 Hi everybody. Thank you for having me. It's really an honor to get to be here. I'm just out of the car, but I'm really excited to not get back in the car for the rest of the day and get to learn and be with you all. So the Pacific Library Partnership has been really generous with time and how we're going to do this. I'm somebody who really believes in participation, and I know that we have a couple of hours here this morning. So I'm going to share some of the things that I've learned around collaborating with communities at our museum and through work with other institutions around the country. And then Janice O'Driscoll, who I hope is here, maybe she's still fighting the traffic from Santa Cruz. She's gonna join me up here. She's from our Santa Cruz Public Libraries, and we're gonna enter some dialogue with everybody in the room about it. Let me just first say that because I'm somebody who believes so strongly in participation, I'm not gonna use all the time. We're going to really have a lot of time for Q&A, and what that means is this. We are entering into a social contract here where if there is nothing that I say from up here that is interesting to you, it is incumbent upon you to bring up the questions or the concerns or the ideas on your mind that will make this interesting and valuable. So please, as we're going through, you know, think about your hard questions, your frustrations, your confusions, your uncertainties, and let's please have a really rich conversation about this. And then finally, I'll just note that I work in museums. I guess that's kind of obvious. And I've always found personally that when I hear from people from other fields, it's always frustrating and maybe even slightly embarrassing if they try and tell me something about my field and they're coming from somewhere else. So I fully respect that all of you know a heck of a lot more about libraries than I do, and I really expect and appreciate the opportunity to share a little bit about what we've learned in museums, and I'm sure there are going to be ways that this connects with what you're doing, and I'm sure there are going to be questions we have about how our work can complement each other. I have nothing but huge respect for people who work in libraries. I work in museums partly because I think they have design problems that libraries have already solved, and I feel like we need to do a lot of work. So I have huge respect for you guys and just feel really grateful to be here. So what I want to share today, I want to talk a little bit about this idea of radical collaboration. I run this museum, the Santa Cruz Museum of Art and History in Santa Cruz, California. I have some brochures with me and I'd love for you all to come visit, but I'm not going to tell you much about the museum, except to say that we are a small regional museum of art and history in a town of about 62,000 people, about an hour and a half down the coast normally, two and a half hours down the coast today, and a city that is unlike San Francisco in terms of being much smaller and not an urban center in the same way, but quite like it in terms of some of the core issues we have around income disparity, white Latino racial disparity, and geographic differences in our community. I came to the museum in 2011, this is what our museum looks like from the outside, and when I came to the museum in May of 2011, we were not dealing with the questions of collaboration and inclusion that we're going to talk about today. We were dealing with so much more basic issues. The first was money. We had none of it. When I walked into the museum in May of 2011 as its director, we had a week of cash in the bank. We were literally about to close our doors, but more seriously we had this other problem which was a problem of relevance. There were more people who knew that our museum used to be the site of the county jail that knew that it was now a museum, and we looked at these two problems, lack of cash declining relevance, and we thought gosh we have a great opportunity. As somebody once said to me a crisis is a terrible thing to waste, and I really do believe that when you have the urgency of an external crisis knocking on your door, it creates a huge sense of focus and a sense that you must change. You're not equivocating about oh should we owe demographic trends down the line. It's like we are about to close our doors. What are we going to do to make a difference? And so we decided to radically shift what had been a pretty traditional museum to one that wholly focused on engaging our community, and we did so through two different strategies. The first strategy is empowerment. We believe that every visitor who walks through our door has something meaningful to contribute to the institution. That art and history are something you make, not just something you learn about. And so we really decided instead of being a place that told people what art and history were about, we were going to be a place that empowered people's creative agency, their civic voices, and became the place where they could really not just learn about something, but feel that they themselves could take that forward into their own lives. So the very first thing you see when you walk in the museum is a comment board where you can share ideas for how to make the museum better. We invite people from throughout the community to collaborate with us on programming. Our staff produces almost no programming. Instead, they facilitate other people producing programming. I'll talk more about that later. We invite people to share their objects in the museum. We invite people to share about themselves, not just what's on the surface, but what's inside of them. And we really focus particularly on people who do not feel necessarily that they're empowered in other spaces. I have to say when we were first shifting this way, I had a board member, a city council member, a two-time mayor who said, why are we talking about empowerment? You know, I don't go to a museum to be empowered. And I had to look her and say, Cynthia, you're the mayor. I don't think you need the museum to be empowered. But there were a lot of people for whom that opportunity, not to be reinforced with this idea that what's in the museum is about somebody not like you, somebody smarter than you, somebody with more money than you, but is exactly about you and about supporting you. That's the shift we want to make. Because we believe that everybody has within them creative skills to bring to the table, has great stories to bring to the history side of what we do. Not that everybody is a professional artist or a professional historian, but everybody has a voice and an important thing to contribute in our community and in our museum. So empowerment for individuals is the first part of it. Now, the second part that we really focus on is this idea of social bridging. There's a guy named Robert Putnam who wrote the book Bowling Alone. Has anybody read that book? Okay, so he wrote about the decline of American civilization, really in the last 60, 70 years in the U.S., and he basically claims that there are two ways that we build social capital. We bond with people who are like us and we bridge with people who are not like us. His argument is that America has gotten more and more divided because we have more and more opportunities to bond and to be with people who are just like us and fewer and fewer opportunities to bridge and to be with people who are not like us. So we looked at this research and we thought, huh, museums, we already know they're great bonding places. We already know if you come with your kid or you come with your date, you're going to have a great experience. But we don't want to be a bonding place that promotes this kind of tribalism that prevents us from building a stronger community. Instead, we want to be a bridging place. And so one of the things we really focused on when we were starting our transition was, we said, okay, we have these traditional target audiences of retirees and school kids. As we shift, we're not going to just trade those people for like hip 20 and 30-somethings. We are going to try and really position ourselves as a place that bridges people across difference. The place where you come, not to be with people who are like you, but to be with people who are not like you. So I love this picture from a bike night because you can see the diversity of people in the room. You have, you know, the art bike guy in the front, you have senior citizens, you have people with kids, there's a homeless guy in the back, and everybody is having a good experience in this space. We have really positioned our space and thought a lot about how we design our space, not to segment and target people, but to create comfortable, safe, welcoming bridges between people of different backgrounds. So that impacts how we design exhibits, thinking about how can we design a game that gets strangers to come to the table together, how we design our events and collaborations, how do we bring artists together from different backgrounds, different walks of life. This is a graffiti artist and a knitter who became creative collaborators after working with us at a festival. How can we