum of Art Store

$17.95

“[I love when a] gift shop has a specialty blended tea.”

For Those With a (Discerning) Sweet Tooth

Cultured Bees MAD Honey – 2 Oz Jar from the Store at the Museum of Arts and Design

$12.50

Recommended by Cedar Imboden Simmers

For Those Who Respect a Craft

Tea Towel Squares from the International Quilt Museum Store

$16.95

Recommended by Sheila Green

For Those Who Prefer Armchair Travel

Museum of Jurassic Technology View-Master Set from the Museum of Jurassic Technology Gift Shop

$65

“My favorite museum gift shop item has to be the View Master set from the Museum of Jurassic Technology. It includes images (and info) of many of their main exhibits, so you can experience their unique collection from anywhere, just by clicking through the slides. It’s a nostalgic and imaginative way to bring a bit of the museum’s particular brand of magic home ”

And yet, despite their growing presence, Latinos are often poorly understood and represented in American society. National institutions have struggled with how to define this large and heterogeneous group, even including what to call them. Meanwhile, misguided and outdated stereotypes have clouded their image, obscuring their category-defying multinational, multiracial, and multicultural origins in favor of a simplistic story.

Thankfully, a new Smithsonian museum is coming to Washington, DC, to paint a fuller portrait: the National Museum of the American Latino. As the museum works toward a physical home on or near the National Mall, it recently made a major step forward, unveiling its inaugural strategic plan, logo and branding identity, and charter membership drive. To learn what the process of planning the museum has revealed about engaging and representing Latinos in museums, I spoke with Founding Director Jorge Zamanillo (who also happens to be the Chair of the AAM Board). Here’s what he had to say:

Joseph O’Neill: The new vision statement emphasizes that “the lived experience of American Latinos transcends geographic and cultural stereotypes.” What are some of those stereotypes you’re hoping to combat through the museum?

Jorge Zamanillo: The museum has to serve as a trusted cultural ambassador to promote the diverse and authentic lived experiences of US Latinos. It acts to break the stereotype that all Latinos are one race when, in fact, American Latinos represent many races and have roots in more than thirty countries and territories, each with its unique history, culture, and traditions. The museum also includes the rich contributions of Afro-Latinos and Indigenous communities—often underreported or underrecognized—through programs and events. The power of American Latino communities is centered on their diversity, which is the same foundation of America’s narrative of strength, resilience, endurance, and hope.

We aim to show that US Latino culture is more than an annual observance of popular foods and dances. Through outreach, fundraising, and a brand awareness campaign, the museum aims to elevate Latino history and culture. We also aim to create spaces that help bridge divides and dispel misperceptions by offering resources to inform the public about the invaluable contributions of American Latinos, foster a deeper understanding of American history and culture, and connect communities nationwide.

 

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JO: The process for developing the plan involved surveys, SWOT analyses, interviews with key stakeholders, and more. Did any themes emerge from this that surprised you?

JZ: We weren’t surprised to learn that there is a need and desire for a museum like this to represent US Latino communities and their stories. On the contrary, the findings validated the need for a national museum that captures the diversity of the Latino experience in the US and serves as a cultural anchor. Developing this strategic plan helped crystalize our core values for the museum—collective caring, authenticity, accessibility, innovation, and collaboration. In addition to being an iconic destination in the national capital where Latino communities belong, we want to be a home where stories unfold, cultures connect, and, most importantly, everyone is welcome.

JO: The plan mentions a priority to “elevate Latino philanthropy” in the museum’s fundraising efforts. Why do you think it’s important to tap into Latino philanthropy specifically, and what have you learned about doing this successfully?

JZ: The museum must tap into Latino philanthropy to recognize, honor, and empower the Latino community as key contributors to preserving their heritage and culture. By elevating Latino philanthropy, the museum acknowledges the legacy of giving within the Latino community, which has often taken the form of mutual aid, communal support, and grassroots efforts. This builds trust and ensures that Latinos actively secure the museum’s future.

Elevating Latino philanthropy also aligns with the museum’s mission to be a community-centered institution. Latinos will see themselves reflected in every aspect of the museum, from its exhibits to its funding sources. When the community feels invested in the museum’s mission, it creates a shared sense of ownership, pride, and responsibility in preserving and telling their stories.

Furthermore, by focusing on Latino philanthropy, the museum can build a sustainable and diverse donor base that strengthens its impact and resilience. As Latino communities continue to grow and thrive, tapping into their philanthropic potential helps fund the museum’s initiatives while fostering a deeper connection with the very communities it serves.

We find that donors and funders with ties to Latino communities are deeply invested in preserving and representing Latino culture and history in the United States. This is especially true among business leaders and executives who are in positions to make decisions about corporate and foundation support. We also expect similar enthusiasm and support among individual donors through our Charter Membership Program, which serves as a grassroots approach to connecting with and empowering the broader Latino community.

JO: Can you tell us more about the Charter Membership Program and how you think a grassroots funding model like this can be successful?

JZ: Our Charter Membership Program is designed to engage individuals nationwide in supporting and connecting with the museum. This program invites supporters to become founding members, which helps raise essential funds and creates a sense of belonging and shared investment in our mission. Members become part of a national movement to elevate and preserve Latino history and culture by joining.

