Quick Hit: Upcoming Talks on Leading Change

Let's say you want to transform an organization. What's more effective: drastic change with incremental progress towards that new vision, or incremental change that builds a new vision?

I'm prepping for a week of talks to museum, zoo, and library folk, and this is the question that is driving some of what I plan to share. Note: if you are in NYC area or Toronto, I have FREE talks in each - see bottom of this post for details. Preparing talks is always a great opportunity to reframe my thinking about what's going on in my work and how it might be relevant to others. And this time, since a couple of the talks I'm giving are explicitly for directors, I'm thinking about leadership and institutional change.

In thinking about some of the changes that have happened at our museum in Santa Cruz, I've realized that they were predicated on setting a clear, big vision first, and then incrementally moving towards that goal. When I write it down, that sounds like a pretty obvious approach. But change doesn't always happen that way. Sometimes there's a new direction but not a known destination. Sometimes an organization noodles with change in many areas and finds itself wobbling into a new place entirely.

Here's my hypothesis: while a top-down approach may seem autocratic, it can be incredibly inclusive and democratic in implementation. When there is a very clear, explicit vision and goals, many people across an organization can become leaders in the change. When the vision is clouded or the goals uncertain, you are stuck with a "I know it when I see it" approach to change that may leave people frustrated or mystified as to how they can make a difference.

I'm struggling with this now as we embark on our next phase as an organization--one with more distributed leadership. That distribution hopefully means more collective ownership. But if we don't do it right, it could also possibly mean more confusion, and, paradoxically, less participation.

I remember talking with a director of a large public radio station about many innovative things happening at his organization. "But you know," he said, "when I'm really honest, I realize that most of these ideas ultimately come from my desk." When I heard that, I wondered if everyone in his organization knew what his vision was for tremendous work. I wondered if he was articulating it clearly enough for others to bring brilliant ideas forward. I wondered what I could do to avoid that kind of feeling.

When I see projects at my museum that I'm proud of, more often than not they are things I have very little to do with directly. They are projects led by staff members, volunteers, and collaborators who are infused with our vision. They can make magic and scale up our impact because they know what we are trying to achieve and they want to be part of it.

So I'm planning to use these talks to encourage people--especially directors--to articulate clear, powerful visions. To fight for those visions, support people who want to further them, and protect those people from detractors. I'm not sure this is the best way to lead institutional change. But it's a way that has allowed our work to get out into our community quickly and powerfully, often without having to touch my desk at all.


If you happen to be in New York/New Jersey or Toronto, I will be speaking:

• JERSEY: Monday January 27 at Seton Hall at 7pm in the Walsh Library, Beck Rooms. I don't really know where that is, but I'm sure we can all figure it out. No RSVP required.
• TORONTO: Thursday January 30 at the Textile Museum from 4-6pm. This is a more informal talk/dialogue. They can only fit 70 people, so you must RSVP to programs@textilemuseum.ca

I look forward to traveling, speaking, and learning with you in the next week.

Teenagers, Space-Makers, and Scaling Up to Change the World

This week, my colleague Emily Hope Dobkin has a beautiful guest post on the Incluseum blog about the Subjects to Change teen program that Emily runs at the Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History.

Subjects to Change is an unusual museum program in that it explicitly focuses on empowering teens as community leaders. While art, history, creativity, and culture are the vehicles for that empowerment, the teens involved spend a lot of their time with activists, civic leaders, and social psychologists. They describe themselves as "a group of chronic doodlers who dig music, embrace creativity of all kinds, and are determined to not only make our community better, but want to get other teens involved."

Emily's post shares three things Subjects to Change has taught her about youth and community leadership. I want to return the favor with three things this project brings up for me.

Community-building/engagement is related to but not identical to content engagement. Subjects to Change isn't an art club or a history group. It's about empowerment and community leadership through art and history. One of the reasons Emily took this approach was based on what we saw in the ecology of teen programs. We heard from youth program leaders at museums who struggle to keep teens engaged despite a huge amount of committed resources. We saw a lot of intense hand-holding and not a lot of youth ownership. In contrast, when we looked at the programs we admire most locally, they all are fundamentally focused on youth as leaders and changemakers in their own lives and community. Whether they are using skateboarding to grind out child hunger or changing their own fate through farming, we saw teens taking agency and being leaders in ways we hadn't seen in arts organizations.

