How Hello Museum Builds Intimate Community in one of the Biggest Cities in the World

When I tell stories about how the MAH builds community, I emphasize the importance of deep partnerships and relationship-building. We connect with people both professionally and personally, at the museum and on the street. Colleagues from bigger cities often ask: is this approach relevant to us? Can this kind of intimacy and informality work in a sprawling metropolis? This weekend, I got my answer in Seoul--the 18th biggest city in the world--at Hello Museum.

Nestled in a forest of high-rise apartment buildings, this small museum connects children and families with contemporary art. Like the New Children's Museum in San Diego, Hello Museum creates building-wide interactive exhibitions with artists, on themes like nature and #NoWar. But while Hello Museum originally opened as a "children's contemporary art museum," that's not the tagline they use today. Now, they call themselves a "small neighborhood museum"--in the middle of a city of 9.8 million people.

Hello Museum embeds neighborliness in every aspect of its work, starting with its name. I assumed the name was an invitation for children to say hello to contemporary art. But director and founder Ysaac Kim explained that it's not about people connecting to the museum. It's about them connecting with each other. As she said, "I noticed that children these days are taught not to talk to strangers, not to say hello to them. So we made this museum as a place where you can say hello."

Walk into Hello Museum, and you'll encounter a million touches that create a sense of intimacy and community. Everyone takes off their shoes on entry, which creates a homey feel. As we padded in, the front desk was manned by a visiting artist. In a warren of small rooms without doors, parents sat chatting on the floor as their children swirled through art installations made from everyday objects. There were plants and books everywhere.

We wandered up the stairs, slipped on slippers and sunhats (provided on a friendly shelf), and enjoyed a small rooftop garden with waterplay and painting areas. Up on that roof, our world of paints and plants felt tiny in contrast to the skyscrapers looming all around. It felt like a place to be human in a concrete and steel world.

While Seoul is very different from Santa Cruz, Hello Museum felt like a sister to the MAH. The warm, sociable spirit felt the same. Visitors easily and happily collided and said hello to one another. Staff members and teenage volunteers brokered conversations and play. At one point, Ysaac effusively greeted a woman visiting with her child. As they hugged and laughed, they explained to me that the mother was a friend - and part of a company that had sponsored this exhibition opening. It reminded me of every time I've given a tour of the MAH and run into a friend or partner along the way.

Like the MAH, Hello Museum brokers new "hellos" through local partnerships and visitor participation. They try to be of, by, and for their community (which is why I was visiting). For example, on our way into the museum, Ysaac pointed out tiny textile factories dotting the neighborhood run by "grandmothers." In Hello Museum's maker space, children worked with scraps donated by these seamstresses. On the floor, children sat and slid on denim cushions, sewed by the grandmothers out of cast-off jeans donated by museum visitors. After the exhibition closes, these community-made denim cushions will keep doing good in the community. Hello Museum is donating them to a local animal shelter that needs warm cushions to insulate dogs and cats from cold concrete floors.

Ysaac and her team at Hello Museum have created something small, beautiful, and powerful. Seeing this hive of creativity and human kindness made me realize that this kind of museum may even be more valuable in a big city than a small one. In a city that is rapidly growing and changing, they've created a place to come together and play and create things and make friends. A place to slow down and say hello.

Hello Museum taught me that intimacy and community-building is a choice. It's a choice to keep things simple. To work with neighbors. To design spaces that feel human and warm. A choice that any small museum, no matter how big the city, can make.

This is What the Participatory Museum Sounds Like

It's late in the afternoon. I'm cranking away on a grant proposal, when suddenly, a classical rendition of "All the Single Ladies" wafts up the stairs. In the office, colleagues lift their heads. "Is that...?" someone asks. "Yup," another nods. We grin.

This is the magic a piano in the lobby makes.

We've now had a piano in the MAH lobby for several months. About once each week, a visitor walks in and blows everyone away. Sometimes it's a homeless person. Sometimes a lover's duet. This week, it was a little guy, attended by a stuffed toy on the piano bench. It's rare that someone sits down to bang out noise. 95% of our piano users play music, beautifully.

The piano is a simple invitation to meaningful visitor participation. The activity is clear and well-scaffolded. The outcome is open-ended and visitor-driven. It invites visitors to make the museum better. When visitors share their brilliance, it brings the museum to life.

I believe that every person who walks into our museum has something valuable to share. A creative talent. A personal history. A special skill. It's not their job to present their abilities to us. It's our job to welcome them, invite them to contribute, and give them the tools to do so. This is the participatory museum, played out loud.

Guest Post by Jasper Visser: Storytelling for Social Cohesion at Story House Belvédère

I first read about Story House Belvédère on Jasper Visser’s excellent blog, The Museum of the Future. This small, startup cultural project in Rotterdam works directly and intimately with community members to share their stories. It is a platform for social bridging and cultural exchange. Jasper enhanced his original post to share with you here. I hope you’ll be as charmed and inspired by Story House Belvédère as I am.

Story House Belvédère in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, is a magical place. On a beautiful location in a former jazz-era night club, a committed team works on storytelling activities to bring different communities in the city together, and contribute to a happier, more engaged city. They do so by making the stories of individuals and communities visible, and encouraging new encounters. In its short existence (it opened in 2013), the place has made a name for itself as a successful community-driven, innovative cultural initiative.

I visited Story House Belvédère as part of the new Intangible Cultural Heritage and Museum Projects I am involved in. I had heard a lot about Belvédère before my visit, so my expectations were high. The place surpassed them. I spoke with some of the people working there, especially founder Linda Malherbe.

What makes Story House Belvédère so special?

It is rooted in its diverse neighborhood and the people who live there.

Story House Belvédère is in Katendrecht, in southern Rotterdam. Katendrecht is a part of town that for over 125 years has been a home for migrants and newcomers to the city. The neighborhood is a mix of people and communities by design and has a rich social history. Currently, the neighborhood is being gentrified and its development, which tells a wider story about the city, is ongoing. The team found the current home of Belvédère almost by chance when they were looking for a temporary working space. But the location proved perfect. According to Linda, the project could not have been imagined and developed anywhere else in the city. A diversity of people and stories is the reason it exists.

It started as a community project rooted in relationship-building.

Before there was a house, the team behind Belvédère organised a community-focused social photography exhibition outdoors on one of the quais in the south of Rotterdam. It was an exhibition of group portraits of the many communities in the area. City officials doubted the idea of an exhibition in the public space in a part of town they considered dangerous. They said, "you will get shot at, and in two weeks everything will be destroyed." But they were wrong. The exhibition was up for a year and a half. When it ended, the portrayed communities took their portraits home, starting relationships with Belvédère which in some cases still persist.

After the photography show, the team was encouraged to continue their work. They focused on one of the key events in Rotterdam history: the bombing of the city at the beginning of the Second World War. Inspired by Story Corps, they toured the neighborhood with a mobile recording studio and captured memories of the bombing. They created storytelling events and shows, which prompted other communities to start telling their own stories. As Linda says, “Every story inspires a new story.”

The success of the storytelling events encouraged the team to look for a permanent location. They found it in the old jazz club/boxing gym/neighborhood museum Belvédère, a building which dates back to 1894. Together with the communities they had worked with before, they are now renovating the building. In 2018 it will officially reopen. But currently you can visit when the door is unlocked - which is almost daily. After the formal reopening, they still expect to evolve. As Linda says, the process will never be finished, as people will always continue to add and make changes to the building to reflect new stories and ideas.

The community values of the team permeate the space and their projects.

Already you can feel Story House Belvédère is a special place. You feel it the moment you step into their warm and welcoming space. It feels like a living room, where everybody can be a friend. Even the coffee cups and the cookies are in style. The magic, of course, goes beyond aesthetics and is deeply embedded in the organization.

A small team is the driving force behind all projects. It is a committed, dynamic group of freelancers who care about the mission and magic of the place. The place they created is warm and welcoming, and yet it is their energy and enthusiasm that stuck with me most after my visit. I asked Linda to describe what defines the team, and received over a dozen characteristics:

• A shared love for people 
• They are good listeners 
• Positively curious, and always asking new questions 
• Actively looking for (a diversity of) people 
• Etc. etc.