Grassroots funding is at the heart of this effort. Broad-based community support can create a powerful sense of ownership and pride in the museum. Grassroots funding succeeds when individuals feel that their contributions, regardless of amount, are meaningful and essential to the museum’s mission. This approach also aligns with Latino cultural values of mutual support and collective action. By offering various giving levels and benefits, we aim to make participation accessible to all and show everyone’s support counts.

What makes grassroots funding effective is that it builds momentum through personal connections, stories, and shared values. Through the Charter Membership Program, we’re creating opportunities for people to not just donate but to join a larger community united by a shared vision. We’re leveraging digital outreach, events, and local partnerships to reach individuals nationwide and create a national network of supporters. This approach allows us to amplify the impact of every contribution and sustain long-term engagement.

Ultimately, this program helps us achieve two critical goals: raising the necessary funds to support our initiatives and building a nationwide community of museum ambassadors who are committed to preserving and celebrating Latino culture.

JO: How do the new logo and branding you’re debuting reflect the vision and goals of the museum?

JZ: The new logo symbolizes the museum’s commitment to bringing clarity and insight into the diverse lives, stories, histories, and cultures of US Latinos. The logo’s vibrant colors and dynamic design elements visually represent the diversity and resilience of the US Latino community. The brandmark illustrates how the National Museum of the American Latino will bring US Latino culture and history into focus and become an iconic destination in the nation’s capital. The logo reflects our core vision and goals, centered around preserving the rich history, culture, and contributions of Latinos in the US.

 

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To celebrate the new brand launch, museum supporters are invited to share stories or reasons why the museum matters on social media as part of the #MiMuseo (My Museum) campaign. Personal connections to the museum can showcase how it belongs to everyone and reflect the histories, stories, achievements, and cultural heritage of Latinos throughout the American experience.

JO: Is there any advice you could share for other museums trying to represent and engage Latinos more fully?

JZ: We are learning that authentic storytelling that reflects the diversity and richness of the US Latino diaspora and the American experience is crucial for effectively representing and engaging US Latinos. Our team is visiting communities nationwide to seek input and build relationships with Latino communities through partnerships and collaborative programming. We want to center Latino voices and stories in our museum planning and work.

Since 2023, the museum has hosted ninety-six listening sessions in thirty cities and nineteen rural communities across twenty-two states. These conversations included local leaders, educators, artists, museum workers, and others who support Latino communities or work with Latino content.

So, this Halloween, we decided to pose a challenge to our Field Notes readers and Facebook followers: pitch us a title for a horror movie set in a museum. With well over two hundred responses, the competition was stiff, but here were a few in particular that got the greenlight from the museum community:

In either case, you would be right, but you wouldn’t be thinking big enough, say Kylie Peppler, Maggie Dahn, and Mizuko Ito, authors of the Wallace-Foundation-sponsored report The Connected Arts Learning Framework: An Expanded View of the Purposes and Possibilities for Arts Learning. While they agree with both of these arguments (which they dub “art for art’s sake” and “art for academics’ sake”), they believe neither one gives enough credit to the full impact an arts education can have. Such exposure can not only enhance students’ artistic and academic development, they say, but impact other areas of their lives, like personal relationships, emotional well-being, and career development. For that matter, the impact doesn’t stop at the individual student, but can spill over into communities and society more broadly, as networks and relationships build, civic engagement increases, and areas for social progress come to the fore. In that light, artistic and academic growth are only small parts of a bigger holistic system of learning that the arts feed into.

This bigger system has a name in educational research circles: the connected learning framework. However, as the report’s authors explain, the term is not yet widely known in out-of-school or arts education, despite its alignment with many of the goals and outcomes its practitioners pursue. To bring the framework into wider use in our sectors, they have adapted it into a new subgenre they call “connected arts learning,” in the hopes of giving educators useful new language for describing and extending their impact. Here’s a brief summary of the framework and how museums can use it (and already are).

What is Connected Learning?

“Connected learning describes how educators and researchers can create meaningful learning opportunities by building relationships, basing learning on youth interests, and providing opportunities linked to real-world issues and communities,” the authors write. It takes a big-picture view of the role of learning in our lives, looking beyond acquiring information and skills for their own sake to the way these activities build our interests and develop our identities as we grow. In this way, connected learning emphasizes the “why” of education and asks whether the structures and practices in place are optimal to nourish those outcomes.

Connected arts learning, in turn, “describes meaningful art education that connects young people’s interests in the arts to present and future opportunities by building relationships and networks, both within the arts organization and extended to the broader community.” While it is a universal framework encompassing the needs of all young people, its emphasis on the role of culture, community, and identity is especially helpful for determining how to support those from marginalized backgrounds. For that reason, the authors center education scholar Tara J. Yosso’s concept of “community cultural wealth,” which “focuses on the ways young people from historically minoritized groups can derive power from within their communities, rather than being pushed to assimilate into dominant cultural norms.”

