Founded in 1962, the Museum Association of New York (MANY) helps shape a better future for museums and museum professionals by uplifting best practices and building organizational capacity through advocacy, training, and networking opportunities. Every year, MANY hosts a multi-day conference for museum professionals to continue their education in the career field. A different conference theme is selected each year, and for 2024, the theme was “giving voice to value.” Thanks to the New York State Council on the Arts and CNY Arts for their support in awarding me a Grant for Professional Development, I could attend the MANY 2024 Annual Conference in Albany, NY, from April 6th to April 9th.

At the 2024 Annual Conference, MANY curated a diverse conference with over 100 presenters across 25 concurrent sessions, pre-conference workshops, and capstone experiences. I was honored to be among the presenters for the concurrent sessions, co-presenting with education consultant Jennifer Hesseltine. Jennifer worked with us at the LPOM to develop the live Virtual Field Trip (VFT) program between 2021 and 2023. Our presentation, titled “Design & the Olympic Winter Games: A New Live Virtual Field Trip for Classrooms,” was a 75-minute exploration of how we are giving a new voice to our collection through the live VFT program.

After detailing how we developed the program, we discussed how the conference’s theme, giving voice to value, was connected to the live VFTs, both through the LPOM’s collection and through the 21st-century shifts in the New York State Education Department Learning Standards. At the LPOM, we have a large collection of around 30,000 objects, with only a small percentage on display. The live VFT program has allowed us to utilize parts of our collection that are not currently on display, so it helps us to give a voice to the artifacts that are not being interacted with by the public. It has also allowed us to create more awareness of our museum and collection for audiences we would not usually interact with. For instance, our most recent VFT was with an elementary school in Greenville, South Carolina.

The 2024 MANY Annual Conference encouraged all participants to start looking at new ways to communicate our institution’s value to stakeholders, funders, legislators, visitors, and the community, and the live VFT program at the LPOM does just that. Through this program, we can dedicate resources that align with our Olympic values to keep developing relationships with local, regional, and national K-12 schools to continue blending sport with culture and education, the perfect example of the philosophy of Olympism that we at the LPOM strive to meet every day.

Written by Julia Herman