Museum Advocacy Day!

-Interim Head Curator

Today is Museum Advocacy Day and we're celebrating museums across America!  While we're working hard building our new permanent exhibit, we thought we'd take a minute and share some fun facts about museums from the American Alliance of Museums.

Did you know:

The beauty of the desert

• There are approximately 850 million visits each year to American museums- more than the attendance for all major league sporting events and theme parks combined (483 million in 2011)
• About 17% of museums are located in rural areas with fewer than 20,000 residents
• Americans view museums as one of the most important resources for educating our children 

• Children who visited a museum during kindergarten had higher achievement scores in reading, mathematics, and science in third grade than children who did not

Shawii Day: learning about food

• Museums help teach the state, local, or core curriculum, tailoring their programs in math, science, art, literacy, language arts, history, civics and government, economics and financial literacy, geography and social studies
• Museums directly contribute $21 billion to the U.S. economy each year. They generate billions more through indirect spending by their visitors
• 78% of all U.S. leisure travelers participate in cultural or heritage activities such as visiting museums. These travelers spend 63% more on average than other leisure travelers
• In determining America's Best Cities, Businessweek.com placed the greatest weight on "leisure amenities (including density of museums), followed by educational metrics and economic metrics, and then crime and air quality."
• Governments that support the arts find that for every $1 invested in museums and other cultural organizations, $7 is returned in tax revenues

And yet:

Coiled Clay: fun for the whole family!

• Only a small (and shrinking) percentage of America’s museums receive federal funding of any kind
• Despite growth in the economy overall, more than two-thirds of museums reported economic stress at their institutions in 2012