In other words, if connected learning negates the idea of learning in an educational vacuum, connected arts learning negates the idea of learning the arts in a cultural vacuum. Instead of leaving their communities behind to learn skills and knowledge developed in other cultures, students learn to look deeper into their communities and unlock the beauty, opportunities, and resources that exist around them.

How does this translate into concrete programs? The authors identify five general approaches they came across in their research, which are not mutually exclusive but often overlap within one program:

1. Culturally Sustaining Arts: Basing arts learning on the cultures and identities of the learners and community.
2. Future Forward Arts: Preparing or involving youth in the workforce or civic life by helping them build relationships with working artists and activists.
3. Networked Arts: Embedding arts learning in social networks that include youth, family, and educators.
4. Doing Well By Doing Art: Supporting mental health and overall well-being by explicitly responding to students’ social and emotional needs.
5. Youth Voice Arts: Giving students a platform to develop their perspectives, leadership abilities, and voices in public by combining activism and art.

Already, there are countless examples of museum programs that take these approaches, whether or not the educators in charge are aware of the connected learning framework. For example, the National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library has helped Iowa youth develop employable skills and practice activism through a monthslong project to build a replica of the Berlin Wall (Future Forward Arts, Youth Voice Arts). The Museum of Children’s Art has enrolled Oakland teenagers in a yearlong Community Futures School, where they lead discussions of oppression and its solutions, analyze futurist texts, and work with professional mentors to create artworks that combine technology and Afrofuturism (Culturally Sustaining Arts, Future Forward Arts, Youth Voice Arts). The Hammer Museum has hosted fourth-through-sixth-grade classes from underfunded Los Angeles schools for weeklong Classroom-in-Residence programs, opening a supportive space for students to reflect on heavy topics like grief, and supported their teachers with months of professional development to incorporate art into lessons (Networked Arts, Doing Well By Doing Art).

How Can Museum Programs Incorporate Connected Learning?

While you’re likely already working with elements of connected learning in your programs, studying the framework and the body of research behind it can help you enhance your impact. In particular, you might uncover aspects of your program design that are undermining your goals by minimizing the role of student interests, relationships, and opportunities. Peppler, Dahn, and Ito provide a rubric for assessing how well your program aligns with connected learning in these areas, as well as a series of questions you can ask to bolster each one. Here is a summary:

Stoke Interests

Even when educators aim for broad impact on students’ lives, they “still sometimes try to get kids interested in arts learning without first discovering what interests those kids already have,” the authors write. Instead of trying to “get young people interested in art,” connected arts learning uses art to explore what they’re already interested in. This means finding ways to collect input from students and develop the curriculum to follow their passions, rather than developing it in isolation based on outside sources. To accomplish this, one organization the authors interviewed relies on a youth council, an external evaluator, and informal conversations with students. An example insight: Whereas staff thought youth would be interested in experimenting with cutting-edge technology like virtual reality, they learned they were really more eager to experiment with the humbler medium of podcasting.

To center learners’ interests in your program, the authors recommend asking these questions:

• How do you incorporate youth interest and voice into programming?
• How do young people drive decision-making?
• How do you include learners’ identities and cultural backgrounds?
• How are the arts leveraged to engage learners?
• How are new interests supported in collaboration with professional artists?

Build Relationships

The traditional arts education paradigm tends to minimize relationship-building, consisting mainly of short-term engagements where educators lead students in individual projects during a confined class time and encourage them to practice on their own. Connected arts learning, in contrast, endeavors to build long-term relationships with youth and their families that extend beyond the classroom and allow for collaboration. This includes welcoming families and communities into both shaping and participating in the learning experience—not only in special events or projects, but day to day.

The authors suggest asking:

• How do you cultivate affinity-based networks of support?
• How do you support learners in working collaboratively with others?
• In what ways are relationships among young people, artists, and families accounted for in your programming?
• How are channels of communication kept open to support and sustain arts learning?
• In what ways are inter-generational relationships incorporated and leveraged to connect youth to arts opportunities?

Provide Opportunities

Traditional arts programs don’t think far beyond the classroom walls, measuring success by learner’s achievements within the program itself, and rarely introducing them to opportunities that extend beyond it. Connected arts learning flips this on its head, intentionally cultivating opportunities for learners outside of the classroom, whether connecting them with mentors, providing them with career training, or giving them chances to perform, exhibit, or engage in civic life.

Ideally, these opportunities are not just arts-related, but allow participants to explore any interests they may have. They are also not just career opportunities, with the goal of getting students on a stable financial path, but have the broader goal of helping them develop a meaningful life. (As one staff member interviewed tells the authors, “A lot of college and career readiness is based on the presumption that low-income students have to get set on a path much earlier…. I’d also like to strive for something where they can have the time to explore, just like a student of any income level.”) Finally, when these opportunities include professional work, like internships, apprenticeships, or leadership positions, students are ideally paid.

Questions to ask:

• What types of arts opportunities are communicated and offered to young people?
• How do the goals of the arts program connect young people to opportunities beyond the program itself?
• What are the values of the class or program and how are those values embedded in the arts experience?
• In what ways are young people matched with inspiring opportunities that align with their arts interests?
• How do you support networking that can connect youth to opportunities in and outside of the arts?

