There are challenges inherent in both approaches, she says. “We’ve learned that if you want to involve recent immigrants in dialogue about their experience, you need to be able to speak their languages.” She notes that for the past several years, the museum has been recruiting staff who speak Chinese and Spanish, the languages spoken by most in the community. The museum also added a second component to its ESOL program, through which immigrant students create exhibitions in the museum’s storefront windows. “Our aim is to engage the ESOL students to be more involved with the museum, to make the connection between the museum exhibits and their own experiences and to provide a venue for them to express their perspectives as recent immigrants,” says Russell-Ciardi.
Fulfilling the Wing Luke's mission required the museum to broaden the skill sets of its staff and turn away from more traditional methods of recruitment, a shift that was hard to make. Position descriptions and recruitment methods were redefined to include community organizing and negotiation. New staff members have come almost exclusively from the community, with skills nurtured in the American ethnic studies and social justice movements.
This has had a tremendous impact on the Wing Luke’s ability to delve deeper into community concerns. The museum encourages staff to participate actively in professional associations and conferences and to join one or more community organizations. In this way, staff get to know a lot of local people and are able to learn from them. “Museums of the future need to look for staff . . . who are bridge-builders, have strong negotiation skills, and who can work collaboratively,” says Chew. The ability to negotiate and facilitate is a crucial skill, particularly for the director and other senior staff because it is they who must push the project along. This approach is playing out in the museum’s goal to move to a new site in the same neighborhood. A $23.2 million capital and endowment campaign is over 85 percent completed, and fundraising and construction in the new site will be completed in 2007. This would not have happened without strong community support. “Community members are committed to preserving the historic core of the neighborhood,” Chew notes. “Our community is changing–there are a few large-scale developments in this neighborhood, and community members recognize the importance of retaining a culturally appropriate and historically accurate core for the neighborhood. Support for the Museum is a vital outcome of that commitment.”
Having a bridge-building staff affects the museum and its community in other ways, as well. Confronting and addressing difficult issues is most likely to occur in an environment of trust. But how do you encourage people to work together, particularly on issues that may touch individuals emotionally?
From the "Electric Chairs" series by Andy Warhol | Staff at the Andy Warhol Museum knew it would be a challenge to create the 2003 exhibition “Andy Warhol’s Electric Chairs: Reflecting on Capital Punishment in America.” |
A few years earlier the museum had hosted another show with difficult content, “Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America.” The more recent exhibition focused on Warhol’s “Electric Chair” series, begun in the 1960s and based on a photograph of the electric chair at Sing Sing prison in New York. An electric chair elicits a range of responses and interpretations, and that ambiguity is the key to the project. According to Assistant Director for Education and Interpretation Jessica Gogan, it “offered an opportunity to apply our ‘dialogue’ knowledge to connect issues of social concern and civic dialogue with powerful examples of Warhol’s work.”
The museum organized “Electric Chairs” in collaboration with Amnesty International and sought support from other groups, including the Pennsylvania District Attorneys Association (PDAA). Questions soon arose about the role of advocacy in a museum striving to serve as a forum: How would different points of view be represented? Which statistics would be presented? What form would the dialogue take?
“Both Amnesty and PDAA grappled [with] what their official and public support of the project meant to their own organizations,” says Gogan. “In essence both [had] to give up desiring or competing to control the terms of the dialogue. [That was] extremely difficult for these organizations, one driven by an abolitionist mission and the other supporting the current law for capital punishment [and] wary of . . . the liberal bias of the arts/museum environment.” In the end, PDAA declined to participate in the project, but Amnesty gave official support through its Human Rights Education Division. The museum views this as a learning experience. As Gogan notes, “[For this particular experience, PDAA] seriously engaged with the museum, debated official involvement and decided against it, all the while talking with us, engaging with the issues and with their individual contact maintaining his own involvement throughout and participating in programs.” The PDAA contact is now part of the museum’s network, and the door is open for more dialogue on other topics.
