In our interview, Mark reflected on the early days of KAM: from producing the early editions of the collaborative brochures and supporting smaller museums, to helping host the Ontario Museum Association Conference in 1998. He spoke about the challenges of working with little funding, but also the unique spirit that set Kingston apart from other communities, where “the haves” supported “the have-nots” so that all museums could thrive together. Mark also shared memories of major milestones, including KAM’s incorporation, the creation of the City of Kingston Heritage Fund, and the birth of Beyond Classrooms Kingston, an initiative that continues to give students the chance to learn in local museums.

What shines through most in Mark’s story is the power of people coming together with a shared vision. His reflections are a reminder that the work of today’s museum community builds on decades of dedication, creativity, and teamwork.

We invite you to read the full interview below with Mark Badham to explore more of his insights, accomplishments, and hopes for the future of KAM.

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Interview with Mark Badham

Thanina: Could you please tell me about yourself and your connection to KAM and the cultural heritage sector in general?

Mark: Sure! My name is Mark Badham. I started my career, and for my whole career, I was at the Miller Museum of Geology at Queen’s University. I started there in 1986 and pretty soon after I started that job, I became the rep for the Kingston Association of Museums and Galleries as it was known at that time. Met a lot of great people there. For the first while, it was a certain core group of people, and they…some of them moved on… were some of the initial, I guess, people who started the group.

Thanina: Yeah, for sure.

Mark: And I ended up being the recording secretary for most of its early days. I took over doing a lot of the marketing. I did the brochure for the group, things like that. And I basically, you know, I don’t like to I guess take credit for everything, but I really worked hard to keep the association moving along for a number of decades, even with very little funding, a lot of support from the local museum community. We were all like-minded individuals who wanted to work together to grow the heritage sector, and we did a lot of amazing projects together

Thanina: Yeah, well, I think honestly, you should take credit for the good things that you’ve done. And I think it’s not a bad thing to take credit, especially when you’ve been able to collaborate with others and get their work to get promoted and all of that. So it’s a good thing!

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Thanina: What did you learn through your experience of collaborating with others and progressing, even despite having little funding?

Mark: Yeah, you know, I was always amazed with the will of the great people that I worked with. You know, at one point, we had a visit from a group from the Atlantic Provinces (which is where I’m living now). They had gotten funding for a bunch of the small museums to come to Kingston to learn how we collaborated because in so many other places other than Kingston… I mean, I don’t have a lot of experience in other places… but I’ve heard colloquially that we are a very strange group in that we wanted to promote each other and work together. So many other places were very siloed, and you were in your own lane, in your own marketing bubble, whatever.

People were amazed that we were able to put together a brochure that advertised all of us, and in the beginning it was a simple thing, but in some cases some of the museums couldn’t even afford to pitch in very much, and the bigger museums would pitch in a little more to cover the shortfall from the other museums. There was a lot of amazing work there to make sure that the whole sector benefited from our efforts, where the “haves” helped out the “have-nots”. That was the great thing that I learned, and I was, I guess, surprised to learn how unique we were in that respect. I think that was my biggest eye-opener. It seemed to me to be a no-brainer, you know, if you wanted to get some synergy, to get all the museums working together, and show what a great experience there was in Kingston for heritage museums and historic sites, you know, why not work together?

Thanina: That’s a great point, actually. Why do you think it was so unique to Kingston? Maybe it was because of the people, people like you, who were willing to collaborate and put each other up, like lift each other up instead of insisting on dividing people?

Mark: Yes. Instead of competing, we saw ourselves as a as a whole unit, a whole entity that could work together. And I think it was down to the people. I mean, you’ve already talked to some of them, I mean, Kevin, John and Sue. I don’t know if you talked to Dave St. Onge. No? Oh, okay.

Thanina: I think we should, that would be a great person to talk to.

Mark: It would be, yeah, because, I mean, we were all there almost from the very beginning. I guess Sue came in a little later but yeah, it was an amazing group of people, I think, that made the difference. And the other thing, that was on one hand a good thing and on the other hand maybe a bad thing, is that we were seemingly “lifers”. We were all there for so long.

Thanina: You were committed.

Mark: Yeah. I mean, you know Kevin was there before me and I was one of the early ones in the KAM group. So, he predates me, and he was there longer than me. I mean, my circumstances changed, and I moved away from Kingston, but he’s been a force with Kingston museums for whatever it was, 40 years or something like that.

Thanina: Yeah, it was a long time, yeah.

