Six Steps to Community Engagement

By Christine Moreland, Ontario Museum Association

The Ontario Museum Association has just released Engaging your Community: A Toolkit for Museums (EYC). This free toolkit outlines a six step process for museums to work with their communities to assess institutional relevance and create a plan to deepen the museum’s relationship with its community, in turn increasing the sustainability of the museum. The intended outcomes are to:

• Provide your museum with a process to deepen your understanding of what community engagement means to you; 
• Examine, evaluate, and articulate your current relationship with and role in your community; 
• Explore how community engagement can be part of planning and delivery, at all levels and in all aspects of the museum.

Who can use it?
Anyone! One of the main goals during the development of the toolkit was to make it user-friendly. The toolkit includes instructions and activities that we hope are straightforward and accessible for museums of all sizes.

This year, the Ontario Museum Association will assist four museums in completing the Engaging your Community process. Participating organizations will write case studies on their experiences to share their learnings with the wider museum sector.

Are you ready to Engage your Community?

Read or Download the Toolkit

Want to learn more?
Join us at the AMA Conference for a pre-conference workshop to test drive some of the toolkit activities:

Thursday, September 17
10:00 am to 3:00 pm
Lunch and refreshments provided. 
Registration required.

Engaging your Community: A Toolkit for Museums is an initiative of the museumsuccession project, funded by the Trillium Foundation, an agency of the Government of Ontario. The toolkit was adapted from The Learning Coalition’s Building Responsive Museums (2009) by Tamarack, Institute for Community Engagement, and the Ontario Museum Association.