 Attendees of Pass Forward 2016, please welcome to the stage Catherine Malone-France. Thank you. The Trustees Emeritus Award for Historic Sites Stewardship recognizes success and innovation in historic preservation, management, and programming at historic sites. I am so pleased to present this year's award to the Eastern State Penitentiary Historic Site. Opening to the public for the first time in 1994, Eastern State Penitentiary has finished ambitious preservation projects in recent years and expanded its focus on contemporary corrections, all while remaining true to the uncompromising standards of this national historic landmark. At a time when criminal justice reform remains a key civil rights issue, Eastern State is the closest thing the country has to a national prison museum. Earlier this year, Eastern State took a bold and unprecedented step to hire four formerly incarcerated people to give tours and speak directly with visitors about the state of American prisons today. Eastern State actively embraces its historic significance and contemporary relevance as a site exploring complex issues with broad audiences, and it serves as a prime example of excellence in historic sites stewardship. Congratulations. Here to accept the award are Sally Elk, President and CEO, and Sean Kelly, Senior Vice President and Director of Interpretation and Public Provision. Now it's my pleasure to introduce our keynote speaker, Nina Simon, who is a visionary leader in making cultural institutions truly relevant to their communities. Nina is currently the Executive Director of the Santa Cruz Museum of Art and History, and she is the author of the Participatory Museum, the very popular Museum Point 2.0 blog, and most recently, the Art of Relevance, which she will be signing after this session. Smithsonian Magazine called Nina a museum visionary, and in 2012, she received the American Alliance for Museum's Nancy Hanks Memorial Award. She was also named one of the 50 most powerful and influential people in nonprofit arts by the Western States Art Federation. Nina's work has been described as simultaneously game-changing and utterly doable, but I think the description I love most of her work is that it manifests relevance as radical hope. Here to bring us radical hope is Nina Simon. Thank you, thank you so much for having me. My radical hope is that we can use relevance not to sell to more people, not to superficially connect to current events, but to matter more to more people in our communities that we serve. As Catherine mentioned, I run a small museum of art and history in Santa Cruz, California. We also run a couple of historic sites in our county. Santa Cruz, if you don't know it, is a community of about 65,000 people an hour and a half south of San Francisco. This is the outside of our museum, and this is what it looks like today, but it's not what it looked like when I came to become its director five and a half years ago. At the time, we had two really big problems. At the first was money, we didn't have any. The day I walked in as our new director, we had $16,000 in the bank, we had $36,000 in unpaid bills, and there was no secret check or grant on the horizon. At the same time, we had a bigger issue, a bigger gap, and that gap was in relevance. There were more people in Santa Cruz County who knew that this building used to be the county jail than knew that it was now a museum, and it had been a museum at this point for almost 20 years. And it was in the context of this dual crisis, a financial crisis and a relevance crisis, that our board was spurred to act to say we want to matter more to more people, and we're willing to make a change to do that. So I was hired, as somebody once said to me, a crisis is a terrible thing to waste, and we made very short work of using this crisis to our advantage, to radically change the work that we do, to make the museum a welcoming gathering place for our community, to say, instead of saying that we have the art, we have the history, and it's our job to share it, to say the art and history lived throughout our county, and it's our job to find it and ignite it. And we do these things so that people can bond with the people they love, but more importantly, so that they can bridge with people and ideas and cultural experiences that are new to them, and also not so they can necessarily learn and feel disempowered by the disembodied voice of a curator, but so that they can feel empowered to make art and make history themselves. We memorialized all of this in this theory of change we use to connect the activities we do to the impact that we want to have, and what's important to see here is this last statement. We changed our museum not by changing our building, but by changing its purpose, by saying we exist to build a stronger and more connected community, and we're gonna use art and history to do that. And while that's aspirationally exciting, it's frankly been a game changer for us from a business perspective as well. So in my first five years, we were able to almost quadruple our attendance to more than double our staff, more than double our budget, and to go from that $16,000 in unsure if we could make payroll to being able to build and grow our impact and our capability in our community. And what you can't see in these