ABOUT THE PROJECT

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June 1 - 7, 2020 is Museum Survival Week! Read about this special one-week event.

We Know How People Get Through Hard Times. 

​What Is #MuseumSurvivalKit? 
#MuseumSurvivalKit is a collaborative social media project designed to share tips, tricks, and tools
​rooted in the traditional skills and life ways found in our museums and cultural organizations.

#MuseumSurvivalKit was born from informal conversations about all the know-how our museums preserve and share. Many of the communities we work with and interpret are keepers of cultural knowledge and practical skills that have helped see them through tough times.

A goal of the project is to show how all communities have faced challenges creatively, so we want to feature a diversity of institutions and individuals that interpret many different people and ways of life.

​“Survival skills” could be anything from butter-churning to beatboxing, knot-tying to toyhacking, sewing to semaphore, making a killer hot sauce to backyard birding to reviving an old-school home beauty technique. Be creative!

We hope this will be a fresh way to share our collective knowledge with people who are dealing with this crisis today - struggling with anxiety and boredom, facing the challenges of life without the usual support structures, and taking on new tasks. It’s an opportunity to offer some inspiring examples of the resilience of our fellow humans. 

​By sharing information from your museum, historic site, or program in this quick, friendly format, you can help people sheltering in place today learn some of the skills our forebears had, or pick up pointers from neighbors who practice them today.

Goals: 

• Make quarantine less miserable.
• Share ideas from museums, historic sites and arts and cultural organizations about how people in the past - and present - take care of themselves in hard times .
• Raise awareness of museums and cultural organizations as places that sustain traditional knowledge and help us remember what we know (or once knew).
• Help drive engagement with other museum content.

How to Participate

​Step 1
​Figure out what quarantine “survival skills” your site has to teach. Use your collections, programs, etc. Check out our ideas page!

Step 2
Download the graphics kit and use it to build a 1-3 minute video, Instagram story, Twitter thread or Facebook post using the graphics package.
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Step 3
Post your survival kit item to your museum’s social channels beginning May 6, 2020. Be sure to include the hashtag #MuseumSurvivalKit.
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