Elevating Community Voices: Impact Visibility of Community-Based Collaborative Projects

ID: WMA2026_590

Track:

Community collaboration has transformed traditional practices in exhibition development, the collection of oral histories, and programming, leading to new and strengthened relationships as well as identifiable institutional impact. In a session designed to help illuminate the possibilities in generating community-based projects, panelists from exhibitions, curatorial, and historical collection positions present their experiences considering process, lessons learned, and essential tools needed for success.

Session Information

Format: Regular session/panel (roundtable, single speaker, etc.)

Uniqueness: Community-based work is essential to develop and sustain museum relationships. It welcomes audiences into the creation process where authority is shared, resulting in higher impact programming and exhibitions.

Objectives: Learning Outcomes include: 1) Providing general understanding of the varied levels of community-based work in museums and historical societies. It can empower museums and historical societies to work with members of the community to actively engage in the development of exhibitions, collections, and interpretation of history. 2) How community-based work can lead to institutional impact and transformation (in terms of external relationships, policy or systemic change, interdepartmental relationships, etc.) 3) Understanding of the “opening of process” from internal to external and its implications.

Engagement: Audience will listen to the experiences of the panelists and see demonstrative slides. Resources needed include A/V for a slide deck presentation. After the presentations, there will be questions posed to the audience for further thought and to prompt Q&A.

Relationship to Theme:

Audience

Audiences: Curators/Scientists/Historians Events Planning Registrars, Collections Managers 

Professional Level: All levels 

Scalability: There are staff from two museums and one historical society on this panel representing varied institutional sizes and disciplines describing their experiences with communities. This brings a wider range of interest for audiences to attend the session.

Participants