Kim Ondreck Carim: Welcome. If you are here for Beyond Financial Sustainability, nourishing healthy financial communities, you are in the right place. I just want to let you know we were also honored to write an article about this session for Museum Magazine.

You can find the link to that to our slide deck and to the handouts that are on the table in front of you by going to either the AAM conference website in the program tab or by going to the app,

clicking on our program, and there are links to all of those documents. The links to the slides themselves, themselves standalone are here in the QR code, but I know for those of you sitting in the back that may be too small to see.

So, we are going to tell you a story about the Oakland Museum of California’s journey around financial decision -making. Oakland Museum of California, which we lovingly and phonetically refer to as OMCA,

is about a $16 million budget -size multi -disciplinary museum in urban Oakland, California, on Lejean -Aloni territory.

We have art, history, and natural science galleries, and we say that we tell the story of California with an Oakland beat. So, before we launch in,

I just to be clear that we understand that when we’re talking about financial sustainability and we’re talking about moving beyond financial sustainability, we are not leaving behind financial health, okay? So we are not equating financial health and financial sustainability. Those to us in this presentation are two different concepts, okay?

So, let’s introduce ourselves. So, I am Kim Ondreck Karim. I use she /her pronouns. I am the Chief Financial Officer at OMCA, and I’ve been with the organization for just over six years now.

What I hope you will take away from this presentation is really being curious and conscious of the values that you’re espousing when you make financial decisions.

Nisha Gulati: Hi, I’m Nisha Gulati. I use she /her pronouns, and I’m the Associate Director of Digital Strategy. I sit on the marketing team at OMCA. And I’m really excited to offer a new way of thinking about attendance.

Hilda Schmelling: Hi, I’m Hilda Schmelling. I’m the Development Events Manager at OMCA. I use she /her and they /them pronouns. and I’m excited to talk about reimagining events with you.

Mirella Rangel: Good afternoon. My name is Mirella Rangel, and I use she, her, and ella pronouns. And I’m from the Colibri Collaborative. I’m the founder and collaborator within the organization. So, I’ll pass it back to Kim.

Kim Ondreck Carim: Thank you. So, we’re gonna take you through three main topics. We’re going to give you some insights about how we see the financial decision -making ethos called financial sustainability and how we’ve moved beyond that.

Maria is going to talk about the evolution of our liberatory financial ethos and then Nish Hilda and I are going to give you practical examples of practices and events that were transformed by OMCA’s perspective on financial decision -making.

So, For the past two years, I have been starting almost every financial presentation that I give to board and staff with a moment of reflection. I typically ask two questions before I get to this one.

The first question I ask is, “What did you see and hear about money growing up?” And then, “What’s one thing that the adults in your life, when you were young, did with their money that you want to replicate? And what’s one thing that the adults in your life did with their money that you want to not replicate? So really thinking about someone’s personal relationship to money.

So, for example, if you’re of my generation, it was something that I witnessed growing up that it was perceived as impolite to talk about how much salary you made.

So that is an assumption, a tradition that I need to be aware of as I am entering into conversations about salary transparency with people who are not of my generation. That’s the example that I can give for how personal attitudes can affect how you have financial conversations.

Capitalism can inflict trauma. that trauma can live in our bodies. And really, when we’re processing it, it goes up to our minds, right? So, when we’re thinking about finance, we are using our heads a lot. So I’m going to ask you to ground into your bodies for a second. If you’re willing, I’m going to ask you to sit back in your chair, put your hands in your lap. However, you’re comfortable. I’m going to read you three statements. And I want you to just pay attention to how your body and your emotions react without kind of intellectualizing what these statements are.

So, take a deep breath, close your eyes if you’re comfortable. So, the first statement, money serves stability and longevity and is a zero -sum game. Money is power.

The second statement, money serves healing by being conscious of and working to change a system of extraction and ingrained inequities.

The third statement, money serves continuous restoration and fosters a sharing of power. So, take a deep breath, open your eyes, and just remark how those statements, The example of financial sustainability is look at money, financial integrity is look at money, and finally financial authenticity is look at money felt in your body. So that when you’re in conversations about financial decision -making you can go back and say, oh, that’s what I’m reacting to, that’s what I’m feeling, bringing that consciousness of how you think about money up to the surface.

