Community Engagement on Parade

At noon on the first Sunday in May, 50,000 spectators lined Bloomington Avenue in Minneapolis for the mile-long May Day parade that ends with an outdoor pageant and music and dance festival that lasts until dusk. The parade is not always May 1^st. It is not always pleasantly cool and sunny. In fact, one year it’s 91º and another year it’s 30º with snow flurries. But the parade and pageant, a distinctive blend of Bread and Puppet Theater, Earth Day, and Mardi Gras, are marvelous–lively, colorful, humorous, joyful, and powerful community experience.

Stilt walkers and hoop spinners; costumed and masked characters; swirling dancers and musicians; and unicyclists in this walking theatrical performance are from the neighborhood, community organizations, and school groups. They are volunteers, friends, teachers, clerks at the store, and artists. Cheered on by the crowd, they become the celebration of spring, dancing down the street, pounding on tambourines, pulling floats, pushing carts, and carrying banners. At the pageant in the park, the Tree of Life awakens from the darkness of winter and rises to the steady beating of drums. A festival of food and music extends the celebration to dusk.

The Heart of the Beast Puppet and Mask Theater’s (HOBT) annual May Day parade is not just a great way to spend a fine Sunday afternoon or a rite of spring. Honoring many cultural traditions, showcasing local talents, and giving voice to many, it is a grand and festive expression of community engagement assuming many forms and reaching back 42 years.

Photo credit: Max Haynes

Preparations begin months in advance and are nurtured by the creative vision and community spirit of Founder and Artistic Director Sandy Spieler as well as HOBT staff and friends. Groups and individuals, newcomers and veterans come together regularly in the social and creative environments of HOBT’s Community Build Workshops. More than two hundred committed participants help in workshops and construct 20-foot puppets and floats that punctuate the parade. On the day of the parade and pageant, 2,000 participants dance and boogie in the parade, carry water, hand out maps, serve as parade marshals, and star in the pageant.

Over 4 decades, the Heart of the Beast has become a catalyst for the creativity and connection that make community visible.

Rich and varied expressions of community and connection are everywhere along the parade route, in the banners and bantering, cheering, and in the strains of the parade’s anthem, “You Are My Sunshine.” The community workshops, much of what happens in the months leading up to May Day, and on the parade route itself is relevant to museums’ efforts to engage more fully with their community and friends. Several qualities strike me as particularly relevant and adaptable.

A roomy vision inspires and invites groups to craft their own messages. Much as a museum’s vision and mission guide and inspire its campaigns, initiatives, and community work, HOBT’s mission to create vital, poetic theater for all ages and backgrounds inspires the annual parade and its theme. Radical Returnings was the 2016 parade theme.

Each section of the parade carries a message which may be poetic, serious, or humorous. Groups of like-minded individuals compose messages to share on banners and signs along with elaborate costumes. The Rivers Have Called Upon Us honored Berta Cáceres the Honduran environmental activist who recently passed away. Dozens and dozens of fantastic costumed crabs, snails, lobsters, and hermit crabs swirled around a banner asking, Feeling Crabby? In the spirit of a community event, the parade is capped off by the beloved and sometimes zany, Free Speech section with banners, signs, and floats announcing causes and issues. 

My personal favorite among the sections: a banner announcing, Safety is measured by human kindness. 

Everyone gets into the act. During the 6 months of public parade preparation (internal work at HOBT begins on the heels of the previous parade), there are multiple opportunities to engage and connect. Opportunities allow both extended and briefer degrees of involvement. This openness to anyone and everyone participating reveals itself on May Day as a celebration by, for, and with the community. Babies through elders march in the parade and sit along the parade route. Spectators see cousins, teachers, and neighbors marching, waving, and singing. Local bands and cultural groups play and dance in the parade and at the park. Hometown music idol, Prince, was honored as a larger-than life puppet leading a parade section. 

"Can you take care of this snail for the rest of us?"

The parade spills into the crowd; spectators become participants. More than a few of the 50,000 spectators become participants along the way. Happy May Day greetings from paraders invite responses from spectators. Strains of “You Are My Sunshine,” fill the air and the crowd sings along and claps. The banner, Howl for the Whole Earth, elicits howls from paraders and spectators that last long after the banner has passed–just for the fun of it. In a quieter moment, a giant fish approaches a young child holding a very large snail made of clay in its hands. The fish asks the child, “Can you take care of this snail for the rest of us?” A quiet conversation follows. The child accepts and solemnly holds the snail for the duration of the parade.