The approach the team takes to connect with communities and then connecting communities is straightforward. In projects, they build a profound relationship with one specific community, such as the Chinese, Bulgarians, or football hooligans. This relationship is based on a genuine interest and includes a long-term commitment to stay involved with each other. When I visited, a community member had made our delicious Bulgarian lunch. Such profound ties make it possible that when a new project focuses on another community, the team can personally invite people from other communities to join. In that way, they build bridges between communities. Everything starts with listening and being curious about the other, and then inviting people, as guests, to take part.

This approach permeates all activities of Story House Belvédère. If you rent the place for a private event such as a wedding, some spots at the event are reserved for people from other communities. So, if you’re interested in joining a Syrian wedding or Jewish Bar Mitzvah, you can. The reason this works is because of the personal ties between the team and the communities. The aim of Linda and her team is to create relationships with people that are everlasting.

Why We Moved the Abbott Square Opening - A Mistake, a Tough Call, & a Pivot: Introducing Abbott Square, Bonus Post

Excited to open... but not quite yet.

This is the eleventh in a series of posts on the Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History (MAH)'s development of Abbott Square, a new creative community plaza in downtown Santa Cruz.

Twelve days ago, we started the two-week countdown to opening Abbott Square. We sent out hundreds of flyers with the eight-night Opening Week schedule. We lined up press. We shifted staff schedules. We had 2,000 t-shirts to give away, 850 balls to drop, and over a hundred artists, accordionists, salsa dancers, taiko drummers, and bubble ladies ready to go.

Ten days ago, we called it all off.

Why? The reason is simple: we weren’t ready. Abbott Square is a plaza, a garden, and a marketplace with 6 restaurants and 2 bars. Marketplace construction isn’t complete. All those chefs haven’t had a chance to stock their food or train their staff. We know food and drink are essential parts of Abbott Square. They are worth the wait. And so, at the last moment, we pulled the rip cord and postponed the events.

The more interesting question is this: why did it take so long to make this decision?

I knew for months that construction was delayed. I knew for weeks that we weren’t going to be able to do all the restaurant prep we had planned for. Why didn’t I make the decision to postpone sooner?

I think the answer comes down to three things.

1. I was too optimistic.
Leading an entrepreneurial project requires a lot of optimism. For years, I’ve been a cheerleader, fundraiser, and spokesperson for this project. When people were skeptical of the vision three years ago, it was my job to win them over. When we needed funds two years ago, it was my job to inspire people to give. When staff were unsure how it would change their jobs a year ago, it was my job to get colleagues onboard. And now in construction, I’ve been telling the community how great the project will be when it opens.

And let’s be clear: it WILL be great. But my realist brain never got the full attention of my cheerleader brain. Partly, I was inexperienced; when construction managers gave me a date, I figured they knew more than I did. But considering how often those dates slid, I should have seen the writing on the wall sooner. I should have taken a break from cheerleading to identify the likely outcome of the trend of construction delays.

2. We had a hard opening date instead of a go/no go threshold.
Back in March, I asked our market partner when he thought construction would be done. He said April 15. And then they’d want two weeks of soft opening - May 1. We added a month to be safe and agreed to have a big grand opening June 2-9. Once we locked this in, I focused on those dates, driving towards them, cranking to get done in time. I felt that a reasonable goal would focus us to get to a successful opening. As that goal became unreasonable, instead of adjusting, I dug in harder. I pushed to open on time, and got more and more stressed as it seemed like we might not hit our dates. By the time of that key decision, I’d barely slept in days.

How could we have avoided this? Instead of pushing to hit a date, I wish I had defined thresholds for a quality grand opening, like “we must have a Certificate of Occupancy at least three weeks prior” or “chefs must have at least 2 weeks to train/soft open.” If I had taken that tack, we would have postponed sooner.

3. It felt easier to commit to dates than to embrace ambiguity.
I felt pressure, both in myself and within our staff team, to provide a date. We are pros at event planning at the MAH, but all event plans start the same way: with a date. It felt like we needed to lock in a date so we could book collaborators, schedule staff, market the activities, and plan everything. So we did. We picked dates we thought were extremely safe… until they weren’t. When construction delays started to get too close to June 2, we started reframing the events—calling them “previews” instead of “opening.” Ultimately, even this reframing wasn’t going to fly, and we had to postpone.

Weirdly, once we decided to postpone, it seemed much less overwhelming than I expected to move everything. Now it feels like we have an amazing event-in-a-box ready to go whenever we are able to lock in new dates. That fixation on dates may have been unhelpful from the start.


I am so grateful to our staff, board, and community for supporting this change. I made the mistake, and they made the solution work. Our staff did an amazing job communicating the change with press, members, and partners—even shifting a huge cover story that went to print just hours after we made the change. Our team clearly, quickly told everyone about the change, and we emphasized that we were postponing so we could offer members the best experience possible. People were understanding about the delay and excited about the opening to come. And I went back to sleeping at night... while spending my days working hard to make the project live up to our community's biggest dreams.

Have we reset new opening dates? Heck no! Here’s our new strategy:

• We’ll host an Abbott Square Preview Night on June 2 as part of First Friday activities.
• When the Market gets its Certificate of Occupancy, we will work with the Market management to determine how many weeks of training and soft opening they need to open successfully. We'll start soft opening our new programming in the plaza during this period too.
• We’ll set new grand opening dates based on soft opening needs and fire up our events plan with a few tweaks. 

And next time we open something comparably complex, we’ll set this kind of plan from the start.


Please share your questions or comments! If you are reading this via email, you can join the conversation here.

Ask Me Anything about our Expansion... and Enjoy All the Posts in the Abbott Square Series

We’re just weeks away from opening Abbott Square to the public here in Santa Cruz, CA. Over the past ten weeks, I’ve written about some of the most potent, confounding, and pivotal moments in making this $5,000,000 community plaza project real.

Here are all the posts in the series. For every story I wrote down, there are ten others rattling around in my head. I’d love to hear your questions and comments. What do you want to know about the project or the process? No question too small. Let's learn more together.

Add your questions to the comments here. Enjoy these posts. And if you are in the area, join us for the Abbott Square Preview June 2 in downtown Santa Cruz. You can also check out the great cover story in the Good Times.

INTRODUCING ABBOTT SQUARE

1. Introducing Abbott Square - welcome to the blog series
2. Why We're Expanding in Public Space - and Why You Should Consider it Too - if our community lives beyond our walls, shouldn't our work go outside too? 
3. Community Participation Builds a Community Plaza - how we involved community stakeholders and citizens from day 1
4. The Most Important Question to Ask in a Capital Campaign - what is your project worth?
5. What a Board is For - how trustees help you go beyond your limits
6. Two Prioritization Techniques We Used to Negotiate a Great Lease - how can you decide collectively what you value most?
7. How Getting Sued Ruined My Vacation and Taught Me about Stress - a cautionary tale
8. From Mine to Ours - Sharing Ownership of Our Expansion - when and how do you bring your staff into a new project?
9. Think Like a Real Estate Developer - a new way of looking at opportunities on the horizon
10. What's More Inclusive: Food or Art? - questioning long-held beliefs about gentrification and inclusion

Please share your questions or comments! You can join the conversation here.

What's More Inclusive: Food or Art? Introducing Abbott Square, Part 10

This is the tenth in a series of posts on the Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History (MAH)'s development of Abbott Square, a new creative community plaza in downtown Santa Cruz.

When we started working on the food side of the Abbott Square project, it raised some basic questions about community inclusion. How could we build a market that was as diverse as our museum? Would adding a major commercial component to the project make it more or less welcoming?

Our staff and community saw these questions differently from the start. Staff members wanted to protect the MAH’s focus on reflecting the diversity of our community. We’ve worked hard for years to make the MAH a place that includes and welcomes people of all backgrounds. Success for us looks like MAH participants reflecting the age, ethnic, and economic diversity of our county. We’re very close to hitting all these targets. We didn’t want Abbott Square to be a step back on the path to community representation.

At the same time, we heard from community members how essential food was to make Abbott Square a compelling place to visit. People were hungry for more lunch, dinner, and happy hour options downtown. And the kind of food they wanted—fresh, local, diverse cuisine—didn’t lend itself to the cheapest options possible.

When we started working with the master tenant/developer on the market, he promised the market would feature “real food for real people.” Diverse chefs would present cuisines from around the world. There would be no white tablecloths—nor any table service at all. But some of us were still wary. Were we creating a gentrifying space instead of an inclusive one?

