Change Is Required: Museums and Healing: For Ourselves and For Our Publics

foreigner hmm welcome everyone uh my name is John Victor I am the president and CEO of aaslh and I want to welcome you this afternoon to this wonderful webinar that we are going to have we have a great turnout the webinar is

museums

and curation for us and to our audience thank you all for being here today, we have a great panel this afternoon, this is the second webinar in a series based on the new book

change

s that are

required

to prepare for the post-pandemic museum and the book is the the newest and the eight there it is, the book is the newest in the aslh series that we published with Roman and Littlefield and you can get your copy of the book at the URL that we will post in the chat.

We are excited to have it. your comments in the chat there will be time for questions at the end if you order a book of course if you are a member of aslh you will get a 20 discount from Roman and Littlefield and in addition to partnering with Roman and Littlefield we have also partnered with museumexpert.org on this webinar. We are grateful for your help in organizing this webinar and the other webinar and others that could be held and for the work that museumexpert.org is doing for the entire field and now it is my pleasure to introduce you to Marcia Semel, who is the co-editor of the

required

change

s.

Marcia is the author of Partnership Power Essential Museum Strategy for Today's Network World, which was published in 2019. She is a renowned independent consultant now independent in the museum field. She worked in all kinds of places, she had a notable career, including president and CEO of the Connor Prairie and the Women of the West Museum. She also worked in neh's public programs division for many years and made a huge impact in the field. when she worked at the Institute of Museum and Library Services for 10 years and today she's here with us to do some presentations, so take it, Marcia.

Oh well, thank you very much John for your kind words and thank you to aslh for co-editing our book, so we are very, very grateful to you and we are also grateful to Eric and Matt Arthur for helping pilot this Zoom for us and keeping the chat going Get going and post in the chat some of the big topics we're exploring today. I wanted to start by saying that I am a cisgender white woman. I'm wearing bright red glasses, a tan turtleneck, and a navy cardigan. I come to see you from my central book office in Arlington.

Virginia, it's really a pleasure and we also want to thank a museum expert for giving us the opportunity to give some of our 48 book authors a chance to talk not only about their essays but also about their thoughts on their big themes in the two years since the book, well, the book was only published less than a year ago, but the essays were actually written in 2021. The book emerged from a series of Zoom conversations and blog posts involving Avi. Director Kenny Ellis and I, the three co-editors, began our conversations in the spring of 2020. As we listened to our colleagues from around the museum world in all different disciplines, types and sizes of

museums

, the kind of nested crises. of the coveted pandemic, as well as the urgent need to address systemic racism, loomed large for almost everyone who was part of our conversations, but it was also important to realize that the need for major change in our field is actually Prior to the events of 2020 and and after that, there have been many signs from our communities, our funders, staff members and other stakeholders that the practice models of leadership, management, organizational structure and certainly deai practice prevail.

It was outdated and needed a lot of attention, so we asked 48 different museums. leaders in different types of museums in different positions and from different generations with special attention to bipod colleagues to write short personal essays on 12 different topics that relate to the changing world of museums and today I am pleased to Present three of them, Andrea Jones, associate director of education at the Smithsonian Community Museum of Anacostia, Mary Ruth Leftwich and senior director of museum operations and education at the Jamestown Yorktown Foundation, and Isetta, director of automotive interpretation, Collections and education at the Reginald Museum F Lewis from African American History and Culture, you can find their bios on LinkedIn and each of their essays really deals with different dimensions of our general thematic museums and curation for

ourselves

and for our audiences.

I'm just going to say a little bit about how each of them. links to the topic before moving on to some of the big questions we'll explore together in Andrea's essay Getting Lost on Purpose noted that in 2020 there was a full-blown identity crisis looming for museums. and Andrea evoked the transitions. Guru William Ridges invited museums to mourn and mourn appropriately for what had been lost during the closures, but before moving on to their new beginnings, he urged them, even with prevailing uncertainties, to listen to The Winds of Change and They will experiment with new ones. ideas and identities that could lead to successful reinvention, and in fact, if museums didn't indulge in this kind of self-examination, she noted that a lack of introspection could come back to bite them in the future in Mary Ruth's essay.