This meant really stripping back to our mission in developing this program and being willing to let the teens lead us in some unexpected directions. For example, they are planning a series of teen nights at the museum, complete with art activities, history exploration, youth bands, etc., but themed around community issues like "public safety" and "gender representation."

I'm completely curious as to whether their peers will actually want to come to a museum on a Friday night about public safety. I'm a little amazed that this is happening at the museum at all. It's hard to imagine a staff member pitching a public safety-themed event and everyone feeling like it is a good idea. But every step of the way these teens have shown that the issues they care about are compelling to lots of people (of all ages) in our community, and that they are ready to do meaningful work to engage people around those issues.

Scale is still a challenge for co-creative work. Subjects to Change engages fifteen teenagers. Many are having a life-changing experience, but still, it's fifteen people. How do we scale this impact to reach more people? This is a chronic problem of in-depth co-creative projects. In many museums, these tend to be youth-focused projects. In lean years, it's hard to justify focusing so many resources on a small group.

Watching these teens do their work has expanded my thinking on the issue of scale. If these teens truly become community leaders through their work with us, they will extend their impact beyond themselves. They are forming partnerships in the community, developing events to reach more teens, and developing content for general museum events. We are already seeing a difference in the makeup of our audience on the nights that these teens are involved because of their attendant communities.

This makes me realize that a leadership-focused program is fundamentally different than one that focuses inward. A city council, for example, is necessarily small and consumes a ton of resources. If outreach and community leadership is the meat of the program, maybe the scale problem isn't as big an issue as I had previously thought.

Space-making is magic. I've written before about Beck Tench's beautiful framing of how "every risk-taker needs a space-maker" to clear the path for experimentation. Emily's generous first line of her blog post makes me realize that this concept of "space-making" is bigger than just supporting risk-taking. It's about making space for real change to happen, and to grow, throughout an organization and a community. I am starting to wonder how we could take this lens to more of the work we do, both as managers internally and as facilitators of community experiences externally. Space-making may be the ultimate strategy for scaling up.

The Most Popular Part of our Weekly Museum E-Newsletter

It's not what you think.

It's not a great photo of people enjoying the museum. It's not a witty description of an upcoming event. It's the wishlist.

At any given time, we are on a hunter/gatherer mission for an upcoming project at our museum. Right now, we're looking for wood chips for a creature-making workshop. Last month it was cardboard boxes for a collaborative opera. Last summer it was beach chairs for a history exhibit.

When one of these needs arises, we approach it in a simple way: we ask people. About once a month, our weekly e-newsletter includes a request for humble items. It's not uncommon for someone to bring in a trash can full of wine corks or to load up a bike trailer with cardboard (OK, his blog post about it was a special touch).

The wishlist is the most responded-to part of our e-newsletter. On one level, this seems kind of preposterous. We provide plenty of intriguing content about exhibitions and events and the thing people click on most is the request for bottle caps.

But on another level, the wishlist is the most participatory part of the newsletter. It's the one part that begs a response.

One woman came up to me last Friday night at the museum to say: "I love reading the wishlist. I am always curious to see if I have some junk that could be useful, and then I like wondering what you guys are going to do with it."

When she said this, I realized that what we thought of as a thrifty practicality is actually a great symbol of our participatory, inclusive ethos. Being a participatory museum means looking at every person who walks in our doors as someone who can contribute meaningfully to the institution. It means making the path to participation clear, easy, and fun. It means turning their contributions into magic.

Join us for Museum Camp 2014 on Social Impact Assessment

What is the change you hope your work effects in your community? Igniting compassion? Building a more creative workforce? Bridging cultural differences?

We all have aspirational social impact goals for our organizations. These goals are expressed in mission and vision statements. They are hinted at in fundraising letters. They are stewing in our guts when we wake up to get to work.

But how do we measure them? How do we know if our work leads to an increase in compassion, or unity, or creativity? How can we learn from our successes and failures and adapt our work to increase impact?

These are the questions that underpin Museum Camp 2014, a professional development experience in which diverse people from the arts, community activism, and social services will measure the immeasurable together. Our focus is on social impact in communities, and we will encourage teams to look at complex outcomes--like safety, cohesion, compassion, and identity--that are not commonly covered in our standard evaluative practices. We will do this by defining impacts of interest, identifying indicators of those impacts, developing creative ways to measure the indicators, actually doing the measurements, and reporting on the results. And we'll do this all in three days on July 30-August 2, 2014 in Santa Cruz, CA.