So our whole staff went to visit another public market the developer had started: San Pedro Square Market in San Jose. The food was mid-range in price. The cuisine represented many countries and flavors. The space was loud, friendly, and packed. And the staff and clientele were more ethnically diverse than any museum in the region--including ours.

Visiting San Pedro Square Market was a humbling wakeup call for me. Here we were, feeling righteous about our inclusive work, and there they were feeding a more diverse crowd than participated at the MAH.

No matter how focused we are on inclusive work at the MAH, we’re still doing it in the frame of a museum. To many people, an art museum is a more potent symbol of exclusivity and elitism than a hipster coffeeshop or a poke bar. In some communities’ eyes, art is a bigger gentrification concern than food.

Visiting San Pedro Square Market reminded me of all the community members who got excited about Abbott Square and the MAH because of the food. There are many, many people in this world who do not feel welcome, invited, or interested in museums. All those people eat. Many of them (more and more every year) eat out. More people, and more diverse people, go to restaurants than go to museums. Many people might feel a greater sense of invitation from a West African rice bowl or custom popsicle in Abbott Square Market than from MAH exhibitions.

I don’t want to discount the potential for Abbott Square Market to be a force for gentrification. It could be. We have to be attentive to its impact on the MAH community and our downtown. But I'm not willing to give the MAH or any art institution a pass in this attentiveness. I don't assume that nonprofits are automatically more inclusive than businesses.

We have to keep working on many levels to include diverse participants—and we will keep doing so, indoors and out. In Abbott Square Market, we’re working with diverse chefs, with diverse staffs, to welcome diverse customers who like to eat out. In the plaza and the museum, we're working with diverse partners, on diverse programs, to welcome diverse visitors who like to connect through creativity and culture. We’re offering many experiences, at many price points, with many partners. It’s all part of opening up the MAH to more of our community.


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Think Like a (Real Estate) Developer: Introducing Abbott Square, Part 9

This is the ninth in a series of posts on the Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History (MAH)'s development of Abbott Square, a new creative community plaza in downtown Santa Cruz.

Studying engineering taught me to think like a designer: state the problem, brainstorm, test, iterate.
Working with creative people taught me to think like an artist: observe, explore, dive in, look out.
Partnering in community taught me to think like an organizer: listen, connect, build shared purpose.
Building the Abbott Square project taught me a whole new mindset: that of the real estate developer.

Real estate developers have two distinctive qualities I’m learning to adopt: they think from the outside in, and they balance flexible optimism with clear criteria for success.

OUTSIDE IN

Before the Abbott Square project, I approached planning from an internally-driven perspective. We develop the ideas. We explore the possible programs. We develop the projects. The “we” isn’t always staff; in most cases, our staff work with community partners in a participatory, co-creative model. But we mostly start projects from the dreams and challenges of the partners in the room.

Real estate developers don’t think this way. They approach planning from the outside in, starting with the external conditions of the land around them. Each site provides its own set of opportunities and constraints. The question is not, “what do I want to do?” but “what can I do with this?”

This mindset expands my world. Even as we talk about “abundance thinking” in nonprofits, we tend to restrict ourselves to a limited landscape of opportunities. We don’t look too far beyond our existing programs, sites, and partners. We don’t scan every new encounter for its potential. Because we want control, we start by controlling ourselves, pre-selecting a narrow window of possibilities based on the frames we’ve already installed.

Real estate developers taught me to stop focusing on my own locus of control. Now I look outside the window and wonder what opportunities different sites and partners could unlock. It’s like Pokemon Go for professional opportunities; that site has some gold sparkles, that park is hopping with party animals, that collaboration request has a rainbow guarded by trolls.

FLEXIBLE OPTIMISM + HARD CRITERIA

Real estate developers blend optimism and flexibility with clear-eyed assessment of what external conditions make a project go. Developers will move mountains to make a project they believe in work—but they’ll also drop a project in an instant if the external conditions make it untenable. If a project doesn’t pencil out or meet the criteria they feel spell success, developers walk away. There will always be another site, another project, another opportunity for a better fit.

This approach requires being explicit and honest about criteria for success or failure. Every developer I’ve talked with can list specific things that will make them pursue or drop a project—at any stage. One guy will only work in specific municipalities. Another has to own the building. It doesn’t matter how attractive the project is if they can’t have what they feel they need to make it succeed.

In my nonprofit world, I’m neither required nor challenged to develop such clear criteria. My general nonprofit MO is to pursue a project and to keep adjusting and learning our way to the finish line. There are some projects that go on too long before they get axed. We identify flaws emergently rather than starting with clear “go/no go” criteria.”

Thinking like a developer has made me more comfortable pursuing many early-stage possibilities in parallel instead of marching forward in sequence. I assume most early-stage opportunities won’t end up lining up, but I won’t know which ones are viable until we get further down the road. I want the “deal flow” of opportunities—and I’m working to hone my own mental checklist of necessary criteria.

***

An engineer says: “I’ll try this and learn something, then I’ll try that and learn something, and eventually I’ll get it right.”

An artist says: “I’ll explore the world, pull ideas from it, and craft a response.”

A nonprofit manager says: “Based on what we’ve learned and the partnerships we’ve built, we’ll move forward like this, together.”

A developer says: “I’ll open many conversations, and when I find the one that meets all my criteria, I’ll go full steam ahead on that one and drop the others that don’t.”

All of these are valid ways to approach the world. Which will you use for your next project?


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Introducing Abbott Square Part 6: Two Prioritization Techniques We Used to Negotiate a Great Lease

This is the sixth in a series of posts on the Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History (MAH)'s development of Abbott Square, a new creative community plaza in downtown Santa Cruz.

Imagine this situation: you’re about to negotiate a long-term partnership for a massive expansion project. Money is on the table. Values are on the table. Everything’s on the table. How do you decide what to prioritize?

18 months ago, I entered lease negotiations with real estate developer, John McEnery IV, who our board had selected to develop the food component of Abbott Square. John would run Abbott Square Market, a multi-vendor food and drink business, adjacent to the plaza, adjacent to the museum. John would manage the food, the MAH would manage the museum, and we would co-manage the plaza. That’s all we knew going into negotiations.

There were lots of big unresolved questions. How much money would we each bring to the table? How much would John pay for rent and how should we structure it? Who would manage construction? Who would steer the design? Who would pick the food vendors? Who would be responsible for what in the plaza? When would the market be open and under what conditions?

I was overwhelmed and under-confident. I needed a way to focus. I needed a way to get direction from our board and staff on what was inviolate and what was negotiable. I needed the board’s leadership without having all of them involved in every little deal point.

So we did two exercises—with board and staff, separately—to develop our priorities. I suspect these exercises might be useful in any complicated project. It is in that spirit that I share them with you.

MISSION/MONEY MATRIX

Nonprofit folk are familiar with this 2x2 grid, with mission fulfillment on one axis and financial sustainability on the other. Nonprofits use this grid to analyze program performance and to explore ways to shift UP towards higher mission fulfillment and/or RIGHT towards higher profitability.

In the case of the Abbott Square Market negotiation, we used this matrix to get a basic sense of our goals. We'd been leasing the site of the future Market as commercial office space for years: solidly profitable, with no mission impact. That (red) dot was our starting point.

We gave board and staff members this diagram and asked them: when the Abbott Square project is complete, where do you want this dot to go? Do you want us to make the same amount of money but increase the mission impact? Would you sacrifice some money for greater mission impact? Would you sacrifice some mission potential for more money?

They drew their dots, building consensus around the blue dot shown. The project had to increase mission impact. And it had to do as well--or better--than the office building financially.

So we structured the rent in a “base with kicker” format. The museum is guaranteed a monthly base rent that is stable and comparable to what we were receiving when the space was leased for offices. But if the Market does better than a certain threshold, we get more money - a kicker - above the base. That's the dotted line potential for the revenue to increase.

YOUR TOP THREE PRIORITIES

In the months leading up to the lease negotiation, trustees and staff voiced lots of different priorities for the project. Some focused on the need for Abbott Square to be as welcoming and inclusive as the MAH. Others cared about it being clean. Still others wanted local food vendors. And so on.

We couldn’t succeed in negotiations if everything was a top priority. There had to be some things we could trade to get other things that mattered more.

