 of AIC's Emergent Conservation Professionals Network, or UCPN. This will be hosting our fourth webinar today titled, Get Involved Conservation Education, Outreach, and Advocacy. So those of you who don't know, UCPN is a network with an AIC dedicated to supporting conservation professionals as they move through the first stages of their career. We do this by organizing a variety of programs, such as webinars like this one. Recordings of our previous webinars can be found on AIC's YouTube channel. Today, we will be using GoToWebinar. Before I introduce the speakers, I want to quickly review some of the features of this software. The view window, where you see our title slide right now, can be resized by clicking and dragging the lower right corner. The control panel is where you as an attendee can take some control of your own screen. You may find that with inactivity, the control panel automatically minimizes. If you'd like to keep it open for the entire presentation, under View, there's an Auto Hide the Control Panel option that can be turned off by unselecting it. The Audio section tells you if you are joined to the audio by phone or internet. All of you listening out there are muted, so the way that you can communicate with us is through the question in chat box. There's also a raise a hand option, but we won't be using that today. Today, we have 53 people joining us, and of those, 8 are pre-programmed, 12 are graduate students, 8 are 1-3 years out of graduate school, 8 are 4-6 years out of graduate school, and 5 are 7 years or further out of graduate school. And most of the people watching us today do have some sort of experience with outreach or advocacy in some form or another. But today's program is focusing on the subject of outreach and advocacy and how conservators, especially those who are emerging, can become involved in these important efforts. This file is ASC membership and meetings coordinator. We'll open the program by sharing with us some of ASC's outreach and advocacy initiatives and the ways in which members can get involved. Following this, we'll hear from three conservators who have incorporated outreach or advocacy into their work in different ways. Theresa Meyers, private practice conservator, will be sharing with us her experience participating in Museum's Advocacy Day in 2011, and she'll share suggestions for conservators wanting to advocate for conservation on the national level. Richard McCoy is an arts and cultural consultant, and in 2013, he launched Richard McCoy & Associates, a firm dedicated to creating novel approaches managing contemporary challenges in conservation, support preservation, and cultural curatorial projects. In addition, he is adjunct faculty in Johns Hopkins University's online museum study program. He's worked on a number of outreach initiatives online, and we'll be talking about how conservators can contribute to projects like these. Sarah Barrack is a fellow, a Crest fellow in technical art history and an adjunct faculty member at the Conservation Center in NYU. She's also the co-chair for AIC's K312 outreach working group. She will be discussing some of their projects and suggestions and suggest ways in which conservators can get involved in educational efforts. At the end of the program, we will have some time for questions from the audience. If you have a question, just submit it in the question chat box. Anisha Gupta, ETPN's webinar coordinator, will be moderating the Q&A session. In addition, we have with us, say, Ryan Moonfield helping us run the go-to webinar software. So to begin us, Ruth is going to give us some background on AIC's efforts in advocating for conservation. Ruth, welcome to our webinar. Thanks for joining us today. Can we start by giving us a brief explanation of the difference between FAIC and AIC? Yes, thanks, Megan. I would say that both AIC and FIC are directly involved in outreach to related organizations and professional-related fields as well as the public. The main difference to keep in mind for this presentation is that due to tax reasons, only AIC can engage in FIC. So both AIC and its foundation are involved in outreach activities. It really is only AIC that is involved with advocacy. And I guess one point that I want to make sure that everyone realizes is that outreach is a main part of what AIC does. It's something that we're involved with every day. We partner with many organizations on a regular basis. Some of the most visible are when around disaster response or education. We have partnered with American Alliance for Museums on a lot of their webinars, again connecting our members to other organizations so that that expertise gets out in the field. And then I just wanted to touch on a few sort of special highlights of AIC outreach activities that people may not be aware of. One of the main forms that our outreach takes to related organizations and their members is AIC often has at least six times a year we take the AIC booth to a related organization conference. For example, in 2013, AIC had a booth at the American Institute of Archaeology, College of American Art, AAM, AASLH, APT, and the American Society of Oriental Research. These opportunities are always showcased in everything that AIC is doing to those professionals in related fields. But one of the, I guess, most things that I've found very refreshing is, and I'm usually the person that's at the booth, is the really AIC has great name recognition. It's very rare at one of these conferences that someone stops by the booth and doesn't have an idea of what AIC is. They're often not as aware of all of our programs and that's where having the opportunity to talk about them at the conferences is so important. And one thing that I've found is often a lot of folks who are in related professionals, but these fields and are looking for, conservators often don't know about Find a Conservator. I think in some ways the museums have done a great job at getting a Find a Conservator tool out there to the public. But it's been interesting being able to walk some