invite people to build bridges across ethnicity? How can we invite people to build bridges across generations? We've, again and again, when we've had the choice, chosen to de-target our programming. Instead of having family festivals or kids' events looking at how can we make that multi-generational, how can we keep emphasizing to people that when you come to the museum, you're going to have a great experience, you're going to be individually empowered and you're going to be connected to somebody who is not like you. And so for us, these two strategies, empowerment and social bridging, took us through a huge transformation in my first couple of years. Oh, this is one more bridging story that just happened. This is a Hawaiian biker club from San Jose who got involved with us with an amazing surf history project we've been doing. So bridging across cultures and really across stories of what people are passionate about. So when I came to the museum, as I mentioned, Santa Cruz is a town of 62,000 people. At the time, we had about 17,000 people coming to the museum annually. We now have over 50,000 people and we're also working with about 2,500 collaborators annually in our community to do this work. Also, just note on the financial side, we went from years in the red to a situation where we've more than doubled our budget, we've doubled our staff and we've been able to really grow in a way we never could before. And we didn't do this with fancy blockbuster exhibits or a capital campaign. We did it by saying, we're going to focus on this community and we're going to be a place that celebrates what this community is all about. And so, you know, I'm executive director. I love numbers, especially, you know, those budget numbers. I feel a heck of a lot better about supporting my staff, knowing that I can pay them. But I have to say that for me, what's even more important is kind of hearing what people say about their experience. This is a comment card I just snapped a picture of a couple weeks ago from this person saying, we've done an incredible job making them our museum, a reflection of us and a place where we can appreciate art, share it with each other, learn and make new connections. It's like this person has read our mission statement. Although I've been to beautiful museums all over the world, this museum is unique. I dance with my friends here. I watch live performances here. Thank you. And again and again, we hear from people that our value in our community has shifted. It's no longer about I've learned something, although certainly people do learn things in the museum. It's no longer about I came just to see this exhibit, although certainly people do do that. What it's about is feeling a value of being connected to a community and being in a place that matters to them as an expression, not just of them individually, but of our whole community in Santa Cruz. So I don't know why that showed up again. But interesting. OK. Well, I was asked and encouraged to share a little bit of a couple of examples that have involved libraries. So let me just share a couple of those very briefly. We've had great partnerships with our public library early on with a book bomb project this past year. We did a book igloo project that was very popular. And let me just say, I'm sure you guys hear this all the time, but the biggest question we always get when we do these is why are you destroying these books? And they can't believe it when we say that the library is giving us these books and allowing us to destroy them for art. I'm so sorry. I don't know how this got duplicated. But at least we got to see the books. So again, this fact that people are saying that the community building experience is what is value to them about the museum. That's really what shifted and really for me been the most powerful part about what we do. So what? Yes. OK. Good. I was afraid that like the Twilight Zone was taking over my computer. What I wanted to do for the next 20 minutes or so is just share a few of the things we've learned in building a more radically collaborative institution. And at the end of each of these, there'll be a question and I want to invite you, you know, if you're finding throughout this that you're not coming up with your own questions. These are questions I've been mulling over and I'd be really curious to hear your responses to when we talk later. So let me just note before we go into these steps that if you're going to radically change, you are going to radically change. And I think we all know this conceptually. But let me tell you as somebody who has been through radical change that people will notice and it is not all going to be really fun. And so, you know, I think we have this kind of false idea that when we grow, when we include more people, we're going to kind of have the people we have. And then we're just going to get more of them, right? We're just getting more people are just going to come and that this is really kind of a safe kind of growth because the center of what we're doing can stay where it is. We're just going to get more people. Well, in my experience, if you're going to really include new people, it doesn't really look like that. It looks more like this. You kind of have the people you have, you know, have your purple circle people and then you grow in a new direction towards new people, people who weren't involved before. This is the kind of change that we had. And I'll say first that there's a really safe part to this, which is that in our case, most of the purple circle people stayed. Most of the people who are traditional museum supporters continue to support and be involved in the museum. Most of them said things like it's so great to see so many young people in the museum. It's so great to see people I don't know in the museum. Most of them stayed. Now, let me say some of the people who left, they were mean and ugly about it. And, you know, if you want to talk about the variety of microaggressions to overt racism that you can encounter when you really shift who you're including, bring it on. I'm happy to talk about it. But they were a small percentage. That's not the scary part. The scary part that I found in making this kind of change is that to do this, we at least had to recenter our programming outside of where we had been before. And when I think about inclusion, I always think about this, that it's like, it's not that you have a party and you're just like, let's just open the doors wider. Let's just send out more flyers and more people will come to the party we already have. If you want to include new people, you've got to be hosting your party in a whole new way, right? It's new, different music. It's different food. It's a different host at the door welcoming you in. And so we had to take that leap believing that this yellow circle existed even though we only had the purple circle people we had. And I want to share an example of that. So one of the programs we do throughout our county is called Pop-Up Museum. A Pop-Up Museum is a museum that anybody can create. It exists for just a couple hours on a given day. People bring objects on a theme to a place. They write hand write labels for those objects and they're there for a couple hours. Boom, instant museum. So one of the very first Pop-Up museums we ever did was one the night before Valentine's Day a couple years ago on the theme F my X. This is the poster from it. And so we invited people. You may have heard of this thing called the Museum of Broken Relationships. We were kind of playing off that. So we invited people bring an object from a broken relationship to this bar for happy hour the night before Valentine's Day. Hand write a label and we're going to make this Pop-Up Museum. This was incredibly successful. You can imagine as we had this flyer and it's like a new kind of party invitation to people who never knew that the museum existed who were excited about it for a whole new reason. But you can also imagine that for some of those purple circle people this was not exactly what they expected. And I'll just say the one piece of marketing advice I've learned in my life is just like don't put the letter F alone on a poster. It's not worth it. But more seriously we got some feedback from some traditional museum people who said you know the whole idea of this the irreverence the ephemerality this is violating the basic idea of what I think a museum is. And I really am struggling with this. So the young woman who was running this program she was an intern at the time she dropped me off this morning. I'm sure she'll be walking in any minute. But I encourage her to write a blog post about this whole experience and this friction about the Pop-Up Museum and kind of our shift in programming. And we got this really interesting comment in from this guy who says I'm stodgy to the tradition I'm closer to the stodgy traditional museum supporter than the audiences you're currently trying to reach. But I strongly support your outreach and attempts to involve new communities. It's precisely because of the outreach I finally became a museum member last year. But I still have little occasion to go to the museum but I'm willing to support it as an important community