ROM’s Highest Priority Needs
There is no more powerful way to transform every experience with art, culture and nature at ROM than through unrestricted support. Your gift can enhance ground-breaking exhibitions, help interpret and expand our collections and bring our education and community outreach programs to even more people.
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Unrestricted funding provides ROM with the greatest flexibility to meet our most immediate needs. In a world moving faster than ever, such funding enables the Museum to capitalize on emerging opportunities that are often difficult to foresee. From supporting pressing research projects and conservation issues to integrating new technologies that allow us to share our collections in more relevant, participatory ways, unrestricted support is what drives ROM as an essential destination for understanding.
ROM Accessibility
How can ROM make its collections and programs not only more open to the public, but relevant to the unique demands of our diverse communities? Through our ROM Community Access Network (ROMCAN) programs, your gift can deepen your Museum’s leadership in access and inclusion.
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Through the expansive reach of our ROMCAN partners, we build connections with underserved groups that otherwise may have limited engagement with the Museum. From supporting new partnerships with community partners to assistive technologies and other accessibility services, your support can help share the wonder of ROM with all audiences, regardless of background, circumstance, needs or abilities.
Welcoming New Canadians
A ROM visit can connect children and adults to their cultural heritage or new country. As part of our ROMCAN initiatives, the Museum introduced two enhanced newcomer welcome programs. In partnership with the Institute for Canadian Citizenship, ROM was a founding partner in the Ahlan (Welcome) Cultural Access Pass program that gives facilitated group visits to Syrian newcomers. ROM also partnered with the Toronto Public Library to expand the Museum + Arts Pass program with the Newcomer Welcome Pass for Syrian newcomers. These passes provide free ROM family visits for library cardholders
ROM Acquisitions
Collections are the core of any great museum, and where experiences of art, culture and nature ignite understanding at ROM. Your gift to support acquisitions across core collecting areas will strengthen our ability to inspire discovery and promote learning for generations to come.
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ROM’s collections include more than thirteen million artworks, cultural objects, and natural history specimens, whose embedded knowledge can challenge the understanding of our past and catalyze new ideas that transform our future. Your gift to help fund new acquisitions will expand research opportunities for established and emerging scholars, where the insights they uncover directly engage visitors through our exhibitions, galleries, and education programs.
New Dinosaur Species
It’s not every day a new dinosaur species is discovered, and it’s even more exciting when it is named in honour of long-time ROM supporters, James and Louise Temerty. Dr. David Evans and a team of scientists unearthed Acheroraptor, the “raptor” like dinosaur in Montana, USA and the original fossils wouldn’t be on display today if it weren’t for support from donors just like you.
“We are proud to support ground breaking palaeontology research initiatives at ROM, which provide fascinating insights into our history and the world we live in.” —James Temerty
ROM Research
ROM is the largest field research in Canada, where our experts address the planet’s most pressing challenges and the questions that fascinate each of us. Your gift will help ensure that the Museum remains an intellectual enterprise as equally distinctive as our world-renowned collections.
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Deeply integrated into every aspect of ROM, our curators are central to provoking insights that so often change the way we view and experience our world. Your gift in support of research will enable our experts to pursue their boldest ideas, expanding the resources to chart bold new directions in scholarship and programming. It can also expand research opportunities at the Museum for postdoctoral students and emerging scholars, who often bring new ideas and perspectives.
Blue Whale Genomic Discovery
Enabled by donor support, ROM scientists are currently analyzing tissue samples recovered from the Blue Whales found off of the coast of Newfoundland. They are generating a body of data as monumental in scale as the animals themselves! Donor funds have also enabled a postdoctoral fellowship in bioinformatics—a field of study that employs mathematical models to translate complex genetic data into actionable information. This collaborative research project, under the leadership of Dr. Mark Engstrom, ROM Senior Curator and Deputy Director of Collections & Research, is charting unexplored directions in understanding the species’ genomic structure, while also establishing critical baseline data that will greatly benefit conservation studies on the remaining population.
ROM Learning
Nurturing curiosity and promoting the pursuit of lifelong learning is perhaps one of the most profound ways ROM transforms our future. By making a gift to ROM Learning, your support will help cultivate the next generations of engaged citizens and change makers.
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As the largest co-curricular educational institution in Canada, ROM engages approximately 100,000 students onsite and off each year, with hands-on, multisensory learning programs that ignite potential. Your gift in support of education at ROM will help students connect with our collections and research in more relevant, participatory ways, while also extending our reach and impact to even more schools across Canada and worldwide.
ROM Library and Archives
Consisting of the Richard Wernham and Julia West Library & Archives and the Bishop White Committee Library of East Asia, ROM Library and Archives houses a collection of more than 470,000 volumes, subscribes to 150 current journals and magazines, and accommodates the historical records and documents relating to the museum, as well as archival materials relating to ROM’s collections. The Library and Archives supports scholarship and research at the Museum by connecting our curators and visiting scholars with resources that enable them to more closely probe our collections for new insights and context.
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The Library and Archives’ collection strengths mirror the museum’s collection strengths in Asian art and archaeology, textiles and fashion, the material culture of the Indigenous peoples of North and Central America, Egyptology and Nubian Studies, European and North American decorative arts, ornithology, botany, paleontology, ichthyology, museology, and more. Your vital gift in support of ROM Library and Archives will help keep the Museum at the centre of intellectual inquiry, enriching discovery and context across every collection area. Your gift can advance the maintenance of the Library and Archives collections and ensure continued access for both the general public and researchers to these fascinating books, journals, and manuscripts that empower education and research.
A Unique Resource for Researchers
ROM Library and Archives houses more than 7,000 rare books and manuscripts including the recent acquisition of a copy of Sports et Divertissements, a musical score by French composer Erik Satie which features cubist-style pochoir illustrations by Charles Martin. This captivating album combines twenty brief piano pieces and is considered a unique resource for researchers in design history, merging music and fashion into one fascinating publication.