During the Association of Children’s Museums conference “ Interactivity 2014”, we had the opportunity to lead a fantastic session that dug into the struggles of building a brand new children’s museum from the ground up. This session began with a short documentary video (that we shot on our iPhones) featuring several of our industry friends, including Tag! Children’s Museum of St. Augustine, Imaginosity Discover Center of Detroit, and Mississippi Children’s Museum. Each in a different stage of development, from pre-emerging to established and growing, the video shared the story of how each museum came to be.
Following the video presentation, Cloudberry Studio hosted a panel discussion, inviting the audience to share their anxieties about starting a museum and ask questions from the panel. From the questions, we learned something important: it doesn’t matter where your museum is located or even how big it is, we all have similar struggles. While society would agree with us that advocating for children is a good thing, we still come up against opposition as we build children’s museums. It takes a very special group of people and a lot of hard work to accomplish this incredible task, but when the doors open to those smiling faces, we are quickly reminded of why we all do what we do.
We hope you will take a few minutes to watch what we’re calling our “draft documentary”. Wherever you are in the journey, we hope it encourages you. We look forward to adding segments to the film and developing new videos that focus on specific topics, so please leave us a comment to let us know what topics may be of interest to you and your team.
Journeys of Emergence and Reinvention from Cloudberry Studio on Vimeo.