people through it at these different conferences. And then in addition to the booths, we often have members present at AIC sponsored sessions at these conferences. And some of these are because a member came to us with an idea for a session and we worked with a couple other people and put it in as an abstract request for a panel. Some we here on AIC staff have developed and then worked with members to present it as a panel. And just in the last year we've had these sponsored conference presentations again at every place we've had a booth. And there's a nice kind of synergy there when we're also on a conference program. So one thing I could really encourage everyone to do is keep an eye on other conferences in addition to the annual meeting even though I hate to say that over a month out from the AIC annual meeting. And then think about if the theme is something that relates to what you've done and then if you want to try to submit an abstract because that's the best way I think to reach people and related fields and to make sure that in all these conferences there is a conservation component. And if you have an idea and think it would work as an AIC sponsored session just feel free to reach out to me and we can see if we can get something in by the abstract deadline. And AIC can often to a limited extent provide support for this. We also have led and funds for members to present at other related organizations conferences. So again if that's something that appeals to you just feel free to reach out to us. But then again so much of AIC is its members at the end of the day. So so much of what AIC does in outreach is going to be what you all do in outreach. So I did want to make sure that everyone was aware of some outreach tools that we have available on the website. We have a PowerPoint that you can download and use and personalize to your own presentation. And a lot of people have used it and have found that it's kind of a good starting point for their own presentation. We also have brochures and bookmarks and other things that there's a very small cost to them. But honestly if this is an outreach activity that you're doing just again reach out to either lie in our eye and we'd be happy to supply people with reasonable quantities at no cost to help in the outreach efforts. And then I just wanted to touch on few new outreach projects that AIC is doing. And then two of them center around industry suppliers. And I would encourage everyone not to overlook conservation suppliers as partners in outreach. Again a lot of the end users of conservation services are also customers of these suppliers. We are working with Huntington T-Blog to create brochures highlighting conservators and conservation and they should be available soon and then they will be available to all of the Huntington blog clients. So we're looking forward to that synergy. Also at the annual meeting the long-awaited stash website will be unveiled at the pre-conference session Wednesday afternoon. And it is a whole website devoted to practical storage solutions with many different supplier companies listed. And we're looking for ways to link those companies in and then in return they'll link back to the AIC website. So that's another form of outreach. Very briefly on advocacy because I'll also be talking about that a little bit after Theresa's presentation. But AIC has been actively partnering with the American Alliance for Museums and the National Humanities Alliance for years. Many of the alerts that we send out come from those organizations. Those organizations have invested in the software where you just go to their website and type in your zip code and it will tell you your representatives and form the email for you. We also partner with them on both of their museum advocacy days that are very important for museums and conservation. We are entering into a more ongoing partnership with the National Humanities Alliance. Actually Errol Wentworth was recently elected to their board. And they are changing their focus to include preservation and conservation somewhat in part because I think they realize that in some ways what we do is more visible. We think it's hard to advocate for conservation. Imagine how hard it is to advocate for philosophy as a major or Latin or Greek on the hill. With us we can at least show it before and after. That is a little bit harder for some of the other humanities. So we're looking forward to this partnership. They also are working at the more local and national level. They've identified about 25 key congressional districts that they're forming working groups. And we are working with them to include AIC members in those areas in these working groups, which I think are going to have a big impact, especially as we look to the 2014 congressional races. I think for now I'll save a little bit of the points I was going to bring up in advocacy to follow Teresa's presentation. Great. Thank you, Ruth. So we're going to stay on the topic of ways that conservatives can advocate for conservation on the federal level by discussing Museum Advocacy Day on Capitol Hill. Teresa Meyers participated in Museum Advocacy Day with Ruth in 2011. And Teresa, thanks for joining us today and welcome. Can you start by telling us a little bit about yourself and how you got involved with Museum Advocacy Day? Hi. I'm a private conservator in central Maine. And I work with private clients as well as museums and the Motto Cap Assessor. So federal funding for museums and cap assessment directly affects my ability to get work. So the national advocacy actually does directly affect my business, as well as just wanting to support museums in general. I got involved with Museum Advocacy Day in 2011 and as a direct result of Ruth's activity, she very cleverly went through the list of attendees who had registered for the 2011 event and noticed that some of the states were completely unrepresented by any museum staff. And she sent requests to conservators in those states to represent the states. And it struck me as a really useful professional