Given these numbers, there’s a good chance you’re currently wondering: What does it take to attract audiences? Is it a culturally relevant exhibition? A free or discounted admission day? A lively after-hours program? An Instagram endorsement from a K-pop icon? Of all the sundry strategies you’ve seen floating around, which are worth the hype?

Luckily, a large-scale research project recently wrapped which might provide some hints. The Wallace Foundation’s Building Audiences for Sustainability Initiative began back in 2015, when the foundation, troubled by data showing a steady decline in participation at cultural organizations, awarded forty-one million dollars worth of grants for organizations to experiment with new strategies for building audiences. Between that year and 2019, the grantees undertook a wide variety of projects to pursue various target audiences, united by their use of a continuous learning framework emphasizing research, evaluation, and iterative thinking throughout the process. After the grant work ended, Wallace engaged researchers from the University of Texas at Austin to analyze and produce a thorough report of the results, which it published earlier this year.

As the report’s author Francie Ostrower explains, many of the participating organizations went into the initiative earnestly hoping to find the “magic bullet” to building audiences. Sadly, however, they did not uncover any clever “one weird trick,” but instead confronted the many nuances to the practice: Are you trying to grow your audience by numbers, or diversify it by demographic characteristics? Are you satisfied with attracting one-time visitors to special offerings designed to lure them in, or are you more after repeat visitors who will engage with your core offerings? Do you expect these new visitors to contribute to your financial sustainability directly, or is just their attendance enough to attract contributed income and plant the seeds of future support?

In other words, there seems to be no one universal strategy for success, and building a sustainable audience long-term may mean taking the time to wrestle with critical, challenging questions first and foremost. But not all hope is lost for those craving some immediate, actionable takeaways. In studying the results, the researchers did observe some revealing general patterns in what consistently worked, what sort of worked, and what consistently did not work. (One caveat, however: The grantees for this particular project consisted of large performing arts organizations, so while the major takeaways likely carry over to our field, there may be some differences between the contexts.)

What Worked: Rethinking Marketing

When you look at your institution’s marketing and communications, you likely see compelling imagery, evocative copy, and tantalizing offerings. But is that what the rest of the world sees?

For virtually all of the organizations participating in the initiative, the answer turned out to be a resounding no. Given the opportunity to seek external feedback through research methods like focus groups, they learned that their marketing was appealing to people who already knew the art form or subject matter well, but not to those with less exposure.

“Images that we thought, from years of being in the arts, were the most appealing…really meant nothing to many of the audience members,” concluded one of the participants interviewed for the report. Another theater discovered its core strategy of hyping “world premiere” performances meant little to most audiences, despite the supposed cachet of premieres in the industry. A dance company learned common artistic lingo, like “mixed rep” or “non-narrative,” confused the majority of the public. At best, these opaque marketing strategies were irrelevant to audiences; at worst, they felt actively unwelcoming, as if they were being “talked down to” about their lack of prior knowledge. As one organizational participant came to see it, it was like they were a restaurant trying to attract diners without posting their menu online.

The antidote, participants discovered, was to post the menu—metaphorically speaking. They learned they needed to say more upfront about what to expect from their experience, both in terms of basic details like price and descriptive information about the contents. (As market research from the study showed, this most often amounted to grasping “a story” behind the production, though not necessarily a detailed plot summary.) Adapting communications to be more “welcoming, informative, and responsive” proved to be the most consistently effective practice throughout the initiative.

One strategy that proved especially effective, for the organizations that pursued it, was producing video trailers giving a firsthand preview of their productions. However, it sometimes took some tweaking to get the tone right—one participant discovered its first attempt at a video promoting an event series aimed at younger audiences read as too “bougie,” leading it to switch to a format interviewing attendees about their experience. Beyond videos, the participants generally succeeded with more refined used of digital communications, such as targeted emails to certain audience segments.

What Sort Of Worked: Off-Site Offerings

If you can’t bring more people to your museum, can you bring the museum to them?

More and more of our institutions have tested this premise in recent years, “distributing” their experience to outside venues like community centers, storefronts, or food markets. Evidently, a similar strategy is on the rise in other cultural organizations, as many of the participants in the initiative based their projects around performances at venues other than their own.

Did it work? Yes and no. First, the bad news: Most of the organizations found the logistics of taking their show on the road were much more burdensome than anticipated, citing challenges like “ensuring an adequate power supply, fire safety, loading a set away from the shop, and obtaining necessary permits.” (While some of these might be particular to the performing arts, it’s not hard to imagine the equivalents for staging museum exhibitions or programs away from the main building.) Furthermore, they consistently found that the strategy did not attract off-site audiences to on-site programs. Those were reasons enough for some organizations to abandon their off-site programs, particularly when they found they were not reaching their target audience effectively to begin with.

But others, despite experiencing the same challenges, considered their experiments a success. They may not have gained new regulars at their venues, but they did engage—and engage with—new communities and formats, and that came to seem like a victory in itself. For example, one participating opera staged a series of small-scale performances at a local restaurant, initially hoping many of the patrons would be moved to book tickets to a mainstage performance. But staff soon realized it was “naivety” to think the chain between taking in a tableside aria and “buy[ing] a ticket to a three-hour opera [to] come sit in the dark with us” could be so short. Nevertheless, “We realized that the conversion to the mainstage…was not necessarily the metric of success, that engaging with them in the form that they wanted to experience the art was okay, and that it still expanded the art. It still expanded the audience,” explained an interviewee.

