May 2011 President’s Report
American Association for Museum Volunteers (AAMV)
www.aamv.org
Submitted by: Lois Kuter, President, AAMV, kuter@ansp.org / 215 299-1029
Volunteer Coordinator at the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia.
The following is a revised version of a report submitted to the AAM Council of Affiliates. It provides an introduction to what AAMV does as well as how it operates. And it presents some projects completed in the past year, some challenges we face, and hopes for the coming year.
WHO WE ARE
AAMV was founded in 1979 as a national organization to represent museum volunteers and staff members who work with them. Its purpose is to provide a network for the dissemination of ideas and information on the local, regional, and national levels.
THE AAMV BOARD
The AAMV is an all-volunteer organization with a board of 20 to 25 members who are museum volunteers/docents and paid museum staff who manage volunteer programs. It is primarily the board that initiates and carries out the work of AAMV. Positions on the board include the President, Vice-President, Immediate Past President, Treasurer, Secretary, Program Director, Membership Director, several At-Large Directors, and two Regional Directors for each of six regions of the U.S. who serve as a contact point for AAMV Members in their region. We hope to develop a network of State Representatives (non Board members) as well to better engage members in the work of AAMV. We hold Board meetings twice a year, once in the Fall and once in the Spring in conjunction with the AAM conference where we have held a luncheon/meeting for AAMV Members.
MEMBERSHIP
Members are both volunteers at museums (most often docents and docent organizations) as well as paid staff who manage volunteer programs. Members can be individuals or groups. We currently have about 230 members.
COMMUNICATIONS
Since the aim of AAMV is primarily to support volunteerism in museums through an exchange of ideas and information, finding effective means of communication is key to our work and remains a challenge. We produce four newsletter issues a year (sometimes as a double issue) e-mailed as a file attachment to members (or available in print form if necessary). We are developing our website www.aamv.org so that it can better serve as a site for news and resources.
Members have access to an active listserv (since 2006) where questions and concerns are shared and answers and solutions offered. We would like to see more of our members joining the listserv, since this has been a very interesting and useful forum for the exchange of ideas on a wide range of topic. Listserv conversations have included volunteer recruitment techniques, appropriate use of social networking, database management, scheduling challenges, and how to train staff to effectively work with volunteers, to name a few.
We also try to share information with AAMV members and non-members alike through the organization of and participation in local, regional and national conferences and workshops. We have organized three sessions for AAM in May 2011: “Talking Shop: A Roundtable Discussion With Volunteer Managers and Docents,” “Unpaid Volunteer Interns in Museums: Perils, Pitfalls and Pearls,” and “New Directions for Docents: Creating an Effective Learning Community in the Art Museum.” An AAMV Board Member will also be doing a Career Café: “A Day in the Life… (of a Volunteer Manager)”. AAMV was also engaged in sessions at several regional and local conferences.
INITIATIVES
Our key projects remain those described above, but we are working to develop new ways to reach a wider audience. On March 30, 2011, AAMV collaborated in producing a 90-minute Webinar for AAM’s Museum Essential series called “Managing Multigenerational and Diverse Volunteers and Docents.” As an organization we are often called upon to define “standards” for museum volunteer programs, but have found that the diversity of volunteer programs and of museums themselves makes this difficult. We have continued to promote the book we published in 2007: Transforming Museum Volunteering – A Practical Guide for Engaging 21st Century Volunteers as a source for “best practices” that any museum can use to guide the development of their volunteer program.
In 2010 we initiated an AAMV Volunteer of the Year Award and selected an exceptional volunteer as the first winner. In 2011 we had difficulty getting word out about the award to the wider museum community and did not receive enough nominations to choose a winner. We hope that we can make this an annual recognition to honor exceptional volunteers, but need to find the means to better publicize the award.
AAMV was once again an active participant in AAM’s Museum Advocacy project thanks to our Board Members Maretta Hemsley-Wood from the National Air and Space Museum and Carly Shaw of the National Building Museum.
CHALLENGES
The biggest challenge in all the work we do for AAMV is our own availability of time. Whether we are museum docents or full-time paid staff, all of our Board members have extremely limited time to donate to AAMV.
Illnesses, family needs, and heavy work loads, have all presented challenges to AAMV Board members this past year in completing work we want and need to do: advancing the development of our website, communicating on a more regular basis with our membership and with each other, organizing as many workshops as we would like at regional or local conferences, taking advantage of social networking to promote our organization and museum volunteerism, and researching and pursuing new ways to reach a wider museum community …
VISION
In this coming year we hope to finally master our website to get it fully operational.
Building membership is an ongoing goal since this will bring skills and talents that can be tapped to strengthen our network of communication.
We will continue to work to bring more visibility to AAMV and to the important role volunteers play in museums. We hope to work with AAM – and regional museum associations – to gain more recognition for the important role of volunteers in museums. Why couldn’t such museum associations be more welcoming to volunteers by offering a Membership and/or Meeting Registration discount to Docents/Volunteers, just as one is offered to Students? Likewise the role of volunteer program managers could be better acknowledged in the museum world as a true profession. For example, a simple step would be to include this “job type” on the AAM Meeting registration form.