Worth trusting and marveling at, she draws on her experience at Pittsburgh's Heights History Center and the legacy of Pittsburgh icon Fred Rogers as inspiration for some different approaches to her leadership style. Mr. Rogers, for those of you who remember, you focused on the importance of building trust. at all ranks of staff, recognize and honor people's sense of self-worth and emphasize the play of curiosity and reflection both in the leaders themselves and in the values ​​that must be promoted and encouraged throughout the organization and, finally, but not at least in Isaiah Autumn Mobley's essay, Uncertain Afters focused on the widespread discrimination and prejudice in our field against people whose minds and bodies are perceived as outside the range of what is normal or acceptable, in addition to the many isms that have been recognized, sexism, racism, uh and homophobia, etc., I said ableism and the notes of a spotlight. that museums must recognize that, throughout any person's life, congenital disabilities, accidents, illness or aging influence how we move through the world and what adaptations we need to function as full members of the society.

He pointed out that disability is far from the norm and disabled people are the norm and as someone who broke a knee and a broken hand this summer I can really feel that, and I think all of us, as we look at our headlines, read articles and see news on television, over the past few months, the numbers raised by our authors, of course, not only remain and should continue to be a priority for museum workers, but also for many workers who have returned to work or have chosen for not returning to work because they are dealing with mental health issues.

Health, stress, anxiety and accessibility and those problems, whether they come from one of the isms we talked about or the lingering impact of the pandemic, are still present in society and certainly in our museums, in fact, the headline page two. from this morning's Washington Post says coveting during pregnancy increases increases risk of death study fines, so just one example, so what we're going to do and what we're going to do today is I'm going to facilitate our conversation, my fellow editor Avi dector it will. make summative comments uh Eric and Matt will follow the chat and we hope you'll put your questions in the chat and um uh and this session is being recorded uh the captions are live so I hope everyone can access our discussion so I'm going to start by asking each of our panelists to just give a brief introduction to their organization, just a couple of minutes each, especially since two of you have moved to different organizations, so I think I'll stay in alphabetical order and I'll start with Andrea. move on to Mary Ruth and then Isetta and then we'll delve into the issues at hand thank you, thank you Marcia uh I guess I'll start with my physical description um I'm a middle aged white woman uh with short hair. hair um red glasses and um I'm in my office with a beautiful fake plant to my left um and uh a black sweater with a shirt with eyeballs um me my museum is the Anacostia Community Museum it's part of the Smithsonian Institution in the which was formed in 1967, right at the height of the Black Power movement in DC, so it really came from a desire to tell stories from an African American perspective that was missing in the past and also started as that of the first community.

We're focused on museums in the country and we're often, you know, used as a model for others who want to know how to do that job. And I will say that being here we are constantly learning. We don't have all the answers to all that, but um, I mean, I mean, I say the identity of the museum is a little strained by being part of the Smithsonian but also needing the Smithsonian to benefit from the Smithsonian. If we're, you know, obviously, wealth, you know, well-funded for the most part compared to other museums, we get that name recognition, but at the same time, being receptive, as I learned during the pandemic, was a little bit more difficult. . because you know the Smithsonian is a big machine and being a part of that means you can't act on your own all the time, so, that's a little bit about my museum, who would you like to go to next?

Marcia Mary Ruth. good afternoon everyone I'm Mary Ruth Leftwich a middle aged white woman with shorter brown hair sitting in my office surrounded by artwork by women activists I work at the Jamestown Yorktown Foundation we operate two museums the Jamestown Settlement Museum in Jamestown Virginia and also the museum of the American Revolution in Yorktown in Yorktown at least on both sides of a peninsula with Colonial Williamsburg in the middle so we form the historic triangle here in Virginia jyf is a state agency and grew out of two 1957 commemorations .commemoration of the 350th settlement of Jamestown which was in 1607 and then also the bicentennial commemorations in Yorktown, as they commemorated well the most recent information up to the number 250 uh back in 1976 and it is very interesting to work in state organizations in general, but one is particularly rooted in this idea of ​​commemoration and the ways that we're trying as a new leadership team um our leadership jyf uh I'm like one of the second on our leadership team and I've only been here no more than two years um so our new leadership team is really trying to think about what that means moving from commemoration to really thinking more critically about our collective and shared history to make an impact, thank you and I said hello, good afternoon from Piscataway and not going to change land and what.

It is now known as Washington DC. I use she/she pronouns and I am director of interpretation and education collections at the Reginald F Lewis Museum. I'm in front of a gallery wall and I'm wearing a fuchsia sweater um with black glasses with purple wings. um but I would also be encouraged to think about what it means to displace visual primacy um and think about voice um as a powerful way to guide us in my work with the Reginald F Lewis Museum in Maryland that African American history and culture got. all at once um uh we are part of a group of African American history and culture institutions that put the history, culture, art and collections of people of the African diaspora into our Center um and I come to this job um with a deep compassion and love for the creativity of the museum field, and is both an academic and a professional where we are seeing many of these issues appear for members of our community.