development opportunity as well as a way of supporting museums. So I thought I would check it out. I went ahead and registered and I'm awfully glad I did it. Great. Thanks. So what was the experience like? Did you get any sort of training where there are staff members around to help you? What kind of people did you meet? What kind of conversations do you have? The Museum Advocacy Day is set up very well. It's very well organized. Attendees have one entire day of education and then the second day is the actual meetings with staffers and congresspeople. So the education involves how to prepare for meetings with the representatives and senators and also what the issues are that are coming up. It's a very organized push where everybody kind of agrees to touch on just a few really important points that the American Alliance of Museums is trying to present so that it's sort of an organized front and it seems to tend to function, to focus on economic issues and funding of the Office of Museum Services and so on. So and I found that the training was very comprehensive and useful and I learned actually learned quite a lot about how congress works and how ordinary citizens can just go in and meet with their representatives and senators and give them input. As to the day of meetings, here in the state of Maine we have two senators and two representatives and so two of those people or three of those people directly represent me. And I was also at the time doing a large project for the Maine State Museum who's represented it at that time by Shelly Pingry and I had met with them before going down so I met with her on their behalf as well. So I actually ended up meeting with all the available people for the state of Maine and Shelly Pingry was actually the only actual elected representative that I met and she just gave a quick hi. With everybody else I actually met with the staffers who work with the congresspeople and those are actually the people that you really do want to talk to because they're the ones who go out and collect all the information and sift through it and basically create a brief useful report for the elected folks. So they're the ones who actually will take the time to listen and really go in depth and hear what you have to say. And for each of those people I had filled out a form looking at what their interests are, what sorts of committees they were on, how I could draw a point of commonality between the needs of the museum community and what those offices were pushing for. Can you hear me now? Yeah, great. So where did you lose me? You were filling out forms for each of the people you met with. Okay, great. The forms basically allow you to really organize your thinking on what the best way to communicate with each of the offices would be and kind of where to emphasize the points that you're trying to make. And I found that really the economic impact type statements were probably the biggest points for each of those people. We had learned a lot about the economic impact of museums and that was something that they seemed to really respond to. Did you have any sort of follow-up after the day? Well, we had been given a lot of advice on follow-up because if you can build a relationship with your congresspeople, then the idea is that when they have to make a decision about a vote and they're looking for someone's perspective, if they've already developed a relationship with you, you can be the go-to person that they would maybe call for advice on your perspective on the issue if they know that you're a source of information. So it's definitely in everyone's interest to develop that relationship. And they had talked about sending news clippings about your museum or inviting them to opening events and so on. As a conservator in private practice, I didn't necessarily feel that the kinds of relationships they were suggesting would be that useful because I don't represent an institution, but as I mentioned, I had kind of gone down hoping to represent the Main State Museum as well. So when I returned, I gave them all of that information and encouraged them to develop those relationships. And then that year, I also joined the Board of Main Archives and Museums, which is our state organization, and started trying to encourage them to get involved with advocacy on a state and national level. And within a year, we had started planning advocacy initiatives and building that in. So it's kind of entered the statewide consciousness at this point. Wow, that's great. So your involvement really helps get your whole state involved? Yeah, I would hope so. Do you have any advice for conservators wanting to participate? I think that Museums Advocacy Day is just really an incredible opportunity for learning about advocacy on the national and also the state levels. Just a real inside look at how the government works and how these decisions are made and how we can have an effect face to face. You learn about it in high school civics class or whatever, but this is just way beyond that in terms of learning about it. And it's well worth your time to learn about the ins and outs on Capitol Hill because all of the threats to cut budgets and funding really do directly affect all of us. Okay, thank you. So Rick, do you have specific suggestions for conservators wanting to get involved in Museum Advocacy Day or other advocacy events on the national level? Yes, I would just stress how important it is and then also how much you really can get out of it. So the full day of training that Theresa mentioned before you even go to the Hill is a really rewarding experience. I mean, not only do they outline the whole federal situation that year and then what the different asks are, but they also walk you through how to be an advocate, and I also think it's something that would serve people well just within their business or within their institution. So in some ways you're coming to go up on the Hill, but that training that's provided that's the day before I think can really be helpful even after you're home from Museum Advocacy Day. And then