 I thought one of, I have so many things swing around in my head, basically some points that I would like to make this morning is to apply one, some of what Nina was saying to the world of public libraries, and I'm sure when she was talking, you were already beginning to see some of the connections, and I want to tell you a little bit about some of the connections we've made at the Santa Cruz Public Library, and then I also want to talk about public libraries partnering and collaborating with museums, because we can take the principles that Nina was talking about and apply them to our relationships to our colleagues, because museum staff are our colleagues. They are going through the same kind of change, radical change, that we are, because we know that we are leaving the public library buildings too and needing to go out in the community and meet with people and find out what they need and be there where they are. Yes, we welcome them into our communities and we've got things on the shelves for them to check out, but there's a whole lot of other ways we want to connect with them. So I thought I would start with some of examples. I'm the luckiest duck in the world to be a public librarian in the same town with Nina in the museum, so this is not a bad thing. This is great. I heard some people talking at the break about the pop-up museums. I wanted to give you an idea of some of the things that the library has done with the pop-up museum. One of the most successful ones, Nora, came to one of the friends book sales. This is a really easy thing to do, but this is really popular, and set up the pop-up museum. We told people ahead of time that we were doing it, and they would bring in altered books that they had made. Maybe they had bought the book at a friend's book sale, or maybe they just had one, and they've done something to it. They've changed it. They've engaged in some kind of wonderful artistic transformation. So we had an altered books pop-up museum during the friend's book sale, and we were out in the parking lot, and we just wanted a table, so that's what we were doing. It was very popular, and a lot of people came, and then they went scurrying off to find some used books that they could turn in to altered books. So that is one idea that I know works does not take a lot of time, and to answer some of those questions about staff, the community and your friends group would get really interested in this. This is something you could really do without a whole lot of people. I do want to tell one other story. Nina was talking about taking books apart during some of the art projects. I was involved in an art project. Stacy called me and said, every year, every year the museum does a book arts festival, and she said, will you come and participate? And I said, well, sure, of course. What do you want me to do? She said, well, I have an idea, but can you bring some used books? Can you bring some books for friends? Yeah, yeah, we can send them over. What do you want me to do? And she said, well, I'll show you when you get here. And I trusted her. And I think it was her idea, Emily, because I remember both Stacy and Emily being there, but they got this fabulous idea. If you've ever seen Stecco being constructed, it has an infrastructure of metal that looks something like chicken wire except it's sturdier so that it has holes in it and everything. And so they made this cylinder of this chicken wire, and then they dropped tiny, tiny white LED lights in the middle of it. I thought, what am I going to do with this? So I got there, and they had all the used books out, and they said, okay, all you have to do is tear a page out of the book, and you roll it up into a cone, and you stick it in one of those openings. And when you fill out the openings, you're going to have this great lighted sculpture. I said, oh, all right, I can do that. And exactly what Nina talked about happened. So the first, so I'm standing there waiting to do this, and I've got the books all out. And people came up and say, you mean you want me to tear a page out of the book? And I said what I never thought I would say. I said, yes, I'm a librarian, and it's okay. And they said, oh, all right. So I had all this power. I had no idea. And people would come up, and they would say tear a book out of the page, and somebody would point to me and say, yeah, she's a librarian. She said it was okay. The only funny thing that happened there was when somebody came up with a book, and I couldn't see the title, and I said, I can't tear a page out of this book. I can't even believe you have this book here. And I thought, oh my gosh, I hope we didn't bring a Bible or something. What do we have? And it was a book about the Beatles. And she just couldn't deal with it. So I put it away for a later crew. And it ended up beautifully. What I want to say is really work with your museum, even if you have a tiny one person museum in your town, work with that person. A person is one of your colleagues. There's so many different things you can do. And I know one of the questions was online presence and what you can do. You can work with individual researchers too. There's a woman in Santa Cruz who is both a geologist and a local historian. And she has a mobile app called mobile ranger. And the library participates in that just by giving access to our local photographs. And she credits us on that app. We don't do anything but be available to her and app developers like her to be able to present local history in another venue online. Look for things like that. Look for people like that. The other program that I wanted to talk about that's online is War Inc. I know a lot of you know about War Inc. and all the work that Chris Brown has done with that. Two of the veterans in the War Inc. exhibit are from Santa Cruz County. I am waiting for Nina to decide she wants to do something with tattoo art. And we are there. We've got people. We know what we can do. And we're ready to go. So be open to that kind of thing. They're really museums are going through the same thing we are in that connect with their communities. I don't know if you even realize that. Yeah. Well I just want to say about I think it's