What is Museum Camp?

This summer I was fortunate to attend Museum Camp 2014 at the Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History.What is Museum Camp?Museum Camp is an intense learning tool, modeled on traditional summer camps, for museum professionals. It serves as a model for challenging participants to do rather than to talk about making new connections in communities, with each year focused on a specific theme. This year’s theme was Social Impact Assessment and was co-facilitated by Nina Simon of the Santa Cruz Museum of Art and History and Ian Moss of Fractured Atlas.A diverse range of professionals practicing in the arts, museums and social impact research world filled 100 available ‘camping spots’. Museum Camp is designed as an intense and immersive three-day camp that takes participants through a scarily fast process of ‘doing’ (rather than talking about) research design, implementation and reflection of a particular social impact.The late nights and early mornings were set aside for opportunities for informal engagement such as ocean swimming, yoga, karaoke and butter aerobics – this is in California after all. They even allowed campers to sleep pretty much anywhere within the museum to keep costs down and to offer a fully immersive camp experience.Participants were assigned to groups of four. Unfortunately, two members of our group weren’t able to participate so my partner Jason Tseng and I took on the work of the group. Fortunately, this actually made our work easier and allowed us to move through the process relatively quickly, especially since our styles meshed instantly. Covert strategies to get our research location of choice? Go Team Jerica!We were mentored by Rebecca Ratzkin from Wolf Brown who posed thoughtful questions along the way to guide us to where we needed to be.