Mend the Marble - Family Fun for Going Green

Need some idea starters for your museum's after-school program, your vacation program, on Earth Day, or for nights in the museum?  Or an item for your museum gift shop?  Here's a deck of 52 cards, each with an activity to help heal our planet or Mend the Marble.

The 52 ideas are organized along the themes of, you guessed it, Reduce, Reuse, Recycle and Repurpose.

Visiting families will appreciate the deck for help with fun family activities:
- Staging a "No Power Night" encourages activities that aren't plugged-in. Board games by candlelight are the usual favorite - just be safe.
- Make, Mend and Make-over activities are great for a rainy day.

The eco-club you have after school can make battery buckets to take home to help organize recycling. What about making braided place mats or rugs with an old T-shirt, or drawing on saved popsicle sticks for plant labels - can you draw a zucchini?

How about an addition to your gift shop repertoire?

It's a Kickstarter project that will fund the prototype we hope will make its way into museum shops and museum after school programs...and hopefully into families, spreading good green fun to help heal our planet and instill better habits in the next generations.

Online Class Offering: The Green Museum

You can build your value to your museum, and your museums' value to the public by understanding the basics of environmental sustainability. Who wouldn't want to save money while advancing the museum's mission?

I'll be teaching The Green Museum: An Introduction to Environmental Sustainability in Museums, beginning the week of February 4th, for a four-week, self-scheduled, online class through the Northern States Conservation Center, a major provider of online professional education for the field.

Description:
Explore how the realities and principles of environmental sustainability can be applied to museum situations. The course includes discussions about the philosophy of going green, and how it affects institutional policy and planning. Students will be required to keep a journal, collect photographs, and to visit two museums – one not your own. Upon completing this course, students will be able to:
1. Apply principles of environmental-sustainability to work and personal decisions
2. Identify and test facts, understand trade-offs, and recognize mission-effects related to environmental sustainability when they make choices at their museums for programming, and operational projects
3. Encourage others to adopt sustainable practice within a museum context; and support others in bringing about change in an institution and in the field

Details:
MS265: The Green Museum: Introduction to Environmental Sustainability in Museums
Instructor: Sarah S. Brophy
Dates: Feb 4 to Mar 1, 2013
Price: $475
Location: Online at www.museumclasses.org

To reserve a spot in the course, please pay at http://www.collectioncare.org/tas/tas.html If you have trouble please contact Helen Alten at helen@collectioncare.org

Logistics:
Participants in The Green Museum: Introduction to Environmental Sustainability in Museums work at their own pace through sections and interact through online chats. Instructor Sarah Brophy is available at scheduled times during the course for discussion and support. The Green Museum includes online literature and student-teacher/group-teacher dialog. The course is limited to 20 participants.



 

Book Review: Sustainable Museums: Strategies for the 21st Century

Author - Rachel Mandan with case contributions from practitioners around the world.
Publisher - MuseumsEtc, Edinburgh See Book Details Here.
[This publisher  has a wide variety of global-perspective publications...keep an eye on them.]

Sustainable Museums provides solid foundational information for greening museums. It is a mix of the author’s work and a solid list of contributed cases from museums, trusts and agencies in the United Kingdom, the United States, Australia, Denmark and Kenya.

After an introduction on the key events in literature and politics leading to the current state of sustainability worldwide, author Rachel Madan, a UK museum consultant and Executive Director of Green Museums, provides eight sections addressing the value and design of the foundation for greening your museum: vision, leadership, team development, impact assessment, strategy development, use of targets and milestones, developing policies and plans, and then communicating sustainability practices and messages.

She’s dead on when she points out how the world and the museum field has made too little progress on sustainability, and, sadly, I had to laugh and one of interviewees referring to green team situation as more of an ‘after school club’ than an agent of change. It’s true. Green teams have become common, but rarely do they mature past interest-group status to leadership teams.

Madan’s suggestions on developing vision, identifying barriers and ‘drivers for change’, and creating strategic communication methods and sustainability steering groups, caught my eye. I particularly like that in her suggestions, as well as the case studies, that there is very little green ‘bling’ and very much an emphasis on efficiencies, collaboration, and sound baseline information.

The sales pitch is a bit strong, but the author's solid experience, and the valuable cases, soften the advertisements. Among the cases’ great stories I found many valuable snippets I’d hope the field could emulate. If forced to choose favorites, here they are:

 Shedd Aquarium (US) has evolved from a Green Team to A Green Sustainability Department

 Minnesota Historical Society (US) is tackling a statewide, property-wide assessment for efficiencies

 National Gallery in Denmark creates carbon accounts for exhibits

 United Kingdom museums and trusts are benefitting from collaborative, government-supported, direct-delivery programs supporting energy reduction

 The Design Museum (England), uses a cross-comparison of audience datasets between “GreenAware” and “Mosaic” software for evaluating audience awareness of and commitment to green practice, and the correlation to museum interest and support.