Much of the dialogue related to “Electric Chairs” took place on the phone and off the record, as the organizations determined whether they would offer their public support, says Gogan. “We were functioning as a catalyst for those with whom we work to engage in serious conversations about what collaboration might mean for them and how they see this in relation to their missions and agendas. It’s natural that they would discuss this amongst themselves. Both contacts shared their thoughts with me on this process.” Staff often began by discussing the art itself, which gave people an opening to work through the issues or use the opportunity for their own dialogue. Gogan and her colleagues found that the word dialogue “can be off-putting for many people.” Busy professionals may think that dialogue is “just sitting around and chatting” and decide that they simply do not have the time. But the museum encouraged people to participate in other ways, such as by recording an audio portion of the exhibit, serving as a panelist for a public program, write exhibition text or simply giving advice.
Trying to identify how these projects changed the museum and the community is a challenge in itself. Gogan notes, “The idea of dealing with complex issues and working with community and making it part of our practice has become part of who we are. It involves a certain kind of risk-taking. . . . It’s very dynamic.”
“It’s like jazz,” says the Wing Luke’s Ron Chew. “You hit some spots where it flows, and some spots where it’s difficult. You just do it.”
A major obstacle for some organizations is the lack of leadership from the board and/or executive director. Leaders may support the idea of community involvement in theory but fail to provide a structure to ensure it happens. Community work becomes the responsibility of mid-level managers from a few departments rather than one shared by most of the staff. Left to their own devices, the staff members who are committed to community work create their own systems within their own departments, but nothing is institution-wide.
In such situations, “Focus on making sure the board is working from a core of valuing community involvement,” suggests Jeff Rudolph, president and CEO of the California Science Center in Los Angeles. “[C]reate good relationships with elected officials, who are great bridges to communities, particularly communities of color. . . . In our case, building a more diverse board has led to more people knowing about the science center, with the result that now more people want to be on the board.” Community involvement happens when boards recruit trustees and directors who value inclusion. It happens when boards understand that just as communities are always changing, boards need to change as well. It happens when the museum hires staff from diverse communities, giving the entire organization a community-based perspective.
Common barriers to community involvement initiatives are colleagues who don’t see the importance of an initiative or how their work fits in, or who are just not interested. The challenge is to help all staff members to see that community collaborations are an important aspect of their own work. Innovative approaches focus on ongoing support for staff. These include making community involvement part of annual performance reviews for all staff, providing staff with background information on all exhibitions that focus on specific communities and conducting cultural competency training (also known as diversity training) for staff and volunteers. Many resources are available for this training, and some museums have offered it, but it is rarely incorporated into staff development on an ongoing basis. This is unfortunate because when a museum invests in cultural cometency, it opens the doors for significant change. For one, it helps the staff grapple with difficult issues, including how to work better together. And when staff and volunteers are more culturally aware, museums become much more accessible and relevant places for the entire community.
In their 2002 book The Inclusion Breakthrough Frederick A. Miller and Judith H. Katz lay down a challenge: “Creating a culture of inclusion requires radical change. But the improvements that result from the change are equally radical. People must learn to work differently—every project team scans the organization to make sure it has the best and most diverse team for the job.” They further note, “It is almost impossible to create an inclusion breakthrough if the organization fails to link and integrate its strategic initiatives with its mission, vision, values, external environment, people systems and management practices. The alignment of all of these key elements creates synergies that are far more productive than the sum of the parts.” This includes creating a new set of policies and practices and ensuring that the policies are aligned with actual practices and behaviors. Miller and Katz also highlight the importance of identifying, developing and practicing the skill sets needed to build a culture of inclusion. These may include taking the time to listen, listen, listen and respond when people share their ideas and perspectives, or it may mean addressing misunderstandings and resolving disagreements as soon as possible. Lastly, a critical part of creating an inclusive organization is to identify the key internal stakeholders and actively involve them in the process of community work. Help them understand that they can help make the organization a vital part of the community.