This is the second year that the Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History (MAH) is hosting Museum Camp. Last year, the focus was on risk-taking in exhibition design. This year, the focus is social impact assessment. While the topics and the participants are entirely different, the core format is the same: three days, small teams of people from diverse backgrounds, intense learning, doing, and playing in a collaborative environment. It's summer camp for adults, 'smores included.

Because we at the MAH are not experts in this social impact assessment, we are working with smart researchers and evaluators from the arts, social services, academia, and social justice organizations to make this camp happen. We are co-presenting Museum Camp with Fractured Atlas, an organization that inspires me for their thoughtful approach to making art measurable and meaningful. Ian David Moss, Fractured Atlas's Research Director (and the rockstar behind the Createquity blog) and I are working together to develop the camp content and recruit brilliant counselors to support the process. This is the beginning of a couple partnerships between Fractured Atlas and the MAH, and I am PSYCHED to work with and learn from Ian and their crew. We also have some great counselors onboard from United Way, WolfBrown, and Animating Democracy@Americans for the Arts (and more to come).

If you are interested in applying to attend camp, please check out the site and fill out an application today. We will accept applications through February 28 and inform people of our selections in early March. Space is extremely limited, so I encourage you to apply soon.

We are particularly interested in applications from people who are NOT in the arts or museums. Last year, many campers felt that the best part of the experience was the diversity of people in the camp. The strength of our experience together is partly based on the opportunity to come together across different disciplines and perspectives, and we want to continue pushing for that. So please, spread the word--and if you have a friend who you think would love this, encourage them to apply.

My Favorite Fundraising Email

Tis the season for end of the year fundraising letters. Now that I run a museum, I read this mail with particular interest. I'm always curious how organizations represent themselves, what they ask of me, and what they assume.

This is also the season for grappling with where to make donations and how to rationalize those choices. I loved this article by Talia Gibas about effective altruism and the relative value of giving to cultural organizations versus other causes. It is sparking conversation in the arts blogosphere and my own kitchen. Rather than retread the issue, I recommend you just read Talia's post.

I thought about "effective altruism" in a new light today when I received a fundraising email from Machine Project, an amazing experimental art space in LA, entitled "Another Year, Another (Even Larger) Hole in the Floor."

Here is the body of that email:

Dear Friends, 

Mark Allen here, Machine Project founder. As you probably saw, we just did this absurd project where we turned the gallery into a 99 cent store, which led to a disgusting bathroom, which led to a cave, which led to a secret door in the wall, which led to stairs in the middle of the floor, which led to a secret underground theatre. I raised the money to cut the giant hole in our floor and that was great, but I kind of forgot I also needed to fundraise to pay our rent. That wasn't so great!  

So, I'm taking this moment to hypnotize you into becoming a member, or renewing your membership, or making a donation of any amount of money, gold, yachts, or airplanes. Stare deeply into the eyes of the below image...1...2...3....

Excellent. You are completely under the power of this email. Now, without hesitation go directly here and join us for whatever wonders 2014 shall hold. 

best,
Mark and the rest of the elves at Machine Project

This email reminds me that in addition to all the serious work we do to demonstrate the value of the arts to society, it's worth acknowledging the value in providing pleasure, provocation, and joy. This email is a mini-art experience that I felt inspired to pay for. Was that a philanthropic or a discretionary spending choice? Does it matter?

You don't have to argue your way into being apples if you can celebrate being oranges. And if you can do so with a letter as idiosyncratic as your organization, even better.

Happy yacht-donating.

Guest Post: A Shared Ethics for Museum Internships

Is your museum running on interns? In this guest post, CUNY lecturer and former manager of the Guggenheim Internship program Michelle Millar Fisher makes a passionate argument for the end of unpaid internships. It is a strong, museum-focused complement to an excellent three-parter on Fractured Atlas about the ethics and future of unpaid arts internships. 

One of the most poignant signs I saw waved during the Occupy Movement was held by a young woman who politely advised The System to "F**k your free internships." Free intern labor wasn't ever right, but it has become glaringly unethical in the current post-Lehman-crash era. That protest placard highlighted the unpaid internship as a simultaneous symptom and result of badly broken political and social systems.