So, OMCA, Social Impact Framework, we’ve written widely about it. It’s been the subject of several sessions at AAM conferences. Our social impact is about social cohesion. So social cohesion is the problem, is the answer to the question, What problem is OMCA best equipped to tackle in Oakland? The problem is social fragmentation.

The answer is social cohesion. And I just want to stop and bring to consciousness how we actually framed that question. We framed it as what’s the best problem to tackle.

It’s a sports metaphor. It’s competitive. It’s win -lose, right? So, even in the language that we were using, we had a certain perspective. Social cohesion, on the other hand, the antidote to social fragmentation, has many components, but two very important pieces are the willingness to take action together, usually across difference, and a fostering of a greater understanding, trust, connection, empathy among people and groups. So now take that equation and instead of social cohesion substitute your budget process in there.

So then run through the equation. Does the willingness to take action together and greater understanding trust, connection and empathy among people and groups equal how your budget process works? I suspect not. It didn’t for us at the beginning. So that was really kind of the first key to say maybe the way we’re making financial decisions is not in alignment with our vision for social cohesion.

So, in the last strategic plan, we were facing a very specific financial problem. The city of Oakland who owns our collection and our buildings was planning to ramp down our funding,

north of 20 % on an annual basis over a series of years. So, we had a distinctly financial problem that we were trying to solve in our last strategic plan. Some good thinking, excellent brilliant minds came up with, well then, if we need to make sure that we are financially healthy, we need to put financial sustainability and social impact on par with each other.

So, we came up with the goalposts, and this was a symbol that we would use in meetings. But again, a goalpost rooted in sports, rooted in competition, someone winning, someone losing. So, then we’re fast forwarding, we’re done with one strategic plan, very successfully filled that gap,

Going into the next strategic plan, and of course, the pandemic hits, we have the murder of George Floyd, and as many of your organizations did, we at that time had a staff -wide conversation that was very vulnerable, very open, very passionate, very honest. And in that conversation, one of our staff persons said to us,

“Financial sustainability in this model has actually been weaponized to say no. So, in putting financial sustainability on par with social impact and inviting financial sustainability, that decision -making ethos in the door, it actually ended up taking over the party. So, where decisions were being made, that were perhaps improving our social impact, the staff person and others perceived that they were getting nos because when we said we didn’t have enough money, we couldn’t afford it, didn’t matter what the social impact was doing. It was overpowering. So, what we thought about, well then, we had our anti -racist design teams.

And our anti -racist design teams took a look at all of our processes and operations throughout the organization and suggested ways that we could incorporate to make us a more anti -racist organization.

And a lot of those were around how we made financial decisions. So, taking that as context, through a process that was much more organic than I’m actually going to make it sound, we thought, what if there’s another way to think about financial decision -making that actually helps support and create social cohesion. And what does that look like? So, we went from a goalpost to a garden.

So, this is our Friday nights. People on our great lawn enjoying a music performance. And a garden is an ecosystem, right? So, a garden takes soil, It takes the nutrients in the soil. It takes water. It takes seeds. It takes plants growing. It takes plants blooming, regenerating those seeds. It takes sun. It takes shade. It takes wind. It takes temperature. It takes air. So many things working together. We wanted a way to talk about our financial decision making that reflected an ecosystem.

So, we enhanced the perspective of financial sustainability, to include our values and to help us work with and not against our vision of social cohesion.

Again, I make this sound like this is just something that happened, but it is a super long journey. Multiple, multiple years, multiple, multiple “ahas” that led us to where we are today.

Really, the thing that crystallized everything for us, though, was when we started to work with Colibri Collaborative on our new strategic plan, and they introduced us to their culture of liberation.

And that concept helped us articulate what we wanted to move to when we were moving beyond financial sustainability. So, you all have handouts here.

I don’t think anybody’s out of them, but if you do want to follow along online as a QR code to the handout, and I’m just going to talk about the Liberatory Financial Ethos Continuum that we are using now as our lens to look through at OMCA.

So, we started to ask what if we saw finances as connective tissue that drives social change across sectors rather than scarce resources to be balanced. What if we shifted from money as a zero -sum game, I win, you lose to money as mutually healing and a tool to build community. So, if a museum can be a site of community healing, the way it makes financial decisions shouldn’t subvert that. So, this is a Continuum, of course, moving from financial sustainability across to financial authenticity, but it’s additive.

