Several Centretown cultural institutions are launching new programs this year in a bid to bring more young people through the door.
The Bytown Museum, located near the headlocks of the Rideau Canal, is just one of many institutions reaching out to a younger demographic. The museum is now calling for applicants to its first ever Youth Council.
The council aims to engage local youth aged 16-21 in Ottawa heritage and culture through new media and discussions.
Megan Bocking and Evelyn Marshall of the Bytown Museum conducted extensive research into the most effective methods to engage youth in a museum setting before getting started. They stumbled across the idea of a Youth Council and several successful examples from across the country.
The program will start in October, but Bocking says she believes that the benefits of the program will have a lasting effect.
“They’re the ones who will be bringing their kids eventually, and hopefully they will continue visiting when they are adults,” she says.
This is turning out to be a definite trend in Centretown. When it comes to appealing to a younger demographic, the Canadian Museum of Nature and the National Arts Centre are both enthusiastic.
The motives behind the move to increase young adult programming range from wanting to involve youth in the arts, to making an investment in the future of the museum, to just trying to get more people through the door.
The NAC is one of those institutions trying to make the arts more accessible and desirable to young people with their new three-part concert series, Casual Fridays.
The “dressed-down” environment of Casual Fridays is meant to entice young people to explore the orchestra. The night will start off with cocktails, tapas, and live jazz music before a short orchestra show and a reception afterwards.
Although the NAC is not new to inviting young people to the theatre, this new push to include even more programming is indicative of an overall trend.
According to the NAC’s director of communications, Rosemary Thompson, it is important to expose younger people to the arts because “they get you out of your textbook and they make you think of the bigger world.”
This idea of making young people think of a bigger world is something of which the Canadian Museum of Nature is well aware. The McLeod Street museum is launching a second year of its popular, after-hours adult program, Nature Nocturne, in September.
“Nature Nocturne came from this desire to share the museum beyond our traditional audience and with people who are interested in coming to the museum, but not necessarily during our regular hours,” says program co-ordinator Cynthia Iburg.
Iburg says that adults often impose social pressure on themselves when in a traditional museum environment to be a role model around children and families. The night club feel of Nature Nocturne aims to give young adults a release from these social conventions and provides them with a place “to play, to experiment, to discover and even to ask questions.”
Although it is true that many museums are catching on to the trend of bringing in a younger demographic to expose them to the arts, there is also a business advantage.