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Attracting Racially & Ethnically Diverse Museum Trustees

Category: On-Demand Programs: Diversity, Equity, Accessibility, and Inclusion

(This video runs 39:11)

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Supporting Documents

Guiding Question

How do we attract a racially and ethnically diverse range of potential board candidates to our museum?

Webinar Highlights

  • Guidance on building knowledge and interest in your museum; identifying what your museum has done to “sell” itself to and engage with communities that are not currently engaged.
  • Importance of being creative in attracting talent and bringing in new stakeholders as peers, creating space for them to enter and contribute to your board.
  • Guidance on developing genuine relationships—avoiding tokenization, seeking out new perspectives and modes of contribution with intention, not merely for diversity’s sake.

Discussion Prompts

  • Why do we want to attract racially and ethnically diverse audiences/staff/board members?
  • What is our purpose as a museum in pursuing diversifying our board?
  • What outcomes are we looking for? Do those outcomes line up with our DEAI goals?
  • How are we achieving those outcomes? Which communities are we engaging, and what intentional strategies are we coming to them with?
  • What methods of accountability are current board members using to ensure stakeholders are not being tokenized? Should our current recruitment practices and policies be interrogated for barriers to engaging racially and ethnically diverse candidates?
  • How is our museum perceived in the wider community?

Activity

Role Play

  • Teams of two: one participant is a current museum board member, and the other is a potential new member
  • What qualities does this potential member possess that could benefit the board? Do they fall into one (or more) of the Five I Categories of Stakeholders?

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