So, each stage builds on the prior stage rather than moving away from it. And as I said earlier, financial health is a baseline across of all this. So, we’re not suggesting that in leaving financial sustainability and moving towards a lens of financial integrity, we have left behind financial health. That’s not what we mean. So financial sustainability is really characterized by the desire and the goal of balancing our budget. Revenues have to equal expenses. That’s how decisions get made. It is looking at the organization as independent of everything else. Just the health of the organization is what is important.

To that ethos, if we add values and we start to think our financial decisions being made through the lens of our values, we start to reach interdependence because we start to think about our communities and how we’re affecting them and how we want to make sure that, for example, our staff are seen not as a piece of an independent organization, but their own community and members of the community around them as well. So that’s the financial integrity lens that we’re currently looking through.

We aspire to financial authenticity. And that’s moving beyond interdependence to collectivism, really thinking about the ecosystem that we play in financially as one ecosystem to make sure that is healthy.

So that includes funders, it includes partners, it includes people outside our walls, people of Oakland, how do we as an anchor institution use our money and our financial decision -making in a way that creates a collective good?

So, I am now going to pass this over to Mirella, who’s going to talk about how Colibri helped us envision what financial integration looked like.

Mirella Rangel: Thanks Kim. So, as I mentioned earlier, I’m from the Colibri Collaborative and we support organizations where a woman led collaborative that support organizations kind of refresh their strategic plans, do organizational development, strategic planning, et cetera. And we were contacted by OMCA to refresh their strategic plan and building on their anti -racism work.

So, we couldn’t leave that behind. And we think of strategic planning as inquiry work to identifying what are the critical questions we need to answer, answering them in a particular order and in this way we answer them together we learn together and it’s sort of like a learning out loud model right where throughout the process we kind of move forward with that built understanding so that staff, board, the community kind of understand things together and we’re able to embrace the strategic plan together and implement it and feel responsible for it.

So, with an anti -racist lens or DEIB, we begin by nurturing our listening ear. And that means we listen to staff, the community, and centering the voices of those who are most impacted. So, we began the strategic planning process by listening to community leaders and hearing their perspective, focusing on the role that OMCA should be playing in the community.

What have they done before? What can they continue to do? What can they deepen?

And we heard a lot of, “You’re doing this, just do more of it or deepen it.” And so here are a couple of the takeaways that we heard. So, in our WISE Council, which were the seven grassroots organizers that we heard from. We had board staff and key leaders of the organization sort of listening a little bit like a fishbowl. And then when the wise council left, we debriefed together and we shared our key learnings together, sort of along the lines of that listening out loud model. And so, one of the things that we heard was that, especially in the beginning of COVID -19, OMCA was a place where people can safely, publicly gather. It served as a community glue that was essential to our community. We also heard that OMCA has been instrumental in pushing critical conversations.

So, when people think of community glue and community connection, you might think harmony, not rocking the boat, but OMCA is far from that. What they’ve decided is they’re gonna take conversations that are maybe a little controversial, that are their community sort of grappling with and trying to make sense of together and create a platform for us to engage in those conversations where we’re building our understanding together.

And so, one example that they gave was in 2016, OMCA had an exhibition called Altered States. It was about the role and different perspectives of marijuana, and this was before marijuana was legalized recreationally.

So, they really kind of pushed the conversation so we could make sense of, what does this mean for us? We also heard that OMCA is essential to the vibrancy of Oakland.

They were instrumental in supporting local artists, either in giving them a platform to share what they were doing and /or, as you saw in the picture,

the live performances. There’s a Tía de los Muertos event that they do every year where local artists can sort of bring their craft and put it on display.

We also heard that OMCA needs to continue to redefine what a museum is rather than preservation. It should be about, like, how do we build our radical imagination about what’s possible in the future?

So even just last week on Friday, there were hundreds or thousands of toddlers and families who were dancing and having picnics in the garden, and we were all listening to the artist’s fantastic negrito, and everyone was dancing, the kids were running around, the people were there with dogs. It was just, it was the world that I want to want to live in.

