Our Social Responsibility
Open today 10 am – 5 pm
We care for over a million objects in the Museum’s collection, each with its own unique story—and every story has meaning for people and cultures from around the world.
As we display collections and communicate their stories, we commit to de-centering Eurocentric views, dismantling systems that replicate colonialism and racism, and presenting the cultures and traditions of non-dominant groups as living, resilient, and powerful in their scope of influence—from ancient history through our lives today. And as we confront our institutional history tied to colonialist and racist narratives, we are working continuously to reconcile our past with restorative practices. In the Museum’s 2024–2027 Strategic Plan, inclusion and accessibility are central to every goal.
On this page, we share our Museum’s preliminary goals as we take action and explore new paths for repair, starting with the following fundamental areas:
We recognize that this is only the beginning, and a long, hard road lies ahead. But this challenge is also an opportunity. By addressing the Museum’s past and working for a more inclusive future, we commit ourselves to a broader vision of our shared humanity.
As the work evolves and we advance our work towards our Strategic Plan goals, we will share progress updates and resources here. Your feedback is welcome and much appreciated. Help us become the Penn Museum you and communities near and far need. Share your feedback.
It starts from within. Our workforce is the lifeblood of our Museum—who we are, what we believe, and what we do to cultivate an inclusive, equitable organizational culture.
It also starts at the top. Our Williams Director Christopher Woods, who joined the Museum in April 2021, brought with him not only deep museum leadership and scholarly expertise but also a strong commitment to equity and inclusion. Showing demonstrated success in fostering an inclusive and diverse workplace built on equitable policies and procedures, he has a track record before and since joining our Museum of including and engaging historically underserved and underrepresented communities, a crucial part of our mission.
In February 2022, we appointed the Museum’s inaugural Chief Inclusion and Community Engagement Officer, Dr. Tia Jackson-Truitt, SW03. She is a national organizational change expert with almost 20 years of progressive leadership roles in higher education. Before returning to her alma mater in this staff role, Tia served at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, the largest and most diverse STEM institution in the country, where she implemented curriculum focused on inclusive hiring and retention practices and created successful pipeline programs for future generations of diverse scholars. At the Penn Museum, she heads the new Community Engagement Department, focused on deepening relationships with internal and external stakeholders, enhancing new community partnerships, and continuing to cultivate an inclusive workplace culture at the Penn Museum.
In January 2020, the Penn Museum Diversity Committee (PMDC) was formed, with 10 staff members representing various departments across the Museum. Since then, PMDC has been instrumental in advocating for improvements to hiring practices, staff development, and other internal procedures across the institution. As an important part of the Inclusive Hiring Initiative, PMDC representatives sit on the hiring committee for every open staff position. They also advocated for an all-paid internship program and participate in other committees or discussions involving exhibition planning, gallery projects, communication needs, and sensitive topics related to the Museum’s collections. PMDC co-chairs meet regularly with the Chief Inclusion and Community Engagement Officer who provides a weekly report to the Executive Leadership team. They also take an active role in planning regular staff engagement activities to ensure that all staff feel a strong sense of belonging to the Museum.
In the Fall of 2022, the new Penn Museum Community Advisory Group was convened to provide direct, ongoing feedback on every aspect of Museum programming.
Comprised of faith leaders, community activists, artists, and representatives from cultural and government organizations across the City of Philadelphia, this group supports the Museum as we seek to strengthen and build community partnerships; guides efforts around repair; and provides input around internal and external initiatives (galleries, exhibitions, K-12 programs, community outreach, and staff training).
Community Advisory Group members are key consultants to the Chief Inclusion and Community Engagement Officer and all members of the Executive Team to ensure that our strategic goals, programming, and initiatives have input from their constituent groups and the appropriate resources to be successful. Members are invited to participate in all Museum events and are given other opportunities to engage with and be recognized by the Museum.
There is much more to be done to ensure that our staff becomes more reflective of the city of Philadelphia’s diverse population. The following initiatives and changes in our practices mark initial steps in this direction:
A foundational goal of our Strategic Plan is to establish a regular program of wellbeing, training, and professional development opportunities for our Penn Museum staff—including training on inclusion and access topics and customer service.
