Communities of transformation: an example from the museum field

Abstract

Museums are seeking to be more relevant to their communities and help foster social change, which requires museum professionals to reconceive the role of their organization, develop new relationships, and change their practices. In this article, we discuss the Sustainability Fellowship that engaged museum professionals from nearly 200 organizations in learning about the UN Sustainable Development Goals and implementing a whole-institution approach to social, economic, and environmental sustainability. Using grounded theory, we consider the program’s fit with a community of transformation, which is ‘a community that creates and fosters innovative spaces that envision and embody a new paradigm of practice’ (Kezar, Gehrke, and Bernstein-Sierra Citation2018). We conclude that the program can be considered a community of transformation and that viewing it from this perspective provides useful insights that can inform other fieldwide efforts to effect change in museum practices.

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