 My name is Belinda Tate. I am the Executive Director of the Kalamazoo Institute of Arts. At the start of the pandemic, we were really trying to shift our in-person audience to a remote platform. We had to learn a lot very quickly about the technology required to make the shift and about how to engage audiences online. Horses in our Kirk Newman Art School moved to Zoom. Our staff meetings went remote. Our internal collaborations moved to shared online documents. Our programming and exhibitions went virtual too. We wanted to stay connected to our core audiences during this shift or however long it lasted. Typically, our annual exhibitions, Young Artists of Kalamazoo County and the High School Area Show are separate endeavors. This year, we mounted them side by side to offer a more flexible experience for our visitors, students, and staff. We heard from community art teachers that they were already overwhelmed and they weren't able to help us collect, sort, and mount the works as they usually do. So we partnered with other organizations to crowdsource the works and use many different points of collection. We also created free art kits that we distributed to youth throughout the community. We liked and the community also enjoyed the crowdsourcing element of the exhibition because it really allowed more students from across the community to participate. We have good safety protocols in place and many of those came from an interdepartmental task force that allowed our staff to help come up with recommendations to support our reopening plans. Some of our team members were able to work from home with little disruption and others required a bit more assistance from our leadership team in shifting their work. For some of our employees, they needed a technology investment. For others, they needed access to outside training resources on how to shift their programs and to see what other museums were doing as well. As a result of the pandemic, I think we learned a lot of lessons about how to work more effectively together as a team. We learned to trust each other more and we learned to collaborate in new ways and overall I feel that we have a team that is stronger today than it has ever been. And what I really appreciated over the course of the pandemic is our visitors and students approaching me and other team members regularly, letting us know how much they appreciate us and the work that we are doing and the courage that we are demonstrating by continuing to serve them in many different ways on site and online. I think our community is still on a learning journey and it feels like it's quite an honor to be a part of that and to continue to introduce to them works of art, new themes, subjects, ideas to explore. Many of our community members are still feeling anxious about the risk of gathering in person. We're continuing to deep clean and social distance and wear a mask and do things that really give our patrons a high degree of comfort in the fact that we are a safe space. Of course, we believe that the arts are for everyone and regardless of how people choose to experience them, we want to continue to use the arts as a way to inspire, fulfill and transform our community and we remain committed to that vision. The Round Project was a valuable experience. It has offered a unique opportunity to connect with other professionals in the field to monitor the pandemic situation as it evolved and to have really deep conversations about the science as it emerged and to figure out ways to apply that science to our practice in museums and libraries in order to create safer spaces for our staff and our patrons. One of the things that was really unique in the early part of the pandemic is that our group gathered together online often and it was really energizing to see how people could come together in a way that not only demonstrated their dedication to the institution and the community but in ways that really demonstrated their resilience and tenacity. Being on a lot of Zoom calls allows you to peer into people's personal spaces and I think it gave people an opportunity to share more of their whole self and that was a really unique experience. The pandemic has proven to me that there's nothing a dedicated team can't accomplish and of course I'm really proud of our team here at the KIA.