Mark: Yeah. But it was also, we made it fun. We had great meetings. We never took ourselves too seriously, which I think is another good thing, you know. I mean, in the end when we finally got through to the incorporation level, you know, the more organized level of incorporation, it was great. But you know, unfortunately maybe we resisted that for a little while because we didn’t want to be the “board” or the “museum governing body” or anything. We just wanted to get together, talk about common problems, and get funding to do whatever projects we could. I mean, even before we were incorporated you probably heard we hosted an Ontario Museum Association Conference in 1998. Even before that, the year that I joined KAM and the year after, they… I guess I wasn’t involved in the organization (of the project) … but they got a big, huge grant to computerize the network. We were the first computerized museum network in Ontario.

Thanina: I didn’t know that, that’s amazing.

Mark: Yeah, it was in 1988, and we all had IBM PCs with “gigantic” 20-megabyte hard drives and monochrome monitors. We were connected with 1200 baud modems, which, I don’t know if you know anything about transmission speed, but that’s like one 1,000,000,000,000th of a megabit or something. It’s so slow, but we were actually connected through the phone network. As part of the project, we all got computer cataloging software and learned to use it, I guess, independently, but I can remember lots of late nights, helping people with computer problems on their databases. You know, it was just a great time and we did some pretty innovative things for kind of a ragtag group of people.

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Thanina: Well, when you think back of that experience, especially in those early years and even like as the years went on, what are your favorite moments? Like, what are the key milestones that you helped KAM reach? What are your favorite events that you think back on when you look back at what happened?

Mark: Yeah, I mean, you’ll get different perspectives from different people on this but I was pretty impressed with our ability to host the Museum Association in 1998. It was a monumental task that we took on, you know, and based on (the fact that) up to that point or even after that point I think we were – and maybe that was partly my influence – we were a little bit isolated. We worked within our group, but I didn’t make enough effort to connect with other museum groups. And you know, the OMA conference was quite a big step for us to reach out to museums across Ontario and bring them here. I think we had a really successful conference. I think it went off really well. I know KAM again hosted one later on. Now, was that 2018 or 2019? It was right around the time that I was leaving, so I didn’t have much involvement with that one. But no, I think the OMA conference was a big step for us.

I think incorporation was a huge, scary step for us. I mean, again, I think I was sort of instrumental in that. Ed Grenda was really involved and interested in taking KAM to the next step, to the incorporation level.  I think I was the one who had most of the early meetings with the city about, you know, when they were showing interest in helping the museum community, and I think I boldly said, “Well, give us money to run it, and we will run it.” And I think that was a big step because I thought they’d laugh, but they actually said “Well, that’s a possibility” and I was just kind of floored. But yeah. Incorporation was a huge step, and it finally allowed the association to… I don’t know if gain legitimacy is the right word, but it certainly went a long way to have the city recognize us as a more formal group. And like I said, I think we were, in the beginning, really more focused on just doing projects that we could manage and not trying to be a governing authority of any kind. I know KAM still doesn’t really see itself as that, but it certainly has come a long way in terms of advocacy for museums, and having a voice with the city.

Also, the Heritage Fund implementation was a huge success for us. Getting money from the city to distribute to our museum projects. I guess that was another highlight of my time with KAM, especially.

Thanina: Those are amazing accomplishments. Absolutely. I think you helped future museum organizations as well and helped museums individually being able to have a voice with the city. So absolutely. But really, you guys did amazing work.

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Thanina: On the flip side, what were some of the key challenges that you faced along the way, and how did you help solve them or counter them?

Mark: The challenges always in the early days were… I don’t know…”We don’t get no respect” I guess.

Thanina: No respect, no money. How do we move from here?

Mark: Yeah, exactly, yeah. And, you know, I mean, I was on many committees with the city. You might have heard of something called the Tourism Industry Advisory Committee? That was with KEDCO originally and, you know, it was nice to have been invited but I always felt, and other people who took on the role later on felt, that we were a little bit of a … just a token, you know. I shouldn’t say that. They entertained us, and we had a voice at the table but it always seemed like the big decisions were made, after the meeting was done, by the “suits”. Maybe I shouldn’t say this if this is going to be public but, I mean the hotel groups had a lot of power and they really made a lot of the decisions… which was fine, I mean, again at that point we didn’t want to be the dictating power or anything like that. We wanted to know what was going on, and have a seat at the table but sometimes in the early days, some of the challenges were (just) to be “seen” because outside of our group, people didn’t know all of the things that we were accomplishing, you know. They didn’t know all the good work we were doing with projects that benefited our museums. Maybe they weren’t very high profile outside of the museum community so I think that was one of the biggest challenges in the early days.