so clear from hearing Janice talk that you know people always ask what makes a good collaborator. And I always say you know it doesn't matter what kind of organization they're from. It just matters you know are they are they game. You know we often say we have a three meeting rule that if it takes three meetings before we can do anything together it's not going to happen. But you can hear from how Janice talks. Janice is somebody you can call and she will always say yes. And it sounds like you'll show up without even being told what's going to happen which I didn't even know. It's actually it's actually an easier way to get me. It's not to tell me in that I'll show up and then then we'll see what happens. I think I think the other thing that we have in common that I wanted to point out is that we're very locally oriented. Both the public library and the museums are locally oriented. We have some of you may have heard of a database that we have in Santa Cruz that was constructed by Diane Cohen and our IT staff where we have selections of music that can be streamed from local musicians people who self identify as Santa Cruz musicians and you can go on to our site and you can hear some of their music and maybe find some music for your wedding or for your event. In our case when we do YouTube videos we go through our collection and find soundtrack. That's another good example of how we can be locally oriented how similar this is to so many of the things that the museum does. So I think we mostly wanted to use this time to open it up for more conversation with all of us. We now have a museum and a library person sitting up here and a whole lot of great people and great ideas in the group. So I think we just want to open it up and I don't know if Karen if you're available to help us awesome and we can take the conversation wherever you guys want to go. So have you guys done any co-sponsored events. Yes. What have you done tons. Well we sponsor each other right all the time. I go to the book arts thing the pop up museum comes to comes to the library. We they have a there's a great group and I would love to know how they get their name. Maybe you know how they get their name researchers anonymous. I know them I don't think the anonymous part but maybe that's what Nina. But when we're we have another program called snapshot stories where we collect local local photographs and we post them online so people can see photographs and we identify them and we catalog them and we do all of that kind of thing. A lot of times people think they have really a picture of Aunt Maude and actually or somebody from researchers anonymous say yeah but do you see you have that rare photograph of the roller coaster in the background. And that's what they see in researchers anonymous help us a lot. And they're a group who are affiliated with the museum of history people. How is it that they're anonymous. I don't know they I think it's I think it's to keep them from drinking you know. You know most of our partnerships are informal I would say and certainly there have been times and actually before I ever worked at the museum one of the ways I first got involved in Santa Cruz was advocating when the library was going through a service model transformation. But I think that we find that most of our partnerships at the mall are not written down in any clear way of saying here's you know here's the agreement of what you're doing and what we're doing. It's mostly about starting to do things together and then knowing hey if I pick up the phone and call Janice she's going to say yes or we're going to find a way to work through this and I know that I mean it's about ultimately especially a small community you end up building relationships and I think we found we can never force fit people who can't work well together into a relationship with any kind of external structure of this collaboration must happen. But if people start to work together a lot can blossom from it and and you get more ideas. Yeah. It just it just keeps rolling on and on and on and there are things that we bring to each other that we pass on and you know it's fine and and it's just kind of like hey is there you know it's kind of in the neuronal net of Santa Cruz we're just kind of looking for where are those synaptic links between us or where is the link with somebody else for some other reason who's the who's the best source and there's no ego involved which is really nice which is the best organization for either this material or this event or whatever it would be. But even even smaller museums we have an agricultural museum out in Watsonville we connect with them. The San Lorenzo Valley Museum is one person and the hours for that museum are dependent on when she needs to get her grandchild to school and when she has to pick her up. But that's OK. We do lots of programs with them and we get to find out about the history in the valley. So I bet you have museums and organizations like that. We're doing this really interesting thing right now around citizen science. And we're working with the Museum of Discovery for Children in Santa Cruz and the Santa Cruz Museum of Natural History. And every month we bring in somebody different to talk about an interest an interesting topic in science. And of course there's no lack of them in California because you have the drought in Santa Cruz. There's always marine animals. There's birds. There's the condors down in Big Sur. There's backyard wildlife. All kinds of things that you can do. Just connecting with people like that. Opening that door. Other questions. Thank you. How do you get the invitation out there. Yeah. Especially with people who aren't necessarily on an Internet connection. Yeah. Yeah. That's a great question. At least in our case. I'll say two things about that. One is we used to joke that it starts with nepotism. You know you start by asking the people you know. And then what we found over time we've had a shift where at the museum at first it was just when I came in my number one message when I was talking to the press or anybody was we are open for your ideas. We want to embrace Santa Cruz culture. You have an idea. Bring it in here. It's