Planting Seeds for Culture Change: Making Museums More Inclusive for the Autism Community

Museums are places of learning, creativity, and connection. But they are also workplaces — with hierarchies, turnover, and the daily realities of budgets, schedules, and shifting priorities. That can make change feel hard.

In our Building Capacity project, we are exploring what it takes to create sustainable change — the kind that lasts even when staff move on, or when new leadership takes charge. Our goal is to help museums become places where visitors on the autism spectrum and their families feel welcome and supported. So how do we make culture change happen across and deep into an organisation? This is the first in a series of 5 blog posts exploring that questions

Lasting Change Is Never a Solo Job

1. Start with a Core Team

No one person can shift a whole museum. That’s why every participating museum has a core team of at least four people. When a group learns together — whether they are from front-of-house, education, exhibitions, or administration — they build a shared language and a shared sense of responsibility. This spreads ownership across the organization, so it isn’t dependent on just one champion.

2. Share Knowledge Widely

Staff turnover is a fact of life in museums. To keep progress from disappearing when people leave, knowledge needs to move beyond individuals. Our training system is designed to reach staff across roles — from the visitor services desk to the design studio. The more people who understand how to create an ASD-friendly museum, the more resilient the change becomes.

3. Build Connections Beyond Your Museum

Change is easier when you’re not doing it alone. That’s why we’ve set up communities of practice in each city — regular gatherings where staff from different museums share what’s working and what’s hard. These conversations spark new ideas, spread good practices, and remind us that we’re part of something bigger than just one institution. An online platform will extend these conversations even further.

4. Think in Seeds, Not Trees

Organizational change doesn’t happen overnight. It grows from seeds: small shifts in daily practice, small wins that show what’s possible, and small conversations that open new perspectives. When you make your gallery labels clearer, when you give visitors more choice and control, when you brief new colleagues on inclusion practices — you’re planting seeds. Over time, those seeds grow into habits, policies, and values that shape the culture of the museum.

5. Keep the “Why” Front and Center

Ultimately, this isn’t just about systems and training. It’s about people. It’s about families who might otherwise feel excluded finding joy in your museum. When staff remember the why — making museums welcoming for everyone — it motivates action and helps the change endure.

This NSF funded project is working to both create the change and explore which aspects of the project best support culture change. That why you will find some of our evaluation questions targeted at understanding how change is happening in your museum.

Culture change in museums is possible. It’s not always flashy, and it’s rarely immediate. But with shared learning, cross-departmental teams, city-wide communities, and small, steady steps, we can create museums that truly embrace inclusivity — for visitors with autism, and for all of us.

Coming next in this series: Share Knowledge Widely — how to make inclusion everyone’s job, not just one person’s responsibility.