A joyous blend of serious and silly. The edge between silly and serious blends and blurs moving the parade along in a spirit of joyous celebration. HOBT stirs imaginations and offers the materials– water, flour, newspaper, paint tape, and lumber–to tell stories, explore the struggles and celebrations of human existence, to build and create. It is also a welcoming place that individuals and collaborative groups can inhabit.   Rollerbladers and cyclists on tall bikes, backwards bikes, and unicycles cruise through the parade. Some, like the Southside Battletrain, build their own creations. This Mad Max" esque, bicycle-powered float has preceded the parade over the last few years, treating the crowd to new features including a Ferris wheel, band, and bar-b-q.

 Not every museum will find a "Mad Max" esque, bicycle-powered float with a Ferris wheel, band, and bar-b-q to be an expression of its community engagement intentions. But it does suggest that every museum can become a catalyst for  the creativity and connection that strengthen community and make it visible.  

 Related Museum Notes Posts

Local and Happening Now

Place Matters

Place matters. It matters to children and families, to communities and regions, and so–too–to museums and what they offer.

Place

An attractive but complex concept, place is more than physical setting, more than precise coordinates, or geography, weather, or historical markers. Place is something we experience directly, physically, and intensely through our senses. Place is also intangible, carrying the spirit of a physical setting that emanates from the shape and the feel of the land; from ground and vistas and how they meet; and from the quality of light and blue of the sky.

Describing, or defining, place can be difficult because we are surrounded so continuously by it. We might not notice until it changes or until we change our place.

Place Matters

Place is an important way in which we make meaning of the world. We mark our lives according to place. We live at an address, navigate using GPS, and share information with friends on Four-Square. Fundamentally, place is where we come from, where we feel alive, and where we find the past in the present moment. We want to know and be where we are. We share places with others, return to places that hold meaning, and remember and tell stories brimming with place.

Pipestone, MN

Many believe there is an instinctive connection between people and places referred to as a sense of place, place making, and the power of place. Place-people connections take many forms: experiencing smells, warmth, moisture, pungency particular to a place; identifying personally and deeply with it; feeling a bond or attachment to a place; and fiercely and proudly sharing a sense of place with others.

Some places have a greater degree of identity. A spectacular landform that has acquired meaning for many people over time distinguishes one place from others. A remarkable place often gains power from the intersection of the natural environment, culture, and technology–where people have invested labor, ingenuity, and perseverance in working land and resources. Power builds on power when a place of significance resonates with people, pulls and draws them to it because of what happened there over many years.

Place Matters to Museums

Place matters. It matters to children discovering who they are, exploring their world, and finding their place in it. Place matters to families growing and deepening connections to their communities. It matters to communities staying vibrant and being resilient. And place matters to visitors and newcomers who want to know and feel a place and what makes it distinctive.

The mill traces that powered the flour mills

Museums want and need to matter, to be meaningful and valued by the people and communities they serve. Their presence at powerful or distinctive intersections of the natural environment and human environments often establishes their relevance. At the water’s edge, in a park, or on a promontory; in an historic house, mill, or lighthouse; at a landmark, site of an engineering feat, or where a plesiosaur was discovered, museums, zoos and nature centers capitalize on local assets and pride. They are in a strong position to engage people in exploring, understanding, and connecting to the unique character of their surroundings.

Museums often view themselves as a commons, town square, or crossroads. Being grounded in place serves them in this role. It strengthens their connection with audience and community. Place counters a growing separation from the land that has been occurring. The emotional bonds to and knowledge of a place that visitors often bring offer a starting point for engagement, alternative perspectives, and new relationships. For those already familiar with the noteworthy and distinct qualities of a place, a museum’s rootedness can build on existing ties and heighten a sense of belonging. The appeal of something that only happens right here or with resources found exclusively here can attract experience samplers and collectors of novel experiences. Interpretation of engineering feats like the greatest direct driven power the world has seen in the mills at St Anthony Falls in Minneapolis now builds on local pride and interests in alternative energy. Place is always in process, evolving naturally, in memory, and meaning over time; inviting residents, neighbors, and tourists to return, reflect, and reconnect.