on. You know our website says that we just constantly reinforce. Bring it in. And what we found over time was in the beginning we really had to do a lot of cold calling and recruiting. And also just reaching out to people we knew to get involved. Now we found as the museum has become more prominent there are more people volunteering themselves to us. And what that's meant is we want to say yes to those people. But it means that we're more strategic in focusing our outreach and recruiting to the people who are not raising their hands. And so we're really looking at OK. Who's who's coming to the table. Who who do we feel like is part of our community but is not showing up in that way. And how do we reach out. And we've really found at least again in a small community. It's about identifying key people who are highly networked. And so whether that means in a given neighborhood or in a given artistic practice or whatever it is figuring out who's that person who's the right first person to contact. But we literally will you know if we're planning an event with a new kind of theme for us. We'll have a staff member who will do a bunch of Google searching and a bunch of cold calling and emailing you know to a whole bunch of different groups or people or Facebook groups that might be related to something just to try and get some things out there. And we do track for our collaborators. How many are new to the mall. Because it's important to us that even as we're working with more people that it doesn't become like we've made our tent bigger and now we close the doors behind those people. So we want to always have you know 50 plus percent of our collaborators be new collaborators so that we're constantly making sure that we're inviting new people in. So doing that mix of working with people who become known to us who are easy and then building relationships with new people. And if you talk to Nora who runs all our Friday night festivals maybe she can raise her hand. She works with 50 to a couple hundred collaborators per month on a festival. And she spends a lot of her time meeting with people and talking with them about what it would be like to collaborate with us. And we have some rules we've kind of figured out like you've got to have an in person meeting before you collaborate with somebody. You know setting some clear sense of what they're bringing what you're bringing that kind of thing. And she spends a lot of her time just building relationships in the community in that way. So it starts with cold calling sometimes and then also reaching out to the people you already know. And with the public library we've spent a lot of effort on our volunteer coordination office and we've reached out. We've got volunteers from the community that never volunteered for the library before. And we've basically what we did was hire people who have we hired two people who have worked in the volunteer field for a very long time and knew how to go out and find those people because there's some people as Nina said that you will always see and will always volunteer and figure right away that maybe the library is a good place for them. But now we're finding all kinds of folks to help with the citizen science program I talked about or jail service or something like that in ways we never would have found. So if you have whatever your volunteer coordination avenues are take advantage of those. You'll find people. And if you don't have I can I can talk to you about that too. Other questions other thoughts. You spoke of big changes at the museum. Did you do and I'm not saying you should have a formal needs assessment or a strategic planning initiative. And then second question. Sorry that might be a big one. So the second one. Well actually let's just stick with that. You can put it out there. It's OK. OK. Well I'll say in our case I would say sort of. So as you might guess from looking at me I'm a fairly nontraditional pick for a museum director. I when I was hired I remember saying to my husband it's going to be really hard for them to hire somebody with a two in the front of their age. You know I was 29 when I was hired and so and I'd never I'd always been an exhibit designer. I'd never managed anybody I'd never done fundraising before. So I really decided you know there have been a question earlier about was I living in the community. So I'd really decided I didn't want to be on planes anymore. I really wanted to do this and I believed in the museum and they had a shockingly long hiring process given how quickly they were running out of money. But but I use that as an opportunity to really do my own needs assessment basically. They also did this thing where the board was off limits to me. So I only had nine nineties. I only had public filings about the museum. But I went and spent a few months basically doing my own needs assessment reaching out to community leaders artists politicians different folks and just saying hey what do you know about the museum what can you tell me know what do you think that it and I'm really getting a sense of what was going on and what wasn't where the opportunity was. And so I actually as part of kind of application process just sort of on my own initiative wrote a three year plan to say hey I know I've never done this before and you might have some questions about that. So here's what here's my playbook. Here's what I will do if you hire me and and of course I'll plan to course correct based on what I learned from you but but here's what I think we'll need to do and we were we stayed shockingly close to that plan for the first couple of years and so and in some ways you know I've been living in Santa Cruz and had had this kind of question mark always look I you know my profession was always in museums and here I had not been involved in that museum and it almost was like there was a well I learned later there was a small group of people who knew and loved the museum but as somebody who wasn't part of that group it almost felt like it was a mystery what what was going on there and so there was a huge opportunity kind of to do a needs assessment actually outside of the museum where if I had had a lot of access inside I might