Rebekah Beaulieu | Engaging Places

I’ll be in Providence, Rhode Island, September 16–19 for the 2026 joint annual meeting of the American Association for State and Local History and the National Council on Public History. This year’s theme, The Work of Revolution, seems particularly apt at a moment when museums and public history organizations are reconsidering how we work, whom we serve, and how we sustain public trust.

I’ll be participating in several conversations during the conference, and I hope you’ll join me for one—or find me in the halls and say hello.

Wednesday, September 16, 5:30 p.m. — History Leadership Institute Reception

I’ll start the conference at the History Leadership Institute reception. If you’re curious about HLI, thinking about applying, or are one of its graduates, please join us. The reception is an opportunity to meet alumni, facilitators, current participants, and others interested in leadership in the history field.

HLI has long been one of the profession’s most distinctive opportunities to step away from day-to-day responsibilities and think more broadly about leadership, organizations, and the future of our field. I’m always glad to talk with people considering whether it might be right for them.

Thursday, September 17, 8:30 a.m. — Love the Mission, Fix the Job: Rethinking Museum Work

Thursday morning I’ll be part of a facilitated discussion about museum workplace culture. Debates about museum work have flourished online and through worker-led movements, while our formal professional literature has often struggled to keep pace.

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*Figure 1. History-Focused Organizations command large portions of the museum field’s revenue and institutions. Source: Internal Revenue Services and National Center for Charitable Statistics.*

Over the past year, Engaging Places has been looking over individual segments of the museum field. While these segments are unique in specific ways, as demonstrated by the data, several of them do share a common theme and mission: an overall goal to promote history. These four segments are History Museums (A54), History Organizations (A80), Historical Societies & Historic Preservation (A82), as well as the broad Museums (A50) category. By combining these segments we can focus on the history-centric portion of the museum field that makes up close to half of its revenue and consists of a whopping 89% of its institutions (see Figure 1). This block of museums is incredibly dominant within the field and a major focus of Engaging Places’ work. For ease of reference, we will be referring to them as History-Focused Organizations.

It is important to remember that as an aggregate these History-Focused Organizations still trend small. Over 90% operate on less than $1 million in revenue annually, with contributions and grants bringing in over half of that vital revenue. For these smaller museums, financial security is a constant and essential priority. While many of these History-Focused Organizations are unable to achieve large pools of investment to stabilize operations, unlike some of their larger counterparts, they can develop practices to move them in this direction.

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