A place-based and local approach can also welcome in new and different audiences. Meaningful settings and engaging scenes may serve as an easy entry point for novice museumgoers. Shared heritage, contributions of historically underrepresented groups, or exploration of a local environmental issue can extend relationships with the museum. Reweaving the fabric of dispersed communities and sharing forgotten stories on place as the The Wing Luke Asian Museum in Seattle and the Lower East Side Tenement Museum in New York city do reach out to new audiences.

The Wing Luke Asian Museum (Photo: AIArchitect)

Being place-based is being local. As daily life becomes more global, being local becomes increasingly valued. We are not likely to be flooded with emotion or memories when we step into a chain grocery store, restaurant, or hotel that could be in any city or along any highway. But we do experience time and human capabilities intensely when we look onto the ruins of old mill buildings or step onto a stone landing where hundreds of thousands of new immigrants first arrived in their new land. Obscure, local details about place are intriguing. Local terms for landforms fascinate: knob, gap, holler, cove, bald, coulee, glen. Often–but not only–food carries the mantle of being local. Landscape, music, architecture can feel intensely local and certainly weather does. Morning fog and evening mist give a sense of local time to space.

Place Matters to Museums In Creating Experiences

Some museums draw strength and identity from their place and fully inhabit it–historic houses, maritime

St. Augustine Lighthouse and Museum: views of history

museums, natural history museums, forts, and lighthouses. Several varied examples are described in the Museums Now blog by Janet Petitpas to which I would add a few of my favorites such as Shelburne Farms, Columbia Gorge Discovery Center, St. Augustine Lighthouse (FL), and Aldo Leopold’s Shack on a worn-out farm along the Wisconsin River outside of Baraboo.   

While some museums may be less obviously grounded in place, any museum can dig in and find place-based connections to what its audience finds distinct, and meaningful. How do museums not blessed with an intrinsically powerful place create and convey a sense of place for visitors? Museum planning is a major avenue for deliberately exploring place in the context of a stretch of river, waterfront, or watershed, of views of bluffs or a nearby quarry, or in relation to an art colony or regional hub. At every organizational level, planning is a tool: for exploring and framing vision and mission, understanding the valued aspect of place, and engaging learners and placemakers across the lifespan.  A museum can consider how to use its resources, expertise, and creativity to influence and be influenced by its neighborhood in thinking about the following.

• Distinct and meaningful qualities related to location, area history, natural environment, cultural, and industrial past
• How to bring a broader perspective to specific features and their interaction in shaping lives and community
• How children and adults can experience a sense of place within and around the museum to connect with their interests and lives
• The varied and engaging experiences can strengthen place-based connections

Becoming Place-based and Place-filled

Tacoma waterfront meets the Museum of Glass

Museums can bring meaning to a place by making connections and relationships between people and place visible and active. Buildings, bridges, boats, shacks, gardens, and, even ruins carry the ambience of a place along with materials, plants, light, and stories. Windows may frame a view that says, “I’m home,” feature a local phenomenon, or capture changes in season, weather, and time of day. Materials that are local and locally sourced ground a museum in its own place. For example, the Baraboo-based Leopold Foundation used trees that Leopold himself had planted to construct its new building; Madison Children’s Museum used virtually all re-purposed materials in its exhibits that came from within 100 miles of Madison. Stone quarried locally and brickwork and the work of stonecutters and masons highlight a museum’s geology. Design references may be local as well, with elements reflecting vernacular or outstanding examples of architecture like the Flynn-Batagglia building for the Naval and Military Park at Buffalo’s Canalside.

Community engagement in planning, curating and interpreting place weaves understanding with meaning over time and from distinct and valued perspectives. Deep knowledge, varied experiences, and a sense of ownership of both natural and cultural environments can contribute understanding, memories, stories, and artifacts. Community voices speaking from direct experience, knowledge, and attachment narrate how a museum grew out of a particular place, keep memories of Borrum’s Woods vivid, and renew the museum’s relevance.

Creating Place-based Experiences

Window view and graphic at MOHAI, Seattle

The rich, tangible, and intangible qualities of place played out across three-dimensions are critical in creating meaningful place-based experiences in and around museums that explore, "you are here." These experiences build on the attractive and compelling qualities inspired by landforms and natural resources, views and stories, and the ingenuity and persistence pioneers and passersby invested in a place.