not have clearly identified as much the gap that existed as much as I did and so in some ways the fact that during this hiring process they had a closed wall in some ways made it easier for me to learn from families and artists and history oriented people and things like that what they thought was missing and so I so I guess I did do that but not quite in the way that an organization typically would and I'll also say that coming in at such a clear time of crisis that turnaround situation and I feel like the leadership needed in that situation is very different than one that is in growth or maturity or kind of on rocky ground so I think we all knew that I was being hired in a sink or swim situation of like we're handing you the keys to this place can you make this work or not and if not we're going to close and so I felt both the responsibility and the privilege to say here's the direction we're going in this direction from day one we're not going to take six months and figure out what's going on here we're just you know we're just placing this bet and going and I feel lucky that it worked out but I was also ready to be fired if it didn't you know so I went in knowing that it was that high stakes kind of situation and the library was lucky because it we were going through a similar crisis and we also had a dramatic service change and before Nina got involved in the museum and the way she just described she was actually coming and giving feedback and helping us think through our situation so that would be very no but no long run it did though honestly it did look we're sitting there yeah that's true that's true yeah that's right you didn't turn out so badly no that's right but so we felt really lucky that we had her until she got really into the museum and had to do that work so yeah worked out for both of us so it's nice of you to say yeah a couple questions yeah I just wanted to thank you I thank your representation just really inspirational and there's a lot to gain from that and it made me think of you know the pope is pope's visit to the US has been in so much of the news and something that he said about that I really thought about a lot is is that interest of you know that chaos is good and messy things are good and it's in that where we can grow a lot and change things and it seems like that part of what you're saying and and presenting is you know we have to be comfortable with expert experimenting and you know seeing what works and revising an iterative iterative process and yeah so I I think that's I don't know if you you know I don't ever make it comforting right I think that one thing I've really learned from artists is a lot of artists will talk about creative tension being a really positive thing and this idea of you know instead of starting trying to resolve a situation how do you get something out of that friction in that situation and so I think that that's true you know I think also we've learned as a lot of places have that you can't have chaos for too long and you have to have some kind of parameters around it and but I honestly I really do think that I think the hardest place to be in and try and change is a place that is doing okay the kind of sees issues on the horizon but there's not enough urgency to feel like we have the clarion focus let's do it and so I would always choose that high stress over that situation however I think that there's a great opportunity for us to prevent getting into these high stress loops by by being ready to embrace those fears and those possibilities before they you know come to us with that level of urgency so that's something I wonder about a lot is kind of how do we get the positive side of that urgency without the you know pretty extreme downsides that come with it as well and and and whether that's possible I don't know how you feel I'm in the middle right now so don't ask me I I have faith that this will end and we'll move forward yeah I will say there's a really great book called non-profit life cycles by Susan Kenny Stevens and she really chronicles kind of the different phases that a nonprofit will go through and it's not just true of nonprofits but she's very explicit about you know when you're in a growth mode here's what leadership looks like then if you're in a maturity mode here's what it looks like then if you're in a turnaround here's what that looks like and I've found it very helpful both at the mall and also like organizations that I help out with in just as we think about diagnosing okay you know where we and what do we need right now and how are things changing and how should we change because of that but it is exciting I'll give you that did you have a question or comment yeah good morning I just appreciated your comment as far as you've taken the initiative to do some type of strategic alignment basically one of the things that my colleague and I were both from rural library she's from San Benito I'm from Kings County and I really appreciated that we as if it's museums or libraries that we do take different approaches when I decided to do a strategic alignment I actually did what was called through Joan Fry Williams and George Anita which is called a strategic strategic reality check because I chose and selected not to do the formal process as far as getting a direction as far as how we're going to collaborate whereas my colleague here who is from San Benito County she did a more traditional approach but however she was able to ascertain a consultant from her community and had services for free so I really do appreciate that some organization sounds like you're small unlike ourselves but we still took the initiative and the approaches are different and I do really appreciate you sharing that today thank you thank you for sharing that we actually ended up not so much as a planning process but kind of as a we called it naming and claiming once we were a few years in we decided okay let's create some strategic document that kind of says what we're about so that as new people are coming in you know we can kind of put some roots under this and we used a process that kind of comes from activist world called theory of change where it's like how do you connect the