Cultivating Connections, Collaboration, and Collective Action within Museum Spaces: Leveraging Oral History and Cross-Sector Partnerships for Local and Global Impact

Workshop Presentation
Gracia Dyer Jalea  

Museums have the potential to act as effective communication channels where individuals, communities, and organizations can gather to witness, share, and exchange stories, strategies, and solutions. This interaction can inspire mutual discovery, build trust, and nurture ongoing relationships aimed at mutual understanding and collective action. As secular and publicly accessible spaces, museums are uniquely positioned to support co-created processes that can lead to action and change within their local communities. To achieve this, museum professionals must excel in collaboration, partnership, facilitation, relationship management, and co-created design. In this role, museums do not possess all the answers, expertise, or resources but become one partner among many, working together to learn and contribute to an ongoing effort to understand how local efforts can advance the UN's Sustainable Development Goals by grounding their relevance in local needs and locally relevant solutions. In this workshop, we will explore how oral history, both as theory and method, can provide an ethical framework and practical skills to guide and design co-created processes. These processes rely on collaboration and interdisciplinary, multi-sectoral partnerships to identify intersecting interests and disseminate strategies that allow locally held knowledge and solutions to contribute to global conversations about sustainable development. Through case studies, story sharing, and mapping exercises, we will harness the collective wisdom of participants to compile examples and strategies that conference attendees can use when designing these processes at their respective institutions.