In fall 2024, over 30 Museum staff who interact with different Museum audiences participated in a five-session “World Class Customer Service” program with Dale Carnegie Institute, leaders in creating training programs to build confidence and develop skills and habits needed to sustain performance change for over 100 years.
Staff also benefit from training sessions from Penn’s own HR professionals; recent onsite trainings for Museum supervisors and program leads included workshops on conducting crucial conversations in the workplace and conducting performance appraisals.
As part of cultivating a growth mindset, the Museum reserves a professional development fund to subsidize the cost of conferences, workshops, and additional training requested by staff throughout the year.
Our college-level Summer Internship Program supports learning and development experiences in a professional museum environment for college students and recent graduates as they prepare for careers and/or graduate programs. The Museum has offered summer internships for college students for many decades, but starting in 2021, we committed to a program in which all internships are fully paid.
This has drastically increased the number of diverse applicants to and participants in the program. The 2024 cohort of 17 students was the most diverse to date and completed projects on every aspect of the Museum’s research, teaching, and public engagement work—growing opportunity and strengthening community in line with our University Practice.
All exhibition spaces strive to exceed American with Disabilities (ADA) standards and apply principles of universal design. Our gallery environments are created for a diverse range of learning styles, ages and abilities.
Since 2017, the Penn Museum has partnered with Project Career Launch At Drexel University to act as a training site for career-focused employment for young adults on the autism spectrum. Project Career Launch students work closely with Learning Programs staff to prepare materials and Museum spaces for thousands of K-12 students every year.
Sensory-friendly bags are available at each Museum entrance to help families, especially those with neurodivergent children, have a more comfortable and enjoyable visit.
Our staff leading tours and programs are trained in audio description to make the museum experience inclusive and welcoming for visitors who are blind or have low vision.
How can we be better at engaging more diverse populations for whom cultural attractions may not be a regular part of life, or for whom costs or accessibility could be prohibitive? From institutional changes that make our Museum and its offerings more accessible, to immersive, multi-year partnerships with organizations that expand the scope of our mission, here are ongoing and upcoming initiatives that help the Museum bring archaeology and anthropology to life across diverse communities.
Our Museum offers a $2 admission rate for ACCESS/EBT/Art-Reach card holders, in order to be more accessible to groups who are economically disadvantaged or have disabilities.
The Museum hosts three free admission events every year including WAWA Welcome America day (summer) and Juneteenth (June), and Kwanzaa (December) to increase access to the Museum to all communities.
From family and teacher programs to lecture playlists and gallery tours, the Museum has made endless learning and adventure free and accessible from anywhere around the world through live virtual events and student and family activities.
Every year we welcome 25,000+ K-12 students, including 6,000+ Philadelphia Title I public school students, to explore and learn from our galleries onsite. Students and teachers can experience interactive guided tours of the Museum’s world-renown collection to learn about ancient civilizations from around the world. Hands-on workshops provide important experiential learning opportunities that meet curricular goals. The immersive Global Learning Lab program asks students to look at objects across cultures to build 21st-century global competency skills in a gallery tour and follow up workshop. Teacher professional development programs, including the Summer Teacher Institute, help educators learn how to use the collection back in the classroom. Many programs are offered through grant-funding including scholarships for teachers for professional development.
Students and teachers in Title 1 schools, where students from socio-economically disadvantaged families make up at least 40 percent of enrollment, have multiple opportunities to participate in free, grant-funded programing. Middle school students from Philadelphia schools can participate in Unpacking the Past, a two-part program that includes a field trip with busing and an in-class lesson at the school. This program is an exceptional opportunity for students to learn about the ancient world and make history feel real, enhancing students’ understanding by exploring what connects humans across time, place, and culture. Through hands-on experiential lessons, students learn to think critically and ask questions about the world. Unpacking the Past serves up to 6,000 students annually.
Students in grades 3 through 8 can also participate in Global Learning Lab, an innovative initiative introduced in fall 2024 to promote intercultural exchange and dialogue among young visitors and educators from diverse backgrounds. This unique program offers transformative learning experiences that transcend traditional educational approaches, fostering a deeper understanding of cultures through interactive opportunities hosted in the Museum’s galleries and classrooms.