activities you do to the change you seek in your community and so we now have this one pager I'd be happy to show it to somebody on my computer later that's or we'll share it digitally it's just a it's a graphic we worked with an artist on that is just kind of a one page playbook of how is the work that we're doing leading us to building a stronger more connected community and for us you know there are some things we do multi-year plans for and things but for us kind of making sure that everybody at the end of the day speaking the same language is ending up with the same goal man you want that document to be as short as possible you know you want people to be able to tattoo it on their foreheads as they're thinking about what they're doing during the day so I think having those different types and those different levels is really important this is great so let's say you're in a situation where they don't really want you to take risks and but yet you have this ability to start doing some things maybe outside the box not that I think I'm going to fail yeah but I'm taking I'm in an organization that's not big risk taker so do you have any tips to when I do fail of ways I can make it so that they will let me yeah continue taking risks yeah what a great question well first of all it sounds like you already feel like you kind of have a little bit of that space which is the most important starting point to feel like you have that space so my background's in electrical engineering that's where my degree is from and so I'm really big on this idea that everything is a problem that you're failing on the way to solving and I don't even really the fail word doesn't really come into my vocabulary in terms of thinking about you're constantly prototyping and testing and so one thing I'd suggest is thinking about is there a way you could do an A to B test where you're trying two different versions of something to learn which one is more successful so the secret part of that is that means one of them is failing but it means that instead you're positioning it around which one of these works better you know or and so if it's I mean certainly let's say it's programmatic and you say I'm okay I'm going to try doing this on a Friday night and I'm going to try doing it on a Sunday afternoon and we're going to we're testing with the time slots one of those is going to be a fail or rather rather relatively one of them is going to be better right so is there a way you can construct it as an experiment so that the concept is we're learning from this rather than did this succeed or not and then the other thing I just say is if you feel like you have even a little bit of room I always say you know your best strategic weapon is your mission statement every institution has a mission statement there's probably something in your mission statement you can hook what you want to try onto and so I feel like it's like those you know third grade diagramming sentences like is there a way you can say oh it will fulfill X part of our mission if we try doing why and you like just use it as strategic armor I mean when I first came I knew that we were going to radically change the museum but they had already written this vision statement saying they wanted to be a thriving central gathering place and there are more words to the vision statement but I just honed in on that and I was like all right that is my armor for trying some of these things and for them being able to say back to people oh I'm fulfilling this thing that is in the thing that you wrote as your strategic vision I'm hired by you to do that and I'm going to do that and so if there's some strategic language you can use I find that any institution whether they use their mission statement actively or not some part of them knows they have to attend to it you know because somebody ratified at some time so if you can use that language to your power then people may not want to listen to you but they kind of feel like they have to so I find that that's also pretty helpful so finding a way to construe it as an experiment and then using your mission as strategic language and then you know you already started doing this but I always think about Audrey Lord saying you know you know self protection is not about preservation it's a political act and you know take care of yourself as you're doing it you know find a way to feel psyched about it I know one place where they created these failure cards which are like coffee 10 stamp cards where it's like you know how who can fail the most here you know and your institution may not be there yet but you know can you create a way for yourself whether it's constructing it as a game or having a buddy who you're doing it with too and you guys are both pushing yourselves you know but finding a way to make sure that you're emotionally protecting yourself taking care of yourself as you're doing it I think is important too. Yeah that's great advice I spend a lot of time on your framework so that you have it in your head and then go for it and then just don't look bad. Yeah. Just go. Yeah. Hi a working in the library that the public institution and then working in museums serving the public how do you have you effectively engaged public opinion on your programs and services. We don't seem to have any problem getting on our services. I never we do make it we do make it formal sometimes we do a focus group sometimes we ask survey questions a lot of times people come in and volunteer it we we really encourage interaction with us and social media and Facebook we have Facebook Instagram Pinterest and our guru is right here I saw her earlier and where she is right there right there there is there's the library guru from social media this is not news to you Jasmine don't pretend that it is so she finds all kinds of ways to get interaction and that way we get a lot of feedback that way people don't hesitate to jump in and let us know what they think but they will walk into all of our branches and we have lots of branch staff here who will test to that. So but we have for certain things like strategic plans present annual reports presentations to boards we do make we do make it formal in all