Seventeenth International Conference on the Inclusive Museum

Abstract

Challenges facing museums today include managing attendance, relevance, and innovation; issues that are linked to a lack of support for diversity in museum staffing, management and stakeholders. These challenges create difficulty in demonstrating a deep understanding of community context and values. Benefits of implementing the values of SDGs in museums include building partnerships and collaborations with organisations, encouragement for stakeholders to work on sustainable development and fostering education and awareness around social and sustainable issues. The United Nations’ 17 sustainable development goals (SDGs), developed in 2015, aim to provide society with a model that reconciles market growth and production with human rights and preservation. There is an opportunity to utilise the SDGs to provide a framework for museums to align their operations with global social and sustainability efforts. The Catalyst for Peace project is an initiative developed in partnership with Salzburg Global Seminar and the Nippon Foundation. The goals are to understand the current state of diversity within museums, and their audiences, and create policies and practices accordingly. The project uses the diversity mapping tool, Diversity Atlas, providing the museum with visitors’ collective cultural profile, improving both short/long-term public and corporate communication and representation. The use of data to map diversity in museums identifies patterns of representation and participation among different cultural groups, which serves as a prompt to identify barriers for marginalized communities in accessing museum resources. This project helps museums become more diverse, inclusive, and effective in promoting peace, and social capital in society.