If you're reading this at work, you're probably reading it within ten feet of an unpaid intern. It's probably a path you had to navigate too. There's a sense of "it worked for me...." And it does - it did work for me. I got my first real job in a museum (at the Guggenheim) after a life-changing internship. My supervisor was amazing, caring, and supportive. I worked so hard in those three unpaid months that I made myself indispensable and jumped ship from my home country (Scotland) and came to New York. My whole career path has been positively changed by that one internship experience.

However, my experience was an exception to the rule that internships increasingly prove: free labor contributes to the growing inequities of the non-profit labor system. Issues of class and economic status haunt the museum internship. You have to be able to afford to work for free in order to take an internship that will help you onto the career ladder. There are certainly excellent programs that try to circumvent this stereotype, and there are stipends to be had in some museums, but they are far from the norm.

My experience was exceptional for one simple reason: my internship at the Guggenheim was the only unpaid internship I ever did. It was the only one I could afford to do. It was made possible by a small, unexpected windfall. If I hadn't had the windfall, it's highly unlikely that as a first-gen college attendee I would have been exposed to the other opportunities it afforded me. (I have somewhat of a "control" in this social experiment in that my talented sister has plied a similar path to me, but was unable to afford the opportunity of one unpaid internship at a museum. Even though she worked just as hard as I did, it took her five years longer to get her foot on the arts employment ladder than it did for me.)

I have done my very fair share of perpetuating the cycle of unpaid internships. As an Associate Manager of Education, I coordinated internships at the Guggenheim museum for four years before I headed back to academia. I expanded the program from around seventy-five interns per year to over one hundred and thirty in almost every department of the museum. I loved my job, and I think many of the interns had amazing experiences at the museum because we tried to take care of them, introduce them to arts networks through a rich weekly seminar program, and encouraged supervisors to be the best mentors they could. But now, as I counsel my university students, I feel it unethical to recommend the same path I took. I have taken a firm stand. I will not forward unpaid internship postings that come my way and actively respond to the senders, even when I know them well as colleagues: “This is not ethical!”

Is unpaid participation in the life and operations of a museum always a bad thing? No. Are the worst offenders larger museums who know they can get away with asking people to work for free? Yes. Is it unethical to ask college juniors and seniors, graduate students, and recently qualified degree holders to undertake multiple free internships? Absolutely. Making small changes and offering some kind of basic compensation for interns in the arts would benefit us all. If the lowest wage on the ladder is zero, entry-level wages don't have to be much higher, and this affects the whole pay scale for the majority of those who work in non-director positions.

Would some form of universal museum internship standard mitigate this? How about a national Museum Internship Ethics Charter that would make three core promises to any museum intern:

1. a stipend 
2. a clear written statement of expectations given at the beginning of their internship 
3. a final face-to-face evaluation with the internship mentor at the end of the internship 

I'm constantly surprised at how many students I speak with, even those who are working for college credit where this is meant to be regulated, do not receive any of these three components. A shared ethics on the subject of internships means a shared ethics for human resources in museum more generally. This type of shared ethics can only be a positive thing for both individuals at all levels, and the institution - and thus its visitors. Happy employees (yes, even interns!) mean greater productivity, creativity, and accountability.

 The students I teach in undergrad classrooms in New York are about a decade younger than me. They're the Internship Generation. The more I am faced with their predicament when they ask me about how to balance work experience that won't pay them with study and (especially at the city college where I teach) the jobs that are paying their tuition, or to write them letters of recommendation for unpaid labor, the more uncomfortable I have become.

How could we all better address this issue? Could museum managers agree to hire interns who need the work experience rather than those with a resume already the length of the Nile? Could they agree to put aside a small part of their yearly budget to compensate interns in some way? Could university instructors (especially those with tenure and a voice) steer their interns in the direction of paid opportunities, and campaign within their own departments to end the cycle of internships for credit? Could we all agree to a universal standard under the auspices of a body like the AAM? Are there already internship models out there that do this that we could learn from and offer as examples?

I'm truly interested in any discussion and feedback on this topic, and taking sustained action. I want to do better for my students, and to participate in the rethinking of a broken model I have helped to perpetuate.

What's your vision for the future of internships? Share your thoughts with Michelle and the Museum 2.0 community in the comments.

Visualizing the Tate's Collection: What Open Data Makes Possible

Detail on distribution of artworks in the Tate collection by birthdate of artists, visualized by Florian Krautli.

