After three years, Chicago’s Freedom Museum permanently closed its doors on March 1 at its Tribune Tower location, 435 N. Michigan Ave, but its mission and civic education will continue.

The Freedom Museum is dedicated to informing the public about the value of freedom and focusing on the role the First Amendment has played in protecting our freedoms in the past, present and future, according to its mission statement.

The museum will continue to bring its message directly to schools and communities throughout the Chicago area and the state with a variety of outreach programs, said Shawn Healy, managing director of the Freedom Museum.

Freedom Museum officials were unsure of the Tribune Tower’s future due to the company’s recent bankruptcy filing, so decided to be “pro-active and leave the space,” said Abby Taylor, spokesperson for the Freedom Museum.

“We took this opportunity to expand and take our message beyond our walls,” Taylor said.

The Tribune Company hired real estate brokers last summer to sell the tower but recently scrapped those plans because of falling real estate prices and its bankruptcy protection in December, according to Crain’s Chicago Business.

Freedom Museum officials believe the move is also beneficial because the core audience of middle and high school students would be better served having the exhibits come directly to them, Taylor said.

“It’s taking our mission to these groups rather than having them come to us,” Healy said. “We think we can do that more effectively and have a wider impact.”

Although still in the planning phases, a variety of outreach programs will be enacted to supply students with the information they would normally receive if they visited the museum, when it was operating.

These prospective programs will include school assembly speakers, teacher seminars, new lesson plans on timely topics, a summer institute class and a mobile museum.

The mobile museum will be a traveling exhibition in the possible form of a bus or semi-trailer likely showcasing interactive exhibits. The full details of what the mobile museum will contain and look like have not been worked out yet, but it will most likely be unveiled sometime in  early 2010, Taylor said.

“The one advantage [of being mobile] is that we can reach a broader audience because, being in a physical location, we weren’t able to reach everyone we could reach,” she said.

In 2008, the museum had  more than 18,000 visitors. But organizers want to reach more students and citizens now that the museum will be mobile, Healy said.

The Freedom Museum contained a variety of informative interactive exhibits with current and relevant topics to students and citizens, such as an exhibit focusing on the role of censorship in movies. Visitors cycled through a list of movies and decided if it was censored by the government. After they voted, the right answer was given, and a graph would appear that showed how everyone else voted that day.

“The interactive exhibits often spark their interests about the reach and importance of journalism,” said Nancy Day, chair of the Journalism Department at Columbia. She added a self-guided field trip to the Freedom Museum into the curriculum for all students in the Introduction to Journalism class.

Healy said he has found today’s youth are not well informed or engaged in civic issues.

“We raised probably two generations of kids who are politically and historically illiterate, don’t consume news and don’t engage in politics,” he said.

His work experience has found that keeping issues relevant will register in the mind-set of children and they’ll begin to understand the importance of freedoms and the value of the First Amendment.

Currently, the museum plans to reach out to the north, south and west suburbs first, and then expand downstate.

“Having a physical location was nice, but we think this is a very positive move for the Freedom Museum,” Taylor said.