Thank you very much, thank you very much. I'm wondering if we can start by looking outward a little bit and talk a little bit about how each of you in your current roles have approached this topic of

healing

and the role of our museums as places of

healing

in all the different dimensions of that word, Whether Through your programs, what are you doing to make your visitors more welcome and improve their sense of safety and comfort? I don't know who wants to go first. Mary Ruth. I'm going to call you since you're in a new country. safe place so I think it's interesting for jyf and I'll talk specifically for Jamestown Settlement right now um so we're not the place where Jamestown originally was uh we're not the fort which is a private and national park site al side of us, um, but one of the things that's really struck me during my time here is that I've never worked in a place that has a history, kind of deep and profound um in terms of thinking about colonialism and Think about the ways in which we intentionally recognize the healing we still need to do.

We most often refer to

ourselves

as the first English settlementpermanent in North America and that's why Jamestown has been important for so long, but we're trying to refocus. that and thinking about the ways that we also understand our indigenous communities and black communities and the stories that are embedded here and the mission really for jyf is really to think about the convergence of these three cultures, the impact, the legacies and what it becomes interesting. When we think about OK, we will expand our story and that was the first step and when I came here it was to say how we make sure that we don't always centralize the story in English, that's not the perspective we always rely on. because that's what they've been doing since 1957. and in that space what we've recognized is that we haven't built the institutional trust to start doing that work really effectively as if we hadn't done that healing work and so when we do the invitation, we have indigenous artists who came, an activist who came last year and started her lecture by saying how scared she was. was going to be a Jamestown um and when you come out you say, oh right, of course, I mean, this becomes a place of genocide for indigenous people, right, um and similarly we put together a June 16 first show and we thought in Jamestown as the origin of the slaves. codes that are then perpetuated, um, and there was a moment where, even though we did that programming in connection with African-American artists, we saw members of the African-American community who essentially said to us, What audacity do you have in Jamestown?

We're doing a show about Juneteenth, so what we're working on now is focusing, not the healing piece, and building trust, and I think that comes to mind when I was originally talking in my chapter about trust in terms . inward, but this work has given me a renewed sense of what it means to build trust in an outward capacity with our communities because this work will never move forward productively if we can't build trust, so we also established a new role of director of community engagement here we have started, you know, an indigenous peoples initiative, so there are many pieces, we are starting to hire curators for cultural representation, so there are many pieces to that, but at the end of The Day for Us, the outside trust, it's going to have to be about building relationships in a way that jyf as a state agency hasn't invested in before, it was a tourist spot, um, so that's the journey we've been on.

I've been thinking about trust and the kind of external healing that we have to do and, of course, first we have to recognize that there is a problem and, frankly, that has been the most difficult step in coming into this organization. like there's another way to do this, you know, there's a more holistic way to do this that's not just about the first permanent moment in English in North America. Thank you so much. I said I spent Sunday afternoon reading the Frederick Douglass exhibit. Lewis and noticed. poufs and couches and uh uh texts in very large letters and fonts and um, so maybe um, I don't know if you want to talk a little bit about whether that's part of your healing work and, um, welcoming that it's you. .

You're instigating at the Lewis Museum. I'm so glad you were able to see it Marsha, that's lovely. You know, Mary Ruth, part of what you say about critical confidence both in the book chapter and in what you just shared. This really resonates with me because I also think of critical trust as an action and so part of what we're trying to do with our exhibitions is think about what actions, um showing, that we can be trusted to actually engage equity in an actionable way and something like that. like saying we believe in accessibility and then having seating available so people can sit well or saying we want to be accessible to a range of youth and children and then creating seating that is really ideal for youth and children across a range. skills or having conversations like we often did while working on the Douglas reading exhibit, um, where I would say, oh, the text isn't big enough and we're going to increase the font even if that seems outside the Standards . than we might generally do in traditional museum practice, we are going to enlarge the fountain even further and have begun Institute.

We don't use the um serif font, so it's all Sam serif font because it's not just an accessibility issue when thinking about Who can see well? So can you see the text? But also thinking about literacy and also how tired people's eyes are when you're on the screen so often. That is part of our intervention. We have also established an accessibility task. team to really get us thinking about how we can incorporate accessibility, because accessibility and thinking about ability are closely tied to the way we think about race and racism in this country, so a lot of the way we We establish ideas about racism is deeply tied to the way you think about ability and who has ability and who doesn't, so you can't really talk about disability in this country without also thinking very critically about race and vice versa. , and we're trying to think about that and how we do our exhibits.