What does "big data" look like for museums? Collecting institutions have enormous stacks of data about the artifacts and artworks in their stores. Several museums around the world have worked hard to make their data accessible by providing free access to datasets, applying Creative Commons licenses to digital content, or creating APIs (application programming interfaces) that allow programmers to build their own software on the museum's data.

Last month, the Tate joined the party when they opened up their collection database to the world on GitHub, a website where programmers collaborate on projects. The Tate is providing metadata about artworks and artists in its collection--over 70,000 artworks in all. The data is in a computer language called .JSON that is commonly used for data sharing and processing. Even if you don't speak database, it's worth seeing how the Tate is presenting their collection to programmers on GitHub.

What can you do with these .JSON files? Anyone can pull down the data and use it for their own purposes, subject to some simple goodwill guidelines. Here are two examples of visualizations created by GitHub users:

• Florian Krautli, a Swiss designer living in London, graphed the volume of artworks by individual artists in the Tate's collection over time.
• Jim Davenport, an astronomer living in Seattle, charted the height and width of all of the works in the Tate's collection. 

These visualizations are fun. They are beautiful. They raise interesting questions about the Tate's collection and the imperfections of collections data. 

But the discussions they raise are limited. Florian's blog post centers on the question of why there are so many pieces by William Turner in the Tate's collection. A commenter pointed out that there must be an error in the data, as it is highly unlikely that Turner produced more than 40,000 works in his lifetime. Jim's post suggests some fun but somewhat silly conclusions about the height/width ratio of artworks.

Reading these posts and the related conversations, I was struck by two conflicting feelings:

1. It's awesome that data-sharing is causing people to have a conversation about what artists are represented in a museum collection, what kind of artwork the Tate has, what surprising things can be visualized and learned from the collections data, and how the data can be improved.
2. The data is sufficiently flawed and idiosyncratic to yield conclusions of questionable value. Knowing the dimensions of the frame a painting is in is much less compelling than many, many other things that could be known and explored about works of art. I'm imagining visualizations focusing on the gender or race of artists in the collection, frequency of loans (and to whom), frequency of display, common words used in label text... the list goes on. 

To me, the fact that #1 is exciting and promising makes addressing #2 worth it. Opening up data is just the first (big) step to make it usable and useful. These experiments prompt questions, identify gaps in the data, and promote new forms of collection, dissemination, and analysis. The data you have is not always the data you want, but you often don't know that until you start monkeying with it. Future iterations of data sharing and use will help institutions and citizen-participants take the next steps to make it meaningful. 

Let's Stop Talking about What People Want and Need As If They Are Different (and we can tell how)

"Our job is not to give people what they want but what they need."

How many times have you heard this phrase in the context of cultural institutions? For me, the answer is too many. I'm calling this phrase out. I think it's presumptuous, disingenuous, and downright depressing.

It's presumptuous to suggest that we know what people "need" in a cultural context.

I know what my dog needs. He needs two cups of food per day. He wants a million cups of food per day. I think it is completely reasonable for me to give him not what he wants but what he needs.

I know what my baby needs. She needs to nap when she gets cranky, even though she keeps flailing her limbs. I think it is completely reasonable for me to wrap her up and put her to bed--to give her not what she wants but what she needs.

Very, very few museum visitors are in the "dog and baby" category. They are human beings. They are complex. I've spent a lot of time reading and engaging in visitor research, and I don't feel like I have a grasp on what visitors need separate from what they want. Does a mom want a program that includes her kids, or does she need it? Does an artist want an exhibition that stimulates his work in new ways, or does he need it? We spend a lot of time at my institution talking with people about their interests, needs, and abilities, but that doesn't mean that we know what an individual needs on a particular day, a particular visit. I don't know if someone need grounding in core content or exposure to new practices. I don't know if they need to be empowered or provoked. I do know a bit about what they respond to, what they ignore, and what it looks like when they really get turned on by something. But what do they need? I assume they are just as changeable and complex as any person in that regard.

It's really important to be able to articulate what we need to achieve our institutional missions. An organization with an public engagement mission has very different needs than one with a mission that focuses on original research. Some organizations need to focus on 3rd graders. Some need to conduct programs in multiple languages.

We may know what we need to achieve our missions. But that doesn't mean we know what visitors/audiences/humans need.