Another unexpected outcome of these experiments was the discovery that “off-site” might be just a state of mind. Instead of going to the trouble to leave their comfortable, accommodating homes, some participants found just as much success from making tweaks to their own spaces to create a different atmosphere. For instance, one theater that originally went looking for a more intimate setting to stage its performances realized that it could achieve the same effect on its own turf by blocking off some areas with curtains and lowering the lighting. The same likely applies to museums—maybe more people would come to your party (or program, or exhibition, or so on) if you dimmed the lights and played different music (literally or metaphorically).

What Didn’t Work: Crossover Programs

Surely there are untold numbers of future museum fans lurking among the public, and all they need is a good hook to bring them in. Then they’ll keep coming back. Right?

Wrong, at least going by the findings of Building Audiences for Sustainability. A majority of participants pursued special “crossover programs” designed to lure their target audience in, hoping this would translate to them attending core programming once they got to know the organization. For example, one symphony arranged a series of performances where indie musicians played with its orchestra, hoping this would serve as a “gateway drug” for millennials to attend main season performances. But repeatedly, the organizations that undertook this strategy saw no success.

As anyone who’s experienced a blockbuster program or exhibition likely already knows, fair-weather fans can haunt museums as much as sports teams. If you’re a natural history museum that lures an audience of jewelry lovers in with an exhibition on rare gems, you should not expect them to come back for your next one on bird calls. (But fear not—survey data points to a worldwide “birding boom” since 2020.)

But while such “crossover” strategies were a confirmed failure in the initiative, on the basis that the attendees did not in fact cross over, that doesn’t mean the programs were inherently worthless. As with off-site programs, the participants realized such one-off successes were still a way to extend the mission and enhance the overall vitality of the organization. (Those jewel hounds still learned something about science, didn’t they?) You just may need to rethink your strategy to one built on attracting many occasional supporters instead of a smaller number of loyal supporters. Or, scary as it may sound, you may need to rethink what your “core offerings” are in the first place, and whether you want to change them to meet the audience where it is.

If so, you’re not alone. Between the long-term effects of the pandemic and the ongoing push to create more welcoming cultures, an increasing number of museums are rethinking the program models they’ve inherited, which are often many decades old and informed by outdated assumptions. Long-prevailing hallmarks of these models, including arduous training programs, intensive time commitments, and inflexible scheduling, are leading to declining ranks and stagnant demographics, many volunteer managers believe. Meanwhile, undefined reporting and authority structures are leading to tension and confusion, in some cases, as the organizational charts of museums evolve.

Still, there are compelling reasons for museums to engage volunteers, not only for the benefit of the institutions, but for the public themselves. Volunteer opportunities can be a meaningful chance to explore curiosities, interact with the community, make friends, and build skills. So, the question is: How can we design programs that maximize these positive outcomes, working with the goals of museums today and welcoming more (and more diverse) people in?

There may not be easy, one-size-fits-all answers, but between the growing body of successful examples, there is an emerging general framework. To figure out what that looks like, I spoke to two of the most knowledgeable sources I know: my AAM colleague Susan Zwerling, who wrote our Designing a Museum Volunteer Program toolkit (now in its second edition), and Elisa Kosarin, CVA, a longtime volunteer engagement consultant. With thanks to them, and the many volunteer managers who shared their experiences in publications I reviewed (see a selected list at the end of this post), I identified a basic six-step process for transforming a volunteer program.

Step 1: Talk to Stakeholders

Just because you have a mandate to “restructure” or “diversify” your program doesn’t mean you’re ready to start. Without agreed-upon parameters for what those words will mean in your case, you may not create anything but disarray. Instead of rushing into change for change’s sake, it’s best to start by talking with stakeholders about what you’re seeking to change, why you’re seeking to change it, and what the new vision for the program should be.

What stakeholders should you talk to?

• Board and leadership. Supportive and aligned leadership will give you the organizational pull to ensure change moves smoothly from concept to execution. In the best of cases, all sides will be on board with change, and these conversations will be about defining what change to prioritize. In more difficult cases, where you may need to do some convincing, program managers suggest emphasizing the opportunity to extend impact and align with organizational goals through program adjustments, as well as the liability for the museum’s reputation and visitor experience if it does not embrace change.
• Staff. Leadership and volunteer managers may not be fully aware of the staff needs that could use community support, especially in departments that haven’t traditionally worked with volunteers. For that reason, it’s a great idea to conduct a comprehensive needs assessment across the organization. Preferably in a structured, synchronous format, ask each department where they could ease their burdens and generate a list of potential volunteer opportunities in the areas they identify. Supporting public programs, helping in the garden, packing art supply boxes? Collecting protest ephemera or supporting voter registration drives? It’s all been done! Think big and think outside the box.
• Volunteers themselves. If possible, there is great value in getting your existing volunteers’ input, for several reasons. First, it avoids blindsiding your corps with any changes and can minimize the chances of a public backlash, as some museums have experienced when they’ve overhauled their programs. Second, it gives you the important perspective of the people who volunteer themselves, who may be more open to change—and more brimming with novel ideas—than you expect. If you have a smaller advisory group on your corps, like a volunteer board, you might consider starting with them.

