The Modern Nonprofit

MAY 1, 2024

Well-planned events enable nonprofits, community groups, businesses and government agencies to showcase AAPI arts, food, performances, and more. The theme should clearly reflect the purpose of honoring and highlighting AAPI cultures. Consider featuring traditional music, dance, theater, or martial arts groups from the community.

Celebrate 59

Celebrate Education Fundraising Culture 59

Museum 2.0

JUNE 25, 2014

Two years ago, we mounted one of our most successful participatory exhibits ever at the Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History: Memory Jars. Two years later, this project is still one of the most fondly remembered participatory experiences at the museum--by visitors and staff. He creates a visual representation of his story.

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Participatory Evaluation Project Museum 52

Beth's Blog: How Nonprofits Can Use Social Media

JANUARY 19, 2017

Yesterday, I spent a day facilitating leadership workshops for arts leaders attending the Art House Convergence Conference near Park City, Utah. This accomplished a few things: I didn’t have to trash my plans and revert to a traditional lecture. I made it participatory so participants helped move the furniture.

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Lecture Classroom Utah Experiment 93

Museum 2.0

OCTOBER 18, 2011

In our quest to make the public areas of the museum more reflective of Santa Cruz culture, we moved these boards from a comprehensive display in the history gallery into a main stairwell, prominently visible from the lobby and throughout the building. We decided to approach the label-writing for these boards in a participatory way.

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Participatory San Diego Museum History 48

Museum 2.0

SEPTEMBER 12, 2012

In the spirit of a popular post written earlier this year , I want to share the behind the scenes on our current almost-museumwide exhibition at the Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History, Santa Cruz Collects. The content focuses on the question of WHY we collect and how our collections reflect our individual and community identities.

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Participatory Museum History International 44

Museum 2.0

JUNE 10, 2010

I spent last week working with staff at the Minneapolis Institute of Art (MIA) on ways to make this encyclopedic art museum more open to visitor participation across programs, exhibitions, and events. While there, I was lucky to get to experience a highly participatory exhibition that the MIA mounts once a decade: Foot in the Door.

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Participatory Museum Arts Artist 46

Beth's Blog: How Nonprofits Can Use Social Media

FEBRUARY 24, 2009

Raymond raised some good reflective questions about backchannels that are still very relevant four years later as back channels goe more mainstream and search for best practices on how to incorporate them into our conferencing experience. One of the reflections. (Warning she says the F-word on the clip.)

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Conference Reflection Resource Arts 69

Museum 2.0

AUGUST 25, 2016

Most participatory projects were short-term, siloed innovations, not institutional transformations. Interestingly--for good and ill--this transformative funding program coincided with a national funding crisis in the arts in the UK. Bernadette Peters' provocative 2011 report, Whose Cake is it Anyway? didn't mince words. and realistic.

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Museum Participatory Resource Place 20

Museum 2.0

MAY 9, 2012

Our curator writes labels about licking the art. Merilee Mostov and the Columbus Museum of Art. In particular, we had a great group of 15 talking about participatory history experiences on Sunday. Participatory art and co-creation on the rise. I found this idea really powerful. I host dating games.

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Reflection Columbus Museum Participatory 43

Museum 2.0

AUGUST 28, 2013

Earlier in 2013, I was amazed to visit one of the new “Studio” spaces at the Denver Art Museum. The Denver Art Museum is no stranger to community collaborations, but we’ve been dipping in our toe a little more deeply when it comes to developing permanent participatory installations.

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Denver Museum Arts Collaboration 35

Museum 2.0

APRIL 15, 2015

"The arts are future-making." I wrote this down when Deborah Cullinan said it at a meeting of arts leaders about a year ago. Deborah''s vision for the arts leading the way to stronger future inspired me. Deborah''s vision for the arts leading the way to stronger future inspired me. The arts ARE future-making.

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San Francisco Arts Design Marketing 20

Museum 2.0

FEBRUARY 1, 2012

Last week, Douglas McLellan of artsJournal ran a multi-vocal forum on the relationship between arts organizations and audiences, asking: In this age of self expression and information overload, do our artists and arts organizations need to lead more or learn to follow their communities more? Here are three of my favorites.