I would also say there are sort of two different types of experiences that people who go on the Advocacy Days will have. One is the experience that Theresa and I have where we're really the only ones representing the whole state. And that I think also really, to be honest, was very beneficial to AIC standing with AAM and get a lot of attention at each of the different congressional offices that we met with. The other experience is if you're from a state that draws a lot of advocates is you will be going perhaps with a group of up to 8 to 10 people. And everyone will say much less because there's a larger group, but one of the things that happens in those situations is you kind of form a little advocacy core and people keep in touch with each other after the event is over. So that's a great way to sort of also build relationships in your state. So I would encourage you when we advertise the Advocacy Days if it's something that you can do, you know, it's definitely worth the time commitment for it. I do understand that it's not a time commitment that everyone can give and certainly not that one that everyone can give every year. So some other things that you can do to stay involved in the advocacy efforts. The first and foremost that's most important is when AIC sends out one of the advocacy alerts, take the five minutes that it really takes to click on that link and then form your email at either the AAM or National Humanities Alliance website and goes directly to your representative. And I'm sorry to say that five minutes is really all that it takes because what happens is there are no points for agonizing over a well-crafted email when it's these kinds of alerts and there's a vote coming up, a junior staffer really sits and is just tallying the number of emails and phone calls that they got for something or against something. So the five minutes spent right when that email alert goes out is worth a lot more than maybe an hour spent a week later to keep to polish the perfect email. And then the other thing I would mention is if you can't get to Washington, every single congressman and senator has district offices. And go and meet with the staff at the district office, develop a relationship with them. They're local so you can invite them to events at your museum or institution or to see your lab if you're in private practice. Because they're local, they're much more likely to be able to have the time to attend. You might even think about making sure that they're on your museum or institution's list for events. And the staff in the district tends to stay a little bit longer than the staff on the hill which do tend to move in and out and move up into different positions with some frequency. But the staff in the district is a little bit more stable so it's worth it to kind of develop that relationship with them over the years. And they're your representatives so don't ever feel like, you know, I shouldn't be taking time to go and visit them. That's what they're there for. They want to hear from you. And I think if invited to events when feasible, they will attend. So in addition to advocacy days, those are a couple things that you can do. Great. Thank you so much, Ruth. And thank you, Teresa. That was really interesting. So our next speaker is Richard McCoy. Richard, welcome. Thanks for joining us. Can you start by telling us a little bit about yourself? Sure. Thanks so much for having me here. I'm really happy to be here and hope that what we've been talking about today and what we will talk about is useful to the folks that are listening. I know that along the way that I'm learning a lot myself. But you did pretty well with my introduction. That's sort of who I am. I'm working primarily now as a consultant around conservation and historic preservation projects. And I also do some program creation and curatorial work for exhibitions. And so what might be interesting is that my approach to this is that everything I do is advocacy and education. And well, maybe not everything, but I see so much of what I do as advocacy and education because I am working to advocate for what I'm doing and the importance of it so that someone will pay me to do it. And also so that more importantly, we can take care of cultural heritage. And I mean that in the broadest sense, be it for museums or for communities or groups and collectives. How's that for an explanation? That's great. Thanks. So you see a lot of your work sitting into advocacy. Can you discuss some specific projects? And how some of your ideas can get involved? Well, sure. I mean just to say, you know, it's interesting to hear Teresa talk about her work in D.C. I mean is that I'm kind of, you know, right now I'm sort of living out on a day-to-day basis because in a much smaller way in that I'm working for the mayor of a small town here in Indiana called Columbus, Indiana, which is famous for its modern architecture, post-modern architecture and public art. And so, you know, what I'm doing in this advocacy role is sort of articulating to the city government what is important about these things and then creating mechanisms and processes for long-term preservation of them. And a lot of this I would see is directly around education because if we don't understand what something is, then we aren't going to have as good opportunity to preserve it. It goes to the saying that the most dangerous person for cultural heritage or buildings is someone who has a lot of money because they may not be in a position to have to really think through what they're doing. And so, but over the years I've done a couple of specific projects unrelated to my Columbus work. I think I have some slides, maybe we could go through. One of them is this thing I created through the Indiana University Purdue University's graduates course in museum studies. So I taught there for a while as an adjunct instructor. And so we taught students how to document public art using Wikipedia and Flickr. And so the idea was that, you know, we could turn the old system of safe outdoor sculpture, which I