At the heart of the Global Learning Lab lies a commitment to developing key competencies in intercultural education. Through engaging activities, students are encouraged to exchange ideas and experiences, enhancing their observation, inference-making, critical thinking, active listening, collaborative learning, and reflective skills. Guided by trained educators, students build global competencies that help navigate an increasingly interconnected world.
Teacher Talks and other professional development opportunities are also available for educators to learn more about Penn Museum. These onsite and virtual workshops are free of charge thanks to Unpacking the Past grant funding and are open to all educators.
The Penn Museum is pleased to partner with the following organizations to provide meaningful learning opportunities: the School District of Philadelphia, Drexel University Autism Institute, Art-Reach, Greater Philadelphia Cultural Alliance, Middle East Center, South Asia Center, and Center of Interactive Learning and Collaborations (CILC).
Heritage West: The West Philadelphia Community Archaeology Project is a collaboration between community organizations like the People’s Emergency Center CDC, the Black Bottom Tribe Association, University City Arts League, and Penn Anthropologists. Focused on the historic neighborhood known as the Black Bottom, this historical archaeology project seeks to uncover, unite, and preserve local community histories dating from the 19th century to the present. Through community conversations, the documentation of family stories and photos, and a local archaeological excavation, the Heritage West Project works with local community members to explore the vibrant histories of this important neighborhood.
Weaving inclusion and access principles into our communications means continuously refining our messaging and visual language to engage audiences of different social, economic, educational, and religious backgrounds. As we tell the stories of people and cultures across the globe, we commit to raising their impact and influence across human history, especially those of non-dominant groups, who are often underrepresented or erased from the narrative.
Our Museum’s Voice Guidelines inform how we present ourselves in all communications—from exhibitions to publications, news to programs, research to social media. It includes examples for using language that is not only inclusive and reflective of diverse audiences, but also knowledge-seeking, rather than authoritative.
Our Editorial and Exhibition Style Guides work to prioritize non-Western perspectives by ensuring proper terminology: removing colonial references and prioritizing Indigenous names for objects, art, and artifacts. This is a work in progress informed by descendant communities, partners, and scholars.
Our Visual Identity Guideline considers the importance of images representative of diverse populations, web accessibility, and multilingual fonts.
Through an internal Brand and Voice Committee, these ever-evolving documents incorporate the expertise, perspectives, and continued contributions of various department roles throughout the Museum.
Our collections represent people and cultures from around the globe, both past and present; it is therefore crucial that the stories we tell expand our cultural conceptions and challenge what we think we know about our shared history. As our ongoing research recovers the voices of people who helped shape that history, it is critical to confront and learn from our own past.
In 1970, we became the first museum to take formal steps towards guaranteeing the ethical acquisition of materials and deterring looting and illicit antiquities trading. This statement of ethics was called the Pennsylvania Declaration, and was presented at the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO).
In 1990, we hired a full-time Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) Coordinator and formed a NAGPRA Committee to begin working with Native American and Native Hawaiian communities on the respectful return of human remains of their peoples. In anticipation and advance of January 2024 changes to the NAGPRA regulations that require updated inventories and adjusted timelines, in 2023 the Museum worked with the University to secure financial and administrative support for two additional full-time staff members in our NAGPRA Office so we can more quickly complete our NAGPRA obligations to Tribes affiliated with ancestral human remains and collections in our care. In 2024 the Wistar Institute, whose collections we also steward, provided funding for us to hire a third full-time staff member to support NAGPRA compliance for that institution’s collections.
Since our institution’s inception, the Penn Museum has highlighted Native American voices and involved numerous leading Native American specialists and consulting curators, including many experts we have met through our work on NAGPRA. We are currently working with eight remarkable Consulting Curators to develop a new Native American exhibition (opening November 2025) where NAGPRA and repatriation are leading themes.
In November 2019, we opened our new Africa Galleries, which traced objects’ stories from their maker to the Museum, encouraging visitors to learn who made the objects, what they were used for, and how they came to be in the Museum’s collection.
In planning each gallery or special exhibition project, we seek feedback, from communities and wherever possible from heritage groups. We frequently involve visitors, community members, students, and outside scholars in co-creating and vetting exhibition content in a variety of ways, including surveys and focus group discussions.