One of the last pieces of feedback we heard of the deep in this was that OMCA needs to be better woven into the community. So as opposed to being working for the community, that OMCA needs to see themselves as part of a network of cultural institutions that are holding the community together and building our community, which was kind of a shift for the organization.

The previous vision statement was, OMCA is the heart of a thriving community, a statewide leader, right? And so sometimes when we’re nurturing our listening ear, it’s hard to take that feedback in. And OMCA was really generous in the listening. It was like always sometimes with, with listening, there’s a little bit of an ego death that happens and OMCA just kind of heard it and ran with that idea of being with the community as opposed to kind of running ahead. They saw themselves part of the larger community.

And when I think about liberation or justice or antiracism, that to me is the definition of it where we see and value our individual gifts at the same time recognizing how we are interconnected and how our kinship is important not just to our — us so that we can thrive, but for the entire community to thrive. And so I feel like these lessons really clarified for OMCA, which often is the work of strategic planning, is to clarify who you are and figure out how to do it better. And so, I think of the Dolly Parton quote of, “Figure out who you are and do it on purpose.

And through that listening, they started to realize organically that they had been doing this work already. And so, they said, well, let’s look back on where we’ve done this, and let’s take those lessons and move them forward.

So, Nish is going to share some of those lessons.

Nisha Gulati: So, what everyone’s been talking about has been really great in concept. So, we actually have a few examples we want to share about how these concepts actually show up in real life, and I’ll be talking about attendance.

This has been part of the evolution of our strategy, where we began to realize that there might be another way to think about visitation and attendance.

So, for years, we thought about using the traditional model, we thought about attendance as being based on ticketed revenue and focusing on that revenue. And that was never in line with our values.

And aside from not being in line with our values, it also just wasn’t bringing in enough revenue to account for all the time and energy we were spending focusing on it. We had a weekly rapid response team of eight people from different departments that met week to week to just review and adjust tactics to increase revenue as a main focus.

That’s a lot of capacity and effort. And no matter how much we focused on it, on ticketed revenue, we never could bring in enough ticketed revenue to meet our targets. The sums just weren’t adding up.

So, wondering how we could be more in line with our mission during all of these shift’s post -pandemic, and in line with our anti -racist values, we started to review other revenue sources like grants, donations, and other funding sources, and wondered if there were different levers we could be pulling, rather than being hyper -focused on ticketed revenue. We realized that if we focused on increasing our overall attendance, there would be more people passing through our campus, more people experiencing our public programming, we could build more empathy, we could build more understanding, more social cohesion, more impact. So, by focusing on overall attendance, whether it was paid or unpaid, that could actually help us fulfill our mission more and increase our impact. And we realized that increasing our impact might actually make us more attractive to donors, foundations, and with institutional giving.

So, we made this shift to prioritize attendance over revenue. That helps us put people first and be more in line with our values and would actually be able to help us increase revenue in other ways. So, thinking about it with this financial liberation lens is allowing us to value every visitor to campus whether they’re ticketed or unticketed equally. So how do we actually do this in practice?

We’re putting actual marketing dollars behind advertising our discount opportunities. So previously discounts for students, educators, EBT card holders, folks with disabilities, they were always listed on our website. But now we’re actively putting in dollars to market these and spread awareness. So, pictured here is our Instagram. It’s permanently featured. Our discount opportunities are permanently featured on our Instagram highlights. We do monthly social posts and put marketing spend behind that. Beyond our own channels, we are putting ads in local media outlets that folks are reading, just trying to reach more and more people in these ways to let them know about discount opportunities. And we’re pitching press.

We’re trying to get the word out in whatever ways we can to reach more people and let them know about these opportunities. And then beyond discount opportunities, for gallery tickets, we’re also putting ad dollars behind promoting free public programs. We’re spending money on promoting our free Friday nights at OMCA event, which is an evening community engagement program.

And pictured here, you can see a digital truck advertising our Friday nights at OMCA events, driving around Oakland during big events. And similarly, we launched a new public program this past winter called Thursday After Hours, which keeps our galleries open late on a Thursday during evening hours for folks who can’t make it during the day. And even though this is inside our galleries and requires a ticket, we launched with a buy one ticket, get one ticket free to value attendance over revenue. And we advertise this. What you’re seeing here is actually a BART ad which is in our local transit system, an ad that appeared there.