don't know if folks know about. It was really, in the mid to late 1990s, Heritage Preservation launched a program to document every single piece of outdoor sculpture in the United States. And they had about 7,000 volunteers that worked it and they documented 32,000 artworks, all of which are now stored in the Smithsonian's American Art Museum's archives, the digital archives. And so the idea is like, well, okay, let's just do that again using Wikipedia and everyone around the world will do it. And so that was somewhat successful. The project I'm working on now, if you go back to the one that was Wiki Project Collections Care. So this is what I'm working on now. Literally right now, I'm teaching in Johns Hopkins University's online museum studies graduate program. And so in this program I'm teaching museum studies students a course on conservation. And I call it a 21st century approach because I'm doing it online. And the final project is for all of the students to make Wikipedia articles about conservation or collection care. And so we're going to have at the end of the day 19 new articles about conservation or restoration. And so I see this as a core of what education is about. And so there's a student right now writing an article about the conservation restoration of outdoor artworks. There's one writing one about books and a conservation restoration of books. We're writing about different collections roles in museums defining what a conservation scientist is, what an objects conservator, what a paintings conservator is and does. And then finally we're defining some general collections care topics. So one of the students is writing Wikipedia article on integrated pest management for museums. And another one is writing on emergency response, for example. And so those are two big projects that I'm working on now. I could tell you about the third one unless you have a question. No, but we're running short on time. So can you make it brief? Sure. I'm also using other online sources to document public art and these are things that I do for clients. And then you're making videos for the conservation reel? Sure. So I'm on the advisory committee for conservation reel which is a Crest funded project to encourage conservators in graduate courses or graduate programs and museums to document conservation practices using video. And so we've created a bunch of videos there back when I worked at the IMA about conservation. And then also some panels and so you can see there, this is a performance, if you all remember, at the opening reception of AIC last year I put together a performance based sculpture. Thanks, Richard. So our next speaker is Sarah Beck. Sarah, welcome. Thanks for joining us today. Can you start by telling us a little bit about yourself and what some of your typical projects would be with K-12 schools? Sure. Can you hear me okay? I just took myself off of mute and I want to make sure that the phone worked. Yes, I can hear you fine. Okay, good. And I'd like to echo what Richard said which is it's so interesting to hear what the other speakers are doing and really enjoying listening to everybody's experiences and I think it's wonderful that we're all reaching out to different audiences but collectively making an impact which is maybe greater than the sum of its parts which is really important. And what I focus a lot of energy on is the K-12 audience and I'm an object conservator and I'm also, as you said, an adjunct, excuse me, at the Conservation Center and I also work in private practice but where I really devote a lot of my passion is also to this K-12 audience, as I said. And Beth Edelstein and I are both co-chairs for the K-12 working group and a couple of years ago we did publish an article about the different levels of reaching the K-12 arena and sort of what that means and that was published at the Colonial Williamsburg Conference. And just briefly we sort of saw it from both a granular level like the individual conservators working with one student for instance a high school student perhaps in a science class advising on a project or working with an intern all the way up through working with classrooms like particular groups of students coming through or working in the classroom to working with teachers and then you can work at a broad level with a teacher's association. I know earlier we heard about AIC's efforts with working with other national groups which I think is a very, very important area to reach out to. And I know a lot of conservators are very interested in working at different levels, one or more, with these groups in the K-12 group which I think is really exciting. So Beth and I have really tried to focus our efforts across all of these types of audiences so for instance I've worked with one-on-one with students through the Metropolitan Museum we're no longer on staff but I do some education work through the Objects Lab there because Beth is still there full-time and we've brought students on to work on science projects there. We've also worked and done a lot of work in the classroom and you see a picture there right now in the classroom visiting local schools in the New York City area and generally that happens through like a word of mouth approach. People just hear about us and call us and we have a lot of relationships now in the education sphere and museum education as well. We also have just initiated a new activity through the K-12 group which is every year and we started last year and I have to give a shout out to Richard who is very instrumental in helping us develop this which is creating a teacher workshop at the AIC location for the annual conference. So last year we did it through the IMA and also the Local Art Teachers Association and we're working on getting that together. Oh, and you see the newsletter that just popped up on the screen that was published for the State of Indiana, the Art Educators Association there. And we're working on, excuse me, this year's Teachers Association with conservators out on the west coast. Teachers workshop. I do apologize, I'm