kinds of ways. We've actually been on a pretty big push for more data and research and we use this phrase measurement that moves we want to measure things that are going to change what we do and so we have a lot of informal ways that people share with us how they feel but we've started over the last year doing more intense audience surveying which first started frankly one of the hardest things was really learning how to take a good sample and you know knowing that you really have to pick random people and it can't be based on who walks up to you it can't be based on who you're comfortable talking with so that whole element of just learning how to survey especially in a free public environment was really rigorous and interesting for us to work on and then what we've done is we've kind of decided that has mentioning our theory of change earlier so we basically have a strategic goal unsurprisingly based on what you heard this morning you know our impact statement we care about what we're trying to do at the end of the day is build a stronger and more connected community and we see people being empowered throwing into that and then people bridging going into that and so we don't measure kind of how much do people like programming we measure how much are people on the track to being empowered and how much are people on the track to bridging and so for example some of those things mean very typical kinds of measurements like for bridging if we're going to say that our audience is reflective of the diversity of our community we've got to know demographics of people so we do demographic research on age, income, ethnicity and what part of the county you live in as well and then but then a lot of the things we ask are questions that really get to you know on the path to empowerment are questions like did you feel welcomed and included in the space or did you leave here inspired with an idea of how you'll be creative in your own life on the bridging side we'll ask did you have a meaningful interaction with a stranger at the museum or did you learn about a form of art or culture that was new to you so trying to really look very specifically at things that are on those strategic things also say that we focus a lot on people who are not coming to the museum and thinking not just about what's happening for our audience but who are those people out there who we want to engage with and where are they at when we were just starting the Latino engagement work we actually for the first time hired out a research firm that did an ethnographic study about Latino it was very specifically focused on kind of Latino families decision-making around leisure time we weren't really interested in whether or talking about the museum we were really interested in the question of how do you decide what you're going to do on the weekend who's part of that decision what come what factors come into it and so we worked with a research firm to get this really front end research just to start to understand some things about kind of ad-intudial preferences and that ended up really shifting some of our programming so for example we heard a lot and you know you're talking earlier about chaos organizationally we we've always had very chaotic programming and we've had a lot of concern about how do you on ramp people into a place where it's like they're making book sculptures over here and they're you know making giant flowers over there and there's a band and there's all these different things going on one of the things we heard actually from that study was there was a real desire for chaotic programming and that we heard from a lot of families who said you know you go to a white event and like it's all scheduled and one thing happens after another and you feel like you don't want to leave because you might offend somebody and but our events everything's going on at the same time and you can come in and out and we're like oh sweet we are that way let's work at that you know versus things where we learned for example about you know huge focus on food at events or outdoor events that really shifted some of our thinking about where and how we should be programming so that's the only time so far that we've really done that kind of more you know highly front end like just straight recent like market research but it was very useful and I think that there are other ways I could imagine us doing that kind of research in the future too yeah some questions you said the left of cash yeah how did you manage to meet payroll and how did you survive that time period yeah so right so okay so we had 16 thousand dollars in the bank we had thirty seven thousand dollars and then paid bills and we had about a sixty thousand dollar payroll at the time and so right away days one and two layoffs and we all took a salary cut so again no unions here we had a bunch of people who are on different furloughs and I just said look everybody including myself we're all going to take a twenty percent salary cut when we get fifty thousand dollars in the bank we'll go to ten percent when we have a hundred thousand dollars in the bank we'll go to full salaries you can work eighty percent time you can work a hundred percent time I'm gonna be here every day you do whatever you need to do but we're all in this together so the the less glamorous side of shift is cuts cuts first so cuts first and then at the same time I went out to all of our and granted I had never done fundraising before I went out to all of our long-time donors and I said we are going to I personally feel that museums been under delivering on our public value we're going to over deliver and I need you to buy in now and I remember sitting in my house practicing in the bathroom saying to the mirror I would like to ask you to commit to ten thousand dollars and like trying to get through that sentence without laughing and but I had a lot of those conversations and so so it was a mixture of cuts and fundraising and just trying to get I tried right away we didn't have any debt which I've learned now is a great thing so it was like let's just get income ahead of expenses a few days at a time a week at a time two weeks at a time so we were just trying to