Also, and then I would say that we're also thinking that there's an exhibit that we're working on that really delves into what it means to grieve and what kind of black cultural grieving practices have been used to really help communities during periods of grieving. , so we really provide opportunities Even in our exhibits for the reflective thinking of community members as they are in our space, great, that's fantastic, thank you and you know, Andrea, this is not part of it. I think about your formal work in Anacostia, but I remember that during the Covet closures you created an exhibit on the fence of your house that was about things that people lost and things that people found during its early stages, um, and that work, It seems to me, it has extended through some of the strategies that you have used at the Anacostia Museum to even do different techniques, but also think about the impact in new ways.

Yeah, I guess thanks for remembering that it was fun to do. You know, I think everyone in these. Sometimes they think of themselves not just as a person who works in a certain museum, but as a person who is a museum person in general, you know, and I think doing an exhibit for five hundred dollars on my fence with my neighbors It was one of the best museum experiences I've ever had, you know, I said I just posted the link in this chat. I think, oh my gosh, thank you all, yeah, that was crazy, I mean, yeah, that was my favorite.

I got to be on NPR, it was like the closest thing I've ever been famous to, but yeah, I think, you know, Isaiah is talking about accessibility, that's one of the big themes of the last two years, two or three years for me, it's not that kind of accessibility, but where? We do our job, we let you know, so I think people have written about this thing called the threshold of fear, like not even going into the museum because I don't know, for various reasons, maybe you think the building is intimidating, maybe maybe not I want to be frisked by security, you know, it could be geographically not, you know, convenient, you know, and our museum, so I've only been here since the pandemic, so I didn't really know about this museum before, I mean.

I was a consultant and I worked here as a consultant, but I think I like, I was ready for that because of the work I was already thinking about, you know, I was starting to think with other colleagues, um. who were part of a little project we did called Freedom Museum where we started thinking about the museum building as a kind of limitation and um then when the pandemic hit, well, this is, you know, this is perfect, now you know our buildings . They're actually dangerous to be in, you know, we measure our success a lot of times in museums using things like dwell time and that kind of thing, but dwell time is what you don't want in a pandemic, right?

It became kind of an excuse to get people, um, I guess, out of the building, uh, and I think a lot of people did, but one thing I think that does is alter the power dynamic, you know, because You are, you know. We can decide what we want to have in our buildings for the most part, but we can't necessarily decide to put something like in a neighborhood without building relationships without um, you know, you're talking about Mary getting that trust, trust is so important um and you know, as part of the Smithsonian, you know, I realized that there were barriers to overcome because some communities haven't really had good experiences with the Smithsonian and um, and whether it was our Museum or not, um, would it be name? it still comes with that baggage, you know, so, we, when we did, the first thing my first project here was, you know, putting a museum exhibit outside in a neighborhood, it was called change men, so this is kind of like that. .

I started on my fence and then I thought, can someone give me more money to do more things? um, but it really was a great learning experience, they were both um, because yeah, with all those relationships of trust they had to form in a community, I mean, this is at the height of, you know, the pandemic and the adjustment of racial reckoning and all this kind of stuff already made everyone very, you know, tense, um and, but it was really, um, you know, I think it was a successful venture, you know, in a lot of ways no, I don't think that it was, you know 100.

I would do things differently, but I'll show you that I have some analog images here, so this is like a picture of the scaffolding that we used. to set up the exhibit where it was, it was about African American men of change and it was in a very overlooked area of ​​the city where the narrative of that neighborhood was crime, you know, and poverty, and no, they come to see, you know. culture um and we found out that a lot of neighbors were really proud of it and um, you know, in terms of accessibility, I mean, we did a study that was really cool and we ended up learning that, oh my gosh, where's my statistic? 56 of those we interviewed had never visited our Museum before, um, that had been going to the um to metachange, so, a little less than half had never even heard of our Museum, you know, so, um, they were doing something there for visibility, um, and it was also doing to you.

I know that talking about curation is one of the things that we think of museums, since you know what their main purpose is: education, learning, um, and in fact, the people that we hire to do the evaluation of men have changed. and they said, "Okay, let's go." Check and see what they learned about all the change men. Know? Do you know their names? And as you know, I said no, this isn't about that, in fact, um, I mean everything, you know it was more important than that. Being there as a whole, like here, you know, dozens of African American male faces that are, um, uplifting, like they're full of accomplishment and pride and boldness and righteousness, and in a community, um, that you know, it looks like this and really. like, um, you know, I wanted to, it's more of an emotional thing as a whole rather than learning, you know the names and the dates and the facts, um, so the fact that I mean there were things that happened during that time.