still getting over this cold so you have to bear with me. And then finally through the K-12 group we also have, and I think this was the first screenshot, we have a links and resources page, the AIC website, so that's a bunch of broader reach and yes, great, we've got it up there. And in addition to just writing links and resources we also have an email where people can email us directly to be connected to local conservators and that's something I wish people used more and I think people, educators, we have had some requests come through and we do try to publicize this through Local Teachers Association conferences, but it hasn't been used as much as I'd like and that's perhaps a goal for the K-12 group. Moving forward is how to get the word out a little more broadly for this resource that we provide. So that serves a range of activities that we do on our own and generally do collaborate with Beth on this and some through formally through the K-12 group. But in brief I just wanted to say a couple of quick points given our experience working with these groups which is that I do work in private practice and I know it can be very hard sometimes when you're working in private practice to feel that you have the time and the bandwidth to do this kind of activity and absolutely I think that it can have great value to your private practice and I think it's not incompatible with the very practical need to generate revenue. And then I also feel that successful outreach calls on skills that have great value to them that will serve you well be it in the private sphere or in the institutional profession means things like project management, communications, public speaking. These are things that I think we serve us all well to hone and to practice and outreach certainly exercises and flexes these muscles. So I think there's these sort of other benefits that we don't necessarily articulate but I think are certainly there embedded within outreach activities. Great Sarah, thank you so much. That's really wonderful. I hope you've inspired some people to get involved. Now we've prepared some questions for all of today's speakers and we'll follow up those questions with questions from the audience if you have some time. Remember if you have questions please submit them in the chat box. And ECPN's webinar coordinator Anisha Gupta will be moderating the Q&A today. So Anisha welcome. Thank you Megan. And thanks to all of our speakers today that really started a great discussion and we'd like to keep it going with like Megan said a few questions that we have and then some questions from the audience. So just to start us out, how did you all find the funding to launch some of these great projects? I know Ruth mentioned a few of these at the beginning but in general are there places that you go looking for funding for specific types of projects? Did you want one person in particular to answer or is this a general question? Yeah sorry so I should explain this will just be more of a general discussion so that all of the speakers have a chance to jump in. Well for K-12 I can say that when we're not always compensated for our work so funding is a general question really because it can mean everything from just the supplies budget to go and do an activity all the way through compensating yourself for your time and your preparation. And in general it's sort of 50-50 sometimes we volunteer and do this and we've done it enough times that for instance we have like a corpus of materials we can just bring with us that doesn't cost anything other than time. And sometimes schools have grants to bring people in so we've definitely been brought in a grant before which is always really nice of course because you feel like you know it's nice to be compensated for your time of course that's not why we do these things necessarily. But for us it's usually the other people it's not us finding the funding it's a school or for instance a museum like classes at the Metropolitan Museum and the education department has funding for that. So I've never had to actually go out and source it necessarily on my own. Okay that's really interesting Sarah. And so do you feel like at this point you have built up relationships that you have people reaching out to you more and sort of how did you go about building that network? Yeah definitely we've built up a network at this point and I'd say on all levels some of it is really informal I have a lot of friends who are teachers and as I started to get interested in doing this kind of thing talking to them and then saying oh let me put you in Texas so-and-so I think they want to do an integrated curriculum program because a lot of what we do is interdisciplinary between art and science of course and then we participate where we can especially through the K-12 group with teacher conferences so the National Arts Association our Educators Association the NAEA they have an annual conference every year and the NSTA which is the National Science Teachers Association so it really feels important and I know this has been touched on several times but working with national groups a lot of national groups have local chapters and local conferences so that is a wonderful way to make connections and we've made a lot of connections across the country that way and I would encourage anybody who's interested I mean that's like low-hanging fruit because you don't have to know somebody personally to go and be involved in a local conference. Great thank you and so in general we're sort of touching on this idea but do any of you feel like there are are there particular ally professions that you think are helpful and your outreach and advocacy efforts so Teresa mentioned that a little bit in pairing up with the main state museum and then also working on the board of the archives but in general are there ally professions that you feel that you're reaching too often or that are particularly that have an interest in what you're doing so if not maybe Teresa you can just talk a little bit more about how your relationship has been working