The Courage Museum: An Immersive Learning Center to Prevent Violence
Change is Real Gallery will feature historical changemakers who are advancing concrete change by acting with courage and leveraging a variety of platforms including art, media, sports, politics, and entertainment.
Stay tuned for the opening of the Courage Museum!
The Courage Museum will be the world’s first interactive, immersive learning center designed to simulate a world in which violence is not an inevitable part of the human experience, and where visitors can instead learn how to create change that will help their families, schools and communities become free from violence, bullying, and harassment.
The Courage Museum is a place to nurture empathy, action and moral courage. Visitors will engage with interactive installations teaching skills for developing healthy relationships, as well as for taking individual and collective action to prevent violence and promote resilience and healing.
Change of this magnitude takes courage — as well as a roadmap.
Science shows that violence is a learned behavior, the product of experiences and influences that shape people’s beliefs, attitudes and behaviors from early and vulnerable stages of development.
Whether that violence is learned from what happens within the family, community or in the wider world, as a result of gender, racial, economic or political injustice, its traumatic effects can linger a lifetime, and are often passed from one generation to the next. Violence can literally change the development of a young person’s brain and have lifelong impacts on health, learning and productivity.
But knowledge alone is not enough. The Courage Museum is where we will take action.
Activating Courage: In this final gallery, visitors will curate and print their personal action plan to take home to begin activating their courage for good.
Jake Barton, Courage Museum designer
The Courage Museum is designed to take visitors on a transformative journey, prompting them to rethink assumptions about how and why violence occurs, to see the individual and collective actions they can take to prevent violence from occurring, and how best to help survivors heal from its traumatic effects. Visitors will enter as witnesses and leave inspired and informed to step up, use their voices, and take action.
FUTURES is partnering with renowned museum designer Jake Barton, founder of the experience design firm Local Projects, whose recent projects include the 9/11 National Memorial and Museum in New York City, and the Legacy Museum in Montgomery, Alabama. Jake and his team will create his signature immersive learning environment through a series of interactive installations that show the causes and impacts of gender-based violence, harassment and abuse, and that inspire acts of courage to end it.
The Courage Museum will also be a destination for educators, policymakers and cultural leaders, to engage in advocacy, experiential learning and courageous conversations. We intend for the museum to serve as a launchpad for the next generation of activists.
In collaboration with leading social activists, historians, neuroscientists, journalists, filmmakers and creative artists, the Courage Museum will also offer inspiring programming, as well as traveling exhibits and digital content to inspire deep and lasting cultural change, a key principle of all of our work at FUTURES.
CONTACT
To learn more about the Courage Museum, or to join us as a founding partner in the nation’s first immersive learning center designed to prevent violence and to offer a place for teaching and healing, please contact Rachael Smith Fals, rsmithfals@futureswithoutviolence.org.