resource. I think this is so interesting because here is a guy who is self identifying as a purple circle person who did not care about that purple circle museum. He cares about it for a different reason because it does something for a community even a community he doesn't necessarily identify as being part of. And I know that so many of us are dealing with this question about how do you shift. I think the hardest thing always is you only have the voices coming at you who you already have right. You're going to change your service model and the people who come out to complain about it are the people who are affected because they already care about your service model the people who will be engaged in that new service model those yellow circle people are fictitious at this point you don't even know that they exist. And so I'm always looking for those voices of where is that shift happening and how is people not just changing how they use the museum but how they perceive and how they value the museum as a community member and in this case as a donor as well. So going back to this few key things that I've learned that may be helpful to you and building a collaborative institution. The first is that fundamentally any collaboration any form of participation is an invitation. I'm inviting you to do something I'm inviting you to get involved. And one of the things I think is really fascinating is how hard it is for us to think of meaningful ways that we can really invite somebody to get involved in what we do. You know if somebody comes in says how can I help. What is the what is the best way that they could help what is the best way that you could answer that question. I find again and again that I find myself stymied when somebody comes up to me and either overtly or inherently or implicitly asks me that question. And I think unfortunately many of the ways that we invite people to participate are kind of lousy. This is a picture I took at a museum and library in New Zealand. I was walking around with their director several years ago and we were talking about inviting people to participate. And she said look at this book Nina you know it was by Sir Edmund Hillary's axe and she said you know here's what happens when we invite people to participate. This is meaningless. This is people saying you know Sam was here Jasmine was here. I looked at this book and I said yep I agree people are not meaningfully stepping up here. But I also feel like your invitation is not meaningfully asking them anything. I mean this book kind of looks like the kind of book you might put out in a hotel or a funeral home you know to get people to sign. It does not in any way invite somebody to share something that might be meaningful to them. And we see this you know in museum spaces we see even more ubiquitously online where we have a constant invitation to participate. But because the invitation isn't designed in a way to really invite something meaningful I think we often draw the wrong conclusion from it. You know I don't think any of these people are foolish. I think that all of these people are probably capable of bringing something beautiful to the table. But I think that the way that YouTube's comment board is designed is not designed to invite them to bring something meaningful to the table. And so I'm constantly looking for how do we invite people how do we think of invitation as an art that's not just about saying come on in or leave your comment here or what do you think but really an art of inviting people to bring their best selves forward. So we've done this in really simple and cheap ways. We've done this in big and fancy ways. When we did an exhibition of veterans we took some of the photos that were unidentified in our archives and invited people can you help us identify them. They actually took this invitation in a whole other way and shared really beautiful memories of their own family members. When we worked with this artist Ed he came to us and said I want to create a giant sculpture for your lobby and we said awesome is there a way you could invite visitors to be part of making it. And he's like well they can't really cut the aluminum fish but maybe they could bang the scales the three dimensionality into these aluminum fish. And this picture shows you just how dangerous an idea this was with the dual hammer experience but in the end we had hundreds of fish with scales that had been banged into them by visitors nobody got injured except for Ed. And so many people could walk in and say I was part of making that artwork. This is a picture from an artwork that actually hangs in my office by an artist named Daniela Wolfe. Our public library when we were decommissioning the date due cards made them available to artists and Daniela who's an incredible paper artist took all of these date due cards I mean and this is just a snapshot of this huge piece and turn them into a really beautiful fiber work so a different kind of invitation to artists. One of my favorite projects we've done where I think we really nailed it around inviting people to bring something meaningful forward was this project called the memory jars that we did a couple years ago. The idea was to invite people to bottle up a memory that like any museum we collect objects but for each of us the objects that are most important to us are often memories things that are in our head. So we created a really simple space we worked with an artist to paint this mural these were the only instructions in there take an empty jar fill it with something from your head right on the label and you can see all the jars lined up on the wall next to it. We really weren't sure anytime you open in a project like this it feels like a huge risk right you have all these empty jars what's going to happen is anybody going to do anything. We found that this project was hugely oversubscribed hundreds and hundreds of people made jars and this is one jar that really spoke to me from a person saying I remember when you were alive before Iraq and open pit burns which gave you cancer I remember when we learned that you died in Iraq and in our arms at home I miss you I miss you. You know I don't think this guy Mark walked into the museum that day expecting to share this memory and let me tell you this is one of a zillion memories many of which were funny were sweet you know all across the map and I think that this project though invited him to bring forward something that was really powerful I assume not only for him but I know also for all the visitors who came and experienced it thereafter. So we're always thinking about this question how do you invite somebody to bring something forward you know each of us every day walks around with the capacity to be brilliant to be generous to be creative to be funny and also the capacity to be banal to be mean to be lousy and so it's our challenge from a design perspective how do we invite people to bring that best self forward or to bring that part of themselves that can really make a difference for others. Now this is obviously a pretty emotional project and I don't want to suggest that all projects that are about inviting have to be at this level. Actually one of my favorite ways that we invite people has been this real surprise to me and this is thing called the wish list. So we send out a weekly email to people who are involved with the museum in some way and one of the things we have in it often is wish list things that we need and this started because we had no money we're really cheap and we needed stuff to do art projects and so we just started inviting people to bring us things we did not I would never have used the term inviting I'm just realizing as I say that when we started wish list we just felt like man we need some cardboard boxes. But what we found is that people have found this to be the most engaging part of the email we now have funny operational challenges with the volume of stuff that people bring down for wish list. And in this case when we were asking for cardboard boxes we actually found online a guy who had made a blog post about the fact that seeing that inspired him to clean out his garage which his wife had been nagging him to do forever to put all the boxes in this trailer and to bike them down to the museum. His cardboard boxes and many others became this castle which became the backdrop to this family opera for this winter festival that we had. And I remember looking at this castle in the end and thinking about that guy with his garage and his cardboard boxes. And the fact that he was not somebody we were going to invite to be on stage at part of the opera. Maybe he is. I don't I actually have no idea who he is. But but by inviting him to do something so simple something to him that was about getting rid of trash. We were also inviting him to be part of something really beautiful and creative. And so you know the question that I'm often I'll just say that having done this again and again in different ways throughout the museum. It really has changed the relationship we have with our community and this is one of my favorite comment cards we've ever received. Really for this last sentence this person saying thanks for trusting us. And I don't