Healing with Play is part of the “Building Resilience Together” collaboration between ACM, the New York Life Foundation, and Knology. The project includes a cohort of 11 children’s museums and a panel of expert advisors.
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.
Started in 1962, the Association of Children’s Museums (ACM) champions children’s museums worldwide. With more than 470 members in 50 states and 11 countries, ACM is the world’s foremost professional society supporting and advocating on behalf of children’s museums, and those who work at and otherwise sustain them. We leverage the collective knowledge of children’s museums through convening, sharing, and dissemination.
A children’s museum is defined as a nonprofit educational and cultural institution committed to serving the needs and interests of children by providing exhibits and programs that stimulate curiosity and motivate learning. Regardless of size, all children’s museums function across four dimensions, as local destinations, educational laboratories, community resources, and advocates for children.
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
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.