 The highly-efficient Normandy American Cemetery Visitor Center honors the site by also using local materials, respectful profile and emotional planning.

 Renaissance South East’s (England) Green SLIME program (Science Links in Museum Education) for partnering with schools to advance environmental understanding and practice

 Hull House (US) and its Re-Thinking Soup program using local food to provide a weekly soup lunch for discussing food sustainability, security, and resourcefulness

They were a pleasure to read, and a shot of inspiration. Some days I feel I am banging my head against the wall, and others I feel at least I’m not doing it alone!

AAM 2011 Session: Climate Change & Collective Action

I have a tendency to attend any presentation on any topic by either Wayne LaBar or Emlyn Koster, both of Liberty Science Center, NJ, but this time they were really speaking my language - museums and their role in increasing human practices of environmental sustainability.

Wayne and Emlyn are part of a mostly-Australian dialogue on how museums can collaborate to address climate change...how museums can help humans navigate the Anthropocene (see Wikipedia...new, unofficial term for the geologic age where climate is changed by human activity...see also Curt Stager with Tom Ashbrook and Bill McKibben March 24, 2011 interview. The project is Hot Science Global Citizens and it's an Australian Research Council Linkages Project. Wayne and Emlyn's presentation was sort of  'news from the field' as they reviewed the project's early-stage exploration of museum interventions, intersection of science and humanities, and responsibilities of citizens and the media. 

Two parts stood out - Emlyn's discussion about why tackling climate change is so difficult for the field (with me loving that we agreed on many points, but I also learned a good bit); and Wayne's discussion about how museums must work to address the realities of public response to climate change understanding.
Emlyn listed museums' structural disinclination to address climate change meaningfully. For the most part, museums still tend to:

• focus on collections
• rely on exhibits primarily
• are slow to collaborate deeply and meaningfully
• are poor at integrating past, present and future
• their funders are cautious
• museums tend to avoid the risk of controversy
• museum schools, which might have tackled this topic mightily, have not been a widespread success
• grants tend to support the status quo, not innovation
• and museums are rarely visionary and do not take global leadership positions

Wayne pointed out that "Climate change is no longer a science event, but a cultural change and it won't be solved by science policy." And he tackled the question of "why are people slow to change in response to climate change?"  The collaborative project discussions have articulated two critical disconnects - one of time and risk, and one of science and emotion. 

First:  Education about climate change is scientific; response to climate change (perception of personal risk exposure followed by changes in behavior) is emotional.  Water and oil. 

Second:  Since the risk of loss or injury due to climate change has an uneven and unpredictable timeline for each human perceiving it (will rising sea level affect me anytime soon or in a way I can see? Did a hurricane just him my house?), the debate about when and how much change there will be becomes a distraction that leads to a stalemate.

So Liberty Science Center, instead of doing an exhibit on climate change, much they way they might do an exhibit on skyscrapers or on human health, has chosen to educate about sustainability across all exhibit platforms. It's not a science fact to be learned in a few discrete lessons, but a cultural issue that must seep into human processes from many, many sources.

As a field I believe we should work hard to address the science/emotion and time/risk factors, but let's also use our position as educators, collaborators, and authorities to emphasize positive aspects of environmental sustainability: cost savings, resource conservation, and livable communities, so that we don't lose our audience.     

I'm delighted to be introduced to the Hot Science Global Citizens Project and will follow their further adventures.

Twelve Green Museum Days of Christmas...

Here's hoping for a green holiday for all museums everywhere:

On the first day of Christmas, donors gave the museum a Building Management System

On the second day of Christmas, donors gave the museum two green roofs

On the third day of Christmas, donors gave the museum three living walls

On the fourth day of Christmas, donors gave the museum four PV Arrays

On the fifth day of Christmas, donors gave the museum five car-charging stations

On the sixth day of Christmas, donors gave the museum six stormwater cisterns

On the seventh day of Christmas, donors gave the museum seven bioswales

On the eighth day of Christmas, donors gave the museum eight motion sensors

On the ninthday of Christmas, donors gave the museum nine recycle stations

On the tenth day of Christmas, donors gave the museum ten operable windows

On the eleventh day of Christmas, donors gave the museum eleven low-flow faucets

On the twelfth day of Christmas, donors gave the museum twelve composting toilets

The PILOTs are Coming: Use Sustainable Practices to Pay your Payments in Lieu of Taxes

The PILOTs are coming; the PILOTs are coming – even to little Concord, Massachusetts.