Another practical step that we took is just being clearer in our messaging about free admission opportunities. So, for many years we offered free admission on first Sundays with a suggested donation of $5 and we realized that even the suggestion of a donation can for many people feel like an expectation.

So, we moved away from it. We just did away with it. We deliberately removed all mention of the suggested donation and just opted to simply call it free for Sundays. And as pictured, we’re putting in paid dollars, marketing spend into promoting these free admission days in local media outlets. And then another new policy we introduced was to make ticketed public events at OMCA all sliding scale so we can democratize event attendance and focus on people we can serve rather than only being accessible to folks who can pay a certain amounts.

I have some final thoughts to consider or to ask you to consider is really how are you thinking about revenue? Is ticketed tenants’ revenue a main driver in your overall revenue, or are there other levers you can try to adjust? How are you thinking about attendance? Is it paid? Is it free? Can that be reimagined in any way? And what can help you in your institution achieve the greatest impact?

And with that, I would like to pass it over to Hilda, who will tell us about how her team created one of the best events of the year, thinking about it in this new way about democratization.

Hilda Schmelling: Thanks, Nish. So yeah, I’m here to talk about events and more specifically our re -imagining of our Gala event. So that was part of our one element of our shifting of our financial mindset and our new financial model was considering that gala and some ways we could make it differently.

We had our first version of the new event, the re -imagined event last year in June of 2023 in our garden. We welcomed over 400 guests under the stars and had a lovely celebratory evening. So, I’m going to kind of talk through the new event, like how we came to create the new event, what we considered in the process and the event model we ultimately landed on.

All right, so our old gala which was previous to my time at the Oakland Museum was a bit more focused on exclusivity than inclusivity. So, one facet of our fundraising efforts that was lifted up by our anti -racism design team was that our gala model needed to be reconsidered and there were some challenges to it. So that was put forth and that need was met. We started reconsidering.

So, to kind of describe the old model of the event, it was more focused on wealthy donors. Tickets were very costly. The budget was very inflated for the event. There were also volunteer committees that were heavily relied on and catered to that created a lot of additional labor for staff.

The audience was predominantly white, a bit older, and also unfortunately attendance had been dwindling a bit for that event and it wasn’t generating the income to justify the work and expense.

So, there were a lot of different pieces coming together in addition to that recommendation that were making the event not exactly workable for what we were hoping to accomplish with it.

So, the recommendation was that our 50th gala was to be the last of the previous model and that of Gala was set to happen in March of 2023, March 2020. And there goes my memory, right? So, memory has changed. But as we all know what happened in March of 2020, we entered a worldwide pandemic.

So very definitively, the old Gala model came to a close because of a variety of different reasons. But as restrictions started lifting, doors were reopening, our doors were reopening at OMCA, we realized that we really still wanted to have a large gathering, a fundraiser, a friend -raiser, a space to bring people together. And so, we needed to put time into thinking about our why for having that event and also doing some listening to a lot of different communities that come onto our campus and interact with our campus to understand how we could bring — I haven’t even toggled through my slides.

I’m so sorry. I’m a little bit nervous. Okay, thank you for understanding. So, to bring you a bit more into values alignment and be more mission driven and welcome a lot of new audiences.

So that brought us to a discovery process. So, we put about a year into really digging into what we had learned, what had happened in the previous event and just looking through all the details. We created Jamboards, Google Docs, you know, copious documents just trying to really understand and dig through everything and understand it, what had come before. We also talked with our colleagues internally, got their feedback about the event, what had worked for them, what they felt bought into, what they would like to see different in alignment with our cultural change and our financial changes at the museum. And we also convened a group of our trustees to go to get feedback from them on how they had experienced the event.

So, there were a number of discoveries that came out of that space of listening and having curiosity about how we could reimagine our event model. So, through detailed assessment, yeah, through detailed assessment, we learned that actually ticket sales were not the key driver of financial success for the event. Actually, sponsorships were much more a key driver of financial success.

So, learning this through looking at the data allowed us to open up to a new possibility of considering a sliding scale ticket model for the event, which was a very big shift for us, and obviously allowed us to invite more people, different communities, things of that sort. We also learned that our trustees really rallied behind the idea of the event being more than a fun party, but having intellectual content, having mission -driven content, having something they could really grab on to at the event, they really supported and championed that idea and that shift for the event. So that really opened us up to some new possibilities as well.

