Kalamaja Museum’s engagement tips for all communities

Kristi Paatsi, Director of Kalamaja Museum

Kalamaja Museum won the 2024 Silletto Prize for Community Participation and Engagement at the European Museum of the Year awards presented by the European Museum Forum. How can you get to a point where you receive such recognition? Allow me to share some of our experiences describing the engagement methods that made Kalamaja Museum stand out in Europe, and tips you can learn from us to make your own fun project a reality.

Opened in September 2021, Kalamaja Museum is a welcoming place for locals and visitors alike, with exhibitions, public programmes and a range of community projects showcasing the past, present and future of the district. It captures a slice of the area’s colourful character. From the very beginning, our community museum was created with the people of Kalamaja – the local community. This process was unique in Estonia. The idea for the museum was sparked by a survey of locals in spring 2018, followed by brainstorming sessions and meetings which canvassed the community’s views and proposals for the creation of the museum at every stage. Dozens of past and present residents have contributed to the permanent exhibition by donating objects and sharing their memories of life in Kalamaja. By fully engaging, empowering and working with the local community, we’ve become the best in Europe!

Nine exciting examples of our work with the community

1. Ask first, then act. Talking to the community was key in creating our museum. We asked locals what was important to them in Kalamaja, what their Kalamaja was and what stories they had to tell about the place. We didn’t come up with our own vision: in the course of us creating the museum, people told us what they wanted to see so that the museum would present their vision. If you have specialists and people on your team who are willing and able to contribute, direct them to ask questions and run surveys, brainstorming sessions and interviews. All the methods we used in creating the museum are ones we still use in our day-to-day work. For instance, in what was our most unusual and in fact relatively unique action in Estonian terms, people got to choose a visual identity – which is to say a logo – for the museum. We worked with the community to develop four initial options, from which everyone had the chance to vote online or physically (outside the museum, by dropping a ballot paper in the mailbox) for the one they liked the most. The people’s choice was the fish-eye perspective, which duly became the museum’s visual identity.
2. Keep in touch with the people in your community. We always send Christmas cards to our partners and friends and people in our area, because it’s nice to be remembered by your local museum. It’s a serious amount of folding and sticking for us every November-December, but it’s worth it! In addition, we take or send flowers or something home-baked to members of our community to mark special anniversaries and birthdays. The fact that the museum remembers and is there for them is important in maintaining the relationship between us and our people. A museum can be a friend, a companion and a family!
3. Get involved in initiatives. Projects that start in the community and grow out of people’s aspirations don’t have to be grand things on a huge scale: they can be small and sweet. For example, we were approached by Piret and Mati, who wanted to post the story of their building on a wall in the communal space in both words and pictures. This is how the ‘House Stories in History’ project was born, which a lot of apartment buildings in the area are now part of, displaying their own stories in their stairwells or gardens. So throw your lot in with the community and get involved in what they’re doing!
4. Be visible in the urban space you inhabit. Organise street events and exhibitions, share what you do on social media and elsewhere and describe how you do it. That way the community will know what you’re about. For instance, this June we opened a phone box audio exhibition in Kalamaja in front of Kalma Sauna. You might call it the smallest branch museum in Estonia! In it, you can listen to stories about Kalamaja and Vana-Kalamaja streets, told by community members themselves. The museum brought people together, and a phone box was installed with the help of the architects behind the Vana-Kalamaja Street makeover. In this way, the phone box forms part of the history of the street and is open 24/7, while the museum is present in the urban space through the stories of local people.
5. Pass the baton. One of the magic things about us is that we get people involved in all sorts of things, and do it all the time. The Kalamaja community wanted the museum to have a kitchen in which cooking classes could be held – and who better to run them than the locals themselves? In winter, we host a series of such classes called ‘Tastes of Kalamaja’, where participants prepare delicious dishes using timeless recipes under the guidance of current and former residents of the district. They then enjoy the fruits of their labour together, and get to take recipes home for all the food they’ve prepared. We’ve had lovely ladies sharing their grandmothers’ recipes, while exotic flavours have been introduced to the kitchen by Brazilians living in Kalamaja. These evenings have even grown into a fully fledged exhibition and the forthcoming Kalamaja Cookbook.

So get people involved! Invite them to run cooking classes or ask them to write stories for your blog or give presentations or organise tours. You could do some gardening together, or clean a greenhouse. Anything, really. Why not give community members the chance to put on their own exhibition? Let them curate it, thinking about and tweaking all the aspects themselves. Empower locals, supporting, guiding and listening to them throughout the process wherever needed. For example, one local, Piret Tali, will be putting on the next exhibition at Kalamaja Museum, which will be about her family. The story of one family in our area will inspire others to take a closer look at their own family history.

6. Expand your community. With each new project or exhibition you take on, try to find and get people on board who haven’t been involved in your activities before. That way you’ll help to grow the community and build new relationships. A big challenge for us is getting new residents of Kalamaja involved in the museum’s activities – those who have only moved here recently and don’t yet have a strong connection to the place. Our community days, or Kalamaja Days, have helped a lot in this regard, forming new relationships and drawing people to the museum with events.
7. Bring community members together. It’s easy to make new contacts and catch up with old neighbours at exhibition openings and other events. This is particularly important in urban environments. We launched Kalamaja storytelling evenings this spring, and will continue to organise them in autumn: events at which people can tell their own stories, spend a relaxing time together and meet new people.
8. Surprise people! Work with the community to bring exciting projects to life that stand out from the crowd. All too often people still think of museums as dull, grey places, but that couldn’t be further from the truth these days! In partnership with the community, we’ve been designing a brilliant Advent calendar on the garden wall of the museum for a number of years now, where you’ll find Christmas reading recommendations from the local library, a programme of Christmas performances from the local theatre, as well as little gifts. For example, passers-by have been able to take a local lady’s recipe for gingerbread home with them, and many local organisations and institutions have donated reflectors for pedestrians to grab and wear.
9. Be there, be open and be ready to listen and think. Listen to people in the community. Talk to them and contribute your own thoughts. Build new relationships and make new friends. For instance, talking to Andres, who lives in the building opposite the museum, we learned that he studies manhole covers – which, incidentally, are great sources of history! To date, he’s showcased manholes through the museum on his tours of Kalamaja and Tallinn’s Old Town and published a book on the study of manhole covers.

What more does a museum need when it has such inspiring community members!