get in the black so we weren't putting any money into a hole and so we could everything that we raised or everything that we cut was leading us in the right direction and you know hugely fortuitously I started in May and we did that right away and in October we went to ten percent cuts and by the end of the year so I think it took a little under six months to get to full salaries and Stacey when were you hired? To work yeah so January of that so eight months later we hired our first next staff member so we were able to turn ourselves around pretty quickly fortunately yeah well I had a question so you said that you had triple attendance and well that's a that's a great accomplishment and but and that you were also performing really well in in in your attendance according to income distribution yeah but I do understand like from most of my experience is that a museum is kind of a rich place kind of yeah there's a kind of a financial barrier to entry yeah so I was just curious as to how you address that while the income distribution thing while you know balancing that with the museum sort of and basic entry sure yeah great question well so first of all I fully acknowledge like museums are traditionally perceived as white wealthy educated spaces period and if we are going to include more people in them we have to kind of acknowledge that and break down with what that means culturally and and open it up one of the things so our museum costs five dollars to enter but about 70% of our visitors come for free either on a free day or we have this policy we call spontaneous free I actually learned this from a librarian I remember a librarian a long time ago he said to me the best way I can make a library patron for life is to waive your fees if you come in with a book that's overdue and Eli Newburger I'm sure many know him he's from Ann Arbor he said you know if you bring in a book that's over loot and you're nervous and I can say to you don't worry about it we are building a relationship that's different and I took that and I thought wow how could we apply this to a museum and so we have a policy called spontaneous free where a lot of people walk in and they kind of look around and you can tell they're kind of like assessing like do I want to come in here and maybe it's not even a financial assessment maybe it's about time whatever always those people we say hey is this your first time here come on in be my guest and so we have a very open policy in that regard now I will say one of the things we learned from audience research which was very surprising we have two Friday night festivals per month one is free on first Fridays and one costs five dollars on third Fridays and we were very surprised to learn that our audience for third Fridays the one that costs five dollars is more income diverse and more low income by percentage than first Fridays and that really surprised us because we felt like wow why isn't the free night the night that is you know more more lower income people coming and the answer is first Friday is a kind of community wide like art walk night where people kind of think of it as a night where you go out you look at some art you drink some wine it has a cultural bias towards a more affluent group who are coming and doing a downtown thing versus if you're coming for radical craft night or you're coming for the growth festival or adventure or any of our third Friday festivals we've recruited collaborators from across our community you're probably coming because you know one or more of those collaborators or you're interested in that topic the value is way more than five dollars but you're willing to pay the five dollars and it's and where we are actually recruiting an audience that is more income diverse than the audience that is already there for first Friday so we have a lot of I have a lot of questions about that whole question of should we be free should we not be free you know and just how does price bear into these things and I think that there's plenty of research at least in museums that shows if you make the museum free more people will come but they'll actually be more of the same kind of people who are already coming who already felt the museum was a place for them and that if you're really trying to engage people who may not feel like a museum is a place for them I'm sure this is true for libraries it's not just about opening up the doors wider it's about actually doing something different to recruit and include and involve those people yeah so yeah so when we made this commitment to do deeper surveying we decided okay we want to do this for real and so we started we recruited a group of actually in our case they were volunteers UC Santa Cruz students mostly they call themselves the beta data so they are a survey task force group and they got very rigorously trained in how do you get an accurate sample and basically the way they do it is it's in every a number of people so if it's a really busy event it's every fifth person if it's less busy it's every third person or every other person but they just have a rule about which people they have to approach to ask to survey and then we make the surveys as short as possible so it's as easy as possible for somebody to say yes to do it but the most important thing is getting a real sample and so we even though we know we could have probably more surveys come in and we'd love to make it like there's an engagement station also as a survey we know that that's going to be volunteer based and it's just not going to be as rigorous as getting a real sample so that's the most important part and that was worth investing the time in to figure out how to do it Nina I have a quick question so it's amazing what you did with like very little money and so I was just wondering when you picked your brain what do you think is the biggest barrier to public libraries just think of them as in general not like Santa Cruz or San Francisco but what do you think would be a good starting point for us to open it up and so let me just say that I started off my talk saying how much respect I have and I really feel like I love libraries and I think it's one of the reasons I might actually be where