What questions should you ask these stakeholders?

• Who are you trying to include? Remember, there are many kinds of diversity, including race and ethnicity, gender and sexuality, age, ability, economic status, national origin, languages spoken, and many other aspects of identity. As with diversity initiatives for audiences, you’re not likely to have much success if you try to be vaguely “inclusive” to all these categories at once, since different demographics will require different strategies. Instead, it’s best to define what aspects of diversity are lacking in your corps and what types would be most significant and realistic for your museum to gain. (For example, if you live in a city that’s 70 percent Latinx but your volunteers are all white, or a city with a median age of 35 but your volunteers are a median of 65, those could be good places to start.)
• What should volunteers do? There are multiple ways to transform a program, whether that’s tweaking existing opportunities, replacing those opportunities with others, or simply adding new opportunities. What departments will you assign volunteers to going forward, and what will they do in them? (This is where your needs assessment will come in handy.)
• Who should volunteers report to? Many institutions do not have a defined place for their volunteer programs on their organizational chart, which is one reason why power struggles and miscommunications can occur. Where should your program go? The field is divided on that issue. Some museums structure theirs within a dedicated volunteer management department, some nest them inside education and interpretation, some put them in visitor services, and some assign them to human resources, among other options. There may not be one right answer, but try to choose the one that will be least siloed and have the strongest relationships with the rest of staff.

Once you’ve spoken to these stakeholders and established the answers to these questions, you might consider putting them into a formal document, like a strategic plan for volunteer engagement, so you can share and cite those findings as you embark on the next step.

Step 2: (Re)design Your Roles

Now that you’ve identified lots of organizational needs that volunteers can support, and a vision for where you do and don’t want them to be working, your task is to narrow down this list and define specifics. (Think convergent vs. divergent thinking.) What are the best, most manageable ideas for new roles, and what will it take to get them up and running?

To maximize the impact of these new roles, and successfully recruit new people your current structure may be excluding, here are a couple questions to keep in mind:

• How long should the assignment last? Museums tend to automatically envision long-term or indefinite volunteer positions, with significant training upfront, but this level of commitment is likely to deter people with busier or less predictable schedules. (In fact, research suggests organizations that offer more flexible positions have had less trouble with recruitment and retention post-pandemic.) As you (re)design your roles, think about how you can vary their length and duration, giving people the ability to build their engagement over time. Assignments can be:
  • One-time, such as supporting a special event or one-off pilot program
  • Episodic, such as serving on a gala committee or assisting with an exhibition installation
  • Regular, such as working a welcome desk or conducting educational outreach
• Where should the work take place? Another important aspect of flexibility is where the volunteers work. Do they need to be on site for their assignment (at the museum or another location), or can their work be fully or partially virtual? When possible, removing the need to commute to a specific location can make opportunities more attractive and feasible, particularly to those who have disabilities, those who live farther from your work site(s), or those who have limited free time. Even if some of the work for a role requires being on site, you might be able to reduce the burden by making parts of it virtual (or virtual-optional), like training, meetings, or administrative work.

To allow for this flexibility, you may be able to create multiple roles, even within the same departments or supporting the same needs. You might have some regular volunteers who sit at your welcome desk weekly, for example, while others greet visitors during public programs or popular exhibitions, and some speak to visitors from home via digital kiosks.

Step 3: Revisit Your Training

Once you know what roles you’ll be offering, and on what basis, it’s time to consider what training you’ll require for them and how you’ll administer it. This can be equally important to attracting diverse volunteers as varied durations and responsibilities. Long, detailed trainings—like the crash courses that are typical of many docent programs—can discourage would-be volunteers, not only for the sheer time (and sometimes money) they require, but for the sense of psychological commitment they impose. While you want your volunteers to feel well-prepared for their roles, you don’t want them to feel like they must undergo an elaborate initiation to join you. Make it easier for them to say yes to your program by providing efficient and flexible training appropriate for what the role will require. Consider:

• Time commitment. Can you reduce the length of trainings by distinguishing essential from supplemental information? Can you minimize the amount of information volunteers must learn by dividing their areas of responsibility?
• Location. Can you make trainings less demanding by offering them in fully or partially virtual formats, or hybrid/virtual-optional?
• Scheduling. Can you offer asynchronous trainings that volunteers can complete on their own time, or a mixture of synchronous and asynchronous? Can you schedule trainings outside of typical work hours, or offer alternatives for those who cannot make those times?

When aiming to increase diversity, you should also consider what training you might provide your corps to help them cultivate a welcoming environment and potentially discuss issues of identity with visitors.

Step 4: Rethink Your Recruitment

At this point in the process, you should have a new range of opportunities that are appealing and feasible to people with a variety of life situations. Now the only remaining question is how to reach those people and tell them about the opportunities.

