The Oliver V. Hirsch Young Adult and Museum Studies Fund at Harbor Conservatory was created to carry on Oliver's wishes that the important field of museum studies be opened up to students from the East Harlem community. The Fund will help these students take part in the Smithsonian Affiliations Intern Partnership Program. This program will enable them to do a ten week summer internship at the Smithsonian Institute in Washington, DC in collaboration with the Raíces Latin Music Museum in East Harlem, NY. These internships will help these students develop careers as museum professionals.

Oliver V. Hirsch (10/13/46 - 1/15/07) was Exhibitions Director of the Raíces Latin Music Museum, a Smithsonian Institute Affiliate, Professor of Exhibition Design in the Graduate Program at New York University and President of Hirsch and Associates Fine Arts Services, Inc. In his time at Raíces, he initiated their participation in this internship program and it was his desire that it become an ongoing project.

Oliver felt a great responsibility to the world in which he lived and which his and others' children would inherit. He brought this perspective to his work in museums: "I take my role of custodian for the stuff of history very seriously, and I feel most responsible for the ways in which the stories of these treasures are told."

Oliver brought to the field of exhibition design an understanding that there is no such thing as art without context - a context determined by the inequalities that have existed in societies throughout history. He was deeply concerned that the growing field of museum studies be as multi-national and diverse in class stratification as the stories that need to be told. He brought to his work a synthesis of high artistic and archival standards and a deep ethical responsibility to those normally cast out. While both welcoming them into the museums and by making exhibits accessible to them, he wanted the walls filled with the history, art, stories and objects of those otherwise unheard and unseen.