I wouldn't have thought to measure how people said the city picked up trash more frequently since the Smithsonian was in the neighborhood, um, you know, if you can do that, why not, that's cool, it's a great effect. as far as I'm concerned. It worries me, it shouldn't have to be that way, but I think museums don't usually think about those kinds of intangibles, so those are some of the things and then we continue to repeat that with um, where we do our work, you know, because we were closed for so long um, we created a street team of educators um, to do work outside the building, I have a great photo for you, check them out, they liked the street style activations and performances. city ​​um and that's something that will stay with us I think in our kind of infrastructure so that's really really fun and then the last thing I wanted to say was something unexpected that I think well some museums really rose to the challenge during this time in terms of giving not only the healing that people needed but also the physical needs.

As we notice that well, in our neighborhood we have the highest rates of food insecurity of any part of the city, so do those who Do you know that the people who are hungry are the ones who need a museum exhibit the most? Know? Maybe not, maybe they just need food, so we partnered with an organization called Feed the Fridge to install a refrigerator in our parking lot, which serves and continues to serve 100 meals a day. The way they do it is the power, the refrigerator takes care of everything. They get their meals from restaurants so it supports local businesses and then you know they stock it every day and you know people just come and grab what they need.

I mean, it's those museum visitors. You know, I don'tI know, but I don't think they even entered the building and interacted with anything we designed, but I still feel like those are our people. so thank you Andrea, I mean, I and I, actually I know, I said it quite a while ago because I remember when she did some public acting shows, uh, when you were a graduate student, but we won't get into that, I don't think so. , but um, you know, I think I think that each of you, in one way or another, in your pieces, within your organizations, have asked questions about possibility, have opened your cells and your institutions to new possibilities.

Now I don't remember who said it. I think I'm not sure which one of you, but this notion of how we could maybe it was you, Mary Ruth and your um in your piece, so I'm just looking at the time and I want to start kissing. um uh the inside and the outside because I don't think you can implement your visions on your own so maybe this is a place that we can start talking about um uh your practice, you know, Isaiah writes in Herpes how embedded the teachers were in their I have the feeling that they can't show their own problems.

I would know that they saw that they saw who they are in some way. It's weak until Isaiah just brought out those chairs and, all the teachers love to sit in them, but how could they talk a little? a little bit about those strategies for getting others on board. I mean, if you have a degree in museum studies, you might not be willing to try one of these things. You know it might be too risky, too vulnerable, so I don't know who wants to start talking about it, Mary Ruth or Isetta to start with. maybe I mean, I think what strikes me about the three of us conversing with each other is a trust in the Wonder game and design thinking and it manifests itself in each of our three pieces in different ways, but even as we think. about things like Wonder or thinking about things like uh critical confidence that there's still a piece for the three of us at some point you have to apply this and what the application looks like because it can't just be what we've said this and then we don't apply it and That's where things come in like thinking about really effective community partnerships, asking questions about where we do our work and how we do it.

I think I said in my article towards the end that at some point someone has to place the chairs correctly so that there is all this beautiful thinking that has to happen correctly about why we do our core work and how we do it and what those investments are in moments of commitment and then, in the end, someone has to go get it. the chairs, someone has to go get the agenda, someone has to turn on the subtitles, there are action pieces right there that happen in each of these crucial moments, um, and that they wonder, play and trust, perhaps to many Of us, we have been taught that this is something soft. skill, but then when it comes time to apply, that kind of design thinking, that kind of trust building becomes so vital to being able to not only execute our work, but maybe even pivot and change so that we can still be more effective, agile or responsive, thank you, thank you, yes, I think I should pick up on what Isaiah was saying and certainly my chapter was also linked to this work by Fred Rogers, which really makes the Center, um wonder and play and curiosity , but he did that work and he did that research and to be clear, he was very well researched in this right and he just didn't decide to show up one day with puppets, right?

I mean, it was very intentional the work that he did based on learning research and he did that work. for early learners and I think one of the things he was trying to do was say how do we understand these things to be true for people regardless of their age and that was a question I was actually asked by a school district superintendent. knowing how we take the learnings of Fred Rogers and make them applicable and I think when you start to say that these are not only the fundamental pillars that early learners need, but we all need to have self-esteem, we all need to have confidence, we all need our curiosity be lively and have time to play and have time for reflection and solitude and those are not things that, in my experience, have been really prioritized, certainly in museum workplaces, um, when people ask, it's the happiest moment.

