Join instructor Tara Young beginning September 2, 2024 for the four week course Managing Museum Volunteers.
This course will focus on strategies for running a successful volunteer program that adapts to the needs of the museum. Appropriate for professionals starting a new volunteer program or wanting to reinvigorate an existing one, this course will include topics such as: assessing the museum’s needs for volunteers; managing the recruitment, selection, onboarding, training, and evaluating of volunteers; and troubleshooting problems with volunteers. We will also consider some of the ways that volunteerism in the US is changing overall and how those changes might affect museums.Join instructor Helen Wong Smith beginning January 6, 2025 for the four week course Cultural Competency.
Everyone believes they work well with cultures unlike their own and are aware of the benefits of intercultural or Cultural Competency (CC) practice. How you define and incorporate cultural competency in your museum requires the ability to function with awareness, knowledge, and interpersonal skill when engaging people of different backgrounds, assumptions, beliefs, values, and behaviors.
In this workshop you’ll be challenged to examine personal perceptions that might surprise you and strategies that will increase your ability to practice inclusion to your stakeholders including staff, donors, visitors, and communities.
This workshop provides the skills to employ cultural competency and the stages individuals and organizations can implement to improve relations with internal and external communities.
Join instructor Shannyn Palmer beginning March 4, 2024 for the four week course Foundations of Community Engagement.
The role of museums is evolving in a rapidly changing world. A global reckoning with the legacies of colonialism and collecting has raised questions about what it means to be a museum in the 21st Century. Museums are increasingly expected to be responsive to their audiences and actively develop the roles that they play within society, which requires a re-imagining of museum practice and accelerated efforts to develop new ways of working.
The challenge and opportunities of museums today is to connect effectively and meaningfully with the communities they serve to tell stories, explore issues, and deliver powerful experiences that reflect the diverse and entangled nature of our past and present.
And yet, while terms like ‘community engagement’ and ‘collaboration’ feature prominently in contemporary cultural institutions, their use is often inconsistent. This works to dilute their meaning and can lead to tokenistic claims of inclusion that perpetuate the notion that community engagement is something that can be tacked on to a project.
This course is designed to prompt thinking about why community engagement is important and to begin to develop a practical understanding of how to engage with people and communities in ethical, meaningful, and empowering ways. It draws from leading thought in community engaged practice to provide the necessary concepts, information, and practical tools to begin developing an approach to effective and meaningful community engagement.