But personally, I guess my challenge was to step outside of my comfort zone, because I’m totally not, you know … museum people are not politicians and we are not, you know, movers and shakers in the business world. So, it was very difficult, at least in my day, it was very difficult for us first of all to get the time to “step out” because we were basically running museums by ourselves, with a couple of volunteers and some students. You know, it was very difficult for us to get out there and try and move the needle forward in terms of funding or in terms of recognition or anything like that. I think those were the biggest challenges we faced.

Thanina: I think that’s a great point because I think even though the great work you did was recognized by the community, especially people who visited the museums and were more involved with museums, it’s hard to gain legitimacy outside of it when people don’t take the time to become interested and get to know what work you guys are doing. That’s a great point to bring up.

Mark: For sure. And I mean, we always had the joke that tourism people thought that people came to Kingston (just) to stay in the beautiful hotels. That was the only reason they came, you know … that there was nothing else to see. They didn’t come to see the architecture, the museums, the art galleries. I mean, in Kingston, we are just blessed with a huge variety of museums.

Thanina: Absolutely, yeah.

Mark: And being able to come and see fantastic art at the Agnes Art center, Rembrandts and things like that. We punched way above our weight level, I think, for a small community at one point.

Thanina: I think successfully, though.

Mark: Yeah, and, I mean, at one point our marketing tagline was, “A Trip Through Time in Kingston” where you could come to my museum and see dinosaurs and things that were millions and billions of years old and then you could go through basically the development of Canada with the forts and then, you can go all the way up to modern art at the Modern Fuel Gallery. You know, we just had a sampling of everything in this little community (that) was amazing. And still is.

Thanina: Yeah, absolutely. I think too, when you come to Kingston, it’s a good opportunity to get to see the history of Kingston. And so, you get to see the city as it is today when you visit and walk around, and then with the museums, you get to see the city’s past and its history a little bit, which is always fun.

Mark: Yeah. As an aside, actually, that was always a big thing that we seemed to be lacking. There was always talk that there should be a Kingston Museum and I think that was what the city (government) was, and still is maybe, aiming towards with an actual city curator, and, you know, trying to preserve the history of the place itself, not just the pieces within it, I guess. Also, another thing was… I don’t know… it was a goal of some people, and other people maybe thought “Well, we already tell that in pieces with Bellevue House and, you know, the forts and all these things. We tell the story of Kingston from a certain perspective”  so they didn’t want to have another museum that tried to deal with the whole. But anyway, it was always there. There were always thoughts and things going on in the museum community to try and make it better, try and do what we could build on it.

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Thanina: What are your thoughts about a potential Kingston Museum? Like a broad, don’t know, like, three stories museum that tries to cover everything?

Mark: Yeah. I don’t know what my thoughts are on that, actually. I mean, I think City Hall is a museum in itself, that building, and they could do more to do exhibits like that. But, yeah, I mean, I don’t know. The argument was “Well, it will be another museum to fund, and it’ll take away from the little people that are here already.” So, there are opinions on both sides. I think Kingston is an amazing place. When I graduated, I kind of fell into museums. I was a science guy. I did my degrees in geology. I knew pretty early on that I did not want to be a field geologist and go exploring in remote areas for large lengths of time. I either wanted a museum job or a lab job, something working with minerals, hands-on, and it just turned out that the museum in my department at Queen’s had been dormant pretty much for decades and they were just exploring the idea of bringing it back to life. There was a curator before me, but he only was there for a couple of years. I started working there summers, and I just gradually moved into it and stayed there for 32 years, which floors me still.

Thanina: That’s amazing though.

Mark: Yeah, it was amazing. And so, yeah, so, I guess Kingston… What I started out to say was that my wife and I, when we got married, I told her, you know, “Just come and live in Kingston for a couple of years and we’ll gradually work our way back to Ottawa. I’ll work at the Museum of Nature or something like that.” Well, this city is incredible. It’s got everything that you could ever want in terms of culture, sports, beauty downtown. It’s just a great place. So yeah, Kingston is just an amazing place.

Thanina: Well, I agree. And as someone who’s from. I’m from Gatineau, so not quite Ottawa, but I know Ottawa, and I would choose Kingston over Ottawa any day. So yeah, I agree.

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Thanina: In your opinion, why do you think KAM is important, and what do you think its main objectives are? It can be, maybe those objectives changed over time. But why do you think KAM is important as an organization?