Particularly if your museum and/or its existing program reaches a limited demographic, this will require thinking beyond traditional marketing or word of mouth. While it’s always a great idea to share opportunities through the museum’s communication channels, or to ask staff and volunteers to spread the word to their networks, this may not reach those outside of the demographics you’re already serving. Instead, you’ll need to think in terms of broad, proactive outreach to the community. Here are some strategies suggested by program managers at the International Spy Museum and Baltimore Museum of Art:

• Build a list of referral sources, such as young professional organizations, retired teacher associations, disability service organizations, and community centers. Reach out and ask if they can help communicate the opportunity to their members and patrons.
• Go out into the community. Visit gathering places like libraries and community fairs and tell people about your opportunities and the benefits of volunteering.
• Connect with local colleges and universities. Besides being full of people who are looking for skill-building opportunities, and can likely help with any age diversity goals, higher-learning institutions are a great way to connect with international students, who can help you diversify the languages spoken and national origin among your corps.

Step 5: Communicate Your Changes

Once you’re ready to unveil your revamped program, it will be important to communicate the changes carefully to your stakeholders, particularly existing volunteers. Ideally, you want to avoid alienating them during the transition, making it clear that you value their past contributions and welcome them to join the new structure going forward, if they are willing to embrace it.

Here are some suggestions from Justine Gregory Dodson, who overhauled Denver Art Museum’s volunteer program:

• Communicate what you’re changing (and why) as often and in as many venues as possible, such as newsletters, meetings, and learning management systems.
• Identify key stakeholders to communicate with one-on-one and address any misapprehensions with, such as volunteer leaders and known champions or challengers of change.
• Find ways to honor the past contributions of volunteers at your museum, such as plaque displays in your building or an “emeritus” program for those who retire from the program.

Step 6: Evaluate Your Changes

As with any new or updated program, you don’t want to stop developing once you’ve implemented the changes. Look for opportunities to gather feedback and data on how the revamped program is working. If your museum has a research and evaluation team, or the means to engage independent evaluators, this would be a good opportunity for partnership. If not, consider informal feedback mechanisms, like basic surveys, check-in conversations, or comment cards. Be sure to take any findings to heart and make any necessary adjustments that arise—they can make all the difference in your program’s success.

Further Reading

While this framework covers the basics of transforming your program, there are many more nuances to consider as you do so. Here are some AAM publications that will help you along the way:

• Rethinking the Status Quo by Jenny Woods, Brandi Shawn-Chaparro, and Abbey Earich
• Designing a Museum Volunteer Program by Susan Zwerling (Purchase required)
  • How Can We Make Volunteer Programs More Inclusive and Accessible? By Susan Zwerling and Kia Hunter
  • Do Volunteer Programs Need Reinventing for the Reopened Museum? By Susan Zwerling and Marcie Keller
• Questions an Organization Should Ask When Transitioning a Volunteer Program by Susan Zwerling, Jenny Woods, Justine Gregory Dodson, Mary Fernandez, and Brandi Shawn-Chaparro (AAM members only)
• Museums and Equity: Volunteers by Elizabeth Merritt
• How Volunteer Programs Are Embracing Diversity, Equity, Accessibility, and Inclusion by Elisa Kosarin
• How the National Air and Space Museum Took Volunteering Virtual by Elisa Kosarin

Get your copy of the Designing a Museum Volunteer Program Toolkit today!

With spring upon the Northern Hemisphere and its trees and shrubs abloom, we thought we’d ask our Field Notes subscribers to share the inside scoop on their favorite museum gardens, as they previously did for cafés, bathrooms, and stores. (Subscribe now to join the next poll!) Here were the ones they mentioned most often across hundreds of responses.

The Courtyard at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum (Boston, MA)

Recommended by Kate Nardin, Ryan Beckman, Lizette Gradén, Elizabeth Wiecher Pierce, Tammi Edwards, Kristin Crawford, Monica Gomez, T.C. Steele State Historic Site, Maddie Mott-Ricci, Christine Melville Harvey, Margaret Isham, Jen Kretser, Karrie Porter, Sean Blinn, Catherine Caverly Taraviras, Lisa Sheley, Hailey Conneely, Eric L. Mundell, Ann Barnard Toftness, Ruaidhrí Belfry Crofton, Gavin Culbertson, Meg Donaldson Carson, Fabiana Chiu, Del Baker Robertson, Sarah Gretchen Titus, North Andover Historical Society, and Amy Littlewood Frasco

 

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The beloved central space of this idiosyncratic Boston museum manages to be both a perennial and a seasonal delight. Thanks to dedicated horticulture staff working mostly out of a temperature-controlled nursery, the Courtyard boasts blooms year-round, with almost-monthly rotating displays in categories like orchids, chrysanthemums, and nasturtiums.