think this person saying thanks for trusting us not to break the art or you know thanks for trusting us to show up. But I think she's saying you thanks for trusting us to be a part of it. Thanks for again and again inviting us to be collaborators to be participants to just bring our junk and ourselves and our creativity down here and take part. And so one of the questions on my mind which I'd love to hear more about with you is this one. You know what small invitation could you make to whom. How could you practice that art of invitation and invite people to be part of what you do. I'm going to take a pause for people to think about this and at the same time to invite everybody who's standing up if you would like to sit down. There are some really wonderful seats throughout here and you will not be offending anybody if you choose at this time to come sit down. This is great. There's hugging. We're making friends. We're getting seats. I'll just quickly embarrass. Can you three ladies just stand up for a minute. So I'll just say that I'm here with three of my colleagues Stacy Nora and Emily from the museum. They run youth programs. The opera Nora started the pop up museum. Stacy runs all of our community engagement. So if you want to talk with them about programming I know they're really excited to be here and learn with you all today too. So OK. End embarrassment. Yeah. Great. Thank you. I I'm really glad that everybody can be comfortable. OK. So that's the first piece practicing that art of invitation. For us a second piece of really being radical collaborative has been thinking about alliances with many different kinds of entities in our community on many different levels. And for me this really starts with thinking in a community first approach. So the way that we approach designing new programming is we do not start by saying what projects do we have coming up or what do we have in our collection or what do we want to do. We really start by saying OK who are the communities of interest who are working with or who we desire to be working with. What are some of the assets and needs of that community. What are they really proud of where are there amazing bright spots that we could really amplify. What are the things that they're seeking. And then what projects and collaborations could stem from that. You know this is an exercise that we do internally but we also more often do it externally in partnership with members of those communities to really make sure that we're taking a community first approach. It's something that I feel really strongly about is at least in museums we so often airlift our programming into a community we like created in our own you know private machine and then we say we have this sparkly thing for you wouldn't you like it. And I think that if we are really going to be places that empower people in our communities if we're going to bring people together it's got to be based on the things that they're most seeking that they're most proud of not the things that we assume. And the first part of that really on that left side is identifying who your community is. One of my kind of pet peeves about the word community I don't know if this is happening in library world but museums it's getting used all the time and it's almost become this kind of Orwellian abstraction of the community without any specificity about who we're talking about. And so one of the things that's really important to me is to say OK when we say community who are we talking about. And as far as I can tell there are at least kind of three big clumps of ways to think about how people identifying communities. So communities are people who are connected by something that's shared and one of those things can be geography. You know in our case we are a museum that exists for our county pretty explicitly. I'm sure most libraries public libraries are in the same thing where you have your service area that's a helpful way to be able to find communities. A second one is really by identity. What are those statements that people make where they say I am X you know I am a woman I am Jewish I'm kind of where it's really core to who they are and how they identify and affiliate. And then thirdly there are communities by affinity. You know I love to knit. I love to mountain bike. You know I always go to this particular restaurant. I'm a you know a Mac I'm a PC whatever. So we like to look at all three of these kinds of communities as we really think about who do we want to be engaging with and then who it makes sense to collaborate with based on that. I mentioned earlier that we have over 2000 collaborators we work with annually. Here are just a few of them. We work with all different kinds of people. One of the things that has been really important to me is that we don't just collaborate with other arts organizations educational organizations libraries. We love communicating and collaborating with all of those. But we really feel like if we are going to speak to what it means to be creative in Santa Cruz it is as important for us to be working with fire artists and instrument makers and taxidermists as it is for us to be working with painting leagues and arts groups. And similarly you know if we really care about civic engagement and history it's as important for us to be working with genealogists and people who are writing historical fiction and people who are exploring food in all kinds of ways or maps as it is for us to be working with more formal historical institutions. One of our challenges that comes up again and again is when you throw you know there's often this question about like well if you throw it open to the community then who's determining your programming. Well in our case we started out by just opening up and saying hey we want you to be part of this. But over time we really realized you know what we can't program based on you want to do an evening cocktail hour thing and you want to do a day long festival and you know it's like we were going crazy trying to accommodate all these different preferences people were coming in with. So then our challenge became how do we create program formats that accommodate a lot of collaboration so that we still can invite as much as possible but then we know where we can plug people in and we know where they're going to be successful in that space as well. So some collaborators come to us when you run a museum I don't know what the library analog is for this but when you run a museum anybody who contacts you the first thing they say is I want to do an exhibit on X exhibit is like the core way that they think about a museum. And so often we have to say oh interesting you're only interested in a one day thing sounds more like an event you know or you're doing this long history project maybe you should get involved with the archives maybe it's not an exhibit as the program format. And so we're always trying to figure out how can we have program formats where we can say ah ha you are an astrologer I'm going to plug you into magic night I'm not going to create a whole astrology night for you you're going to be there on the night with the astronomers and with the digital artists and the people and the magician the blind magicians and there is a great blind magician in Santa Cruz he the great blind Dini his motto is now you see me now I don't he's a collaborator of ours. So we have embraced the amateur to professional spectrum and then really thought about how do we create program formats where we can plug people in many cases that's events sometimes it's exhibition sometimes it's another program that we're doing. You know many times people coming in perfect example somebody says I'm a print maker you should do a printmaking exhibition we say hey let's incorporate printmaking into an event we're doing who are you most interested in reaching let's get you as part of that event and that kind of thing but then we also have people and Janice will be joining me up here later has been part of this group this I realize as I look at this picture how deeply Santa Cruz this picture is but there's Janice there's Janice address go right here from our public library and this is a group we run called see three which is the creative community committee it is a group of diverse leaders from throughout our county who get together once every couple of months and to really figure out how we can amplify each other's efforts this is a group that started as a community advisory group and we found that we were not really successful with a community advisory group that was just like hey come and help us think about things of the museum because we found that what happened was if you were high school teacher you came on the night we were talking about teen programming if you were a gardener you came on the night we were talking about outdoor programming and you didn't mix and what we really cared about because of our focus on social bridging is people from all different backgrounds giving us advice on all different kinds of things so we decided to recalibrate instead what if we turned this into a leadership network for a community that uses creativity as its core that has the museum as its convener we still get all of the community