And we also learned that our trustees didn’t really enjoy filling the tables that were part of their benefits of the event. They didn’t actually want to come and be around the sameness of the people that they were with regularly at many events. They enjoyed supporting the museum and sponsoring the event, but one of their key drivers was not filling tables and bringing more people to the event specifically. They wanted to be around new community members and more of the fullness of the OMCA community and move a bit away from that exclusivity piece.

So that also changed our thinking about it. Our most generous donors weren’t really invested in sponsoring our event because of VIP spaces or exclusive spaces, so hearing those pieces of feedback really helped us keep moving towards a reimagining towards a more equitable, accessible model, but one thing we also really drilled down on was our why. So, if you’re having a big event, you know, we’re all here at a massive event, events take so much work, they’re really, it’s a whole tentpole coming together, joining, and making something bigger than ourselves. So, we really needed to understand our why, like why did we want to still have a gala?

And as we drill down towards it, we realized that we really wanted to invite more people into the culture of being contributors or donors and feeling the joy of their efforts in supporting our work.

We wanted to shift the view of the fundraising event and make it an entry point to being a donor at the museum. So, with the redesigned gala, we wanted that to be messaged and understood that everyone was contributing to something bigger.

And it wasn’t just more of a socioeconomic or only wealthy people are contributing and making this museum possible and keeping it moving forward in the future. But everyone here is a donor and really work towards sharing that information.

So now let’s talk about the actual event we put on last year, which was held in June and it’s going to be held actually in a couple weeks. So, as you can imagine, I have quite a bit on my mind right now.

So, gathering in the garden, as I said, was held in June. Some of the pieces of that event where we did have sliding scale tickets, they ranged from $50 to $1 ,000. And all attendees, regardless of ticket price, got full access to all event benefits. There were no specific exclusive spaces. Nothing that sort of separated anybody in relation to the ticket price that they purchased. And we also created a tiered ticketing strategy that promoted those who have the means or, or more to give Like giving at a higher amount in support of the event being more Accessible to a much wider audience.

We also offered a number of free tickets to the community Many of those went to educators. We have a strong education program at Onca as I’m sure many of you all do have at your museum, so it was really important to connect with educators in a different format as well and lovely to invite them to the event.

In moving away from the exclusive model, we created an open seating format. There were no safe seats, there were no reserved tables, there was no stand -shunned -off area that was just for one person or one set of people where there was a different food item or something like that.

Everything was open to everyone, no VIP space at all. And we also leveraged connections to bring in talent, local to California, who brought that intellectual piece of the event. Last year, we welcomed W. Camal Bell, a local writer and comedian, and Ryan Coogler, who’s a filmmaker, most notably of the Black Panther films. They had a lovely conversation on the garden stage and really brought both of those pieces. And then we had music and food and all the other more traditional elements. So, we really combined both and we crowdsourced possible options for speakers with staff because we really like to get staff input at OMCA.

It’s really important and it’s nice to have, you know, a list of names you can draw from and sort of new ideas that are always there and available to you. And we also utilized community artists and entertainers for live music in a really lovely full circle piece of last year’s event. Our AV manager also performed in the band that played, which was also like just a really sweet part of the event. And this is a presentation about budgets. So just to speak to that piece, we did reduce our budget very significantly from our previous Gallo model, I think by at least almost $150 ,000 less budgetarily and increased our net profit. So overall the event really shifted, was reimagined and was a big success across community engagement as well as revenue. So that was really wonderful to experience and learn from for ongoing events. So, for anyone here who might be considering reimagining an event or putting on an event in the future.

I just wanted to offer some different lenses to consider and some different ideas to consider and maybe take back with you if you have any curiosities or things like that related to events work. So, some of the different lenses I think that can be considered when planning or defining an event are an institutional lens, a staff lens, and a community lens, as well as kind of what we’ve been talking about a bit in this presentation, but sort of weighing what event success means to you. Does it just mean finances? Does it mean community engagement? Could those be weighed equally? Like how are those pieces being considered and how are you like reaching into the curiosity of what that means and what that means to your event and your institution.