So I wrote up ten distinct priorities we’d heard throughout the process and invited board and staff members to each pick their top three.

We tabulated all the top priorities by votes to generate a ranked list. While trustees and staff had different top priorities, the cumulative priorities were clear. We were able to split the original ten priorities into five “must-haves” and five non-essential preferences. You can see them in this chart. The must-haves on the left, and the negotiable non-essentials on the right.

Unsurprisingly, the five must-haves were the ones that hewed closest to the MAH mission. But they were not the ones people talked about the most in the months leading up to this exercise. Once we had to prioritize, some sexy, much-discussed ideas—like celebrating local food—gave way to core MAH values—like celebrating cultural diversity.

Focusing on five priorities gave me focus and freedom. I could focus on what was important, and I had the freedom to pursue and protect those important elements in whatever way I felt best. In many ways, the five “non-essentials” were even more helpful than the must-haves, because I knew I could deal them away as needed.

In the end, we signed a contract that answered all the big questions about how to manage the project. Any contract would have done that. But the answers hewed to the priorities articulated through these two exercises. No matter how small the deal point, I knew I could use these big priorities as a guiding light. And board and staff knew that I was acting on their collective wisdom and our shared vision for success.

What techniques have you used to set priorities for a big, complicated negotiation?

If you are reading this via email and would like to share a response or question, you can join the conversation here.

Introducing Abbott Square Part 5: What a Board is For

This is the fifth in a series of posts on the Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History (MAH)'s development of Abbott Square, a new creative community plaza in downtown Santa Cruz.

I’m embarrassed to admit it, but for my first couple years as nonprofit executive director, I was mystified about the board of trustees. Beyond the legal requirements, I didn’t understand what it was for and why it was necessary. It took an ambitious expansion project--Abbott Square--for me to learn how a great board makes the impossible possible.

I came to the MAH at a time of transition and turnaround six years ago. The board that hired me included many dedicated, exhausted people who were ready to move on. We expanded the board, bringing new energy and diverse thinking into the room.

I liked my board. I admired them. But I still didn’t know what the board was for. I thought of the board as a benign, friendly force. I saw them as supporters, advisors, fundraisers, and champions. I expected them to provide guidance to keep the organization on the right track, like bumpers on bowling lanes. But I also saw their role as responsive to my actions as the executive director. I didn’t want them getting too involved in our programmatic changes. I wanted their support, participation, and advice, but—when I’m being really honest with myself—not their leadership.

All that changed when we started the Abbott Square project in 2013. Suddenly, I was way out of my comfort zone. I knew a bit about community planning, creative placemaking, and business planning, but that was it. I knew nothing about capital campaigns, real estate development, contract negotiations, nor city permitting processes. I didn't need a little advice; I needed deep partners to explore what the project could be and how it would work.

And so I turned to my board. There was the farmer who built the business plan with me. The retired judge who guided us through complicated lease negotiations for the market. The designer and the city councilman who saw the full creative potential of the site. The fundraisers who honed our campaign structure and outreach plan.

Every step of the project, board members extended our reach and improved the project. They provided superb expertise matched by thoughtful enthusiasm that money couldn’t buy. And they took ownership alongside me of the key decisions, budget allocations, and struggles along the way.

The most important thing they took co-ownership of was the courage to see the project through. When I asked them if I should be spending half my time on this expansion, they said yes. When I asked them if we could raise $5,000,000, they said yes. When I asked them if it was worth the pain, they said yes.

If they hadn’t been there to say yes, I would have said no at some point. I probably would have pulled back or shrunk the project at key stress points. We might not have completed the project at all.

This project taught me that a great board is not one that supports the staff and buys into the Executive Director’s vision. A great board supplements the staff and expands the vision. They take you places you could never go by yourself.

If you want to reach beyond your limits to achieve your mission, you need your board. They are the people who will push you over the edge, pull you up when you stumble, and make the organization soar. Sure, our organization could manage without a board of trustees. But we can only fly because of them.

If you are reading this via email and would like to share a response or question, you can join the conversation here.

Introducing Abbott Square Part 4: The Most Important Question to Ask in a Capital Campaign

This is the fourth in a series of posts on the Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History (MAH)'s development of Abbott Square, a new creative community plaza in downtown Santa Cruz.

When you embark on a big capital campaign for a community project, don’t ask how much the project will cost. Ask how much it’s worth.

When we started the Abbott Square project, we focused on how much the project would cost. We were brand new to capital fundraising, and we were nervous about what we could afford. We had no idea what it would take to do a big campaign. We knew we’d have to reach out to new donors who weren’t connected to the MAH. We’d have to find them, get them involved, and get them invested. It all sounded daunting—especially for an organization that had no development director when we started the project.

So we played it cautious. At first, we wanted to fix up the plaza and add some art. We put a $250,000 price tag on that. Then, we realized we wanted to do more, maybe add some food, definitely make spaces for performances, and improve the infrastructure for community festivals and events. That brought the price tag to $1,000,000.

And then I sat down with a major donor—someone I hoped would give a big gift to the project. She changed my whole way of seeing the project. She taught me two crucial things:

1. The project price tag is what it’s worth, not what it costs. She said, “This project is worth more than a million dollars. Having a town plaza, a place to connect in the middle of downtown, a creative gathering place—that’s huge. That’s worth a lot more than a million dollars.”
2. Mega-donors make decisions based on the value and price tag of the project… not the balance in their bank accounts. She said, “Here’s how I look at things. I’m considering a project and let’s say I’ve bought in. I want to pay for a percentage of the project - let’s say 15%. So if you tell me the project costs $1,000,000, I’ll give you $150,000. If you tell me it’s $5,000,000, I’ll give you $750,000.”

Her insights blew my mind… and sent our team back to the campaign drawing board.

We made a crucial shift from scarcity thinking (“What’s the least we could do? What’s the least we could pay?”) to abundance thinking (“What’s the most we could do? What’s the full value of this project?”). Inspired by our supporters’ big dreams for the project’s potential, we started thinking bigger, too.

That donor encouraged us to think about what it would take to make the best possible version of Abbott Square. She pushed us to crunch the numbers on a meaningful food experience. We started to pencil out what it would cost to fill the plaza with great events and art activities every week. We talked to other donors to gauge what they thought the project was worth.

We got to $5,000,000.

We didn’t get there by inflating the budget. We didn’t get there through cost overruns. We got there by finding people who dreamed of a creative gathering place, listening to them, believing in their aspirations, and matching the scale of the project to the value they told us was there. We raised all $5,000,000, ahead of schedule. (And that donor? She gave $800,000.)

Now when people talk with me about their capital campaigns, I don’t ask how much the project will cost. I ask how much it’s worth—to their donors, and more importantly, to their community.

If the project is worth as much or more than it costs, you’re in for a pleasure of a fundraising campaign. If it’s worth less than it costs, hit the pause button and ask yourself—why are we doing this? Who is it for? How can we make it something so valuable to our community that it will feel more than worth the cost?

If you are reading this via email and would like to share a response or question, you can join the conversation here.

Introducing Abbott Square Part 3: Community Participation Builds a Community Plaza

This is the third in a series of posts on the Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History (MAH)'s development of Abbott Square, a new creative community plaza in downtown Santa Cruz.

When we first started talking about redeveloping Abbott Square as a community plaza for downtown Santa Cruz, we ran into some basic questions. What amenities does it need? How will it feel welcoming and inclusive for different communities? Whose vision of downtown are we designing for?

We answered these questions through four years of community conversations. We kept meeting and involving new advocates with strong and differing perspectives. We built specific community processes appropriate to each step of the project development. Every step involved community participation. The result is a project dreamed up by our community, then harnessed, honed, and taken to completion by the MAH.

Here are three significant ways community participation influenced our project.

Community stakeholders made us confront the reality of divergent perspectives about downtown Santa Cruz. 

Going into the project, we saw the MAH’s location in downtown as a huge asset to the project. MAH staff and trustees see downtown as a vibrant retail, dining, and entertainment district, packed with diverse people. We started the Abbott Square project to bring more of the people visiting downtown into the MAH.

But when we started hosting formal community visioning workshops in 2013 with the Project for Public Spaces, we heard other opinions of downtown. We heard suburban moms describe downtown as dangerous, dirty, and unappealing. Businesspeople asked how we would keep out homeless people, drug addicts, and deviant behavior. Some people were downright incredulous that we could achieve our goals for a creative community plaza in downtown.