advising that we need out of that group and yet more and more that group is using each other to amplify each other's efforts beyond and outside of the museum so I ask you and these are two really big questions what community is key to your success when you think about where you are and who you serve what are the communities that are really core what are the organizations or the people or the key people in that group that could be part of it and how could you practice the art of infidation with them how could you involve them is it about being a strategic partner is about plugging in for a given event or a project that you're doing is it about multiple different levels okay the third place I'm going and there are four of these so we're close to the end I think one of the most interesting opportunities that the web has provided us is to think really differently about the programs that we provide and to think about how can we turn some of the programs that we provide to a limited number of people into platforms that we can provide to a whole lot of people as bill mentioned in the intro I run a blog called museum 2.0 and I like a lot of librarians in the library 2.0 movement have been really interested in this question of how do we take the levels of participation and engagement happening on the social web and not just deal with them digitally but really convert them to what can happen in physical space so one of my favorite and very trivial examples I want to share is this one this is a website called one million giraffes and it was made as a bet between two teenagers in Scandinavia and one teenager bet his friend that he could get a million people to make a giraffe take a photo of it and post it on the web that's it that's what this project is he was successful he in 440 days got a million giraffes from 102 countries around the world and this young guy says I want to thank everyone who's sent in a giraffe or two you made this happen not me I'm forever grateful for making this an adventure I will tell my grandchildren about until they hate hearing about it thank you now this guy really is figured out this art of invitation thing right but you know I ask you if we if you sat down tomorrow with your boss or with your colleague and you said let's do a project that's going to get a million people involved how many staff would you think you would need to do that how many resources three sweet all right want to hear about that later I think one of the interesting challenges of the web is to try and push us to think about how could we instead of limiting how many people could be involved how can we create platforms where as many people as possible can be involved I think about this all the time with our amazing teen program that Emily runs and it's kind of like okay we can have one staff member working with 15 kids really intensely if we wanted to scale up it's not just about two staff members and 30 kids how can we get to a point where as many kids in our communities want to be part of it could be part of that would have to be about shifting from thinking about it as a program to thinking about it in some way as a platform we haven't figured that out yet on the teen side but I'll show you an example of where we have figured that out which is the pop-up museum so I mentioned earlier pop-up museum is a museum that anybody can create with their own objects in their own space and what we decide to do when we created the pop-up museum was not to make it a program that the museum runs but a toolkit and a platform that anybody could use pop-up museum actually came from a challenge we were having which is we have one facility in downtown Santa Cruz but we supposedly exist for the whole county of Santa Cruz and so I as the director again and again people come up to me and say what are you doing for Live Oak what are you doing for Davenport what are you doing for Boulder Creek what are you doing for Watsonville and the answer was not going to be adding more facilities in those different places nor having permanent programming in all the different parts of our county so we wanted to figure out a way to have a much broader presence throughout our county without it constantly requiring it to be staffed and so the pop-up museum functions in this way such that you know when the surf history people want to have a pop-up museum in a parking lot by a surf spot they can and people can come out of the ocean and literally bring seaweed and plop it down and tell the story of it when people in the backyard of a church want to have a pop-up museum and share their story they can they can do it in a public space they can do in a private space this is one we did at the parking lot of Comerica Bank which had been the former site of the Santa Cruz downtown Chinatown showing some of the archeological shards that were discovered that are really the only physical material remnants of that Chinatown so pop-up museums have become a really flexible format that can happen in lots of different ways because they're a platform are they deeper and richer when we program them probably but we decided again and again as we were building the toolkit how can we make this as easy as possible for anybody to do so that it's not something that we have to own and program but something that anybody can do and I'll just note I am mistaken in not doing this but if you go to popupmuseum.org if you're interested the toolkit's there please put on pop-up museums tell other people about it we'd love that and so one question I have around platforms is where could you have more impact where could you reach more people by giving up some control by shifting a beautiful jewel box program into something that's a more open platform and what are those beautiful jewel box programs that we shouldn't do that for that's another question I think about a lot okay the last piece I want to share before we open it up relates to this platform element and everything really we've been talking about which is the number one thing I've learned about being an institution that is open to our community is this concept of space making and this concept that our job is not to do the thing our job is to make space for other people to do the thing and I learned about this concept from a woman named Beck Tench who really inspires me she's actually pretty involved in library circles these days but she started out as a digital librarian who then went to work at a science museum in North Carolina and she was hired there with a really unusual in particular mandate IMLS funded their museum to hire her and they said your job is to take risks on her first day she was told if you do not fail you are not succeeding at this job and she was psyched you know to have this job and yet ten minutes after you get that speech you suddenly get this sinking feeling of oh shit you know what am I supposed to do and she realized pretty quickly that to be an effective risk taker in her institution she needed somebody else her boss to be a space maker for her to give her the resources the political cover the encouragement to make that space to take those creative risks to feel good about failing and doing it again and again and what she found was she got successful at this she started taking risks she started new projects at the museum and she started to realize that if the museum was really going to become a risk taking institution it wasn't going to be based on her sequentially taking risk after risk that she in turn had to become a space maker and empower others in her institution to take risks and that that was the most effective way for her to do her job now I don't care if you use this framework to talk about risk taking or creativity or just doing your work I have found again and again that especially those of us who are managers the more time we can spend making space for people and the less time we spend telling people what to do the better the result for everyone this is an example of a time where I narrowly avoided screwing that up when I first started the museum one of the first things I said was we've got to make this building feel more welcoming a lot of people you know were walking in they were talking about the jail thing it was cold it was gray and they did not feel welcome there so one day I walk in and I see this there are these chairs which I think came from the street and this sign that says roving armchair tour sit back relax and enjoy the art and I have to tell you my background is in exhibit design and I saw this sign in all of its primary color preschool kind of glory and my immediate reaction was like we got to we got to replace that sign we got to take down that sign and then I realized wait a second nope this person who made this sign is trying to make the museum more welcoming that's what we said our goal was don't shut this down and it made me realize you know this is like one minor success and I'm sure there are a million times that I screwed up and I told them to replace the sign and I feel like so often when we say we want to make space instead what we do is we micromanage and we say that's not right and we shut down instead of opening up that space and so if you have a big goal and you're inviting people to be part