Speech Delivered by Mr. Patrick O’Reilly to the Rotary International District #5550 World Peace Partners on Tuesday, April 7, 2009

Good morning ladies and gentlemen. On behalf of the Canadian Museum for Human Rights I want to say how pleased we are to join you today, together with the Friends of the Canadian Museum for Human Rights, for the signing of the Memorandums of Understanding between Rotary International District 5550 World Peace Partners, the University of Manitoba, the University of Winnipeg, Collège universitaire de Saint-Boniface and the Canadian Mennonite University.

As Canada’s fifth national museum and the only one to be located outside the national capital region, the CMHR has great responsibility, and it is one we take seriously. We are committed to living up to and hopefully exceed your expectations.

I’d like to share with you our plans for educational programming, links to the scholastic community and the use of new media and internet based technology to reach audiences far and wide in new and creative ways, as we move towards our opening in 2012.

The official mandate of the Museum is to explore the subject of human rights, with special but not exclusive reference to Canada, in order to enhance the public’s understanding of human rights, to promote respect for others and to encourage reflection and dialogue.

Our goal is to present Canada’s and the world’s human rights stories while bringing many people together, challenging all to think differently, and to consider other points of view. We will engage and empower Canadians and visitors from all walks of life to combat prejudice, intolerance, and discrimination. As we begin to approach these challenging issues, we still need to be a people-friendly and welcoming place for all ages, genders, abilities, cultures, orientation, and beliefs. We also need to be FUN!

Ours is an “idea museum,” where rather than exhibiting artefacts and complementing it with a story, the focus is on telling the story enriched with artefacts. It’s a 21st century collection, predominantly using digital technology to house stories told through narrative dialogue, first person accounts, and memory and oral history. We are both a traditional museum in a gorgeous new building, and a virtual museum housed on the internet, providing visitors not with duplicate but rather two complementary experiences.

An idea museum also necessitates that we demonstrate multiple perspectives, based on sound research and scholarship by multiple parties, providing visitors with a comprehensive range of perspectives. These will sometimes converge, sometimes conflict, but will most certainly always be deeply held. Our objective is to foster a better understanding of human rights and to advance that knowledge through a better understanding of others’ points of view.
We will work with ministries of education across the country to develop programming in the museum which merges into curricula in schools across the country. These curricula will tie back to the student travel program engaging students in preparatory studies at home, a trip to the museum and a contributory project in their community upon their return. This program is one of the cornerstones of our foundation and today’s agreements move us that much closer to fulfilling our mandate and reaching our mutual goal of educating youth.

But, the educational component of the CMHR will be more than formal schooling. I want us to explore how we can engage people of all ages and all abilities in “experiential learning.” In his book Blink, Malcolm Gladwell speaks about how people nowadays are less interested in the book and more interested in the experience of engaging with the author. We are operating in an environment that values “community”, “authenticity”, and “connectivity”.

In engaging people of all ages and abilities in their lifelong learning, we have to adapt the interaction to the participant. For some, a more traditional physical museum exhibition is comfortable and a good way to learn. But, we also know for younger generations with the ability to “multi-task”, a static environment does not keep their interest – they disconnect if they aren’t engaged or involved.

For others it may mean using social networking to bring strangers (or, as their known on Facebook, new friends!) together in dialogue and debate. We want to encourage that sort of virtual interaction, along with technology facilitated interaction in the museum, to bring about shared understanding and learning. This technology will allow the students who come to Winnipeg through the exchange program to continue to interact with each other and learn together long after their visit.

Just as we expect our visitors will learn from the points of view of others in our exhibitions and stories, they too will be able to learn from each other while exploring our exhibitions. We are going to challenge the traditional approach of standing quietly and looking at exhibits to actually designing exhibits that encourage us to interact with each other and to share our own points of view. We’ll tie in this concept with our student programming as well.

Rotary International through its partnerships and these Memorandums of Understanding with our province’s colleges and universities will help ensure that students from across Canada and from all corners of the globe will have the opportunity to experience the Museum first hand. Your efforts are enabling us to stretch farther and reach an even greater number of people whose lives will be touched by their human rights educational experience.

We applaud your efforts and look forward to working together with you to achieve our mutual goals.

Thank you.