At first, I resisted and discounted these skeptics. I thought they had distorted perceptions of downtown. But over time, I learned to take their perceptions at face value. Their reality is not my reality... but it is real to them. And that led to two conclusions. First, that we should do what we can to address some community members’ real concerns about safety, cleanliness, and signals of welcome. We started designing ways to make Abbott Square a desirable “first landing place” in downtown—especially for families with children. And second, that while we want Abbott Square to be a welcoming community plaza downtown, we have to accept the reality that some people in our county will never come downtown. We are taking concerns about cleanliness and safety seriously. But we are focusing on people who are skeptical yet open to downtown, not those for whom that door is closed shut.

Community stakeholders drove us to add food to the project in a big way. 

When we first pitched Abbott Square to community members as a MAH project, we heard the same thing again and again: “I like the MAH. I love art and performances and family festivals. But FOOD and DRINK is going to be the thing to bring me back again and again.”

This community preference gave me a healthy dose of humility. A plaza rooted solely in creative practice was not going to achieve our community goals. So we scaled up the food component.

We went from planning for one coffee shop and a small cafe to imagining a public market with five mini-restaurants and two bars. We invested way more time, money, and energy into adding food than we had planned. We entered into a major new partnership to build Abbott Square Market. While Abbott Square still has art, history, and community at its heart, I accept the reality that food is what will drive most people to the plaza.

Community stakeholders made this a community project. 

Every step of the way, we reminded ourselves that we could only build a community plaza with our community. We found ways to engage community members in every step of the development process. Rather than engaging people in one aspect or way, we developed new forms of participation as needed. The first workshops with PPS were quite formal. They generated a fancy (and useful) report. But they were just the beginning. Here are a few other ways we involved community members in Abbott Square development:

• We held open design competitions for the two major public art components of Abbott Square. Community members served on juries, and we invited hundreds of museum members, donors, and visitors to weigh in on proposed designs. 
• We invited Abbott Square advocates to host their own lunches or cocktail parties at the MAH to discuss the future of downtown with their friends. 
• We created a set of coasters with the Abbott Square core components written on them: FOOD, ART, HISTORY, PLAY, COMMUNITY. Any time we met with people about the project, we invited them to sort the coasters in order of importance and discuss their rankings. And then we encouraged them to keep and share the coasters. 
• Whenever possible, we held public presentations/celebrations of the project. Most involved a fundraising ask, but we always made sure to welcome donors giving $1 as well as those giving $10,000. There were several events where we received gifts across that full range. 
• We empowered a teen intern to make a video featuring MAH visitors to generate support for the project (shown at the top of this post). 
• We invited interested folks to attend major City and County hearings on the project and to offer testimony about the value of the project to them. 
• We formed an “Operation Abbott Square” task force of business-minded volunteers to help us plan for operational changes at the MAH post-expansion into Abbott Square. 
• We let people put their mark on the project. Before we tore out all the pavers, we invited people to “buy a brick” for a contribution of any amount, painting their name on it right then and there. We held a demolition party where people could draw and write their names on walls that were later destroyed. And when neighbors asked if they could take home pavers for their own construction projects, we always said yes.

How have you involved community stakeholders in your capital projects?

If you are reading this via email and would like to share a response or question, you can join the conversation here.

Introducing Abbott Square Part 2: Why We're Expanding in Public Space - and Why You Should Consider It Too

This is the second installation in a series of posts on the Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History (MAH)'s development of Abbott Square, a new creative community plaza in downtown Santa Cruz.

The MAH fundamentally has two jobs: we bring art and history out into our community, and we invite our community in.

Over the past six years, we’ve done a great job bringing the community into the MAH. Our audience has quadrupled in size, and the people walking through our doors increasingly reflect the age, income, and ethnic diversity of our County. We’re proud that the MAH is a thriving museum AND community center for Santa Cruz County, a place for people of all walks of life to connect around our shared creativity and culture.

Visitors tell us how much they love the MAH, saying things like, “I love that the MAH holds very welcoming, accessible, open-minded and open-hearted space where people from every walk of life can gather and (re)create community.” Or “I love the MAH because it is a truly participatory space where diverse groups can enjoy, express themselves, and learn from/about/with others.” Or “The MAH is a living invitation of out-of-the box, beyond-perceived-walls thinking.”

There’s a lot of love inside the MAH these days. But in the spirit of that last visitor comment, we feel it is our responsibility and our glorious opportunity to spread that love beyond our walls. If we only build community inside the building, we’re trapping ourselves and our visitors in a bubble. We want to break out. We want the MAH’s inclusive creative energy to ripple across our county. Our vision is to build a stronger, more connected community through art and history. If we really want to achieve that vision, we’ve got to get to work in all the places where people live, work, and play.

We’ve experimented with beyond-the-building engagement through projects like the Pop Up Museum, Evergreen Cemetery restoration work, and partner-led festivals. I’ve seen again and again how outdoor programming has impact beyond what can happen inside the museum. Some casual passers-by jump in to participate, and even when they don’t, they get a bit of a contact high from the fact that art is happening as part of their urban experience. The engagement may be less intimate and focused, but the opportunity for ripple effects is greatly increased. The impact outdoors is wider and wilder than anything that happens inside the walls of an institution.

So we’re going big by expanding into Abbott Square, the under-utilized plaza on the MAH’s front doorstep. The “why” behind Abbott Square evolved over time, with four main reasons at the core:

1. marketing and audience development
2. meeting community needs
3. achieving our mission / strategic alignment
4. strengthening our business model

When we started the project four years ago, the primary reason to expand into the plaza was about marketing and audience development. Abbott Square physically connects the MAH to the main drag of downtown Santa Cruz. Four years ago, we were in the early stages of expanding and diversifying MAH programming, and we saw Abbott Square as a key physical connection between the growing museum and the vibrant creative life of downtown. Furthermore, we learned from a Latinx-focused ethnographic study that outdoor programming was particularly appealing to local Latinx families. We wanted to reach more people, and more diverse people, and we saw Abbott Square as a great place to do it.

Once we started community conversations about the potential for Abbott Square, the “why” shifted to community desire for a town square. While locals were interested in the MAH, they were MUCH more interested in having a downtown gathering place. We don’t have a town square in Santa Cruz, and people feel the acute lack of creative public space. What started as being about the MAH became more about the community. Community members’ expressed needs and desires drove the planning of Abbott Square and led to major decisions we would not have made if this project was “just” a MAH extension (more on community involvement in next week’s post). While this was exciting, it was also a bit disconcerting. At times, it felt like we were taking on a new sister project to the MAH in Abbott Square, as opposed to an expansion of our existing work.

To my grateful surprise, that sense of separation resolved itself as the MAH's strategy evolved in alignment with the project. While we were designing Abbott Square with community members, we were also strengthening the MAH’s overall commitment to community-driven programs. Three years ago, we wrote a new MAH theory of change with an impact statement to build a stronger, more connected community. We knew this impact could only happen if we expanded our work further beyond our walls.

Through the lens of our new theory of change, suddenly Abbott Square was core to our overall institutional strategy. Just as we have opened the MAH up to more diverse people, perspectives, art forms, and historical narratives over the past few years, now we are physically opening our facility with new offerings that are accessible and appealing to a much wider audience—including thousands of people who might not ever set foot in a museum. The people who enjoy Abbott Square’s whimsical Secret Garden, locally-rooted public market, and free outdoor performances will all experience the MAH—whether they also visit exhibition galleries or not. This intersection is not entirely a coincidence—the MAH and the Abbott Square project grew up together—but it was reassuring to realize that the community’s interest in Abbott Square was in our strategic best interest, too.

And finally, a fourth “why” was key throughout planning: Abbott Square was designed to generate revenue and maximize use of our real estate assets. The MAH has an unusual business model in that part of our revenue comes from managing Abbott Square plaza and an adjacent commercial office building. By incorporating a food market in the ground floor of that building (something community members urged us to do as part of the project), we are hopefully building a sustainable revenue source into Abbott Square. At the same time, we’re transforming a “high income, low mission impact” asset into a “higher income, high mission impact” asset. Hopefully.