So, some other questions to ask are in my opinion, like what are your institutional values? How are they woven into your events? I think sometimes events can end up being a bit separate from mission and institution and maybe there’s a way to bring them more together to feel a greater alignment and for a greater sense of pride.

Who is the event catering to? I think just really putting deep thought into the audiences, both the audience that comes, the audience that you maybe want to have come, how you might need to shift your event in order to reach new audiences, like not creating a similar model and just replicating it and hoping for similar audiences to attend or new audiences to attend. And then at OMCA, we really like to think about staff, as like as all of my colleagues have lifted up. So, what is your staff capacity? Events take a lot of labor. Do they have, will the financial outcome and engagement piece be in alignment with the amount of effort that staff are putting into bringing that event to life?

And how many other priorities would be put aside? So just something to like talk about with your staff and think about in relation to your staff.

Also, event equity and event accessibility. I think some good questions to ask are, is your event accessible to those with physical disabilities? Is your event accessible to those with vision or hearing impairment? People that are neurodivergent attendees, people that might need to bring a service animal, people that speak non -English languages. Is your event space accessible? Is your event accessible? Just some questions to consider. So obviously all these needs can’t be met every time. The point is just to explore the curiosity and the fullness of what your event can offer, all the communities that might be attending.

All right, so at OMCA, we’re very invested in social cohesion and access and what we call our warm welcome, inviting everybody in.

So, I’ll just close with a few takeaways from our new event model, our reimagining. We welcomed over 400 guests last year for our reimagined event and we’re Lifting that to 500 this year, we want to keep upping that number as sustainably in order to keep welcoming as many community members as we can. We downsized our budget and increased our revenue. We also collaborated across many departments and many staff volunteered at the event and joined us in the celebration and the energy of the event to feel pride and connection to working at OMCA.

The age, race, ethnicity, and class diversity of attendees shifted significantly in the new version of the event. I know we’re all really proud of like making big strides and change as far as our attendees that we have coming to the event and new community members.

So, from a financial attendance and social cohesion standpoint, the 2023 event was just a big success and a big learning place for us and just a great place to gather and go from a goal post to a garden.

So, keep dancing. And now I’ll pass it back to Kim.

Kim Ondreck Carim: All right, I’m gonna bring it home with our last two examples.

The first one is the way we changed our salary philosophy to move into alignment with our values. So, we’ve long had a salary philosophy that focused on internal equity, made sure it was legally compliant, and market competitive. But we had always had a caveat on market competitive that it had to be within budget. So, for those of you who do budgeting or in a finance role, sometimes you will set your non -personnel expenses. You’ll set your revenues. You subtract the expenses from the revenue. what’s left over is what staff gets.

Whatever raise that number is, it is not based on market, it is not based on everything. So that really, we knew, but we decided to stop making decisions in that manner so that we could focus on making sure that staff who are also part of our community, also part of broader communities, received market competitive wages no matter what our budget was. So, we crossed a line through within budget.

We now we started outpaying staff when we went to this first model. 80 % of market value, 90 % of market value. Now we pay 100 % of market value across all jobs and actually we for our lowest tier of our salary grades, we pay no less than 400 % of the federal poverty level for one person. So that’s our compensation floor. So as of July 1st, our frontline staff who are at that grade level will be receiving $29 .91 an hour. Our investment portfolio and We really also went to make sure that that was values aligned. So, we just finished re -envisioning the purpose and priorities of our investment portfolio. This was a process that started in 2019. I honestly can tell you I wrote the preamble to our new statement in 2019.

It just took that long to get people to come along with building a social cohesion value into our investment portfolio’s priorities.

So, we did it both and with the re -envisioning. We kept the traditional ways that you define success for an investment portfolio, to provide a predictable stream of operating funding and to maintain the portfolio’s purchasing power.

And we defined priorities that are in line with reducing inequities so that we can support the ecosystems required to increase social cohesion in California, and ecosystems required to support social cohesion in all global communities, because that’s how far our investment portfolio can reach.

So that concludes our examples. We did have a lot of points of We’re not going to dive deep into any of these. They’ll just flash them up. Happy to answer questions about them.

