Around 530 BC the earliest known public museum opened in the Mesopotamian city-state of Ur. Run by a priestess-princess inside the palace complex, it displayed regional artifacts and provided multilingual labels — an early example of institutions collecting, interpreting and sharing cultural heritage.
Today museums still care for objects, but technology and changing expectations have transformed how those objects are presented and how audiences interact with them. Digitized collections, social media, virtual reality and other tools let people explore holdings in new, more immersive ways. More profoundly, however, museums are shifting their mission: the emphasis is moving from the collection itself to the people who visit, participate and belong to the community around it.
That change is reflected in an important institutional shift. In 2022 the International Council of Museums (ICOM) updated its definition of a museum to explicitly highlight inclusivity, diversity and community participation. Where older definitions spoke of serving society, the new one recognizes that museums must involve society as an active partner.
This participatory approach has deep roots in some regions. Latin America, for example, embraced community-led and citizen museums from the 1970s onward and developed the ideas of social museology — treating museums not simply as repositories of objects but as institutions concerned with living people, especially marginalized groups, and with social empowerment and transformation. Today many museums across the globe are adopting similar practices, adapting them to local contexts and institutional histories.
“Museums are moving in this direction,” says museum thinker and consultant Sandro Debono. Julia Pagel of the Network of European Museum Organisations sums up the trend as “from collection to connection.” Funding bodies increasingly link support to social relevance, encouraging museums to become civic infrastructures: trusted places where people meet, exchange ideas and access services, not just venues to visit.
This broader civic role can look very different from one museum to another. Traditional outreach programs such as talks and school tours have long been standard, but contemporary offerings often go further, inviting people to use museum spaces in ways unrelated to viewing objects. At the National Museum of Singapore, for example, seniors with cognitive and memory challenges take dance classes, join art workshops and participate in discussion groups, turning the museum into a site of socialization for people who might otherwise be excluded.
In Los Angeles the Hammer Museum hosts poetry readings and public panels that bring legal and current affairs discussion into the galleries. Elsewhere, “museums on prescription” schemes partner with health systems to recognize museum visits and activities as therapeutic interventions for loneliness, depression and other conditions.
Engagement can also mean letting communities shape what a museum is and does. The Museu de Favela in Rio de Janeiro defines itself as a “living museum” whose chief collection is its residents. Founded in 2008 and run by community members, it stages exhibitions of street art, records oral histories and offers locally led workshops and lectures that foreground the voices and experiences of favela inhabitants.
More traditional institutions are experimenting with citizen involvement too. In Serbia’s Gallery of Matica Srpska a 2022 project invited prominent local citizens to choose artworks for a public exhibition. In Bonn, the Bundeskunsthalle launched a Gesellschaftsforum — an advisory council of 31 local residents tasked with guiding the museum on accessibility and relevance. The initiative proved so valuable that the advisory body was made permanent, breaking down barriers between museum staff and local voices.
The Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam has pursued youth participation for nearly two decades through its Blikopeners program. Each year a diverse group of teenagers work in the museum in roles spanning tours, programming and marketing, bringing fresh perspectives into institutional decision-making. An impact study co-authored by program alumni argues that such engagement must be long-term, intensive and embedded in institutional structures; one-off projects will not deliver sustained change.
That point is crucial. Debono and other experts stress that participation cannot be merely symbolic. Depth matters: genuine shared authority, sustained collaboration and meaningful roles for community members are what turn participation into transformation. Superficial gestures risk reinforcing existing hierarchies rather than redistributing power.
As museums broaden their remit, they are increasingly seen as social and civic actors — places that collect and conserve, but also connect, care and catalyze community life. The shift from objects to people does not abandon collections; instead, it reframes them as one resource among many for building inclusive, participatory, and socially relevant institutions. For museums to remain vital in the years ahead, involvement must be continuous, rooted and substantive — a change in practice as much as in rhetoric.