The Modern Nonprofit

MAY 1, 2024

Curate an exhibit of paintings, photographs, sculptures or crafts by AAPI artists. Artists, writers, and cultural leaders. It’s a wonderful way to include everyone and still work towards your fundraising goals. Be sure to recruit knowledgeable facilitators. Displaying AAPI visual arts is another engaging activity.

Celebrate 59

Celebrate Education Fundraising Culture 59

Museum 2.0

MARCH 4, 2015

This week marks five years since the book The Participatory Museum was first released. I thought the pinnacle of participatory practice was an exhibit that could inspire collective visitor action without facilitation. Since 2010 I have seen, again and again and again, how valuable human facilitation is to the participatory process.

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Participatory Museum Empowerment Facilitation 20

Beth's Blog: How Nonprofits Can Use Social Media

JULY 1, 2009

When I talk about designing participatory experiences, I often show the above graphic from Forrester Research. Museums see open-ended self-expression as the be-all of participatory experiences. Why aren’t more museums designing highly constrained participatory platforms in which visitors contribute to collaborative projects?

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Participatory Experiment Museum Teen 50

Beth's Blog: How Nonprofits Can Use Social Media

OCTOBER 26, 2006

Another point of intersection here for me is Henry Jenkins recently published 72-page white paper " Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century." Collaborative Problem Solving - (working toether in teams - informal/formal to comlpete tasks and develop new knowledge.

Participatory 50

Participatory Teen Vlog Mashup 50

Museum 2.0

JUNE 24, 2010

It incorporates work by local artists, old and new construction, and is completely gorgeous. She did several things over the course of the tour to make it participatory, and she did so in a natural, delightful way. But participatory facilitation can be taught. Tags: personalization participatory museum.

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Museum Participatory Model Seattle 51

Museum 2.0

DECEMBER 29, 2009

It's my "artistic rendering" of one of the most inspirational participatory projects I know of--the Bibliotheek Haarlem Oost book drops. Too often, cultural institutions design participatory projects that require visitors to learn new tools or make sacrifices to contribute. Read the original post on this project for more info.

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Participatory Project Library Museum 40

Museum 2.0

JANUARY 25, 2012

Stacey has been collaborating with local artists to produce a series of content-rich events that invite visitors to participate in a range of hands-on activities. The event involved over fifty artists throughout the building helping visitors make their own paper, write poems, stitch books, etc.

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Activities Active Activism Participatory 50

Museum 2.0

MARCH 16, 2009

When I talk about designing participatory experiences, I often show the above graphic from Forrester Research. Museums see open-ended self-expression as the be-all of participatory experiences. Why aren’t more museums designing highly constrained participatory platforms in which visitors contribute to collaborative projects?

Participatory 44

Participatory Experiment Museum Teen 44

Museum 2.0

OCTOBER 2, 2013

In this post, George grapples with the challenges of balancing the care for a museum collection with that of contemporary artists-in-residence who are constantly reinterpreting it. Every Saturday, the curatorial team at Elsewhere , a living museum in downtown Greensboro, NC, reviews the project proposals of its artists-in-residence.

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Artist Museum Proposal Participatory 49

Museum 2.0

FEBRUARY 19, 2014

The man is artist Rocky Lewycky , whose work is part of a group show of visual artists who have won a prestigious regional fellowship. If an artist can come into a museum and smash stuff, what does that tell visitors? It is not acceptable to walk into a museum and destroy another artist''s work of art.

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Museum Arts Artist Participatory 50

Museum 2.0

JUNE 10, 2015

And so, one of the most successful, accidental, and fraught participatory projects of the past decade comes to an end. The "love locks" are not a project with an institutional or artistic director. So many participatory projects do the opposite, requiring you to take a dozen tricky steps to no meaningful end.

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Participatory Project Artist Instruction 20

Museum 2.0

SEPTEMBER 26, 2012

Visitors bond and bridge through participatory experiences at MAH. Assess and Respond to Community Assets and Needs If you want to activate community engagement in your programs, you first need to work together with your communities to determine their diverse needs, assets and interests.