Mark: Yeah, as an organization, I mean, museums need a voice. Like I said before, most of us in my day, museums – and I really doubt that it’s changed much – we were understaffed; we were overworked; we had very little money to work with and we don’t have the time to liaise with governments, and we also need a unifying body. When we were working with KAM, we had monthly meetings…and I think they still do have monthly meetings… and it’s coordinated through the Museum Association. You know, it used to be that I was basically called the recording secretary, but that meant I did everything, I mean, I organized the meetings, and planned the agenda, and recorded the minutes, and sent the minutes out, and then, you know, we would put committees together to do things. But it was very tough, you know, just to organize everything. So, for the museums themselves, having KAM touched on that organizing center that they knew, even if they couldn’t contact each other directly. Nowadays, we can contact each other directly. But still, you know, you put in a call to the Museum Association and say “I need some help with this” and they will have heard “Oh, somebody here is working with the exact same thing.” And connecting people within the museum community is great. The other thing that I think, KAM does a great job with is, you know, getting these kinds of grants. I think this (interview project) is funded by a grant, probably that the Museum Association got. And individually, museums wouldn’t have the opportunity or the time to put something like this together. But to have a body that can do those kinds of organizational things is really important. And also, again, to have a voice with the city. We are not… I wasn’t, for sure, definitely not… a politician. I don’t know how to talk and how to ask for things, and push my agenda. I don’t do that. Now, there was a time early in -… I guess not early, mid-KAM I guess … where one of the members asked me about, you know, advocacy, and pushing our agenda outside of the association. And I remember, to my chagrin afterwards, I said, “We don’t do that. We don’t have time for that.” And he went on to… I don’t know… Can I name names and stuff like that? Is that okay?

Thanina: Yeah, absolutely.

Mark: Like, this is Paul Robertson (I’m talking about), who was the first city curator. He should have been probably the leader of KAM at the time because he was much more outward-looking and more focused on growing the organization (than me). I was pretty happy with what we were accomplishing in our little group. I was too tired to try and envision anything bigger than that. So, Paul was a big driving force and a big help once he got into the position of city curator. We had a connection, a direct connection, to (City of Kingston) Cultural Services and things like that. So, yeah, that was really important, I guess.

Thanina: No, I think that’s a great point, though, to have this unifying voice that acts on behalf of museums in their best interests. And also, it’s a good thing when you have a group that reunites different people who have different strengths. So, if there’s that one person who can be forward-looking and more ambitious or more like extroverted, that’s always a good thing. And then, you need also people who are willing to do the work, day-in and day-out.

Mark: So work will be easier, yeah, for sure. I think KAM is a great organization. It does great work. I know I haven’t been as involved since I left but my whole world pretty much turned upside down when I moved out east and I was trying to figure it out there, rather than trying to keep my roots here. You know, I still probably would like to have a bit more contact with what’s going on here, but I certainly appreciate getting called like this or consulted on things like this. It’s great.

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Thanina: I wanted to ask, since now you’ve left. You’ve had a long time at KAM, and you can now reflect on your experience. What are the key lessons that you learned from your time, and what advice would you offer to other museum curators or historians and researchers who may be looking to get involved in the cultural heritage sector?

Mark: Yeah, it’s probably quite a different world out there right now for museums but, you know, in my time it’s always been the collaborations that have stood out. And I think I could have done … if I was doing it again … I would have done a lot more collaboration farther afield. I mean, we did a lot within our circle, but for anybody (starting out) it’s a really rewarding job, especially in a small museum. I know it sounds weird, like people ask me, “How did you do the same job for 32 years?” Well, I wasn’t always doing the same job because I was doing everything. I was doing exhibit design. I was doing hands-on classroom programs with kids. I was doing the accounting. I was fundraising, and grant writing. There are so many opportunities in a small museum. A good benefactor of the museum once said he bemoaned the fact that “people these days learn more and more about less and less, until pretty soon they know everything about nothing.” with you know, being so focused on this (one) little thing.

Mark: I was given the Award of Excellence in 2016 I guess it was a complete surprise to me. And I did say, you know, this isn’t for me. This isn’t only me. This is for all of the people that work together in KAM. I guess, I was somehow deemed the poster child, I guess, and given the award.

Thanina: It’s well deserved though.

Mark: You know, I hope so. It was quite humbling, yeah. It was quite an experience. But now, for people starting out, small museums are still amazing. You know, some people, to this day even, think that, you know, “Well, I’ve seen that on the internet. It’s the same thing.” It’s not the same thing. Go, go to the museum and touch the object, listen to the person talking about it and ask questions. That’s what it’s all about. That’s reality, and that’s where you get these experiences, in museums and art galleries.

Thanina: No, absolutely. And I think it’s great that you touched on the idea of wearing many hats and learning so many things when you are doing what seems like one job to the outside world because it’s true. I think sometimes, museums get this reputation that when you are working there, you only do one thing, you are so focused on that. But because KAM is focused on collaboration, it gives the opportunity to people to learn many different things and expand on their knowledge base, which is really good.