The Morton Collection consists of over 1,300 crania, which were collected by Samuel Morton and others during the mid-19th century. Morton’s research was used to justify racism and white supremacist views. After his death in 1951, the Academy of Natural Sciences purchased and expanded the collection, which was transferred to the Penn Museum in 1966. The crania come from all parts of the world and range in date from ancient Egyptian times to the 19th century. As a result, the Morton Collection needs to be treated as multiple smaller groupings, not as a single unit.
In August 2020, the Morton Collection Committee was formed to discuss a NAGPRA-informed infrastructure and process that would inform the repatriation or reburial of the crania of enslaved individuals within this Collection.
In April 2021, the Morton Collection Committee publicly released its report with recommendations for repatriation and burial, including the formation of a Community Advisory Group consisting of Philadelphia spiritual and community leaders and city officials, together with representatives from the University of Pennsylvania.
In December 2021, the Morton Community Advisory Group’s recommendations, which included burying the cranial remains of Philadelphians at Eden Cemetery, a historic Black cemetery, were publicly released. In 2022, we petitioned Philadelphia Orphans’ Court to seek approval to respectfully bury and commemorate the Black Philadelphians whose cranial remains are part of the Morton Collection. Public notices in local newspapers were also published in June and July 2022. The nineteen Black Philadelphians were interred at Eden Cemetery and a public Interfaith Commemoration Service was held in their honor in February 2024.
This is the first step in what we expect will be an ongoing effort towards atonement and repair. If further research yields new information about the individuals in the collection, we remain committed to taking appropriate steps towards repatriation or burial.
See the full updates here.
In August 2020, the U.S. Department of State entered into a partnership with the Penn Cultural Heritage Center (PennCHC) to protect and preserve international cultural property at risk from political instability, armed conflict, or natural or other disasters. PennCHC draws upon the expertise of the curators and researchers of the Penn Museum to develop long-term programs for the preservation and promotion of community-based cultural heritage. This includes studying the threats to cultural heritage from the looting and plundering of archaeological and historical sites, the illicit antiquities trade, and commercial development.
In 2021, reuniting the human remains from the 1985 MOVE tragedy with the Africa Family was a priority, upon learning they were at the Penn Museum. After consultation with Consuewella, Janine, Janet, and Sue Africa, any known MOVE remains were placed in the care of a West Philadelphia funeral home in April 2021, and were received by the Africa Family on July 2, 2021. Following through on recommendations by the Tucker Law Group’s independent investigative report, which was publicly released on August 25, 2021, included work towards a comprehensive inventory of our Biological Anthropology Section and a promise to investigate any new information that emerged. In 2024, this work led to uncovering another set of MOVE remains, and this information was immediately communicated to the Africa family. As we uphold the ethical stewardship of human remains and prioritize human dignity, our work towards a respectful resolution is ongoing.
In 2023, we released an updated institutional Human Remains policy after a comprehensive reassessment of displaying, researching and teaching with human remains in our collection. Prioritizing human dignity and considering consent of the deceased and wishes of descendant communities are the governing principles behind this vital and essential institution-wide update to the Penn Museum’s Human Remains Policy.
Our intention with this Social Responsibility page is to identify our areas of growth, while also highlighting our efforts to correct past mistakes. Like many Western institutions housing collections from around the world, the Penn Museum was founded on Eurocentric and colonial narratives. As stewards of the collection, it is our collective responsibility to reckon with the past, challenge processes and practices that marginalize others, and develop an action plan.
It is our Social Responsibility to be a museum that acknowledges the contributions of the past, including the scholarly contributions of our curators and conservators, the advocacy of our PMDC, the responsiveness of our Executive Team to their recommendations, and the daily contributions of all museum staff who create a welcoming, world class experience on a daily basis.
We also acknowledge the many Indigenous cultures whose artifacts we highlight within our walls.
We must also reexamine our culture, values, and goals, to ensure we are responsive to the evolving needs of our diverse audiences. We strive to provide transparency and optimism and will keep this page updated with our actions and policies.
As the work evolves and we work to fulfill our Strategic Plan goals, we will be sharing progress updates and resources here.. Your feedback is welcome and much appreciated. Help us become the Penn Museum you and communities near and far need. Share your feedback.