I feel I like working at museums because I don't love museums I feel like there's so much we have to fix whereas I'm one of those like nostalgic library users who's annoying but but I will say that one of the things we were talking about this in the car on the way up I have been surprised at the extent to which I feel like the library has gotten easier and easier for me to use transactionally which is in some ways very positive right I my mom taught me that she's from L.A. you know she's like you know you can check you can reserve the books on you know I reserve my books online I go to the library to pick them up I self check out and but I am concerned that that's a very frictionless and it very it's I don't necessarily need more humans in that chain but I do feel like I'm somebody who loves the library and my only real access point is very transactional except for obviously the collaboration we do so I'm really curious about this question of libraries as community centers and and putting that branding more explicitly out look in museums we have a huge barrier that you guys don't have which is we have this weird fixation on this professional amateur divide right we are so fixated in museums I'm like what art belongs in and what art belongs out whereas every public librarian I know says you want to read Danielle Steele great you want to read you know Foucault great we are excited about you being part of this like there already is such an inclusive community perspective you're not going to have or maybe you do I don't know a lot of people snipe at me about is this a museum or a community center it's like it's both get over it you know but I think for a library you have such an opportunity to just totally own that space and I think also libraries like museums there are so many preconceptions people have about what they are and who they're for and we've got to find ways to very overtly very explicitly break those preconceptions because otherwise we're just going to keep being killed by what people think about something that is not for them you know I always say museums are like church nobody goes anymore but they don't want it to change they want to be exactly like it was when they didn't when before they you know decided they didn't want to go anymore and I feel like there's a potential with libraries similarly to say man like what is the best possible experience we could create in this community and how can we just unapologetically do that and be that from a community center perspective because I really believe in this Robert Putnam theory about bridging and this fact that we have fewer and fewer spaces to be with people who are different from us from different economic backgrounds different racial backgrounds different perspectives and if we can tap into that opportunity whether as museums, libraries, community centers whatever we can make our community so much more vibrant and so much more successful there was a great New York Times article recently about you know libraries doing tool lending instrument lending and one of the things that really struck me about it is how especially we know this in the Bay Area the sharing economy is in some ways such as thin veneer of like fuzzy BS over this deeply exploitative market economy thing going on but libraries could be these places where it's like no sharing is this beautiful thing that we do as communities and we're going to own that so anyway that's I feel like there's an opportunity to move I think it's already happening programmatically so I think it's more about overtly, loudly being those community spaces and making sure that those people who are becoming transactional users maybe they're not hooked in you know maybe they're not talking to a person when they check out a book but there are a lot of other reasons community reasons that they're using and involved with the library and I think there's huge opportunity for that I'm sure many of you guys are doing that so that's my non-knowledgeable perspective Dairy-knowledgeable So we only have time for one more question here Let's start down here How do you keep from being overwhelmed and stressed out and also how do you how do you maintain your energy and positivity? I'm often overwhelmed and stressed out I was once told that the one thing that a leader needs to bring is energy that everybody if you're the leader of an organization everybody keys off your energy and if you are not engaged then they are not going to be engaged and you don't have the you don't get the right to show up without energy as a leader any day, any time and it's like it's one of those you know crosses to bear and so I believe that but look yes it's easy to be overwhelmed and frustrated but look at all the things we can do for our communities I mean it's so beautiful like I guess I feel like there are so many reasons for me to be inspired and there are so many jerks who just get me more fired up too so I think that especially when people are overtly discriminatory it's so easy to be like oh we're going to crush you you know and we're going to make this awesome and I don't know I think it's just I think you know I often feel like I don't know how much this comes up in libraries but I really feel in museums that we don't embrace the extent to which some of this work is activist work and that we have to bring that kind of political agency and energy to the work and there are other ways to do the work too but that's how I choose to do the work and so you know that's the fire that's inside of me to do it I feel like if I was getting a paycheck and doing a job I wouldn't be nearly as engaged or as energetic what about you Janice you have a ton of energy I feel like I do see being a public librarian as having being able to have a job where you can contribute to the community and be part of social action part of community service and that's why I was attracted to being a public librarian and stayed that way my entire career so I have the same feeling it's a chance to make a difference it's a chance to be part of the community and not very many people get to have a job where that's true yeah thank you guys thank you Nina and Janice that was an epic Q&A session epic