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Arts Museum Artist Tucson 45

Museum 2.0

JANUARY 16, 2013

Then again, Saturday was hardly normal at the Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History. This past weekend, in conjunction with our exhibition about Ze Frank's current participatory project, A Show , we hosted " Ze Frank Weekend "--a quickie summer camp of workshops, activities, presentations, and lots of hugging.

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Reflection Community Museum Participatory 43

Museum 2.0

NOVEMBER 6, 2012

I'm thrilled to share this brilliant guest post by Marilyn Russell, Curator of Education at the Carnegie Museum of Art. In a straightforward way, Marilyn explains how her team developed a participatory project to improve engagement in a gallery with an awkward entry. Reassert the "forum"?

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Museum Arts Problem Design 45

Museum 2.0

NOVEMBER 5, 2013

Our museum in Santa Cruz has been slammed by those who believe participatory experiences have gone too far. We always knew that the inclusion of participatory and community-centered practices in arts institutions was controversial. To me, the backlash against participatory and community-centered experiences is not surprising.

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Participatory Museum Arts History 53

Museum 2.0

APRIL 20, 2009

I’d never attended before and was impressed by many very smart, international people doing radical projects to make museum collections and experiences accessible and participatory online. Are participatory activities happening on the web because that is the best place for them? Instead, I found a standard art museum.

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Participatory Museum Web Indianapolis 35

Beth's Blog: How Nonprofits Can Use Social Media

MAY 7, 2010

I'm a huge fan of work and the way she thinks - especially after she road the Scare House ride on the Santa Cruz boardwalk with me and did a brilliant reflection on its design. Nina has written a fantastic book engagement called The Participatory Museum. Tags: Art Sector Arts & Technology engagement.

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Model Active Activism Activities 98

Museum 2.0

JANUARY 4, 2010

It's rare that a participatory museum project is more than a one-shot affair. Wikipedia Loves Art, Take One The first version of Wikipedia Loves Art first took place in February 2009. Over 13,000 photographs were submitted by 102 photographers at the fifteen different institutions, documenting about 6,200 pieces of art.

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Wikipedia Arts Museum Images 40

Museum 2.0

APRIL 26, 2018

One that has found remarkable success is California’s Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History. She says that the museum made changes in hiring and board recruitment practices, and invited the community in to help reshape the facility into a place that reflected and represented its people and their interests. The impact was dramatic.

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Washington Audience Museum Intergenerational 49

Museum 2.0

OCTOBER 2, 2013

Proposals involve sculpture, performance, participatory-projects, videos, and installation that use and respond to the museum’s collection. This past July, artist Guillermo Gómez proposed to restore a piece of art. Both objects and art-objects would be part of this continuing transformation and evolution.

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Artist Museum Proposal Participatory 49

Museum 2.0

JULY 1, 2011

I've now been the Director of The Museum of Art & History in Santa Cruz for two months. It really reflects what we're trying to do here to transform our institution into as relevant, dynamic, and successful an organization as possible. Lots more on this in the months to come, but I thought you might like to read the article.

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Museum History Arts Work 31

Beth's Blog: How Nonprofits Can Use Social Media

NOVEMBER 14, 2007

The question forced me to reflect on my experience last summer. It made me curious about the art of mircoblogging - and how you develop the technique of saying it in 140 characters. I just discovered a new site called " Great Nonprofits " another participatory philanthropy site. How do you know if a charity is legit?

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Reflection Conversation Develop Cambodia 50

Museum 2.0

SEPTEMBER 18, 2013

Originally posted in April of 2011, just before I hung up my consulting hat for my current job at the Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History. In 2008 and 2009, there were many conference sessions and and documents presenting participatory case studies, most notably Wendy Pollock and Kathy McLean''s book Visitor Voices in Museum Exhibitions.

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Museum Question Participatory Vietnam 45

Beth's Blog: How Nonprofits Can Use Social Media

NOVEMBER 3, 2015

It is always challenge to use participatory techniques when your participants are not native English speakers and you don’t speak the language. I thought I’d share a few quick insights and tips that I learned for others who may be preparing for doing tech training internationally and want to use participatory techniques.