The Huntington Botanical Gardens (San Marino, CA)

Recommended by Leah Melber, Alyssa Cordova, Karen Graham Wade, Kathy Arnold, Elizabeth Wiecher Pierce, Sylvia Bruner, Joseph Kolasinski, Catherine McCarthy, Akeia de BarrosGomes, Sunny Spicer, Kelli Walsh, Mar AceMehia, Sarah Jane Cox, L.E. Brown, Eric L. Mundell, Holly Deakyne, Julie Steiner, and Martin Fox

 

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Stretching over about 130 acres, the Huntington Botanical Gardens feature eighty-three thousand living plants between sixteen themed gardens, including a Jungle Garden, Chinese Garden, Shakespeare Garden, and Palm Garden. The Huntington also operates a laboratory for botanical conservation and research.

Desert Botanical Garden (Phoenix, AZ)

Recommended by Kim Baker Nickels, Cheryl Thornhill, Angela Watts, Joseph Kolasinski, Karrie Porter, Rox Adams, Kathy Wells Clark, Jen Kretser, Sean Blinn, Sharol Buck, Gavin Culbertson, Melissa Kershaw, Catherine McCarty, Patricia Ann Raynor, and Martin Fox

 

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“Think the desert is all dirt and tumbleweeds? Think again,” declares this Arizona institution. Throughout more than fifty thousand displays of cacti, trees, and flowers across 140 acres, the Desert Botanical Garden proves the beauty of desert plants rivals any others’.

Storm King Art Center (New Windsor, NY)

Recommended by Hassan Najjar, Catherine Bergmann, Sarah Braverman, Molly Phillips, Kathy Greif, Joan Lessing, Jennifer Rubin Garey, Renée Compagna, Melanie Fraticelli-Twardzicki, Sean Blinn, Catherine Caverly Taraviras, Gavin Culbertson, Eileen Gill, and Holly Deakyne

 

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This sweeping open-air museum in New York’s Hudson Valley is a premier destination for taking in both natural and artistic beauty. Visitors can stroll through five hundred acres of open landscape while viewing a world-renowned collection of large-scale sculpture and site-specific artworks.

Missouri Botanical Garden (St. Louis, MO)

Recommended by Makenzee Brown, Renée Compagna, Rod Williamson, L.E. Brown, Ann Barnard Toftness, Gavin Culbertson, Catherine McCarthy, and Chris G. Carron

 

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Founded in 1859, this St. Louis institution can proudly call itself the oldest continuously operating botanical garden in the country. Major features include a geodesic dome conservatory, a fourteen-acre Japanese strolling garden, and an interactive children’s garden experience that teaches the significance of nature and plants.

The Gardens of The Met Cloisters (New York, NY)

Recommended by Heba Khairy, Dana Golan Miller, Jennifer Lawton Schloat, India Rael, Holly Deakyne, and Katherine Danalakis

 

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With three unique gardens and an orchard, the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s branch museum is as much a showcase for the plants of medieval Europe as its art and architecture. Each design reflects thorough research into historical sources: the orchard and Judy Black Garden in the Cuxa Cloister mimic the design of aristocratic pleasure gardens, the Bonnefont Cloister Herb Garden showcases the known uses of more than four hundred species in the Middle Ages, and the Trie Cloister Garden riffs on the “ecstatic” fantasy gardens described in the art and literature of the period.

Winterthur Garden (Winterthur, DE)

Recommended by Robin Sarratt, Brenda Hornsby Heindl, Cheryl-Lynn May, Julie Steiner, and Danyelle Rickard

 

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In addition to a museum and library, the Winterthur estate in Delaware maintains the historic garden designed by founder Henry Francis du Pont. His naturalistic design is particularly regarded for its “lyrical” color combinations, the result of decades of experimentation with thousands of different plants.

Philbrook Gardens (Tulsa, OK)

Recommended by Melody Lowe, L.E. Brown, Joseph Kolasinski, Ulrich Museum of Art, and Ruaidhrí Belfry Crofton

 

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The gardens outside of this Oklahoma art museum reflect its building’s past life as “Villa Philbrook,” the home of a local oil tycoon modeled on an Italian Renaissance villa. In addition to the home’s original formal gardens, which take their structure from sixteenth-century models, the museum also maintains a modern sensory garden design conceived in 2004. The Philbrook also houses a beloved garden cat, Cleome, who serves double duty as pest control and visitor-experience-booster.

Honorable Mentions

• Rooftop courtyard at the Museum of Jurassic Technology (Culver City, CA) – Recommended by Kate Nardin, Emily Lytle-Painter, Mar AceMehia, and Holly Deakyne
• New England Botanic Garden at Tower Hill (Boylston, MA) – Recommended by Ryan Beckman, Ali Kane, Amy Littlewood Frasco, and Diana West
• Gardens at Biltmore (Asheville, NC) – Recommended by Christal Tongish, Meghan Ward, Joan Lessing, and Karrie Porter
• Donald J. Hall Sculpture Park at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art (Kansas City, MO) – Recommended by Alex Whitney, Angela Watts, Karrie Porter, and Anne Manning
• Mary Livingston Ripley Garden (Washington, DC) – Recommended by Meredith Peruzzi, Betsy Smith Platt, Tania Said, and Patricia Ann Raynor
• deCordova Sculpture Park (Lincoln, MA) – Recommended by Amy Littlewood Frasco, North Andover Historical Society, Lauren Kaufmann, and Martin Fox