I firmly believe that more creative institutions should be in the public space business. If we care about building community, we can’t just do it within our walls. We live in a time—especially in the United States—when people are more divided than ever. Space is contested, privatized, and segregated. Working on this project has opened me up to the incredible opportunities we have to claim public space for our communities and for the values that underlie our work.

Many people call this work “creative placemaking.” The idea is that creativity—not just sculptures or murals but events, art-making, art-sharing, commerce—can help turn an intersection or a riverfront or a concrete wedge into a place with a story and an identity. Creativity and culture connect us to place and to each other.

Yes, art is place making. But art is also future making. Art rejects the limitations of what we are and what we have been. It inspires us to imagine what we will be.

I want to imagine a future of downtown Santa Cruz in which creativity, commerce, and community are all welcome. I want to imagine a future in which the spirit of welcome and inclusivity that permeates the MAH spreads throughout our whole town.

We’re trying to build a slice of that future in Abbott Square. What future do you want to build in your community?

Introducing Abbott Square: A Multi-Part Series on the MAH's Expansion into Creative Public Space

I love the sound of jackhammers in the morning.

My organization, the Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History (MAH), is in the home stretch of a major expansion project. Over the next two months, as we head towards opening, I want to share some of the stories of this project and the process behind it.

This is not your typical museum expansion. When the construction is complete, we will have added zero square feet of gallery space. No new classrooms. Not an ounce of storage space, office space, nor exhibit prep space.

Instead, we're spending five million dollars to take our museum outside. We're transforming an underutilized downtown plaza next to the MAH, Abbott Square, into a creative town square. We're gutting an adjacent office building to host a new public market with five mini-restaurants and two bars. We're planting gardens, painting murals, chalking out performance stages, and hanging market lights. The goal is for Abbott Square to become a new creative heart of our county, a town square that brings together art, history, food, play, and community.

I've spent about half my work-time on Abbott Square over the past four years. It has been an incredible learning experience. I've immersed myself in the politics of public space, the idiosyncrasies of public-private partnerships, the opportunistic mindset of real estate development, the thrills of capital campaigns, the complications of merging current and future operations, and the creative possibilities of community co-design. I've made a lot of mistakes. There were lots of sleepless nights. I look forward to sharing some of these stories with you.

I'm a project junkie. Every time a big project approaches completion, I feel pride, excitement--and a tinge of loss. I love the uncertain energy that pulses through unfinished work. The tough decisions. The creative debates. I love the sound of jackhammers in the morning.

With the concrete flying and opening day fast approaching, I'm taking a step back to capture this project in writing. I don't want Abbott Square to be under construction forever. But I do want to keep the conversation open by sharing and discussing its story with you.

What Does a Great Distributed Digital Museum Experience Look Like?

Museum technology nerds: this post is for you.

I've been thinking recently about distributed content experiences--ways for people to interact with museum content (art, history, science, etc.) as they make their way through the world outside the museum. There are a zillion apps for making your own tours, podcasts, maps, or QR code-infested games... but none of them are great.

Distributed mobile content experiences seem to suffer from two basic problems:

1. Underwhelming entry points. It's extremely hard to get people to download a new app. Where and when does an institution ask you to do so? At the museum? At the historic site? While walking down the street? The impulse to download an app is driven by curiosity or an urgent perceived need. While museums may cultivate curiosity, they rarely offer sufficiently clear, urgent use cases to encourage you to go through the drudgery of downloading an app.  
2. Unlikely reentry points. Once you download an app, are you really going to remember to (re)open it to find an interesting historical fact tagged to your geolocation? Are you going to use it to scan for public art near you? Most of these apps seem so niche, so useless for anything other than accessing semi-interesting content in a clunky interface, that they end up languishing in the Siberian outback of your phone.

In contrast, successful distributed projects seem to have one of two characteristics:

1. Compelling and/or versatile mobile experience. What do we use our phones for most? Communicating, playing, exploring. Quality content experiences tend to piggyback on massive social media platforms apps that are already well-used (i.e. facebook) or create very compelling whole worlds unto themselves (i.e. Pokemon Go). 
2. Prominent real world presence. One of the simplest, effective distributed projects I've seen recently is Walk [Your City]. It's a system for creating signs, zip-tied to existing traffic/lightpoles, that direct people to points of interest, special experiences, and surprising encounters. Some cities use them for straightforward wayfinding, but in many towns, the signs have a whimsical or poetic nature. It's amazing how much impact simple signs can have. I'd choose repeated physical presence over a fancy digital interface any day.

Thinking about these two characteristics, here are some highly speculative ideas and questions:

• What is the most effective way to have lots of physical presence in the built environment? Working with cities and public property involves a lot of regulation (though if you can push through the red tape, a lot of potential impact). It's often easier to make deals with private property owners than to lobby the government for use of public space/sidewalks/streets. Projects like Little Free Library and the Peace Pole Project work this way; individuals choose to build them on their own land. How can we activate movements for people to participate in producing and sharing content on the land they already control?
• What's the cheapest advertising money can buy? I generally assume nonprofits can't afford to compete in the advertising world, but there's so much advertising in our visual landscape, some of it in very odd (and affordable) forms. Could you give out free coasters at bars? Make beautiful bike racks? Provide your local coffee shop with thousands of sleeves for paper cups? Is there a distributed layer to life (in the form of advertising) that is hackable for good?
• How can we creatively hack into mobile apps that lots of people already use? Of course you can create content for podcasts, twitter, instagram, etc. But what about apps where you don't have to build a whole media presence? What about creating geo-fenced Snapchat filters connecting people to art nearby, or making Tindr profiles for historical figures in the area? Are there other ways to piggyback on popular apps for content experiences?
• Who's going to build the killer app for distributed learning experiences? Part of me feels like learning is just so low on people's priority lists that distributed museum experiences will always be niche... but then I think of the huge success of online learning platforms like Khan's Academy. I wonder if we just need one (or a few) powerhouse app to take the lead on facilitating quality distributed learning/augmented reality experiences. I think it's possible an institution could do this... but only if it was more focused on building an industry-wide solution than building something custom for their own museum or historic site.

I know that there are very smart people working on these problems. Who's tackling them? What are some of the most interesting approaches underway?

If you are reading this via email and would like to share a comment or question, you can join the conversation here. 

And a note to readers in the Boston area: I'll be participating in a MuseumHive real world / Google hangout on these topics (and others) on October 26. Register today.

What Happens When a Viral Participatory Project is Too Successful? Diagnosing the Power of the Love Locks

Last week, the international press lit up with a story from Paris: the city is removing the "love locks" from the Pont des Arts bridge. 45 tons of rusting padlocks, inscribed with lover's names, were hauled off to protect the historic bridge and its views of the city. And so, one of the most successful, accidental, and fraught participatory projects of the past decade comes to an end.

The "love locks" are not a project with an institutional or artistic director. Nor are they historic. They started to proliferate on bridges around the world in the mid-2000s. The concept is simple: visit a picturesque bridge in an historic city. Carve or write your names on a padlock. Lock the lock to the bridge, throw the key in the water below. Your love is memorialized forever... or until the municipality decides that the locks must go.

No one planned the love locks, but their success is rooted in the same principles that make all the best participatory projects work:

• it requires no instructions beyond its own example. See the other locks on the bridge, and you immediately understand how to participate. The other participants teach you how to play. While the tools require some forethought (purchasing and inscribing a lock), on the most active bridge, enterprising vendors have sprung up, ready to sell you a lock and inscribe it for you.
• it is simple to do, but it feels significant. So many participatory projects do the opposite, requiring you to take a dozen tricky steps to no meaningful end. Payoff here is fast and powerful. 
• it has emotional resonance. You don't need to write a missive about your relationship, just affix a symbol (which has been helpfully assigned by everyone else). And yet, the symbol feels important. It is an expression of the idea that love is forever and no one can tear you apart. I've read stories of people affixing locks during honeymoons, but also after the death of a spouse or a child. Sentimentalities can be embarrassing to say aloud... which means we are constantly seeking comfortable, often symbolic, ways to express them. 
• it is durational. One of the reasons lovers are so frustrated by the removal of the locks is that they can no longer fulfill step two of participation: visiting your lock years later and reconnecting with time past. Few couples will actually do it, but for those who do, there is a huge secondary sentimental payoff. If your contribution is thrown into the trash bin at the end of the day it was made, it may feel trivial. The longer it stays, the longer the perceived commitment to the participants and their experience.
• it connects you to something greater than yourself. We often say at our museum that "make and share is better than make and take." We're constantly seeking ways to invite people to participate in projects that grow over time, so participants can see how their contribution became part of a greater whole. The love locks do this in an incredible way, connecting your love relationship to those of hundreds of thousands of other couples. It reminds me of that moment in a wedding when the officiant turns to the audience and says "all of you are here to bear witness to this commitment." The locks bear witness to each other, and to everyone who affixes one.