Where I have worked is like when I worked in a container store, it was actually the happiest place, not only because I left the storage organization well, but also because of the culture that was created, so I thought a lot about the ways in which can be created. a culture of community in the workplace around these principles of what Fred Rogers said we needed as the most important pillars or foundations for our first students and I think that can be put into practice by starting to compare yourself to those things every day . I mean, that's at least what I've done well.

I mean, I love this analogy, like if you set up the chairs, you know, or if I actually created a meeting agenda that allows for play and wonder and curiosity. Know? Are we creating a team? cultures that allow us to ensure we build trust. In my time at JYF, I have implemented many changes and you know the same thing happens like that. Change moves at the speed of trust and you have to be able to. to build that trust if you ever want to see that kind of change, so I think those are the introspective pieces that have been critical for me over the last few years, you know, getting through the pandemic and thinking about the ways that we need to. invest in our staff in that way.

Great thanks. You know there's a question. I know I want to hear from Andrea, but there's one question that I read really quickly because it was a long question, but it's about talking about Fred Rogers. a person who has colleagues who are very shy when it comes to what they can offer children and you know the types of activity programs that children will be able to participate in and I guess I'm hearing that from you. there's kind of a continuum and there's no straight line where the kids you know are not able to perceive or participate in programs.

I don't know if anyone wants to answer that question and I apologize if I have. um, I killed your question, so I mean, I think I also try to read and listen at the same time, um, I think that's actually what Fred Rogers' work will show you: that he really was able to adapt and do even the more difficult things. accessible to kids, just like you can have difficult conversations, you can do complex things with them, but you have to do it in a way that is accessible to them, so it's never about saying don't do this with kids, it's about finding a way of it's age appropriate and it meets them where they are and then you can do that work with them um and I personally also always create iteration spaces and okay we've had a program that we've piloted for nine years right ? like you don't have to get it right the first time and really let your teams understand that they're in a place where it's okay to fail, you know, learn from failure, move forward with all that kind of stuff, um and then with the kids, Yeah. it requires a lot of trial and error I think I think oh go ahead Andrew oh I was actually going to reference you.

I said it because I'm sure you're used to telling people that when you make things accessible you make them better for Everyone is right and I think it's the same with kids. If you make things that are good for kids, adults love it. I mean, and I don't mean preschool. I mean, I think there are different things that are better for kids of different ages. true, but I mean, you know things that are participatory that you know have, you know, are nice, you know, aesthetically interesting colors, things that invite you to look and learn and don't have tiny types, like all that accessibility type of stuff.

I think it goes well with being welcoming to kids in ways you wouldn't expect, like you wouldn't think about. Oh, well, there are no toys here, it's like it's more than that, you know, so I don't know how to put that in there. as a kind of innovative way of looking at what's for kids and what's not for kids. I mean, I always think it's also very interesting because there's a stereotype that young people can't be abstract thinkers, but they're actually children. They are incredibly abstract thinkers because they are inventing these wonderful imaginative worlds, so I think in the same sense we also have to think about the human experience, so if the museum is a space of lifelong learning, then it is also a space of permanent development and We, as human beings, are developing from being young to adults, middle-aged to old, and that part of what the museum can do is actually be a space not only for lifelong learning but also for ongoing research of Our lives as humans as we develop.

And that's part of why having trauma-informed approaches in the way we think about our audiences and in our exhibitions becomes so critical because we are human and we have this diverse range of experiences, some of which are deeply rooted. in trauma. that we're trying to begin to understand developmentally, and if we think about that and how we design our exhibits or how we allow young people to find spaces to release their trauma or even how we allow a culture that can deny anything traumatic . even having happened, no, we are like nothing, nothing happened, everything is normal again, right, if you provide spaces for that, you are actually providing spaces for people to continue understanding themselves as human beings and learning throughout their lives, thank you.

You know, our time is moving quickly, but Sarah asked a question that I think is really important and gets to something that we've all talked about a little bit, but let's dig a little deeper and today I mean, today I'm still. Think about a lot of stress, a lot of trauma, a lot of anger, a lot of anxiety, and workers in all areas, but this question really has to do with the work of workers within museums and if you could talk a little bit about some of the strategies. that they have tried in their respective organizations to help their staff and assist them as they navigate this space.