Museums bring their own creativity and ingenuity to connect visitors with place. Adjacencies and attention to scale; artifacts, real materials, and traces of past activity; tools to use and objects to touch; navigation with media; and opportunities for play carry the fullness of place. Even without re-enactors and replicas, visitors can become immersed in a place and its meanings as explorers, builders, placemakers, and creators themselves. At build platforms they build and rebuild cities, bridges, and houses; they finger topographic maps and models of the canal or mill traces. They dig for fossils or bones or play at a river exhibit located overlooking the real dig site or river, making comparisons, tracing perimeters, and pointing to identifying features. They stand between a current trolley and an image of its 20th century counterpart. 

Playing with place

Standing within a picture frame of a view or joining statues posing at a scenic overlook, visitors play with place, smile and imagine. Using new technology in unusual places, visitors experience New York’s Central Park through QR codes, listening to a concert played in this band shell or viewing a clearing as it was 100 years ago.

 Place-based Learning

Whether or not a museum is located on a noteworthy site, it can relate to the forces that shaped the past, are relevant to the present, and are affecting the future. Place-based learning is sometimes implemented museum-wide but is also familiar in museum programs, nature and environmental centers, and in school settings. This multi-disciplinary approach emphasizes learning through participation. Learners at every age are viewed as active agents and creators of knowledge.

Islandwood, Bainbridge Island

Place-based learning engages students and community members in exploring local cultures, landscape, or  environments. Projects are concrete, specific, and current, connecting local issues with participants’ daily lives and personal experiences. Some projects are of significant scale in participation and scope like the Sperm Whale Project­, an ocean conservation initiative carried out by the entire Homer (AL) community through the Pratt Museum. This and other projects presented in the Fall 2007 issue of the Journal of Museum Education highlight the variety of place-based learning in museums. 

Grounded in place themselves, museums actively harness the power of place to strengthen their relevance and value to their visitors and communities. Looking to the sweep and roll of the land, where water and land meet, and to the blue of the sky, museums create place-based experiences and environments for children and families, residents and tourists. With collections, interpretation, media, design, immersive environments, interactive experiences, docents and guides, and responsive customer service, museums engage, animate, interpret, and reveal connections and perspectives about its location and the experience of being there–whether there is the Immigrant Steps at the Erie Canal, on Main Street in Winona, MN, or on the waterfront in Tacoma.

Knowledge of a place–where you are and where you come from–is intertwined with knowledge of who you are. Landscape, in other words, shapes mindscape. - David Orr, Center for Eco-Literacy 

Resources

Milwaukee Art Center lifts off on the Lake Michigan lakefront

• Place-Based Education and the Museum. Journal of Museum Education. Volume 32, No. 3. Fall 2007
• Place-based Learning post by Janet Petitpas on Museums Now blog
• Promise of Place: Enriching Lives Through Place-based Education
• Project for Public Spaces
• Center for Eco-Literacy

Local & Happening Now

Seed Bearers (Photo by Bruce Silcox)

Maybe because winter lasts so very long in Minnesota, we relish the celebrations that say a final farewell to winter. This year, especially, winter has stepped aside oh-so reluctantly for spring. 

Sunday May 1^st crowds braved chilly 30-degree temperatures and a fierce wind to watch the 37^th annual May Day Parade sponsored by the Heart of the Beast Puppet and Mask Theater (HOBT). In spite of this year's wintry weather, this is a local tradition to welcome  spring. The mile long parade down Bloomington Avenue in Minneapolis ends in a pageant in Powderhorn Park where a larger-than-life puppet representing the Tree of Life emerges from the darkness of winter, this year represented by a crow. 

From the crow...

... the Tree of Life emerges. (Photos by Liz Welch)

Clearly, this seasonal celebration is not bound by the calendar that says spring arrives March 21^st. That’s the

point. We share a celebration of  Earth Day across the country on April 22^nd. But some celebrations like Arbor Day–celebrated in January in Florida and in May in Alaska–are seasonally timed. This decidedly local quality interests me.