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Museum Program Participatory Community 49

Museum 2.0

OCTOBER 15, 2009

Over the past year, I've noticed a strange trend in the calls I receive about upcoming participatory museum projects: the majority of them are being planned for teen audiences. Why are teens over-represented in participatory projects? Teens are a known (and somewhat controllable) entity.

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Teen Participatory Experiment Museum 24

Museum 2.0

JULY 23, 2014

In the fall of 2013, they launched Re:Make , an ambitious project to redevelop the museum, live, on the floor, with a mix of staff, guest artists, and community members. A strong participatory process is not a loosey-goosey, open the doors and do whatever strategy. Its work is never done. It''s serious. Invested at all levels.

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Museum Product Participatory Community 53

Museum 2.0

OCTOBER 23, 2018

We partnered with foster youth, former foster youth, artists, and community advocates to create an exhibition that used art to spark action on issues facing foster youth. This project wove together many different participatory threads. The result was the best exhibition I've had the honor of working on (check out these outcomes ).

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Issue Childhood Community Create 45

Museum 2.0

JULY 11, 2012

I get excited about a lot of things in my work at the Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History. That's how I felt when artist Ze Frank got in touch to talk about a potential museum exhibition to explore a physical site/substantiation for his current online video project, A Show (s ee minute 2:20, above).

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Museum Participatory Artist History 45

Museum 2.0

APRIL 10, 2013

The weather is hopefully the least of the reasons you should want to come work with us here at the Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History. These are unpaid, part-time internships in which you will make a significant contribution to our work, and at the same time, learn a heck of a lot about participatory design and community engagement.

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San Francisco Participatory Artist Museum 23

Museum 2.0

MAY 22, 2013

I''ve followed Wright''s work for years because of his unique perspective on the potential for game-players to be game-makers - in other words, to co-create the gaming experience. Negotiation" implies a respectful relationship between institution (or artist) and user. Sometimes the negotiation works beautifully.

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Game Artist Museum Participatory 40

Museum 2.0

MARCH 20, 2013

This week, the Santa Cruz Weekly's cover story is about my museum (the Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History ) and the work we have done to make it a more participatory, community-centered place over the past two years.

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Story Georgia Participatory Museum 31

Museum 2.0

OCTOBER 10, 2012

Let's look at the statistics from three big participatory projects that wrapped up recently. This citywide festival showcased work by 1,517 artists competing for a $200,000 top cash prize awarded by public vote. 1,708 artists participated. An estimated 18,000 people attended, of which 4,929 nominated artists for the show.

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Arts Artist Museum Award 47

Beth's Blog: How Nonprofits Can Use Social Media

OCTOBER 25, 2011

One notable aspect of the success of Gasland, which recently won the Emmy Award for documentary film, is the way director Josh Fox worked with grant makers at the Fledgling Fund to galvanize a movement that greatly amplified the efforts of traditional environmental groups. But that is only the jumping off point for the inquiry.

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Guatemala Movie Artist Award 93

Museum 2.0

FEBRUARY 29, 2012

In particular, we want exhibition collaborators--artists, researchers, historians, collectors--to understand our goals and how we intend to steer the exhibition development process. It's a working document, and we mean to put it to work planning new projects with our partners. But we weren't explicitly making those goals public.

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Museum Artist Participatory History 38

Museum 2.0

NOVEMBER 11, 2008

The Art of Participation provides a retrospective on participatory art as well as presenting opportunities for visitors to engage in contemporary (“now”) works. As the museum's website puts it, "this exhibition examines how artists have engaged members of the public as essential collaborators in the art-making process."

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Participatory Arts Design Museum 20

Media Cause

AUGUST 9, 2021

Within Media Cause’s Creative, Brand, and Design team, one of our favorite things to do— besides creating incredible work for our clients—is sharing inspirational and educational resources with each other: articles, POVs, webinars, classes, books, case studies, blogs, tutorials, cheese. Community is key: working with, not for.

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Design Experiment Nonprofit Collaboration 52

Museum 2.0

DECEMBER 28, 2011

We've been offering a host of participatory and interactive experiences at the Museum of Art & History this season. I loved Jasper Visser's list of 30 "do's" for designing participatory projects earlier this month. Artists work incredibly hard to produce their work. This isn't even participatory.