on the board for the main state archives and how receptive maybe you feel they've been it's actually the organization is main archives and museums so it's the statewide organization all museums and libraries and historical societies and so on can be involved with and I was involved my biggest project I guess with them was a cultural outreach project that was grant funded and we went we organized a set of workshops all around the state anyone familiar with the state of Maine will know that we're low in population and have a lot of vast relatively under settled areas so there are a lot of small historical societies really often the hinterlands that you know it's hard for the people to get the funding to drive four or five hours to a workshop have been more southern Maine so the idea of the outreach was to bring workshops out and to bring them to their communities and we were able to plan five or six last year all over the state and the program is continuing now so there's a variety of topics based on what the interests of the people in each region were expressed to be Hey Anisha I had a thought to sort of follow along with that in a certain way Sure go ahead Richard I think it's one thing to look at the why of advocacy and education and it's another thing to look at the how and so I think how to fund it or who might be available to help you out are one set of questions but I think the why is the more interesting question here and this gets to me to the articulation of the difference between the word outreach which I don't really like and community involvement and I think that I try to find projects that pay me to do things but I'm also willing to do some projects that I consider my community involvement and this is part of being just a good citizen of the community I live in and this could be my local community, my state community, or my national community and I think if we start to think about advocacy and education in terms of community and community involvement and engagement rather than a notion of outreach and I know this is just semantics but it can be a lot more significant and meaningful and I just always feel like the notion of outreach is a hand reaching down to this vast swath of unknown people but if we talk about community and engagement and involvement it recognizes that what you're doing relates to a specific group of people or peoples I think, can I respond? Yeah, Richard, that's an interesting point and, oh, no, go ahead Oh yeah, sorry, did you have a follow-up question for Richard? I just thought it was interesting, I want to respond but if you have a question, I will step down No, go ahead, go ahead I think that's a really nice point I also think, and because you touched on this, that you like to be paid for things if not, you consider it part of your, almost a social responsibility I'm putting that in your mouth, that's not what you said but I think that if we phrase it in a way you're saying, engagement and you're activating your local community in some ways that is an investment, especially for people who work in the private sector because you never know what relate, you can, oh, I mean and I hate to bring into this and I think it's much more substantial and significant but one could find a player parallel with a corporation who is going out and building, you know, or promoting their green choices I'm not saying it's greenwashing, but in a way it's investing in your local community that might serve you well down the road by generating revenue-driven projects for you and so those more active words, I think also communicate that and I don't know if that's what you mean but I do think that is embedded in the idea which I think again brings us to the point that even if it doesn't directly bring you money right away it could at the end of the day and that is important also for all of us after all we do have to pay the bills and if that's our professional for all anyway, I just wanted to add that a lot I think those are really good points sorry I just wanted to add that, you know I think there are many people in the conservation community who would give of their time until it hurts and yeah you know, giving, giving, giving, I, when I went to museums at BC Day I footed the entire bill myself and just looked on it as a professional development opportunity but as you reach out and make these connections and build the community you are also, you know, you are building your community and helping the people around you but it's all, it's kind of all built in together isn't it because as we strengthen these relationships with the people that we're interacting with, we're also putting ourselves on their radar and if you have a relationship with an institution or a community it's more likely that they will trust you and turn to you in the future so it does come back to you eventually even though in the short term it may feel like you're just giving away your time and your passion and your energy Yeah, that's a great point Teresa and to everyone and just thinking about how when you do have to go out and sort of stand up and say like what Teresa did at Museum Advocacy Day and say this is why we need funding, thinking about of course emphasizing the economic impact that perhaps, you know, if it's Museum Advocacy how museums, the economic impact they have on the government but all of these other points that we can, you know, we're also trying to make persuasive in order to obtain some of this funding to do all of these projects and so it looks like we only have a few minutes left so I think we might have to leave it there and Megan I'll turn it over to you to wrap it up. Yeah, thank you Anisha I want to thank all the speakers for sharing your projects and your perspectives with us today. I hope this program really helps inform the audience about how AIC members can engage with their community and advocate and I hope we've demonstrated some of the many, many ways in which you can advocate for conservation so thank you so much for joining us today. Have a good afternoon. Thanks, see you later.