Of course, it is this great collective uprising of love and locks that is leading to the love locks' downfall. I support any municipality that feels that the locks must go. I understand that they can pose a danger to people's safety. That they invite tourists to vandalize others' cities. That they are another way to capitalize on sentimentality.

Yet still I see them as beautiful lessons in how we all want to participate. We just need the right opportunity and mechanism. That's the key.

Setting Your Mission Free in the Wild

Where are you most able to execute your mission: inside your facility, or outside of it?

There are a lot of reasons we focus on work inside our facilities. Our facilities are, ideally, spaces optimized for mission execution. Galleries purpose-made to show artwork. Performance halls perfectly tuned for the orchestra. Archives with climate control to protect artifacts.

But I'm increasingly seeing organizations (mine included) expand beyond our walls. In churches. On sidewalks. In health centers and hospitals and laundromats and housing developments. The Irvine Foundation recently published a great study on this phenomenon.

Why go out to these other spaces? We tend to focus on two reasons:

1. It's where the people are. Or at least, it's where certain people are, people who you want to connect with but who choose not to walk through your doors. This seems to be the primary driver behind partnerships with organizations that serve specific target groups, whether those be homeless adults or preschoolers or ESL students. It's also the driver behind participation in events with huge visibility potential, such as farmer's markets or community festivals.
2. As our missions shift, our buildings can't always keep up. The facility that was perfectly primed for the organization founded in 1920 may not fit the needs of 2015. Many organizations end up fighting their facilities--and pouring money into their operation--instead of using them as a springboard for amazing work.

I've been thinking recently more and more about a third reason for going outside: it's where the mission takes flight.

This reason is specific to taking programming outdoors, in the public sphere. Outdoor festivals, plays, and concerts have an energy that gets dampened and contained indoors. The outdoors absorbs difference comfortably; you can come or go, eat or talk, participate in different ways without alerting concern. And outdoor events proselytize themselves; anyone walking by can get a glimpse, a taste, a sensory solicitation to come take part. People share viral videos of flash mob orchestras in grocery stores and operas on the street because these events set isolated art forms free.

This isn't just true of the arts: think of an outdoor capoeria class, dog festival, or co-working meetup. When we take our interests and micro-communities into the public sphere, we bring them into the light. Yes, the space is more chaotic, less intentionally-designed--and that may mean that the experience is less intense than in purpose-built facility. The magic can be more diffuse, the audience less attentive. But the benefits of the open air, the open invitation to partake, often seem to outweigh these negatives.

Even someone walking by who doesn't participate can have his day altered by what he saw or heard. If we walk by many outdoor fitness classes, we may feel more motivated to exercise. If we walk by many public art installations, we may feel more inspired to create. If we walk by music and culture and conversations and kindness, we may feel better about ourselves and our community.

None of this contact happens if these activities are trapped inside buildings. The magic stays locked inside. Sometimes, that works--and you feel the special hum of "just us" sharing the experience. But often, the magic could go further.

How many of the best things you're doing are locked behind doors? How might things change if you could do them out on the street?

If you are reading this via email and would like to share a comment or question, you can join the conversation here.

A City and an Art Center Design the Future: Reflections on the Market Street Prototyping Festival

"The arts are future-making."

I wrote this down when Deborah Cullinan said it at a meeting of arts leaders about a year ago. We were discussing the potential for cultural organizations to have significant impact across communities: on planning, health, education, and quality of life. Deborah's vision for the arts leading the way to stronger future inspired me. But I couldn't fully imagine how a museum or an arts center could embody it.

Last week, I got to see Deborah's vision in action. The Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (which she directs) teamed up with the San Francisco Planning Department and the Knight Foundation to host the Market Street Prototyping Festival. Over three days, 52 artist teams erected experimental projects along San Francisco's biggest thoroughfare. They turned Market Street into a playground, a performance hall, and a meeting place. The result was a true experiment in designing the future--right here, right now--with artists and planners and civic leaders at the helm together.

The Festival is one moment in a decade-long project to redesign Market Street. Market Street is a central artery of San Francisco. It has wide sidewalks and lots of public transportation access points. 200,000+ pedestrians walk along it every day. But it's not just for transportation; it's also a huge swath of public space. In San Francisco, sidewalks account for 80% of all open space. In a city where parks are rare, streets can and should provide the social, recreational, and health functions that we expect from open space.

The Market Street Prototyping Festival was not a typical public art exhibition. The projects were messy, unfinished--true prototypes of future possibilities. A fitness trail for urban life. A soundtrack for the street. A urinal that watered plants. Pop up libraries, performance spaces, and seating areas. A hexagonal ping pong table that invited six people (often strangers) to play together. Lots of social bridging, surprise encounters, and more than a few mystified moments.

The Market Street Prototyping Festival stirred up a few thoughts related to design in public places, prototyping, and communicating complexity.

DESIGN IN PUBLIC SPACE - CONFRONTATION VS. INVITATION

Just because you put something in front of a lot of people doesn't mean they'll take you up on it. One of the challenges and attractions of the Festival is the fact that most people were not traveling to Market Street specifically to play with the prototypes. They were heading to work, going home, running errands.

This made for some amazing emergent engagement behaviors, but also a lot of zooming by. I participated in a mini-observational study of one interactive sculpture in the festival. We found that 12% of passersby even stopped to glance at the piece (let alone interact) over a 15 minute interval.

What kind of cultural experience offers the right kind of invitation and opportunity for pedestrians in public space? Many Market Street prototypes struggled because they asked too much of people relative to their expectations and interests as they traveled along the sidewalk.

I've often encountered projects that try to address this challenge with confrontation. Put the most disruptive, loud, or provocative experience in the right of way, and people can't help but notice. This may be true, but such experiences are often so dislocating that they put people off and people scramble to get out of the way.

Invitation works better than confrontation. One of my favorite projects, designed by the Exploratorium, nailed the balance of invitation and opportunity on a public street. It was a simple pathway of fringed fabric that invited you to wander into a seating area with information about the drought (it made sense if you were there). The fringed pathways were perfect--intriguing and desirable, easy to walk along, intoxicating enough to entreat you into a new world. Many other projects struggled because the desired engagement was so open to the street. They were open books. The Fringe was a tentacle that lapped you in, a teaser that enticed people into stories they didn't know they wanted.

PROTOTYPING, LEARNING, AND COMMUNICATION

Prototyping is about learning, and learning usually requires communication. I was disappointed and surprised by how few of the Market Street projects were actively manned by their creators. While  "final" versions of these prototypes would need to stand alone on the sidewalk, the best prototypes are facilitated.

Facilitation has a dual function: the artists learn what worked and didn't, and visitors learn what the projects are all about. Hundreds of hours of community dialogue went into the development of the Market Street Festival prototypes--both on the street and online. Thousands more conversations during the festival. All of this dialogue helps build better projects, and ultimately, a better Market Street. Where it didn't happen, visitors, artists, and organizers missed an opportunity to learn and grow.

ANSWERING THE MOST BASIC QUESTION

One of the most frequent questions I heard along Market Street was: "What's going on here?"

Many people thought the Festival was "an art exhibit" or "an art festival." ABC news headlined their segment saying "Market Street festooned with public art for 3-day fest." While this is true, it's also a missed opportunity for the larger project.

The point of the festival was artists and communities imagining potential futures for Market Street. The artworks were too rough to be "beautiful" and anyone seeking to judge them by that criteria might be disappointed. But as signals about the possibilities of the street? As prototypes for the future? Incredible... and not self-evident. That message could have been more clearly trumpeted throughout the Festival.

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Overall, I'm amazed at the partnership, coordination, and energy that went into the festival. We often say that "arts deserve a seat at the table" of big civic decisions. It takes leaders like Deborah to claim those seats and launch successful collaborations.

