AMERICAN ALLIANCE OF MUSEUMS

Over the three-year term of this strategic framework, AAM aims to:

Celebrate, strengthen, and connect the museum professional community in all its diversity.

Support museum professionals in learning from each other, managing through crisis, and rebuilding strong, relevant, and sustainable institutions.

Lead the museum field in building support for museums as essential community infrastructure and becoming more equitable, inclusive, and impactful institutions and community partners.

Critically examine AAM’s programs and operations to ensure we model our values.

The Alliance will advocate for the value of museums, their power to change the world, and their essential roles in sustaining strong, inclusive, and resilient communities by enriching education systems, bolstering economies, strengthening the social fabric of communities, improving peoples’ wellbeing, and beyond.

Building on our momentum as a driving force for Diversity, Equity, Accessibility, and Inclusion (DEAI), the Alliance will engage partners, allies, and experts to champion an anti-racism movement across the museum field, catalyzing and supporting changemakers in museums and efforts to create more equitable outcomes in all aspects of their structures and programming.

Our Alliance will bolster its role in supporting, celebrating, and convening the broad scope of the museum community. Following a period of radical disruption for the museum field, we will comprehensively review and adapt key fieldwide programs and initiatives to enable the museum community to connect and thrive.

Equally important as what we do, AAM will critically review how we work to ensure equity is at the core of our culture, our structure is agile and scaled to national service as a changemaker and leader, and our business model facilitates a financially sustainable future.

AAM is able to develop partnerships through its broad reach within the museum field. Approximately 35,000 AAM members and an additional 100,000 audience members regularly engage with AAM content and connection channels. Through AAM's twenty professional networks, the Alliance is able to foster the growth, networking, and professional development of the museum workforce. Diversity, equity, accessibility, and inclusion is a key component of AAM's values and an area of focus in the current strategic plan. In partnership with AAM's Inclusion department, AAM is committed to expanding the intercultural competencies of its staff, trustees, volunteers, and members.

AAM Grows Together: We believe museums can change the world—and in 2021, AAM put this belief into action as never before. In July 2021, AAM celebrated the culmination of our Creative Aging initiative with the Museum Summit on Creative Aging, a virtual summit equipping museum professionals with inspiration, tools, and connections to help them serve the growing and underserved population of people who are “55 or better.” Museums can play a pivotal role in combatting loneliness and isolation—and in finding new ways to harness the knowledge, experience, and creativity of this growing population. It was important to us that AAM leverage our network of member organizations to address this issue—and we are already thinking about ways we can continue building on this work and start similar initiatives supporting other populations.

Our Facing Change an initiative to diversify museum Boards of Directors, 46 percent of which are 100 percent white 1 —hit three major milestones in 2021. We concluded our comprehensive Board training initiative, conducted a field-wide survey to gather updated Board demographic data, and wrote a comprehensive report detailing our most recent findings, which will be made public in 2022.

AAM Acts Together: In 2021, our field witnessed firsthand the link between preparation and successful crisis response. For more than a decade, our Advocacy team has been building relationships with legislators and creating opportunities for members of our field to speak directly to them about the unique needs of museums. This proactive work meant that when the pandemic began forcing museums to close their doors, we were ready to act— and Congress was primed to act on our sector’s behalf. Over the course of the pandemic, AAM secured billions of dollars for museums through their inclusion in the Shuttered Venue Operators Grant (SVOG) program and the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) that helped save 183,000 jobs at over 9,000 museums.

AAM Works Together: Our community was eager to convene in 2021, and AAM was determined to give our member organizations this opportunity. We worked with presenters to come up with new ways of connecting to their audiences, shelving lectures in favor of interactive sessions involving breakout discussions, work groups, and games. A virtual experience also opened opportunities to incorporate the voices and perspectives of individuals who may not have been able to make an appearance at an in-person event. Several luminaries in our field and prominent figures in arts and politics created and sent video messages! Post-meeting surveys indicate a distinct interest in AAM holding future virtual events: a testament to the creativity and hard work of our Meetings & Events team, as well as our members.