One, of course, the board takes its fiduciary responsibility very seriously as it should. So that’s where the financial sustainability mindset kind of creeps up the most. And we’ve done work to move them along to a more values aligned financial decision making. Being independent versus being part of a collective is perceived as less risky because you’re only thinking about the economic health of your own entity.

There’s also a mindset that more is a success. Doing more, more, more is how we get to be the best leader the first. And as we’ve seen in the other examples, it’s not always the definition of success. And then there’s the systemic nature of capitalism. I have a budget, I work really hard to get my budget managers to think differently about their budgets in context of the organizational budget, work with them to not hide, to not do contingencies, because by doing that they are not optimizing that money across the whole organization.

So, someone, one of my budget managers came to me recently and said, you know what, I now see it. I can now see capitalism at work in my budgeting, whereas it was just kind of ingrained before.

So really making sure that we are seeing the assumptions that we are bringing to financial decisions and what that is making us do and act and decide on.

So, here’s all our contact information. We are happy to speak with you at any point, email us, but we’re also now happy to take any questions that you have in our time remaining.

And I would ask if you do have questions, if you’re able, get up and use the mic in the middle of the room as this session is being recorded.

Thank you.

>> Hi. Thank you very much for that. It was really compelling. I’m just wondering if you had a budget that was unbalanced at the beginning of the year, and if you had a plan to fill in those probably pretty big gaps as you were increasing salaries.

Kim Ondreck Carim: So, we had a budget deficit when we started this the strategic plan that I was talking about the first one before the city started cutting our money. We had a deficit then we had a deficit when the pandemic hit. We didn’t have a deficit during the pandemic because of all the government funding that we got. But yes, we’re back to having a deficit. But what we’re learning is that there are opportunities, besides the traditional ways of earning revenue, that are helping us because we are looking for value aligned donors and solutions. So yeah, we have a deficit just like everyone else. But we have a strategy to make sure that our revenues are as value aligned as our expense budgets.

Nisha Gulati: We’re super fun people so come talk to us.

Kim Ondreck Carim: Thank you all for coming we oh, there’s a question.

>> I do have a question. Do you all have an endowment? And if so, how large is it?

Kim Ondreck Carim: That is a really great question. We are very well capitalized, so our permanent endowment is relatively small. It’s in the teens But in our last fundraising pain when we were trying to fill in that missing revenue from the city. This is before my time. The brilliant strategy was invoked of raising unrestricted funds. So, we are sitting on– in addition to our endowment, we are sitting on board -designated funds, so unrestricted of about $28 million. So, we were very well capitalized. It allows us to take more risk. So that’s part of the answer to how are we able to work with a deficit is that we have these financial reserves already that mitigate our risk.

Elvira Valcava: Thank you so much. I’m Elvira Valcava. I’m the director of the Fullerton Museum Center. Loved all the tips and information, especially the reimagining of these events. We’re a relatively small, medium -sized museum, and I want to be competitive for our staff and make sure that everyone has a living wage. But what do you recommend with small museums where I was like the only full -time staffer two years and I just recently got two other full -time staff and I’m hoping to expand but we just don’t have you know we’re not a large institution that can offer that.

Kim Ondreck Carim: Yeah, that is a great question. We were able to talk to some of our donors and have them take their gifts and expand it to meet the first three years of this salary increase so that we could get some runway to figure out what our other funding sources were. So, we are very fortunate to have donors who are values aligned and who understand that paying staff at a market competitive is better for the whole ecosystem.

Mirella Rangel: And this is partially from observation too is that and from my own experience with other organizations is that People love to be part of something new something growing something that’s thriving sort of like Giving people an opportunity to Help build something off the ground actually can create FOMO across funders. And so, I’ve seen that with OMCA, part of their work has been also, “Hey, we’re going to do this groundbreaking thing about paying people in this particular way, do you want to be part of this?” And people were like, “Yes, I actually do because not only is it about this organization that I care and love, but it’s also about the larger community health.” So being a little bit transparent and explicit about what you’re trying to do can actually foster more goodwill or the friend -raising that you can do that kind of creates this what this whole presentation is about is like how do we just like how does how do we become a spark in people’s both imagination but also if they start kind of telling other people hey there’s organizations doing this you should check them out and, and try to support them.

Kim Ondreck Carim: Thank you, everybody, for joining us.