I know. I listened to a webinar the other day where the founder of uh Capital creative said her advice would be not to do it. more with less but let's learn to do less with more oh um, but why don't you address that so we can um um go ahead and answer Sarah's question. So, Mary Ruth, you have a hypothesis that you brought from Pittsburgh to say. Another hypothesis was widely read in the chapter that I wrote at a time of personal and professional transition for me when I was leaving institutions and arriving at a museum.

I kind of loved the trauma that I had in my museum and I came to a workplace where they had their own kind of trauma and institutional trauma and I think that was very real. I think institutional cultural trauma is very real and I think the pieces that I've done and the time I've been here has been To one, let people feel safe, um, and the way I've done it from the beginning and the way I construct conversations, the way we schedule meetings, even things that may ring a bell for those of us. those who are in education and do a lot of facilitation, it's like ground rules that seem basic, but actually when you do that in a much broader sense in an organization, when you say out loud, you assume good intentions, it was like, oh, there was no done that.

Before that, you know, establishing those kind of regular ways of making sure you're gauging what people need and their expectations, and I think always being very transparent with people is key and the other piece that for me has been the important thing is. making sure that people feel comfortable and that they bring what they want of themselves to their work, and in a way that is not overwhelming, in a way that is not to say that you take your work home, but you know, draw this line. that there is a balance between life and work. I won't email or call you after 5pm. m., you know, like work days, right? and to let people have that breathing room because I think in this pandemic world of ours, our daily lives and our after-work lives have become so restricted and so connected, and so we've spent a lot of time trying to think about balance between work. and personal life, but when you're here, bring with you what you want to bring, but then also when you really and truly leave, leave and I think those pieces have been successful so far in the work that we've been doing very well.

I think one of the things I'm really thinking about as well is remembering that the pandemic isn't really over and being able to have an experience where the pandemic is over can be representative for a lot of people around privilege, access and the right to power, so part of this for me has been a reminder that the pandemic and its After Effects and its uncertain After Effects are not really over and although people may want todesperately for it to end, that doesn't mean we've really processed it, so we're really trying to think about giving people space and time to reflect, we're really trying.

To think about that, maybe people's capacity is not the same as before 2020, because there is one in four people who now have long covid, so the staff can change our whole relationship towards what the people can now do good. Maybe before the pandemic you didn't need a microphone to be in the gallery and be able to project, but now maybe during the pandemic and after the illness now you do, so it's really thinking about these kinds of ways to be in the present moment. of reality and continue to plan and reflect on how not only accessibility but also helping people process doing things that could benefit everyone but are not necessarily aimed at this is something that we are doing because of the Covid law that helps people to evolve and change and it's not that we haven't seen this before just in human existence after the bubonic plague, many things change, right, that then stays with us, so we have to think of this moment as if always It would have changed us, thank you Andrea, um.

She had a couple of different thoughts, but I was looking at the question about trauma-informed teaching and, you know, thinking about this museum in particular, our audience has experienced a lot of trauma. I would say more than average. um, a museum where a lot of different marginalized people find themselves in the stories of, you know, the exhibits and things like that, and that's something that, I mean, I found really important is to look at it with that in mind. everything we do, I think about people who have actually experienced, like you're talking about food insecurity, right?

How does this sound to someone who has actually experienced food insecurity? Know? Are you saying like these people? Know? Are you trying? with um I guess the respect and dignity that he deserves um so I think that's really something that I will probably continue with me as you know in the field um and the other thing I was going to say is maybe some flaws that we're experimenting. I feel like what's happening now is they're pushing us like they're pushing us. Back in the building, you know, and now we're, you know, in full speed, full scale programming, you know, exhibit development, um, doing all the things, so this really requires, I mean, if you have planned a large-scale event that requires a lot of time. capacity, we're talking not just about money but also people's time and energy, so I feel like it's a really different cadence than the pandemic, where we were, yes, we were busy, but we were doing bigger projects, We thought, how could we?

It's still going to be relevant, so we're going to try to make them aware of these things and now it feels a little bit more like getting back into the routine. I don't know if all of you are experiencing the same thing, but it worries me, you know, it worries me. how busy we stay because you can't reflect and you can't be intentional. I mean, I advocate being intentional all the time and grappling with these questions. What time do you have to do that? If you're just going to go. from one thing to the next, so of course I don't have an answer.

I just complain about it. I don't know, so one of the things we've done is you know I have and I'm. Sorry, I'm interrupting a little bit, but we only had two more minutes, so, um, um, but please, Mary, because I was just going to ask you some practical suggestions for dealing with that, so you're two minutes in. we literally block out times on our calendars to take time, you know we have, they're like planned breaks for um, even as a department-wide level, don't bother us during this time, this is reflection time on my personal calendar, I have periods of three hours twice. a week that's like I'm not scheduling meetings.

