Work with us when:
you're ready to address the root causes, not just the symptoms
Download this primer from the Spring 2026 volume of Exhibition:
01
Staff have lost trust
in leadership or each other
When people can't trust each other, they can't work together—and no amount of team-building, training, or new policies fix that on their own. We help organizations create the conditions for honest conversations, real accountability, and relationships that can actually move forward in healthy and productive ways.
02
You want organizational change that doesn't replicate harm
Change initiatives can cause their own damage—pushing people out, ignoring power dynamics, or asking for vulnerability without safety. We design transformation processes that practice the values you're trying to build, so the way you change doesn't undermine what you're hoping to move toward.
03
Community relationships are
strained or fractured
When your community relationships are damaged—whether through extraction, broken promises, or accumulated harm—gestures and goodwill aren't enough to rebuild trust. We help design repair processes that center community voices, promote accountability, and build relationships based on what communities actually need, not what our institution assume.
What is "Restorative Museums"?
Restorative Museums applies restorative and transformative justice principles to museum work and organizational change.
Restorative practice centers three questions: Who was harmed? What do they need? Whose obligation is it to meet those needs? These questions reframe harm as something that requires acknowledgment, accountability, and repair—rather than punishment or avoidance.
For museums to transform, this means addressing not only interpersonal conflicts but the organizational patterns, power structures, and institutional legacies that create conditions for ongoing harm. It means building processes where truth-telling is structurally supported, where accountability extends beyond individuals to systems, and where change doesn't replicate the power dynamics it's trying to shift.
This work refuses the false choice between calling people out and letting things go. Transformation requires sitting with discomfort and doing the slow work of relational repair and structural redesign. Statements and trainings don't change how organizations operate. This does.
01
Circle-Based
Work
Circles create structured space for honest conversation and shared accountability. We facilitate restorative circles for specific harms, community building circles with external partners, staff healing circles, and reintegration circles when someone returns after conflict or time away.
02
Conflict and Restorative Leadership Coaching
Want to change your relationship with or approach to conflict and harm? Sometimes a collective process isn't the right kind of support. We offer conflict coaching, restorative leadership coaching, and pre-circle preparation for individuals and teams.
03
Organizational Assessments and Audits
You can't repair what you haven't acknowledged. We conduct restorative history audits, relational health assessments, and organizational memory mapping that reveals whose stories get told and whose get suppressed.
04
Capacity Building and Training
Real change requires internal capacity, not just external consultants. We offer training in restorative justice fundamentals, facilitation skills, conflict transformation, and community engagement so restorative values become how you operate, not just aspirations.
05
Process Design and Accompaniment
Complex situations need custom solutions. We design restorative processes for your specific context, whether you're navigating repatriation, restructuring after harm, co-creating exhibitions with community partners, or building ongoing accountability structures.
06
Strategic and
Structural
Restorative practice requires structures that support it. We help redesign governance systems, build accountability structures, align values with operations, and create the institutional architecture that makes restorative culture sustainable.
Restorative
Museums
Repairing harm,
restoring relationships,
reimagining museums
Origin Story
Kate Merrick (they/she) of ExposeYourMuseum was first introduced to restorative justice in the early 2000s, while working toward a masters in Criminal Psychology in England. Kate volunteered as a "surrogate victim" in her North London neighborhood, participating in "circles" to keep young people connected to their communities and out of incarceration. From that first experience, Kate was inspired by the practice's power to hold space for truth-telling, create conditions for real accountability, and make repair possible without punishment or avoidance.
Since then, Kate has worked as an evaluator, facilitator, and leadership coach in museums and cultural organizations. Kate has seen how institutions with strong values continue to cause harm through their structures, their silences, and their decision-making—how accountability gets individualized while the systems that created the conditions for harm stay intact.
Kate started Restorative Museums to answer the questions they have asked across 20 years of work: How do we address harm that's relational and structural? How do we build accountability that goes beyond blame, shame, and rejection? How do we change from being institutions with stated values to healthy, thriving workplaces living those values?
Restorative justice offers a framework strong enough to address systemic harms and humane enough to hold complex relationships. It refuses the false choice between calling people out and letting things go. It insists that repair is possible, and that it requires real work, real honesty, and real change.
Copyright 2026 Restorative Museums
Restorative Museums
REACH OUT:
kate@exposeyourmuseum.com