For the past eight years, I have had the opportunity to visit 505 museums in 46 states and nine countries. I have heard the stories about the work that museum professionals do in our communities, day in and day out. The work of museums in our country is essential and diverse. First and foremost, museums are educational institutions, and the relevant numbers are impressive – 55 million schoolchildren attend museums through field trips, and museums spend more than $2 billion on educational programming each year. It is harder to measure the lives that have been changed, but we know that museums do indeed change lives, every single day.
Museums are also community institutions, and that role needs to be better understood by elected officials and policymakers at every level. If you name a societal problem, I can point to a museum working to address it – whether it is older Americans with cognitive disorders, or young people on the autistic spectrum, or children caught up in the juvenile justice system, or water quality issues, or grade-level reading, or community design, or hunger, or emerging pathogens. Museums host preschools and elementary schools and high schools. There is no limit to the service museums provide to our communities.
Museums are also economic engines and sources of community pride. As our good friend in Congress, Paul Tonko, from New York said, “Museums provide place esteem.”
Museums, along with libraries, are consistently rated the most-trusted institutions in our society. My favorite trust story involves the Please Touch Museum in Philadelphia and a little boy who showed up one day by himself. It took a while to figure out how he got there, but it soon emerged that there was trouble at home, and he made a long journey, on the trolley, by himself, to get to the place where he knew he would be safe – the Please Touch Museum. This is only one of countless parables about the trust that Americans have in their museums.
As I complete my tenure at AAM, I have only one concern, and that involves our ability to speak as a field, with one voice, about the role of museums as essential societal institutions in the 21st century. The fact that the Obama Administration has proposed a $5 million increase in the U.S. Institute of Museum and Library Services budget for FY2016 – a $5 million increase in what is currently a $30 million annual appropriation – underscores the challenge that we face. The upside for the museum field is $35 million? Museums spend in excess of $2 billion on educational programming every year – that is a vast percent return on an investment of $30 million. The government is constantly looking for cost-effective, proven ways to improve education and to strengthen communities, and who serves communities more efficiently and effectively than museums? Have you ever seen an overstaffed museum? Have you ever run across a museum with a bloated budget? Never.
If we want government officials at every level to understand the importance of the museum field, A to Z – art museums to zoos – then museum professionals and museum visitors have to speak with one voice, so that our leaders see the totality of the museum enterprise. Together, we can move the needle a long way.
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