We ask funders to give general operating support to our organizations because we feel we know best what we need and want to be able to achieve. Why wouldn't we afford our participants the same respect with regard to their needs and wants? (For more on this in the world of poverty, check out this commentary on Give Directly.)

It's disingenuous to use the word "need" to mask our true intentions. In my experience, the "needs" of audiences often look suspiciously like the "wants" of the people speaking.

When I ask what the phrase "don't give people what they want, give them what they need" means, I am often told that we should not be pandering to people's expressed desires but presenting them with objects and experiences that challenge them and open up new ways of seeing the world.

I agree. It is incredibly valuable for cultural institutions to present experiences that might be surprising, unexpected, or outside participants' comfort zones. But I don't typically hear this phrase deployed to argue in favor of a risky program format or an unusual piece of content. I don't hear this phrase accompanied by evidence-based articulation of "needs" of audiences. Instead, I hear this phrase used to defend traditional formats and content in the face of change. I hear "don't give people what they want, give them what I want."

I will always remember when Robin Dowden of the Walker Art Center told me that she knew their teen website was working because she thought it was ugly and impossible to navigate. What teenagers wanted--and needed--was a website with unicorns and sparkly text. That site was not optimized for Robin's experience as an adult. It takes courage to embrace what diverse people want/need, especially when it flies in the face of traditional culture or standards.

It's depressing to imply that culture is not what people "want." Cultural experiences should be a pleasure. They can also be educational, challenging, empowering, political... but they must first be something people want. If we give up on the idea that people should WANT what we have to offer, we give up on the idea that what we have is desirable. Talking about what people need is like talking about going to the dentist. I don't want to be the dentist. I want to offer the most desirable experience possible--even if it's not what people walked in thinking they were seeking.


I'd vastly prefer if we used a phrase like, "Our job is to connect the familiar to the unfamiliar, and in doing so, ignite a passion for how diverse, exciting, and essential art [or history, or science] can be."

Or maybe something as simple as, "We do what we need to do to accomplish our mission. We think it's important. Here's why."

Psychology, Pricing, and Pay As You Will at the Children's Museum of Tacoma

In 2010, the Children's Museum of Tacoma was getting ready to move to a new, bigger facility. Over the years, they had noticed that 50% of their visitors were coming for free or at reduced cost--whether on free days or with special passes. When they moved to the new facility, they decided they wanted to radically expand access to the museum, AND increase revenue.

What did they do? They went to a "pay as you will" model. Now, they encourage visitors to become mini-philanthropists, enabling inclusion for all. Charging admission is a means test, and they want everyone to be able to pass.

The Children's Museum of Tacoma is two years into their "pay as you will" model, and it looks like a success. Attendance jumped from 40,000 at their old facility to about 120,000 at the new facility. Membership has doubled (now including new perks that extend beyond free admission). Attendance by low-income families is up. And while the average amount paid by each non-member visitor is down (dropping from $6 to about $3), the attendance increase means a net revenue gain. The museum launched this new strategy with a major grant from a funder (Key Bank) that provided five years of admissions offset--enough risk capital to give the museum time to grow into the new approach. The transformation of admission fees and its impact is documented beautifully in this blog post by Jeanne Vergeront. Check it out for a lot more details and numbers.

I called the museum because I was curious to learn more about the mechanics of communicating this approach to visitors. "By donation only" can offer a wonderful sense of welcome, or it can be misleading. (Consider the ongoing lawsuits at the Metropolitan Museum on this very issue.) I wondered whether "pay as you will" might come with its own confusion and stress for families without much exposure to museums--the exact people the museum is trying to make welcome. The "pay as you will" messaging is very different, for example, from Mixed Blood Theater's "Radical Hospitality" approach, which emphasizes completely free theater experiences.

"No cost" is much more clearcut than "pay as you will." Might "pay as you will" become another museum mystery, another source of threshold fear for visitors who don't have a yardstick by which to reasonably guess what they SHOULD pay to visit?

I spoke with Chad Russell, the Administrative Coordinator at the Children's Museum of Tacoma, about their experience. He told me, "We often get asked if there is a suggested donation, what should we pay. We don’t want to put any pressure on for a suggested donation – we want you to pay what you think.”

