Business View Magazine March 2023

64 BUSINESS VIEW MAGAZINE VOLUME 10, ISSUE 3 and communities can be a part of the effort towards a more sustainable future. AAM is also investing in sustainability as an organization, reducing paper and transportation by finding new ways to interact with people digitally, locating their offices in a LEED building, and having staff reduce their carbon footprint by working from home on certain days. The alliance has also partnered with the Phipps Conservancy on a toolkit that provides resources to encourage museums to become more sustainable. AAM also has two priorities in its strategic framework that Lott believes are trends and focus areas for the museum field. She conveys, “This is not new to museums, but there is an increased focus on being more inclusive. Museums were often built on a history of racism, and colonialism, like a lot of structures. They are recognizing that and working hard to diversify their staff, their audiences, their collections, and programming, to represent all people in our communities and make people feel welcome.” The second priority is aimed at guiding museums in identifying their roles in communities and in society and communicating this to the communities they serve. “There is a museum that will touch every social issue out there, from climate change to equity inclusion, to bridging divides in our communities, to health and addressing learning loss in students from the pandemic and other education issues. I’m not sure the general public often thinks about museums playing an integral role in those issues necessarily,” she asserts. The administration of accreditation for members is another part of AAM’s role, helping museums maintain standards of excellence in all aspects of their work. Lott elaborates, “There’s not a lot of regulation in the museum industry, so this is an internal kind of regulation that holds museums to certain professional standards. It started with how they cared for their collections, and it’s evolved into how they operate. In the next couple of years, we’re evolving it even further into how they are inclusive, which is a major initiative that