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Design Participatory Learning Instruction 45

Museum 2.0

AUGUST 28, 2013

In this guest post, Stefania Van Dyke, Master Teacher for Textile Art and Special Projects, tells the story of how the co-creative development and visitor participation in the “Thread Studio” that accompanied their 2013 summer exhibition, Spun, changed her perspective on her own work. Some community artists even helped install the space.

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Denver Museum Arts Collaboration 35

Museum 2.0

JULY 23, 2019

Today, I wanted to think about participatory elements, something so essential to this blog. Awards can show higher-ups the value of our work and they can be important tools for showing funders results. We should see ourselves like those board games, where all the players have to work together to win.

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Museum Participatory Interaction Classroom 35

Museum 2.0

JULY 1, 2011

But the point is that the MAH, like just about every other museum in the known universe, was content to define the museum experience as something removed from the outside world, a rarefied church-like space of refined artistic reflection. Her blog, "Museum 2.0," is one of the leading forces working to remake the museum experience.

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Museum History Arts Work 31

Museum 2.0

DECEMBER 14, 2011

They were afraid that visitors would get frustrated or that the quality of their work would not be good enough to translate to the mural. These are both busy people, and while they are very artistic, neither is a crack drawer. We were all surprised by the quality of the visitors' work. You drew that?!"s,

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Participatory Classroom Help Artist 43

Museum 2.0

SEPTEMBER 18, 2013

Granted, I live in an increasingly narrow world of people who are exploring these topics and want me to work with them, but I still learn a lot from the questions and struggles I hear from colleagues and people who comment on the blog. Are there certain kinds of institutions that are more well-suited for participatory techniques than others?

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Museum Question Participatory Evaluation 45

Museum 2.0

APRIL 26, 2018

The whole second half of the article was dedicated to our work: Smaller museums can be especially scrappy in finding ways to connect with the community. It’s something that any museum, of any size, can work toward. This weekend was thrilling for me.

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Audience Washington Museum Intergenerational 49

Museum 2.0

APRIL 25, 2011

Granted, I live in an increasingly narrow world of people who are exploring these topics and want me to work with them, but I still learn a lot from the questions and struggles I hear from colleagues and people who comment on the blog. Are there certain kinds of institutions that are more well-suited for participatory techniques than others?

Question 49

Question Participatory Museum Evaluation 49

Museum 2.0

FEBRUARY 15, 2012

This internship is for the truly self-motivated person out there with a brilliant idea for making museums more participatory, welcoming, community spaces who just lacks an institution at which to try it out. Special Projects interns, who will do, well, whatever you want. Our internships have generally gotten more structured.

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Museum Participatory Arts Attitude 34

Museum 2.0

OCTOBER 24, 2012

To that end, our exhibitions are full of participatory elements. They can contribute their own stories, objects, and creative work to exhibitions. Community members, artists, and organizations increasingly see our museum as a place where they can advance their own goals, and so they approach us. Evergreen Cemetery Board Game.

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Platform Open Museum Participatory 41

Museum 2.0

MAY 10, 2011

I'm also making the 2011-2012 budget, getting to know our terrific staff and volunteers, and starting up a few small participatory projects to launch us into being a more community-driven institution. I even have a couple ideas that you could work on without being here in Santa Cruz. Ever wanted to build a museum website from scratch?

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Museum History Participatory Arts 53

Museum 2.0

MAY 29, 2013

Sarah and some of her colleagues in visitor services feel disconnected from the work that happens "upstairs" in the office and in our creative project development. Any place with people working different schedules in different parts of the building suffers from it. Would enough people use it to make it work?

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Facebook Museum Participatory Adopt 55

Museum 2.0

FEBRUARY 11, 2015

We''re offering internships this summer in: Participatory Exhibition Design. We''ve been working for two years to redevelop our History Gallery to be a more dynamic, diverse, engaging space. Help take the participatory elements of this permanent gallery to the finish line. Community Programs. You can help make the magic happen.

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Participatory Community Museum History 20