of it make space within that goal and then let them do their thing if we keep tearing down the sign then we're not going to have the chairs then we're not going to have the sense of welcome which takes us by the way in a direction that leads to better chairs and better signs donors used to come in and they'd say oh this is great that people have these chairs but these chairs look horrible and I'd say yeah they are horrible we got them off the side of the road would you like to buy us some new chairs and you know we got some new chairs but we were not going to get new chairs first we had to put out some chairs to be able to open up that opportunity to invite people to get some nicer chairs now let me just say I work in a very small place we have 14 full-time staff many of you may work in large institutions you may be looking at all this and thinking she's from Santa Cruz it's a small place they can do whatever the heck they want it's not going to work where I work and so I want to just briefly share with you a story of a place where people have really beautifully made space in New Zealand it's a place called Pukei Ariki it is a museum, library, visitor center for a whole region of New Zealand and there was a group of people at this museum, library, archive, visitor center several years ago who decided we want to try some new things we want to change our relationship with the people who come through the door and so they decided we are going to start a revolution ruru is the Maori word for owl so that's why you see the owl and the ruru and so what they did they started a blog which is mostly dormant now but if you ever want to see the chronicles of an insurrection from within a large bureaucratic institution check out their blog and what you will mostly see is people cheering for each other they started in the simplest possible way they made a whole lot of buttons and they walked up to staff members who they thought might be down and they said hey you know we're starting a revolution we're going to try some new things here do you want a button? and some people said no and some people got buttons and immediately you started to be able to have this identifiable like oh okay I've got some compatriots here I'm not alone in this space they started meeting together and they started figuring out okay where could we have attack where could we find where could we make our own space within this and they started out and they said okay we really want to do something with visitor voices in our museum space and we really want people to be able to share their own stories on labels so they got a little brave they started going out on their lunch hour and trying this out kind of renegade on their own nobody got fired they decided okay let's do a family program let's see what happens you know nobody really pays attention to what we do with the family so maybe we can do something more interesting there again you know they kept picking up steam and it got to the point where they were able to really make some substantial changes in their museum you can see that this bottom label is a post-it but this top one they were able you know and this was something they personally cared about to get to a point where they could kind of have like a staff picks of some really personal labels on some objects in their museum which had been absolutely anathema beforehand and they were able to do this not because it was one person with a brilliant idea but because they kind of found their tribe and they were able to make space for each other and you know they were successful they graduated to getting t-shirts here are some of these revolutionaries they were people from throughout the institution who found each other and who made that space for each other to be successful and I think especially if you care about community collaboration and participation we've got to find ways to make space not just for people inside our buildings but for all those community members outside our buildings who might want to get involved and one of our most successful projects at the museum slam dunk on social bridging is our project out at Evergreen Cemetery Evergreen Cemetery is one of the oldest cemeteries in California it's a public history site we have pioneers buried there civil war vets a lot of the people who helped make Santa Cruz the town that it is today and about four years ago when I came to the museum Evergreen Cemetery was mostly a really great place to do and sell heroin it was overrun with trash it was very dangerous a lot of encampments there and it's right around the corner from the homeless services center and so I sat down one day with a board member from the homeless services center and said hey we'd really like to find a way at the museum to engage with homeless people in a way that's really meaningful and he said to me you know one of the things we're interested in is finding projects volunteer projects where homeless adults can positively contribute to spaces that are perceived as blighted by homelessness in our community so that we can flip that narrative about what's happening in our community and how homeless people can be positive contributors and I said well we manage Evergreen Cemetery and thus started a partnership between history buffs volunteers at the museum and homeless adults in our community who every Monday gosh next week it'll be four years are out there doing work together to improve the cemetery they do landscaping work they build paths they've done research on the people who are buried there it's been an incredible project for improving this public history site and by the way it's also been an incredible social bridging project where I have you know history docents you know 75 year old ladies who say to me this is the first time I've had a human interaction with a homeless person and changed the way I see this issue in our community this is a beautiful project and to me the most beautiful thing about it is that we devote almost no staff time to it our staff time is only spent making space for these volunteers to work well with each other could we do a better program if we dedicated more staff absolutely there are all kinds of ideas we have around social bridging around docenting out there that could dramatically change but by devoting minimum staff time to this project by just focusing on making space for these volunteers to do their thing it means that that same staff member can make space for other volunteers and other projects like this in our community instead of being locked into just one and so again and again I wonder this question where could we make more space where instead of doing the thing could we make space for others to do the thing and I think this is important because at the end of the day all of our missions are not just about the work that we personally do it's about the impact that we want to see happen in our communities and I want to close with a quote from a guy who really inspires me a computer scientist named Dick Hamming he gave a talk in 1986 at Bell Labs about the question of why don't more people do Nobel Prize worthy work and this is what he said he said you know as far as I can tell the average scientist spends almost all his time working on problems which he believes will not be important and he also doesn't believe they will lead to important problems and his point was this if you want to change the world you got to work on an important problem if you whatever it is it may not be a Nobel Prize it may be about a certain kind of impact you want to have you got to be working on that thing and for me making space for community members to improve and strengthen our community that's the important problem that I care about you know important problems are a problem right they keep you up at night they can drive you crazy but important problems are also the thing they get you out of work in the morning and get you out of work that doesn't make any sense they get you out of bed such a better idea important problems they keep you at work late is what I've found it's what my husband has found but I think we have an opportunity you know today we're here talking about the future of libraries talking about how we want to be engaged with each other and as we talk about the programs we do the projects we do you know the infrastructure and how we work I think I hope that we'll also spend some time really talking about those important problems that are most core that most drive us in our passion because that's really the opportunity we have when we get together is not just to focus on the mechanics of what we do but the focus on the things that drive us most to do that work and why it matters so thank you for listening I look forward to the conversation and we're going to open it up so we're going to do some Q&A I'm going to be wandering around put your hand up and there's a mic in the back what's your name? Karen Karen and Bill both have mics great yes there's a man over there great not sure if you mentioned this or not but when you came to the museum originally were you part of the community prior to that? I was, yeah so I'd been living in Santa Cruz since 2007 and started working there at 2011 and so I'd been working as a consultant