Dear ANSM Members,
Thank you for your patience the last few months as we have been restructuring the Museum Evaluation Program (MEP). As many of you know, this fall CCTH’s Culture and Heritage Division asked ANSM to review the program. We’ve taken this as an opportunity to incorporate many changes that have been in long discussion with ANSM members while maintaining our commitment to museum standards. We’ve been working closely with the MEP Working Group, the ANSM Board, and our partners in the Department of Communities, Culture, Tourism and Heritage on a new program which we are very excited to announce today.
This summer ANSM will be piloting our new TRACK program. TRACK stands for Training, Resources, Assessment, Coaching, and Knowledge-Sharing. Building on the success of and replacing the MEP, this program will have an increased focus on coaching and capacity building while maintaining some information gathering and assessment pieces. TRACK will expand beyond museum standards to include EDI, accessibility, responding to climate change, and addressing more community needs. Museum should notice a decrease in work required to participate (keeping the 4 year assessment cycle) and an improved access to capacity building and training (offered to all museums every year). A more complete description of the TRACK program can be found on our website. As we move through the pilot to the final version more information will be released.
Changes to this program are being supported by the Department of Communities, Culture, Tourism and Heritage. The previous Museum Evaluation Program and new TRACK program are not connected to the funding decisions of the Community Museum Assistance Program. We encourage you to read the letter of support from CCTH for more information.
ANSM staff, board, and working group are feeling positive about this new change and look forward to this pilot year. While we will be working with a limited number of museums on the assessment pilot, we are also planning several exciting training pieces which will be open and available to all museums. We hope you will see something of benefit to you and your museum and be able to join us.
Although this is all positive, we also know change is hard and there will be questions. We are planning an information information session on Monday, March 28th at 1pm. You can register for the session here. This session will be recorded if you are unable to attend. Meanwhile, if you have any questions, do not hesitate to reach out to us directly.
We look forward to working with you on this new track.
Maggie MacIntyre, Executive Director
