Brainstorming Session for Proposals CT League of Historians

Get Inspired at our Brainstorming & Networking Session Friday, March 17 @ noon on Zoom Got a session idea but need to find some fellow presenters/discussants, or just a chance to talk through your ideas? Join us on Friday, March 17 at noon for a virtual matchmaking session to share your ideas and meet others from the museum community around the state with similar interests. Call for Session Proposals for CLHO's 2023 Annual Conference, The Connecticut League of History Organizations is pleased to announce the call for sessions for our 2023 annual conference, "Community Matters: Linking Past and Present in Meaningful Ways." The League Conference is a full-day event that brings together ~200 history and museum people from across Connecticut and the region, and includes concurrent sessions, an exhibitor hall, and plenty of networking opportunities. CALL FOR SESSION PROPOSALS Community Matters: Linking Past and Present in Meaningful Ways June 5, 2023 Central Connecticut State University Proposals due: March 31, 2023 Museums inform a community, document a community, and exist as a community for sharing ideas, history, and cultural information. This year’s CLHO conference will address the myriad issues we tackle as organizations and individuals seeking to connect with and support the communities we represent, through a series of conversations around some of the key challenges of our moment. These include: COMMUNITY HISTORY How does the history of your community get communicated to the public, both within and beyond the town line? Are you reviving and telling stories that have been overlooked or ignored in the past? How have you engaged a broader audience through your efforts to interpret—and reinterpret—your community’s stories? What partnerships and collaborations have you forged? What lessons are you learning? A CHANGING PLANET How are you and your museum responding to the challenges and threats of climate change—to your site, your buildings, your collections, your landscape, and more—and how are you communicating those to your visitors? Are you fostering conversations with your audiences around climate issues, either at your museum or out in the community? What are your plans for weathering the changes and uncertainty ahead? AMERICA 250 The Semiquincentennial of the Declaration of Independence in 2026 will be an important moment for museums and communities across the nation to engage with democracy, history, civics, and the long arc of revolution. What are you doing to prepare for America 250? What does your museum or community have in the works? How will the history we interpret in 2026 be different from the stories we told at the Bicentennial? What work can we do to ensure that a fuller story of our nation is told, both now and in the decades to come? RECKONING AND RECOVERY The pandemic moment has called on all of us to rethink our lives, our work, our relationships, our missions. What are you or your institution reevaluating, changing, ceasing, or starting as a result? How are you laying the groundwork for a better, healthier, and more inclusive future, for your organization and your community? How can the museum community rectify its serious racial and socioeconomic diversity problems, and how do we create a future where history and museum careers are accessible to all? Where do you need guidance and support? MUSEUMS 101 Help is on the way. Let’s get together and talk about what you need. From successful fundraising to recruiting staff, board members, and volunteers that truly represent the diversity of our state, and everything in between, we are looking for sessions to help smaller museums thrive and grow. What challenges are you facing at your organization that you want help with? What do you have up your sleeve to share? Nobody has all the answers—but we can always help one another out. CLHO seeks sessions that will educate, engage, and inspire. We welcome all manner of session formats, including panel presentations, roundtables, workshops, moderated discussions, performances, demonstrations, think tanks, working groups, and more. Successful sessions offer timely ideas for discussion, practical examples of projects and efforts that tackle real-world challenges, bring together presenters from more than one institution or community, and provide takeaways that participants can bring back to their own communities. We aspire to provide information and inspiration on Monday that can be put into practice on Tuesday. We especially welcome submissions from art, children’s, science, and natural history museums/nature centers, as well as from grassroots community and history organizations. Do you have a session idea that doesn’t seem to fit with this call for proposals? Send it in anyway. We are open to all good ideas.