The arts ARE future-making. I saw a little slice of the future last week on Market Street.

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Community Science Workshops and Shared Authorship of Space: Interview with Emilyn Green

Imagine the most community-based science center possible. Imagine it in a poor, immigrant farmworker community. It exists. It thrives. In California. In a Community Science Workshop.

A couple months ago, I visited a Community Science Workshop for the first time in Watsonville, CA. I was awestruck. A small room, packed with gadgets, packed with fossils, packed with tools, packed with PEOPLE everywhere making and exploring and building and learning. The people were of all ages--moms with babies strapped to their fronts, six year-olds using skillsaws, pre-teens building robots, teenagers doing homework. There was a spirit of conviviality and purpose and helpfulness and Spanglish in the air. The design and feel of the place was different than any science center I'd ever experienced. I knew I could learn a lot from it.

I sat down with Emilyn Green, Executive Director of the Community Science Workshop Network, to learn more about their history, design, and engagement strategy.

Can you give me the overview of Community Science Workshops? What are they and where did they come from? 

A Community Science Workshop is a place for kids to tinker, make, and explore their world through science. The first one was started in 1991 by a San Francisco educator, Dan Sudran, in his garage. The Exploratorium is great, but it wasn't super-accessible. Dan was living in the Mission neighborhood, which at the time was very kid-dense, mostly first-generation immigrants, and Dan noticed that when he was messing around in his garage with physics gadgets, he could not keep the kids in his neighborhood out of his garage. They were so fascinated and wanted to be there every day.
There are lots of great science museum resources, but not where these kids can walk after school. In most cases, they're not places where kids can go by themselves at all.

So the Community Science Workshop model is to put a drop-in, FREE community science center in a place that is walkable to kids' lives and schools. In a place where kids are already walking around after school.

The core program is a permanent, dedicated physical space, full of interactive hands-on physical exhibits, as well as a tinkering and making space, and recycled materials. Most Workshops also run a wide range of additional programs - supplemental school day programs, afterschool programs, mobile units that go to housing projects. There are a whole bunch of programs to disseminate the science but the central workshop space is the heart of it.

Where do Community Science Workshops fit in the informal science landscape?

It's kind of tricky. We don't fit the more common templates. The best explanation is "community science center." But in the more traditional lexicon, these might be defined as "informal spaces."

Now that there is a new emphasis on "ecosystems of STEM learning" - for us, that's really helpful. Our programs end up being the hub of the local science learning ecosystem--especially in communities where there isn't a science center for miles in any direction.

How are Workshop locations selected?

The first one was in the Mission. We received two rounds of NSF funding in the 1990s to expand. We've focused on farmworker communities--there are so many kids in these communities throughout California. At that time, we expanded to Watsonville, where strawberries come from. And Fresno in the Central Valley--a city of 500,000, hundreds of miles from the closest science center. And a couple other sites that didn't make it financially (more on that later).

I came on in 2010 to start the statewide nonprofit network. At that point, we opened three new locations: Sanger, Greenfield, and a new San Francisco workshop in the Excelsior neighborhood because the Mission has changed so dramatically. The Mission location is still a useful hub for San Francisco school programs. Excelsior is now the walkable neighborhood space.

What happened to the ones that folded?

We received NSF funding for three years and then it cut off. In places that succeeded, at that point, a local coalition was in place to fund the Workshop. Where it didn't work, no local support stepped up. That taught us a lot. Now, when people are interested in starting one, we emphasize permanence. It takes a local coalition of people who are really committed to this to have a program that lasts.

Who are those local coalitions?

We're really different from traditional science centers in our funding model. We don't have paying members. We're not going to do that. It's not a Community Science Workshop if it's not free to participants. In fact, we have almost no individual donors. We have a few shining, beloved exceptions, but that's not a significant part of our model at this time.

So we tend to have three legs of support: municipal, grants/donations, and fee for service (usually with the school district). The municipal support can be actual funding - from Parks and Rec, or Environmental Education/Public Works in Watsonville - or a free building, or free access to a van, or materials... or free access to the dump to get materials. Several Community Science Workshops also get Measure S grants - gang prevention grants - through their cities. Grants come from community foundations, small local family foundations, local businesses. And then the fee for service is mostly school districts that contract with the Workshop for science enrichment/science instruction.

What unique design elements make Community Science Workshops work?

Geography is key. We tend to overemphasize it, because it's the initial requirement for any kind of success in these communities. Kids in these neighborhoods are wandering around alone after school. So if kids can walk to us, they can participate.

Once in the space, there are a bunch of design features that continue to be about access. Our fundamental premise is that kids are really interested in stuff. Given a wide variety of stuff, they will find something that they are excited about and will take on projects. We assume the motivation is there. The interest is there. So if a kid is not engaging, it's likely some barrier to access.

One thing you'll notice when you walk in is a ton of user-generated content. Most is hand-made, by participants or staff or parents, and that is everything from our signage to our exhibits.

We tend to be fully bilingual where appropriate. Our staff is almost always Spanish/English bilingual. And we hire from the community. Over 30% of our staff statewide are either former Workshop students or parent volunteers. That's an important design principle for the space - who the kids see when they enter the space.

We have some considerations about height and accessibility. We make sure that kids can grab materials and tools without staff intervention. Part of this is practical: you can't facilitate making and tinkering for 30 kids if you have to hand them everything they need. And it shows kids that they can be the agents of their own learning.

And then there's the most important design element - it's MESSY. We've been playing around with different ways to describe this and not terrify people. It's not messy like “vermin-infested”. It looks like a space that is used by humans every day. It's "purposfully messy." It's organized enough so people coming in can learn the layout, but it's the opposite of sterile. Surfaces are dense, and covered, and richly layered, and there is nothing in the room that implies "don't touch me or you'll get in trouble." That bar is pretty low for kids - they really need to know they are welcome to explore.

I loved the feeling of the space. It made me think of the Spanish word "ambiente"--that convivial, welcoming feeling. It also made me think about some of what we learned in a recent ethnographic study in which some Latino moms talked about "American events being so organized, whereas Latin events have joyful chaos." I know that most of your design focus is on kids. Do you think there is also a cultural/ethnic aspect to the kind of access and design you use? 

I feel very careful talking about the ways that the particular populations who we choose to work with for social justice reasons are also the people who make our work possible because of cultural expectations. For example, kids and tools. It's much easier for us to work with kids with power tools in these Workshops than it might be with other families because a lot of these parents use tools in their own lives. They are comfortable with them.

I was amazed by how community-based and authentic it feels. Many science centers struggling to engage "underserved" people with informal science. You are succeeding. What do you think is the difference? 

I come back to geography. Easy access to the space. When I talk with people in science centers, some really dedicated people working on these questions, they acknowledge that geography is a big hurdle they have to get over.

But there also is a sense of community ownership. For example, the Exploratorium is an extraordinarily participatory museum, but it's not nearly as participatory as a Community Science Workshop. Any big museum has barriers and limitations to full community ownership. Anyone walking into a CSW could repair a broken exhibit--anytime.

And that's the way we respect the contributions of the families we are working with. They are authors in the space.

To make a sweeping generalization, it seems that the folks we work with--working class people, people who work with their hands for a living, people with larger extended families - are very comfortable with spaces where multiple people are authors. They are comfortable with shared authorship of space and events. Whereas formal organizations have a harder time facilitating a shared sense of space and events.

Really interesting. So there is authorship, but no bylines.

 No visible bylines. But they still exist informally. The bylines are in the community’s awareness of the space. "Aurora made that sign." "I helped paint that sign." "I was here when Sal was working on that." People know, but they know based on their real experience of it in the space.

When I visited, it was so clear that there are so many people who use the Workshop again and again, who build things over time, who get involved in different projects for different reasons. 

Yes. And it's hard for us to document. Half of our attendance per year is in enrollment and school-based programs, but half is in our drop-in spaces, where we don't track participants at all. We know anecdotally that a lot of these people are repeating and deepening their participation, but we don't have the data.

We're just starting to interview our alumni now and creating a catalogue of their stories. It's powerful. But that's not the focus of the program. The focus of the program is to make it work every day.


Big thanks to Emilyn Green and the Community Science Workshop Network for sharing insights in this post. Emilyn will be checking in on the comments here and can respond to your questions.  If you are reading this via email and would like to share a comment, you can join the conversation here.