The Parade is produced by neighbors, school groups, community organizations, friends, and artists in a way that also manages the long wait for spring in these high latitudes. Preparations begin months in advance. Groups and individuals, newcomers and veterans come together regularly in the social and creative environments of the HOBT workshops. Here, they transform cardboard, paper bags, found and natural objects, and, of course, duct tape, into the masks and costumes for the parade. They help construct 20-foot puppets and floats that punctuate the parade and star in the pageant. Finally, neighbors, friends, and students become the celebration of spring, dancing down the street, pounding on tambourines, walking on stilts, pushing carts, and carrying floats.

The sun carriers

Considering the unspring-like weather this year, crowds were surprisingly strong. People appreciate and want to be part of what the celebration represents, even if the weather doesn't deliver.

Not all local celebrations must be big, take months to put together, or use multiple colors of duct tape to be meaningful. Sometimes the most touching ones happen at a very personal scale and on the next block.

Old Man Winter is put to bed.

A celebration of spring was also held last week. Preschool-aged children at the Greenspoon Day Care down the street put Old Man Winter to bed. In a May ritual that has evolved over many years, a dozen young children rushed out from the corner of the house to find Old Man Winter (an obliging husband). Waving their hands to make ribbons flutter at their wrists, they covered Old Man with a quilt. 

Standing over him, they let out great cheers and joyfully tossed seeds into the air. They then moved to claim their winter’s projects to take home: soft dolls they had patiently created  over several months. Very local, very small, and tailored to the audience of appreciative parents, grandparents, neighbors, and day care alums. 

In fact, this celebration almost didn’t happen; some of the littlest children just weren’t sure they could face Old Man Winter. That’s how happening now this event was

Dolls created over the winter are now ready to go home.

 

Being Local: Not Just For Food

Fresh from the garden; Edible School Yard at Greensboro Children's Museum

Examples of how important fresh and local has become for food are as abundant as zucchini in a Minnesota garden in August. They are absolutely everywhere. Grocery stores have local produce sections. CSA’s (community supported agriculture) are popular and growing more so. Cookbooks focus on locally foraged food. Some restaurants advertise local and seasonal menus (a bit challenging in Minnesota in winter). Farmers’ markets apply more qualifiers to their fare: locally grown, seasonal, sustainable, and organic. Friends rhapsodize on the eggs from Donald Popps’ happy hens. House guests arrive bearing gifts of huckleberry jam from western Montana.

If being local instills pride, pleasure, and a sense identity around food, does it have a comparable value for museums? To a certain extent any museum is bound to be somewhat local. Can it be expressly and intensely local? Is there an equivalent terroir–the special characteristics that geography, geology, and climate of a certain place bestow upon particular varieties of grapes and sometimes are applied to other foods–for museums?

Being Local Matters for Museums

Museums need to matter. We can go back to John Cotton Dana who pronounced that, “A museum is good only in so far as it is of use.” Stephen Weill insisted that museums matter in his books, essays and articles. Emlyn Koster and others have lent their voices to a call for relevancy.

If museums need to matter, it follows that they need to matter in the places where they are located; they need to matter locally. Otherwise, why would a museum exist where it does in the first place? How does being local matter? What does being local mean? And what are the many forms that being local takes?

Locals Walking Through the Doors

It’s hard to overlook attendance as a very basic factor in why being local matters. Because of proximity and drive times, a museum’s local market is usually its greatest source of on-site visitors. At many museums residents are more than 90% of visitors. For school groups and families with young children, proximity is an even more relevant consideration in visiting a museum, zoo, or aquarium. Once at the museum, a visitor's experience may be enhanced by seeing a friend, neighbor, or former neighbor or recognizing the friendly cashier or museum director.

Attendance is also the source of members who contribute to earned revenue by purchasing memberships and, in some cases, by contributing as donors. Visitors feed traffic to museum programs, events and films. Attendance provides customers to the museum store and to the restaurant or café. Visitors are also the source of word-of-mouth advertising responsible for getting the word out to potential visitors. Not surprisingly, the very local nature of weather also affects some patterns of attendance, for instance, bumping up attendance in the north during cabin fever days and in the south during stretches of high temperature and humidity. And finally, what can a museum do without the people who step forward to contribute to their community by volunteering?