with museums around the world so I'd been living in Santa Cruz but getting on planes all the time so I was sort of part of the community as we all in the Bay Area know so many people you know your life and your work are at distance from each other and so it definitely was a significant increase in community involvement and just understanding when I took the job but I was already committed to Santa Cruz yeah do you have a follow up? no, okay follow up okay yeah I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about when you were going through the radical change how did you make space in the museum? there must have been like traditional exhibits I was wondering if you could talk a little bit more about what you did with those? yeah so one of the things that we we knew that we had to get people newly engaged with the museum and we had no money so exhibits are expensive and they take a long time so we really decided let's focus on events so you know I mentioned earlier with the chairs that one of our goals was to make the museum just feel more welcoming our other year one goal was to create events that engage new people from our community in the museum so my premise at least was let's introduce people to the museum through events which are cheaper, faster you know where we can kind of create a different feel in the space for one night only and then let's use that by that time as people are getting more involved to be able to start making some shifts to the physical space so that as people get more involved the exhibits are shifting in a direction that connects now I will say that you know we think of the museum as a place for a lot of different users so we still see that there are people and we want to support people who want to come on Thursday at 2 p.m. and have a quiet experience in exhibitions and so I think a constant thing we are balancing is this question of how much do you go wholeheartedly to a mission that is very idiosyncratic and how much do you try and differentiate that you have many different things for different kinds of people and we like to say that the MA is a museum of and, art and history, participation and contemplation you know big crowds and quiet moments and that we are trying to make sure that all those things are accommodated that said almost all of the press and also almost all of our marketing is about the new things we are doing because that is what is engaging new people to come we feel like people who already know that a museum is for them they don't need those messages reinforced to them the way somebody who's new might so it's a little disingenuous when we say that we're a museum of and because we do put certain things more clearly in front of people than others because of what we're trying to do in terms of bringing in new people so that's a real balancing act and there's been a lot of the tension that we have dealt with and mostly gotten through has been based on perceptions of imbalance so people who feel like oh the museum has become way too young or way too loud or things like that and then we often have to sit down with those folks and say well it's actually only loud on Fridays from five to nine and just don't come then you got all these other hours for you and there has been a lot of discussion about that whole thing of kind of how much is it appropriate for somebody to feel ownership over the whole space versus a sense that some of what happens here is for you and some of what happens here is not for you and you know okay deal with it so that's something we deal with a lot I'm sure you guys all deal with that too Yeah, there's a woman with So my question actually two questions it has to do with your pop-up museums and the first part of the question is how much of it is run by staff is there always a staff person there at them or is it fully volunteer and two in your opinion how time intensive how difficult are they, have they been? Well I'll answer and then I'll certainly encourage you to talk to Nora who's sitting a couple rows behind you and is raising her hand right now who created the pop-up museum so they do not have to have a staff member although I will say that people often are confused about I think one of the things we didn't expect I talked about it in this platform way we were really creating it intending for it to be volunteer run and what we didn't anticipate was how much people would see it as a value add to have a staff member that they felt like oh the museum is doing this for us which was actually kind of ironic and problematic because the whole concept of the pop-up museum was that it is non-institutional and so we've kind of dealt with that tension and so there often is but not always as a staff member sometimes a staff member will just do like a 20 minute let me tell you about how this works and kind of a handoff so a lot of times people are looking for supporter expertise from the museum and we have to kind of make the judgment of do we wanna be part of this do we wanna just kind of set you to fly in some way you know how are we gonna do that certainly if they're staffed they're not that staff intensive you know we usually do them as two hours live and it's like a half hour set up a half hour afterwards the real challenge of a pop-up museum is that you want people to bring their own objects so it works best with a partner who has kind of an intact audience of some kind so in some ways ironically you could have a smaller group like for example a church where you know they're very good at sending out a newsletter to their people saying next week bring an object related to the theme of home we're gonna do a pop-up museum afterwards whereas if you're at say a huge public festival even if like Earth Day you've announced to those thousands of people there's gonna be a pop-up museum very few people show up at Earth Day thinking oh let me bring my object like that's not why they're there and so we've also learned that it's best to work with a partner where either they are bringing objects or they're really connected with people who are going to bring objects some of one of our most beautiful ones was this one called Do It Together which was I think totally unstaffed although it was so cool I think a couple of us showed up to check it out and that was run by an anarchist collective where they had like a bike shack and a sewing place and they just really took on the idea that it was all about handmade stuff and they created this beautiful thing so it kind of depends on the partner and their ability to rally people I will say that you know we hear all these things about like flash mobs and pop-up and definitely when we started it we were like oh it'd be so cool if this was in a barber shop or a skate park and it's like that's conceptually cool but actually if you want people to bring objects talk about them, engage with each other it's actually quite hard if it's just something you come upon it's much better if it's connected to something where there's kind of an intact event or a sense of place where people are attending to it yeah we've got one in the back and there's somebody right by you, yeah Hi, I'm interested in hearing more about the logistics of your planning process when you came into the museum and just did you hire outside consultants how did you build with staff and plan things out? Yeah, so we did something that kind of freaked our existing staff out and let me just say our museum's a private nonprofit we don't have unions and nobody's a public employee so one of the things we did I felt like we've got to change some things quickly but everybody already has work on their plate so my approach was I said to everybody on staff okay, here are our goals it's the beginning of the summer I'm gonna hire a whole bunch of interns to get started on some of this stuff I know you're all busy when you wanna get involved, let me know and we got a whole bunch of interns in who got a whole bunch of things going like those chairs and I will always remember the staff meeting where there was kind of a mutiny and staff and there were only seven of us at the time sat down and they were like why are the interns getting to do all the fun stuff and it was like this yes moment because if I had said to people you need to change what you're doing and do X instead it would have felt like something they were directed to do and maybe they cared about or didn't but instead there was this sense of like wait a second, we wanna be doing this stuff and people really kind of opting into it so one part of it was we had such a small team and we were so financially strapped anyway that I really took an approach of like look, we're all in this together I believe in you, let's get this going here's the goal, here's the destination let's go there and a real surprise to me was that we had no we had no real staff turnover in my first year it was only after kind of the dust had settled on kind of here is the new approach here is how things have changed that people started to kind of decide this is for me or not but I think in the beginning there was a sense that like people had been struggling they were excited about the potential for where the museum could go we were all excited to try and make it