Belonging: Co-creating welcoming and equitable museums

Posted on Nov 22, 2019

A neon sign that reads "You Belong Here" in cursive. — A Facing Change Senior Diversity Fellow reflects on barriers that make visitors feel unwelcome in museums, and shares questions we can ask to remove them. Photo credit: "You Belong Here (Yellow)" by Tavares Strachan displayed at the Blanton Museum of Art; photo by Amer Mughawish on Unsplash.

“Can you describe a time you felt unwelcome or like you didn’t belong in a museum?”

This question was posed during a recent conference call for the Facing Change Senior Diversity Fellows. As I listened to my distinguished colleagues recount their lived experiences of exclusion and unwelcome, many of them tied to racism, I tried to hold myself accountable to all the privilege I walk with in the world. Then it was my turn. Though I did not have the same experience with racism and did not wish to make a false equivalency, I wanted to share a story of my own and honor how it has shaped my journey personally and professionally. The story was of my first visit to a children’s museum with my daughter, who at the time was a year old. I had just moved to a new city and had been told by other parents about the wonderful local children’s museum. I had never been to one, despite having rich and expansive experiences with other kinds of museums and cultural institutions.

While the exhibits at the children’s museum were thoughtful and playful, somehow the experience left me feeling isolated and alone, like I didn’t really belong. There weren’t any signs or liaisons helping me figure out my role in this unfamiliar play environment, or pointing me to reflect on what the exhibits might teach. Looking around at the other groups of parents, I felt different from them; they seemed to have an understanding or secret code that I didn’t have. As a relatively new parent and a first-time visitor to this kind of museum, I felt the familiar twinge of “otherness” from my own childhood in an immigrant family. I felt it especially after my daughter had a hard time taking turns and sharing with another child, leading to an awkward encounter with a parent. Ultimately, our visit ended with us sitting on a bench as I read her a book, an activity I knew well and felt comfortable doing, and then we left.

A year later I returned to work and, as fate would have it, I found myself working in a children’s museum. I learned all about the deep and thoughtful intention that went into exhibits and programs, how they were designed based on theories of child development to promote health, inquiry, connection, and bonding. I felt I had finally been given the secret decoder ring I had been missing to understand all the benefits that a visit to a sensory-rich environment has on the growth and development of a child. In my role as an outreach coordinator, it was my job to share this newfound understanding with underrepresented and under-resourced communities, to help them reap those benefits with the sense of belonging and understanding that I had not felt.

But my joy and enthusiasm for this responsibility was soon tempered by the realization that it was rooted in a posture of “doing to” these communities, instead of the empowerment of “co-creating with” them. I had my eyes opened to the deep racial inequities that existed in my city, leading me to reflect on my complicity in upholding structural racism. I had to look hard at what I was doing and how I was doing it—was I acting as a “white savior” upholding a hierarchy even while I felt like an outsider myself? How could I follow the path of empathy for this feeling of exclusion to the understanding and accountability that would make a more equitable and inclusive institution?

My personal and organizational journey was not a solo adventure. It was supported by the museum’s leadership and done in collaboration with colleagues, childcare providers, and families, as well as many wonderful mentors in racial and social justice. At times this work was hard, messy, off-base, and complicated. But what ultimately emerged was a community-created understanding of the barriers to participation that marginalized and minoritized people face in many public spaces. I’ve since adapted this understanding into a framework of guiding questions to help develop strategies for becoming more inclusive and welcoming.

Every community and its needs are different, so your organization’s approach to inclusion and belonging should ideally be co-created with the community and local ecosystem in which it exists. I offer the following barriers and guiding questions in the spirit of reflection and as a starting point to creating collaborations, programs, policies, and practices that deepen the sense of belonging in your institution by your full community.

1. Not seeing yourself, your family, or your values reflected in the staff, activities, or values of the organization

This may be the strongest and most persistent barrier. It is one that our field has been putting effort and energy into and continues to grapple with. It is not enough to say we will diversify our staff; we must be willing to transform the culture of our institutions into inclusive places to work, visit, and champion. In the end, all of us resource with our time and energy the things we value. How valued are we as museums if only a part of our community is engaging with us?