Local Dollars

For some museums, local funding comes from city or county budgets or grants from school districts to support field trips or teacher professional development. Some cities provide annual financial support to their museums. In communities like Denver, funds from a voter-approved city tax district are distributed to museums to strengthen them and to increase museum access for residents. In Phoenix, a voter-approved bond fund helped with the purchase and partial renovation of a historic school for the Children’s Museum of Phoenix’s new home.

Museums not currently receiving city or county funding persist in the hope they will. Building a successful case requires clearly conveying how the museum matters locally, how it aligns with community priorities, makes an economic impact, or contributes to local quality of life. Especially during a time of economic challenge, recognition of being locally valuable becomes even more critical.

Learning on the Spot

Learning is local in very real ways. As infants, we are all learning in very immediate and direct ways–with mouths, touch, and the grasp of tiny hands. While most museums are not hosting thousands of infants, direct sensory experience continues to nourish learning for children certainly through eight years old. Age-related development affects children’s understanding of concepts like place and time. Seven-to-ten year olds begin to grasp faraway and long ago, but they have difficulty learning about both at the same time. Throughout childhood, learning remains local for children.

Simply by virtue of their daily lives, adults are well-informed about what is “here.” They constantly use everyday and every-season information that is deep, personal, and experienced. They develop and use mental maps with short-cuts across town and potholes to avoid. Seemingly specialized knowledge like the average date of last frost and when the smelt run is second nature even in cities. Locals don’t need an app to know the best view of the river, where the eagles nest, or where to find the most spectacular maple tree in October.

Most of us like to feel smart. When we encounter something we know in our hometown museum–that the only place the Mississippi River flows east-west is through the Quad Cities–we are pleased with ourselves. Local knowledge gives us the confidence to stretch to less familiar territory. Novelty may keep us involved, but familiarity is the start we need for exploring more broadly. 

Doing Good Locally

It may be evident that a museum matters locally because a city, metropolitan area, or region is the source of its audience and, hopefully, funding. A museum also matters because it contributes to the community becoming stronger and safer, or it makes an economic impact, or it helps build social cohesion.

Museums, historic sites, and nature centers that are fundamentally about a community asset have a basic connection to being local and are also sources of identity and pride. They draw from a physical connection to a local place, person, event, or a unique environmental or landscape feature. By their very presence and location, they are about here: objects found, made, or used on this spot. They change with these seasons, grow what grows here, and gather stories about here, shared by locals.

Many museums without inherently local roots, however, find being local a compelling direction to follow. They actively pursue ways to contribute to community good. Aligning resources, strategies, and partners, they build a sense of community, increase social interaction, and increase civic engagement.

Working towards greater community impact Pittsburgh Children’s Museum and its partners have been collaborating to create a “vibrant, attractive, accessible” Northside through The Charm Bracelet Project. In countless other communities, museums help educate school children in their area by taking active roles in the local education system. They sync their school field trip programs to local curriculum standards and provide professional development in STEM for teachers. McWane Science Center (Birmingham, AL) conducts science labs that are part of the required city-wide high school curriculum.

Being local is also a way for museums to live out their values and express their identities. Madison Children’s Museum, California Academy of Sciences (San Francisco) and ECHO Lake Aquarium and Science Center (Burlington, VT) are just a few of the museums known locally (and nationally) for well-developed local-only, green, or sustainability policies and practices. The mission, educational, as well as financial motivations for being green also advance the museum’s whole-community thinking.

Being grounded in and connected to a community also help a museum accomplish its broad organizational and strategic goals. Effective stakeholder engagement relies on deep and varied local connections. Knowing the audience or, more important, being known and trusted by residents, neighbors, and visitors, can help build community traction and reach underserved and non-traditional audiences. Bringing learners and citizens into a planning process or involving them in exhibit and program development brings diverse local perspectives, shares local stories, and enriches museum experiences with lived knowledge of the community for other visitors.

This is a very basic start to exploring how being local matters. I’m hoping it might set the stage for exploring some related questions on this topic. Do you see other ways in which being local matters or do you have a different take on being local?

I am also interested in several other questions. I hope you will comment, suggest, or contribute your thoughts to a continuing discussion on being local.

• How do you define being local?
• What are some of the many forms that being local takes in museums?
• How can being local bridge with national or global issues or interests?
• Can being local become a value model, perhaps with economic benefits, that being local has become for food? 
• How will the importance of being local change as museums become more connected in more ways on-line?