Chad also told me:

• They have donation bins throughout the museum, so if people don't want to give much when they first walk in, they can pay somewhere else. Some people will donate more on their way out (but are not prompted to do so).
• They train their frontline staff to engage with people about WHY it is pay as you will, explaining that your donation makes it possible for other kids who couldn’t afford it, so they can come play for free. Some kids apparently come in with their piggy banks, proud that they can pay to attend the museum--because whatever they have to offer is valued as exactly enough.
• When people are stressed about how much to pay, he says, "before we went to this model, the cost was about $5 at the door." This might help more literal-minded people feel comfortable with an ambiguous system.

To me, this seems like an improvement on the norm... especially in a children's museum, which has a high number of repeat visitors (who can become familiar with the system over time). I can imagine families deciding on a value and paying it fairly consistently with little stress. I can imagine the cute rituals of kids, excited to contribute personally, proud to be part of making the museum available to all. But I can also imagine visitors being confused and stressed out--which is even worse in front of your kids. 

Does "pay as you will" fundamentally change the relationship between the institution and community members with regard to the cost and perceived value of the experiences inside? There's still a transaction--or at least a conversation--at the gate. Is that a good thing, because it invites/requires people to grapple with the cost of providing these experiences? Or is it just a different wrapper on same old means test? 

Participation, Contemplation, and the Complexity of "And"

"The words we use in attempting to change museum directions matter. We need translators within each cultural context. We do not yet have precise words or even uniform understanding of the words we use. But we do have 'and.' And a good thing, too." 

--Elaine Heumann Gurian, The Importance of "And"

Recently, I've been embroiled in local and national conversations about the relationship between active participation and quiet contemplation in museums. Our museum in Santa Cruz has been slammed by those who believe participatory experiences have gone too far. It has been championed as a site of courageous experimentation. It has been challenged for our community-centered approach. I joined the dialogue this weekend with an op-ed echoing Elaine Heumann Gurian's powerful call for the "museum of 'and'" - a museum that includes and values multiple experiences and approaches.

Each of these articles--and the comments around them--are fascinating artifacts of a debate that has been behind the scenes for too long. I am glad this conversation is happening and that both museum professionals and local Santa Cruzans are engaged. We always knew that the inclusion of participatory and community-centered practices in arts institutions was controversial. But this is a rare moment when that controversy has come directly to the surface. It's a unique opportunity to learn from people with different perspectives.

To me, the backlash against participatory and community-centered experiences is not surprising. I've always understood that participatory experiences are not for everyone. I've always known that some people feel that social work means mission creep for museums. What surprises me is the argument that participatory and community-centered initiatives, offered alongside many other interpretative strategies, program types, and projects, can erode the value of an institution and the experiences it provides.

Like many of our supporters, I am perplexed as to why critics claim we have thrown tradition out the window when, from my perspective, we have simply added new opportunities alongside a strong commitment to traditional practice. We know most visitors use only a small percentage of the programming and interpretative elements that museums provide. Some people commune with the art. Some visit the archives. Some come to family festivals. Why should a comment wall in an exhibition be more threatening than a label? Why is a crowded Friday night event in conflict with a quiet Saturday in the galleries? Why should any one type of experience in the museum have veto power over others?

I have wrestled with these questions over the past six weeks. In doing so, I've come to believe that the fundamental issue here has little to do with participation. It's about the complexity of "and."

My whole museum career has been predicated on the "museum of 'and'" premise, as championed by Elaine Heumann Gurian and the museum professionals who crafted the seminal publication Excellence and Equity in 1989. I believe the strongest museums fearlessly seek out, test, and iterate many ways to achieve their missions. I believe that the diversity of the human experience necessitates an approach that values multiple forms of learning and making-meaning. As I wrote in my op-ed:

The more "and" we integrate into the MAH, the more people value the museum as a catalyst for meaning-making, creative expression, and civic participation. Value is reflected in the diversity of the people who participate, the power of the experiences we offer, and their ripple effects throughout the county. The stronger our value, the stronger our finances, the stronger our ability to expand all our offerings -- the contemplative AND the participatory.

But "and" is not an easy mandate to carry out. It requires balancing priorities, embracing creative tension, including diverse voices, and staying true to our mission as we explore new opportunities.

