The Association of Children’s Museums (ACM), New York Life Foundation, and Knology are pleased to announce a new collaborative project aimed at discovering how children’s museums can better support bereaved children and families in their communities. Called “Building Resilience Together: Strengthening Children’s Museums for Bereaved Families,” the project builds on the critical support children’s museums provide to individuals and communities dealing with loss and grief, whether due to disease, extreme weather events, gun violence, war, or other causes.

“Children’s museums have a great deal of experience when it comes to helping children and families cope with loss,” notes Arthur Affleck, ACM’s executive director. “As partners in their communities, these museums have an opportunity to influence attitudes and behaviors around loss and, in particular, to help children and families become more resilient in the face of present and future traumas. This project is part of a larger effort to support the development of trauma-informed policies, practices, and programs across the field.”

The collaboration will begin with an exploration of children’s museums’ current approaches to supporting bereaved families. Through a literature review, a survey, and listening sessions conducted with children’s museum professionals, ACM and Knology will document both the needs of bereaved children and the role children’s museums play in providing for these needs. To learn about how community members make use of cultural institutions when experiencing grief, loss, and trauma, the project team will also conduct listening sessions with families. The goal of this phase of the project is to identify effective practices for supporting bereaved families—and to devise strategies for making these practices more intentional and widespread across the children’s museum field.

“Based on the existing research,” says Knology CEO Christine Reich, “we know that children’s museums are safe places that offer bereaved children the opportunity to express their emotions, engage in creative activities, and spend meaningful time together with adults who love and take care of them. But there is also an opportunity to advance the range of ways these museums serve bereaved families by listening to them and learning more about the different supports they need. With this knowledge, children’s museums can deliver on their promise of being more inviting and welcoming for bereaved families.”

“Meeting children where they are—in their natural environment—ensures that every child has access to the support they need, particularly bereavement support, which is often an underserved and overlooked issue,” said Maria Collins, Vice President of the New York Life Foundation. “Children’s Museums are ideal spaces to offer meaningful grief support for children and families, blending comfort, conversation and joy in an environment where they feel safe to heal and flourish.”

On a broader level, the project seeks to create a group of bereavement experts in the children’s museum field, and to help the children’s museums’ field become a key community resource for families experiencing grief, loss, and trauma. By building the field’s capacities in these ways, ACM, the New York Life Foundation and Knology aim to help families dealing with loss move from bereavement toward resilience.

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About Knology

Knology is a non-profit research organization that leverages social science to drive positive change. Knology’s approach to research is not just theoretical—we work alongside highly networked organizations (including professional associations, media creators, libraries, museums, game developers, and community groups) to simultaneously study and solve real world challenges in real time. Through research, evaluation, convenings, and capacity building workshops, our transdisciplinary team of social scientists, writers, and educators helps professionals improve their ability to facilitate understanding and advance public conversation. Our work empowers education and communications professionals through research-based insights, tools, and resources that can be used to amplify impacts and generate shared community understandings that open new pathways to action. For more, visit www.knology.org

About the ACM – Knology Partnership

ACM and Knology became partners in 2016. Through their work together, they have revolutionized ACM’s data collection to create a longitudinal dataset, allowing for multi-year analysis to identify trends. The ACM Trends Report series saw the partnership form a standardized 4-page research-to-practice field-wide reporting mechanism, allowing the field to use comparative data to advance museums’ financial stability, professional accountability, and service to their communities. There are currently seven volumes of the Trends Report series, with previous volumes focusing on the economic impact of children’s museums and the impact of the pandemic on the field. In 2022, the ACM Trends Data Hub was developed from the wealth of knowledge that emerged from the data analysis. The Data Hub allows museums to access their own data, compare their museum to field-wide averages, and benchmark their museum to other museums of similar scale or location throughout the U.S. In addition to the ACM Trends Program, which includes the reports and data hub, the partnership with Knology has expanded to include researching emerging trends in the field, such as online programming and evaluation support on other ACM initiatives.

About the New York Life Foundation

Inspired by New York Life’s tradition of service and humanity, the New York Life Foundation has, since its founding in 1979, provided over $440 million in charitable contributions to national and local nonprofit organizations.

Recognizing the critical need to provide greater support to grieving children and their families, the Foundation established childhood bereavement as a funding focus area in 2008 and has invested over $87 million to bereavement organizations across the nation. As the Foundation’s commitment to the bereavement field has grown, the team has not only served as a funder, but also as an active partner to a wide range of nonprofits, helping to raise public awareness about grief’s impact as well as build communication and collaboration among grantees.

The Foundation supports programs that benefit young people in other ways as well, particularly in the areas of educational enhancement and social justice. The Foundation also encourages and facilitates the community involvement of employees and agents of New York Life through its Volunteers for Good program and Grief-Sensitive Schools and Grief-Supportive Workplace Initiatives. To learn more, please visit www.newyorklifefoundation.org.