happen together and people really pulled together and again that external crisis was so valuable, you know I always think about people always ask about our board and I always remember one of our most traditional art museum people who because we had gotten so close to closure she'd just gotten so clear eyed she was when people would complain about how things were changing she'd be like, well I was here when we were at that traditional museum they say they want and they weren't where were they then I'm not going back to that time when every board meeting we were talking about whether we're gonna have to close the museum or not and so I think there was a sense for everybody that we had to make a change and maybe this was a good change and then as we, because we were so small staffed as our financial sites could start getting better we started hiring new people into new positions so our org chart shifted as we re-grew so in some ways again like having gotten so small and having cut so much meant that there was an opportunity for us to grow in a different direction without it meaning replacing people or replacing existing jobs that had been there Yeah Hi, I have several questions the first one is, do you have any job openings? Ha ha ha So I'm wondering what was your most successful online platform or approach in terms of bringing in folks who weren't already there and secondly, how have you worked to bring in people who don't speak English and or are struggling with mental or physical disabilities? Okay, great. Okay, first on the online side we actually don't do a ton online we because we focus so much on our local county residents we, Santa Cruz County is very different from even when you get to San Jose in terms of the amount of social media use and it's a small enough town that kind of like I know everybody who's on Twitter which is great, it's convivial but it doesn't feel like it's an audience strategy I will say that one of the big things we've done online is really shifted to a focus on creating opportunities for our collaborators to be advocates for what they're doing in the museum so we have a really brilliant community engagement and marketing person who really focuses on how can I arm those 50 or 100 collaborators for a given event for them to be able to showcase to their friends what's happening and their star role in that and so we have really kind of worked towards creating these advocacy kits where it's a little less like here's the Facebook link, send it to your friends and a little more like you're a star performer in this we're so excited about it, here are some tools kind of like we're your publicist in helping this happen so I would say that we live and die by our collaborators our audience numbers are completely driven by how many collaborators we have in a given event we know that, we honor them for that and so we really focus on empowering them as our online agents more than kind of trying to push it ourselves so that's one thing also say just institutionally we use a ton of online tools that our audience is only marginally involved with we use Flickr for everything and love it we catalog everything that way our exhibit team uses Pinterest and Trello to mock up different ideas there are a whole lot of tools that I am distanced from that are being used all the time so I think that we have a lot of fluidity because we're always working with people outside our organization it's not okay if it just lives on the shared drive or on the network if you're working with interns or collaborators or volunteers out in the community okay so that's that first piece we have made a huge commitment to Latino engagement specifically so we've basically decided that for us success in community engagement looks like our audience reflecting the diversity of our county and so we just pull out the county census data and we say how are we doing on age range how are we doing on income how are we doing on ethnicity those are the three we've chosen to focus on we are great on income that's the one where we're best we match we feel great about that and we feel like it's surprising for a museum we're okay on age we need a little more young people which creates a really interesting conversation when somebody who's 80 says I feel like it's all young people in the museum and then you pull out the numbers and you say actually if we were doing this right we'd have a lot more young people here so that's interesting so but on the ethnicity side what we see is Santa Cruz Bicultural it's 60% white 33% Latino and ones and two percents for Asian American, African American native and Pacific Islander and so we really focus on that white Latino divide so what's interesting is that our audience is about a quarter people of color but only about half of those people identify as Latino so we overperform with some people of color and not with Latinos so we've done this huge institution wide effort we now are a fully bilingual institution in terms of all the text all the labels in the museum we've shifted to all of our frontline hires and new programmatic hires are bilingual required and we have a whole lot of different projects going on around setting targets for who are the artists we work with who are the collaborators we work with who's on our board so we really took a whole institution approach and Stacey Garcia who can raise her hand higher thank you runs our Latino engagement programs and what that means is she's not responsible for all the ways we engage Latinos but she's responsible for making sure that everybody on our staff has a goal and is working towards that goal and that she's helping support them with it so we've done a lot to really shift that and where we've really focused and one of the mistakes we made we went into our Latino engagement work really saying we do all these short term collaborations with people for events and projects we often talk about the museum is totally non monogamous we're polyamorous working with thousands of different people and let's really dive into some deeper relationships with some Latino family serving organizations as partners and what we found as we started doing that was that it actually didn't really work well with how we work best and we were really learning that a lot of people in our community who are Latino just didn't know about the museum and what they were asking us to do was very different than what we were proposing and so we ended up shifting to really focus on working in partnership with a lot of festivals people were coming to us and saying hey we have this Gala Getzer Festival amazing performance is amazing food but there's no hands on art part to it could you guys bring that to it and so that's become a really beautiful partnership so starting to be more involved out of the building, out of the building I mean all of our growth we tripled our attendance inside the building now all of our growth is outside the building and I see that that's just gonna continue okay and then we're gonna switch but there will be more open dialogue with Janice too yeah go ahead I have a question about the one and two percent population of the community and I guess it's more of an educational question if they aren't a major part of your community how are you engaging them as far as training or educating other population about that smaller group I mean what are you doing for them yeah that's a good question and one of the things we've actually kind of debated is does being really inclusive especially as an institution that cares about empowerment mean that we should be matching demographics or should we actually be over represented with people who are less represented in places of power in our community and we've kind of decided well let's start by just trying to match now that said one of the reasons we overperform or we have more African Americans and Asian Americans in our museum than in our community is because of UC Santa Cruz and so we do a lot of partnership and a lot of our artistic collaborators we're always focusing on we're very comfortable saying hey this looks like an all white lineup that's not okay and changing things and so we've always had kind of that focus on what we do but it is a question and it's come up a lot around things like Black Lives Matter and kind of talking about this question of in a community that is really bi-cultural white Latino where we have a lot of issues around racism and then a whole other issues drought whatever it might be is Black Lives Matter something that is highly relevant to this community or not and so there's been kind of some weird dialogue around that in terms of trying to figure out what is our role in talking to and working with groups who are underrepresented in various ways who are not kind of our primary focus the way we are focusing right now on Mexican and Salvadorian people and so that's something we're still trying to really figure out. I think that Janice O'Driscoll is gonna join us up here. We are actually going to take a 15 minute break. Take a break. So be back here 1045 we're starting whether you're here or not it might just be you and Janice talking to an empty room. There's still coffee and there are still some pastries out there. Help yourself.