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Facilitation Training Train International 50

Museum 2.0

JULY 23, 2019

In reflecting on the sample, I’ve made some broad reflections on museum workers and visitors. Today, I wanted to think about participatory elements, something so essential to this blog. Lumin at Detroit Institute of Art Now on to the interactives…I’ve been thinking a great deal about the function of interactives in museums.

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Museum Participatory Interaction Classroom 35

Museum 2.0

JANUARY 11, 2012

I can't say that any one experience--working on a collage with other visitors, swinging on a hammock, discovering a participatory display for pocket artifacts in the bathroom--directly contributed to increased attendance and giving. This community was ready for a museum that reflected the unique creative identity of Santa Cruz.

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Audience Participatory Museum History 47

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. The contributions that are the "best" may be a narrow reflection of your own personal preferences.

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Design Participatory Learning Instruction 45

Bloomerang

MAY 21, 2021

The kind of strategic planning processes that I lead are inclusive and participatory which means that the group is consulted, the vision of the group, the energy, we kind of tap into the energy, vision, knowledge, experience of the people who will be doing the work in order to make plans. Where are we not putting our energy?

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Video Nonprofit San Francisco Question 124

Museum 2.0

DECEMBER 26, 2012

I have felt in the past that some of the MCA's holiday videos were a bit too pretentious, but this year's edition is full of joy and a message that really reflects what they do in Denver. I LOVE the way the James Irvine Foundation presents their lessons learned from grant-making in the Arts Innovation Fund program.

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Denver Museum Arts Participatory 33

Museum 2.0

JULY 31, 2013

You''re in for a treat, with upcoming posts on creativity, collections management, elitism, science play, permanent participatory galleries, partnering with underserved teens, magic vests, and more. Reflective time is important, especially when your work is hectic. It is this community--you--that I want to reflect a bit more on.

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Museum Participatory Reflection Conference 35

Museum 2.0

OCTOBER 29, 2009

Unconference sessions , featuring topics as diverse as "playing an ARG" (with real labyrinth adventures ), "engaging visitors who were dragged to the museum," and "measuring and defining success in participatory projects." Facilitator bits. Always start and end with something creative.

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Facilitation Reflection Museum Participatory 32

Museum 2.0

APRIL 25, 2011

I've seen this line of questioning almost completely disappear in the past two years due to many research studies and reports on the value and rise of participation, but in 2006-7, social media and participatory culture was still seen as nascent (and possibly a passing fad). In 2008, the conversation started shifting to "how" and "what."

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Question Participatory Museum Vietnam 49

Museum 2.0

JULY 23, 2013

We are hiring for a School Programs Coordinator to wrangle the 3,500+ students and their teachers who come to the museum every year for a tour and hands-on experience in our art and history exhibitions. Museum of Art and History Quick Hits professional development' Most school tours are for intact groups—a single class or grade.

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Program Museum Work History 39

Beth's Blog: How Nonprofits Can Use Social Media

JANUARY 18, 2011

Establish local networks of individuals and organizations using social media to help build stronger organizations and more participatory societies. The debriefing question encouraged us to reflect on points of connection and reciprocity. Trainer the Trainers: Beth Kanter, Mohamad Najem, Jessica Dherre, and Mary Joyce.

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Network Build Yemen Morocco 95

Museum 2.0

FEBRUARY 22, 2012

What happens when a formal art museum invites a group of collaborative, participatory artists to be in residence for a year? But for museum and art wonks, it could be. Several artists offer surprising insights into making participatory projects appealing to visitors. No, this is not a reality TV show.

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Artist Museum Project Public 39

Beth's Blog: How Nonprofits Can Use Social Media

SEPTEMBER 8, 2016

Last week I was honored to be a counselor at Museum Camp , an annual professional development event hosted by the Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History (MAH). Nina Simon, the executive director of the museum, is an expert in participatory design and fantastic facilitator. Being Intentional About Your To Do List.

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Causes Change Museum Social 50

Museum 2.0

FEBRUARY 9, 2010

Recently, I was giving a presentation about participatory techniques at an art museum, when a staff member raised her hand and asked, "Did you have to look really hard to find examples from art museums? Aren't art museums less open to participation than other kinds of museums?" I was surprised by her question.

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Museum Difference Participatory History 29