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Thanina: What are your hopes for the continuation of KAM as an organization? What do you wish to see KAM accomplish in the future or like keep doing instead?

Mark: Yeah, I hope they keep growing. I know we certainly, I don’t mean growing in terms of member sites as well, but that’s a double-edged sword. At one point, there was a push to get all kinds of different members in, like even malls and things like that. And we resisted that. I mean, we want, you know … I know there’s strength in numbers, but we do want to be a unifying group for heritage and museums and art galleries (specifically).

Mark: It would be nice to get a few more permanent staff in there if possible. That would be my biggest hope, I guess…to grow and have more staff to lighten the load a bit. But yeah, I hope it continues to be a voice for museums within the city. I don’t think we want it to grow outside of this sphere of influence. I mean, we have the OMA for the provincial advocacy and things like that. I still think Kingston, they do a great job of promoting the city, but I think there can still be some more emphasis on the museums and galleries in their advertising campaigns and things like that. In my day, it was always very hard to influence the city, but you know, we can continue to make sure the museum voice is heard within the community, within the governance of the community, I guess, and the business side. I mean, it’s always the business side that has the loudest voice in my opinion, and we need to have a voice there as well. And I hope KAM continues to grow and work in that direction.

Thanina: No, I think that’s a great answer because even though collaboration is great, it’s also, that the business side will have its own interest and then KAM will have its own interest. So, it’s good to have collaboration, but also for KAM to advocate for the needs and the interests of the museums that it represents, as well. Is there anything else that I should know about KAM, its members? Is there anyone else that we should maybe talk to, in the future, that was with you in the early days of KAM?

Mark: Yeah. Yeah, I think, hmm, I mean, obviously Dave St. Onge was there from very early days as well. He might be a good person to talk to. Another person to talk to would be Ann Blake, who was the first executive director of KAM. She was instrumental, as well, in the early incorporation efforts and things like that and she has a much more rounded view of Ontario museums. She came from elsewhere and has a really good working relationship with a lot of museum people so she could give you a better picture of KAM in terms of how it fits in with other museum groups and other areas. It might be also interesting to talk to some of the… I don’t want to, maybe I shouldn’t call them this… the children of KAM, like Beyond Classrooms. We hatched Beyond Classrooms, basically. The pilot was done in my museum to convince school boards that this was a great idea, having school groups come to museums for an entire week and do learning. And Anne Blake would be another point person for Beyond Classrooms, because she’s also very involved with that group. We kind of fostered the idea, did the initial groundwork, and then they became their own entity, separate from KAM so they are more eligible for funding and things like that. So, I think that’s another one of the big accomplishments, I think, of KAM. It was to bring that museum learning especially to disadvantaged classrooms. I mean, some of the groups that came through my museum, the kids were saying, “Wow, this is the first time I’ve ever been to a museum. That’s pretty cool.” And that was, yeah.

Thanina: That’s amazing. It’s sad, but also like really sweet that they were able to experience it for the first time.

Mark: Exactly. They would not have had that experience without the efforts of the museum community. What else did we do? (It) was short-lived, I guess (but) we had a museum summer camp for several seasons.

Thanina: That’s a good idea.

Mark: Yeah. You know, not everyone is built in the sports camp mould.

Thanina: No, that’s true.

Mark: We got kids who were, you know, a little more maybe thoughtful or more interested in not running around and stuff like that. So, I think we built another niche there. It was a great effort from KAM. It didn’t last very long, I guess, because it was hard to keep it going. It was a lot of moving parts and again, a lot of coordination that was hard to do, but it was another thing that we accomplished. So yeah, maybe some of those like I call them, children of KAM or whatever… things that we spun off. And I think they’re still successful today.

Thanina: That’d be a great thing. I agree. I’ll definitely talk to Jamie and Debbie about that because I think they’d be interested too to talk to these people. I asked all my questions. Is there anything else you think I should ask you or know about KAM or your experience?

Mark: Yeah, no. I think we’ve covered a lot of great ground today. I think we’ve captured a lot of the essence of what KAM was, and you see what it is today with, again, getting great funding like this to do these kinds of projects, and to still liaise with the city. I think we’ve covered a good cross-section of KAM. I believe it went back to 1986, I guess, and earlier than that, it was born in a couple of people’s mindsets before then, I believe.

Thanina: No, exactly. It started as an idea, then it became a reality. And now it still is, like, that’s amazing.

Thanina: Mark, thank you so much for taking the time to meet with me. I really appreciated it.

Mark: Oh, you’re very welcome. It was a pleasure talking to you as well, thanks.

Thanina: Of course, anytime. Have a great day.

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