I'm not doing this, it's a very different way to the way I used to work, but I think it's for my mental health and the mental health of the people I work with. That's been really helpful and we're definitely working on less is more. It's a big change from the question I saw in the chat about budgeting and understanding all that I'm working on, but that's definitely the Mantra we're trying. live and ask each other repeatedly, you know, I could keep this conversation going for at least another hour, talking about my tendency towards more, I want more, but it's 3.25 a week, so I have to hand this over to Avi for any final comments . comments I can't thank you enough not only for your participation and your essays, but also for the work you do every day, so Avi, why don't you provide a summary of your wisdom?

This is certainly a challenge given the richness of the conversation. I want to thank Marcia and the panelists for sharing with us so many ideas and so many possibilities. It seems to me that I want to frame this in the broadest way possible and that is to suggest that Covid and the trauma of it basically clash. all of us and I don't mean just some of us, I mean all of us with the challenge of dealing with newness, something that we hadn't been prepared to deal with, in some cases we didn't know that we certainly knew.

I didn't anticipate it and where there were no obvious and clear solutions, tried and tested solutions, so I think a lot of people responded by closing a lot of institutions, however, someone said, well, people want to go back to where we were before, that's not going to go. . In the last three years there have been three important shifts: the shift towards digital, which is now almost universal among medium and large institutions and also many smaller ones, and they are not going to go back to that no matter what. the turn towards community and the turn towards equity and these are all facts, they are not assumptions or hypotheses, they are the facts of life in 2023 um and it seems to me that what it did for us as practitioners was that it forced us to make changes In our mental construction of the world, we had to start thinking about things differently.

We not only had to think about our policies and our practices, but our entire mental map of how the world works, and I think what the three panelists have called us one of the most critical elements of this is that all the limits with which we As we enter 2020 they have changed radically, they are more permeable or have been completely erased or in some cases hardened, but we can now see that the boundaries that once separated our institutions from the community no longer hold. We need to rethink that limit, if there ever was one. We need to think about the boundaries that separate each of us from our colleagues. within the institution and we also have to think about the limits we have mentally imposed on our visitors, separating children from adults, people of one race from another, people of one type of interest from another, people of one origin from another. , so I think that We've seen an opportunity here in projects, whether they're large-scale projects, like Mary Rue said, we're going to think about the broader story, whether they're putting an exhibit on their fence or whether they're increasing the font size so that visually impaired people are able to read the text without asking someone for help uh it seems to me that all these possibilities are possibilities for healing and we need to take advantage of those opportunities this is healing is not healing security security uh they are not foreign to the core functions of a museum are part and parcel of the functions of a museum to put it in the broadest terms possible covid and our responses to covid have forced us to expand the boundaries of moral responsibility and I want to thank the panelists for convening that to our attention thank you for reminding us that we have a happy moral responsibility I needed that today Walter I think you're in I think I thank you a long time before uh for these final words about the conversation that just happened here I I'm not going to do the same, of course that you did very well, but I just want to remember how these conversations and points that have been raised by both the panelists and in the chat are things that are so close to the strategic visions. that we have as an organization at museumexpert.org I just want to say it quickly, the connection between museum staff created a community of people who care about each other within museums that are respected, it is a basis for having good connections with the community through which we want to serve abroad and that is fundamental for what we want to do as an organization in the future and then the latest challenges are faced.

People mention that this is how we are going to convince the leaders today not to come back. to which it was because it seems to be a big trend and a big challenge too and so we're going to follow this and go a little bit deeper each time our next webinar will be on February 8th with Martin saves a dick that you might know he's been in the museum field as a professional and then as an observer and someone who studied museums for 30 years. He is now a professor at Oregon State University on these issues and we will delve a little deeper.

In this aspect of how to build fulfilling careers in museums and that's what we're going to do, we're going to explore strategies with him to create paths to careers that are personalized, fulfilling and future-proof, as I said before, this is the real foundation of making a good job. outside too, so put him in attendance on February 8 at 2 pm with the next webinar with another story. Thanks to Martha and Avi for this collaboration as always. Thanks to aslas for being a great partner and for the technical support they have given us. and the promotion that you have provided for this webinar absolutely and thank you to the attendees who have also been extremely active in the chat and have given us a little more food for thought so thank you all and I hope to see bye next time