Here are the three big tensions we're confronting as we navigate being a museum of "and":

Defining the limits. One could imagine applying the principle of "and" willy-nilly to justify any outgrowth. One commenter on my op-ed, referencing the idea of our organization as museum "and" community center, asked: "If diversity is the goal, why not also make MAH part skate board park and off leash dog area?" The answer to this question comes back to the strategic vision for the organization. Our museum's vision statement begins with the phrase, "The Museum of Art & History is a thriving central gathering place...". This framing suggests a community-centered approach in which the museum brings people together around art and history. If our vision statement started with a phrase like " The Museum is a cutting-edge research facility..." that would imply a different set of appropriate activities, approaches, and limits.

We are rigorous internally about tying our mission and vision to specific programmatic strategies and goals for different program areas. Those goals form the constraints for our approach to "and," allowing us to say yes with confidence to some opportunities and reject others.

Resource balancing. With infinite resources, "and" can exist without friction or conflict. But in reality, every organization has to decide where to put time, money, and attention. It's not possible to perfectly balance resources across areas, and it's probably not useful to do so. Let's take the one example of active participation and quiet contemplation. Here are several different ways to look at the balance of these two forms of visitor engagement:

• Time: 90% of our open hours are daytime hours when people can explore exhibitions in peace and quiet. The other 10% are primarily Friday nights when we offer hands-on, social event-based programming that tend to be crowded and lively.
• Attendance: 25% of our visitors attend during daytime hours. 65% attend during community programs. This means we devote 90% of our time to 25% of our general visitors, and 10% of our time to 65% of them. (UPDATED on Nov. 8 to reflect onsite visits only. The unaccounted for 10% attend on school tours. Thanks to those who wrote in seeking clarification.)
• Space: During daytime hours, approximately 15% of our exhibition galleries offer participatory experiences. During community programs, that number jumps to 95%. Our building is about half galleries, half public spaces. The public areas include both participatory and traditional content but are dominated by open space and seating.
• Staffing: We have 2.25 full-time equivalent staff members devoted to exhibitions and collections, 2.5 devoted to community programs.
• Money: We spent $287,000 last year on exhibitions and collections, $179,000 on community programs. Both of these figures represent increases over the previous year.

Looking at all of these bullets, how would you assess the relative number of resources devoted to participation and contemplation? How would you decide where to put more resources? How would you decide who is underserved and who is overserved?

Our strategy is not to try to perfectly balance the teeter-totter of resources but to develop the most generative combination. We do that through a structure that emphasizes cross-functional job descriptions, a program development strategy in which exhibitions and events build on each other, and an evaluative eye on how our mission and goals are manifest across diverse projects.

Messaging. Perhaps the biggest challenge to "and" thinking is the way that our organization presents itself and is presented in the media. We have a big banner outside our building that says PARTICIPATE. We do not have a comparable one that says CONTEMPLATE. Almost every article about our museum casts the institution as one that has gone through radical change. We issue press releases for everything we do, but the stories that get picked up tend to be about new programs and approaches. People talk about the museum in terms of then and now, old versus new.

In some ways, this makes sense. We want to welcome in people who may have felt excluded by traditional museums, so we over-communicate a sense of openness, inclusion, and active participation. The press loves novelty. People who get involved are passionate about what's new. People who feel less connected focus on what they lost.

A detractor says our museum has "gone to hell." A supporter responds, "Gone to hell? More like back from the dead." Both of these perspectives represent "or" thinking. The reality is that we have made the museum more vibrant by adding, not replacing. But it can feel like more dramatic change because the new additions get the lion's share of the ink and the oxygen.

Is it possible to have a brand that represents the totality of the diverse experiences offered by one institution? Probably not. It's both impractical and strategically undesirable to try to present a museum as all things to all people. Each visit is a single data point in a constellation of diverse experiences and offerings. While our staff and our most engaged participants perceive the diversity of the blend over the course of the year, most people only attend once or twice and form an impression based on those singular experiences--or on what they read in the paper. To teachers we are an educational facility. To historians we are a research facility. To art-lovers we are an exhibiting facility. To crafters we are a making facility. And so on.

As a museum with a mission to "ignite shared experiences and unexpected connections," it is our challenge to make the "and" more overt, to help people see the bridges between the experiences they currently enjoy and unfamiliar ones that might open up new opportunities for them. In the same way that we focus on social bridging--bringing people together across difference--we are also increasingly focused on programmatic bridging--bringing museum experiences together across program areas and audiences. We may never be seen entirely as a museum of "and." But we can do our best to be that kind of institution and hope that the message shines through.