What was the last story that you heard? 

Perhaps, your child told you about their day. Dashia and her bestie at day care used their dinosaur toys, a slightly haggard T-Rex and colorful triceratops, to act out a drama that sounded suspiciously like Lord of the Rings. Or you and your colleague were catching up; he told you about his weekend trip to a new city. His day began with getting lost but ended with finding a scenic outlook. Maybe you were talking with a grandparent. The phrase “back in my day” began, and you learned how your grandma had once travelled from Alabama to Michigan to start a new life, one suitcase in hand.

This month's resources show how shifting your perspective—through storytelling, moments of awe, and embracing contradiction—can deepen empathy, help you navigate difficult times, and open new paths for understanding ourselves and others.

Anyone who manages museum field trips will tell you that even with the best laid plans, some unpredictable logistical challenge will come up. Now, as someone who evaluates students’ and teachers’ experiences on museum field trips, these challenges bring up a whole new crop of questions and potential solutions. I wanted to share some solutions to a few common field trip evaluation challenges in the hopes that whether you’re a field trip program manager, educator, internal evaluator, or external evaluator you can find the best ways to continuously evaluate school field trips—even when the bus doesn’t show!

As someone who joined the museum evaluation field relatively recently, there was a lot to learn about evaluative methods as they relate to museums and cultural institutions. Over the years, Kera Collective has published so much insight detailing how we approach our work, so let’s recap some of our favorite resources on our Learning Hub about evaluation methods!

Impact is the positive difference something (like a museum) makes in people’s lives. It’s how people’s lives are somehow better because of an experience, interaction, or intervention.  

I most often hear impact referenced in the museum field in terms of measurement. Questions like these are common:

• How can we measure our museum’s impact? 

• How can we demonstrate our impact? 

Implicit in these questions is the assumption that impact is happening, and that the real puzzle is in figuring out how to prove it to others. 

But, what makes you so sure impact is happening? And what do you mean by impact in the first place?

We value lifelong learning, and we are grateful for everyone who shares their wisdom with us, helping us to grow and get better at what we do. This month, we’re sharing some of that wisdom with you, including reflections on relational reciprocity, museum AI policies, and effective report writing.

Recently, for a Kera Collective coffee break, where we talk about relevant research and news, we read this thoughtful post by Sarah Jencks on AAM’s blog about why museums need a civic strategy. It made me think about some resulting general questions: can a museum meaningfully engage in civics? What does it mean for a museum to have a civic strategy? And how can engaging in civics create a reputation of trust for museums when thinking about community work? These are seemingly simple questions, but I believe that museums as institutions have to think deeply about their standing before attempting to incorporate civic engagement.

For one of our recent Coffee Breaks, a bi-weekly team meeting where we discuss cultural institution-related news or research, I led a conversation about preserving digital content, inspired by the recent deletion of federal website pages and the Internet Archive’s initiative to preserve them. It’s something I’m passionate about!

We finally gave our newsletter a name—one that reflects our vision and values. Meaning making is at the heart of our work. It’s what happens in museums, and it's what we do every day at Kera Collective. This is a space where we share what we are curious about and what we’re making sense of, together and as individuals.

This is The Meaning Maker.