Restorative
Museums

Relational approaches to conflict, change, and repair

What is "Restorative Museums"?

Restorative Museums brings restorative and transformative justice principles and practices into museum work, helping organizations strengthen relationships, navigate conflict, and build cultures of repair.

Restorative practice asks us, before anything else, to pay attention to relationships: What happened? Who has been affected? What do people need now? What responsibilities do we have to one another? These questions create an alternative to avoidance, blame, or punishment by making space for truth-telling, accountability, repair, and meaningful change.

For museums, this means looking beyond individual conflicts to the organizational habits, power dynamics, and institutional histories that shape how people experience their workplaces and institutions. It means creating structures that support honest conversation, shared responsibility, and change that does not reproduce the very patterns organizations are trying to address.

Restorative work is not only for moments of crisis. It can help organizations build stronger relationships before trust breaks down, navigate difficult change with greater care, and respond more constructively when harm does occur.

The work asks us to stay in relationship through discomfort, take responsibility for our impact, and build organizations that are more accountable, resilient, and capable of repair. If your organization is navigating change, conflict, or questions of trust, there is another way to move through it.

Strengthening
relationships

Navigating
conflict

Building cultures
of repair

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:

Cover of Restorative Museums primer article in "Exhibition" Spring 2026 issue

You want to strengthen trust and relationships

Healthy relationships don’t happen by accident. Whether trust has been damaged or you want to strengthen it before problems escalate, we help teams build the conditions for honest conversation, shared accountability, and relationships that can hold up through tension, disagreement, and change.

Two museum employees talking in art gallery space

You’re navigating change, transition, or conflict

Change can expose existing tensions or create new ones — especially when people feel decisions are happening to them rather than with them. We help organizations navigate change and conflict in ways that attend to relationships, power, and participation, so the process reflects the culture you’re trying to build.

Speaker with long dark hair at microphone in front of room, speaking to seated audience

You want stronger relationships
with your communities

Strong community relationships require more than good intentions. We help organizations build reciprocal, accountable relationships with communities. And, when relationships have been strained by extraction, broken promises, or accumulated harm, we create processes for acknowledgment and repair.

Restorative Practices for Museums

Circle-Based

Work

Circles create structured space for honest conversation and shared accountability. We facilitate restorative circles for community building, to address specific harms, healing and grief circles, and reintegration circles when someone returns after conflict or time away.

Conflict and Restorative Leadership Coaching

Want to change your relationship with or approach to conflict and harm? Ready to become a more relational, restorative leader? We offer conflict coaching, restorative leadership coaching, and pre-circle preparation for individuals and teams.

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 have been suppressed.

Capacity Building and Training

Real change requires internal capacity, not just external consultants. We offer training in restorative fundamentals, circles, listening skills, conflict transformation, and community engagement so restorative values become how you operate, not just aspirations.

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.

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.

Kate Merrick walking in front of large outdoor mural with image of youth holding a flower and the words: "They tried to bury us. They didn't know we were seeds."

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 their 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 and transformative justice and restorative practices offer frameworks strong enough to address systemic harms and humane enough to hold complex relationships. Together, we can refuse the false choice between calling people out and letting things go. Together, we can demonstrate repair is possible, giving it the real work, real honesty, and real change it requires of us.