Internships are meant to be learning opportunities, but professionals are facing challenges: What should we be teaching, what should students already know, and how can we meet all needs? Through panel and group discussion, we will identify opportunities to move forward together successfully for museums and interns alike.

Looking for a large scale community engagement project? Our small team recently completed an amazing exhibition, ‘Through Our Lens: Hands,’ that shared stories of 50 diverse individuals, often the unsung heroes from communities, through black and white photographs of their hands, paired with a poignant narrative of their unique story.

Discover the transformative power of the Vision Lab at the Missouri Historical Society, an exhibition space where a new organizational blueprint for the future meets community feedback. Learn about leveraging evaluation as a leadership tool, ideas for effective cross-departmental collaboration, and generating actionable feedback from the Lab’s first two years.

Stop wishing your staff knew how to effectively manage volunteers and do something about it! Come learn how to create your own tailor-made staff training that is gentle yet effective. Once staff realize the value of utilizing volunteers correctly expect increased engagement and see more mission moments fulfilled.

The way forward for collections stewardship often lies in external funding. A National Endowment for the Humanities program officer and two grant awardees will elucidate on how to meet collections preservation and access goals with grant funding. They will demystify the application process and present case studies of successful projects.

A successful redesign project depends on many things, including crafting an effective RFP, choosing the right partner agency, and allocating the appropriate internal resources to get the project over the finish line. This session will provide you with tips and best practices to manage the process from start to finish.

How can we as museum practitioners advocate for play in a museum space? Hear about Conner Prairie’s answer: a Theory of Change, a combination of logic models and storytelling that links the educational programs guests experience to the change we want to see in the world.

What happens when you fill an exhibit space with vintage items and let visitors touch…everything? Will they steal stuff, break stuff, have a great time, or all of the above? This session explores lessons learned from the immersive “rec room” space of the Illinois State Museum’s Growing Up X exhibition – a risk that paid off!