As more financially-stressed municipalities turn to PILOTs – Payments in Lieu of Taxes – and other nonprofit fees to build revenue, wary nonprofits are exploring ways to respond. ‘Right’ or ‘wrong’ is no longer the discussion; mitigation is.

I believe that by using sustainable practices to reduce demands on municipal utilities and services, museums could challenge their costs to the city: measure the reduced demands you make on city services through your green practices, and use that to stave of requests for PILOT fees.

Municipalities including Boston, Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Indianapolis and even Concord, Massachusetts, are beginning discussions about PILOTs and asking mostly large, but even small nonprofits like Concord’s Emerson House to make payments to the municipality. What’s a museum to do? No, it’s currently against the law to tax a nonprofit, but these requests are in lieu of taxes; they are pressure points, not tax bills.

Now I’m all in favor of responsibility, but I’ve been preaching the green practice is a museum’s responsibility and that green practice reduces museums’ costs to the municipality. I think it’s our responsibility to reduce those costs, but I also think that museums should get credit for those savings in lieu of Payments in Lieu of Taxes!

Since PILOTs are about money, the negotiations between the museum and the city will require quantification: the value of your services, the cost of your demands on the municipality, and fair compensation on both sides of the equation. Measuring the benefits of environmentally-sustainable practice is your ace in the hole:

- how much has waste-reduction reduced your museum’s demand on municipal disposal services?
- how much has water-use reduction and stormwater management reduced water flow from your site?
- how much have energy-saving measures reduced your demand on public utilities?
- how have your museum’s transportation policies and practices reduced demand on transportation infrastructure?

If you’re using this tactic now, or if you do decide to use it, please let me know. I’d love to work with you on this!

A few links for the curious:
Concord and the Ralph Waldo Emerson House
http://www.massnonprofit.org/news.php?artid=1925&catid=13

Boston’s Task Force and plans for
- creating “a consolidation program and payment negotiation system, which will allow the City and its tax-exempt institutions to structure longer term, sustainable partnerships focused on improving services for Boston's residents”;
- clarifying “the costs associated with providing City services to tax-exempt institutions” and - developing “a methodology for valuing community partnerships made by tax-exempt institutions.” http://www.cityofboston.gov/assessing/PILOT.asp

Overview of Cities asking for PILOTs: Boston, Cleveland, Pittsburgh, British Columbia
http://lawprofessors.typepad.com/nonprofit/2009/11/local-tax-exemptions-at-risk-boston-cleveland-pittsburgh-and-british-columbia.html

Hawaii, Kansas, Pennsylvania, etc., etc.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/28/us/28charity.html

The Situation in St. Louis.
http://www.stltoday.com/stltoday/news/stories.nsf/stlouiscitycounty/story/9F3DB4701FB3A495862576FE000A93D1?OpenDocument

A Blog Post suggesting students might help measure the value for Penn:
http://temple-news.com/2010/03/29/sans-estimates-city-nonprofits-have-no-landing-strip-for-pilot/

Call for Nonprofits Participation in Policy Discussions
http://www.blueavocado.org/content/attack-tax-exemption-killers

The National Council of Nonprofits report “State Budget Crises: Ripping the Safety Net of Nonprofits” http://www.councilofnonprofits.org/sites/default/files/Special-Report-State-Budget-Crises-Ripping-the-Safety-Net-Held-by-Nonprofits.pdf

Green Energy for Hancock Shaker Village

Shaker innovation is alive and well at Hancock Shaker Village in Massachusetts. For a few years now the staff and board at the museum have really embraced green opportunities. In a visit last summer I had a short course in bio-fuel research and their Switchgrass (and others)-growing project with UMass Amherst.

But today's news is about a 'bundle' of seven businesses and nonprofits and their new solar panels. The seven groups are installing solar arrays as I type, and they aren't paying for it. Instead, the green energy and financing company is funding the build, with a little help from the State, and the seven members of the 'bundle' have committed to long-term purchase at a good and stable rate.

The Village is installing its array on and next to the modern Visitor's Center, but the energy company will own and maintain the system. The Village benefits from price reductions and protection on a third of the energy it uses. Its staff, members, and community (meaning all of us) benefit from the Village's carbon reduction. And the project builds on the Village's role as a place to think about a more principled life in the 21st century, demonstrating sustainable practice at this site from the 19th into our times.

Renewable energy projects are complex: tackling them as a team is the best and fastest way to make an important difference. Ah yes, yet another example of museums making positive differences in their communities.