numbers is that those 60,000 participants, 92% of them are local, and they reflect the full age, income, and ethnic diversity of our county. We are truly representing and involving our community now in what we do. And as an executive director, of course I love these numbers, I love being able to make payroll, but underneath this growth has been a basic question. Who are all these people who are now engaged with the museum but who didn't care about it before? Are they coming because of this social experience? Is that what's relevant? Is it that we're doing unorthodox programs in unusual places with unusual partners? Or is it about the content of what we share in the museum, who we're empowering as the art makers and the history makers in our community? And it's in the context of all of those questions that I decided I wanted to learn more about relevance. I wanted to go on this quest to understand how other practitioners across the world, across our disciplines, were thinking about this question of how we can matter more to more people. And the very first thing I learned about relevance is this. Nothing is universally relevant. Not Beyonce, not the Super Bowl, and certainly not history. You know, people will say to me all the time, well, history is relevant to everyone because it tells us where we came from or history is relevant to everybody because it helps us imagine where we're going to go. Yes, history is important, but that doesn't make it relevant. We can't assign relevance to things by fiat. People choose every day for themselves what they think is relevant and what they don't. How do we make those choices? Well, interestingly, there are researchers who look at this and they've found that there are two criteria that really make something relevant. The first is that it generates a cognitive effect, some kind of aha, a meaningful experience, whether that be emotional, intellectual, physical. And the second criteria is that it requires a reasonably low effort to get that aha. So for example, we're all here at this conference because we think it's gonna be relevant to us. We think there's gonna be some meaning here, whether we're gonna learn, whether we're gonna connect with colleagues, whether we're gonna enjoy Houston. There is some positive cognitive effect that comes from this. But we're also all here because we decided that coming to Houston this week for this experience was manageable. The effort was worth it. And if this conference were happening in another city at another time, we all might not be here. We make these choices every day. How much meaning am I gonna get out of this thing? How much effort is it gonna take me to get that meaning? Let me give you an example that doesn't come from the cultural sector at all. Who here likes bacon? Come on, give it up, it's the end of the day. Great, so I'm a vegetarian and I have spent pretty much my whole adult life trying to convince my family and friends, the people who love me most, that maybe eating meat is not such a good idea. And they, right, so while there are a few clappers here, at least my family and friends have just totally ignored me. I don't know if this is happening to you as well. So you can imagine my surprise when last year the World Health Organization, you may remember this, they put out this study showing that cured meats like bacon are in the same carcinogenic category as asbestos and cigarettes. Do people remember this? Yeah, so I felt like this was a study I had seen and sent to a million people, but I had not seen and sent this to a million people because this study was the one that broke the internet and that blew up on news media everywhere because the headline was not what I just said, the headline was bacon causes cancer and people flipped out. It was all over the world media. I walked into the dentist and the hygienist told me she'd heard about this on the radio and she and her son had instantly decided to stop eating meat. And I remember looking at her and thinking, what happened here for you that has not happened in my years with my family and friends? And the answer is that this headline, bacon causes cancer is a beautiful example of fitting these criteria for relevance. It provides this aha, right? When something you love, bacon is connected to something you hate, cancer. There's a very big meaning moment there. It doesn't take a lot of effort to understand it. Of course, the effort problem comes in here when you actually think about making an action based on this information, at which point many people said, okay, I got the information, but I'm not gonna change what I do. We can laugh about this cause it's about bacon. But I would submit to you that we are making the same mistake every day in our work. We are trying to sell the meaning of what we do in our frame and we are not finding the bacon causes cancer headline that will make somebody turn around and see that meaning and that opportunity in their frame. And it's in this context that I've started to use this working definition of relevance, that if we think about relevance as a key that unlocks a door to meaning. So imagine your historic site, your museum, whatever it is that place that you love as a room. All the good stuff, the meaning, the emotional experiences, the power, live inside that room. There are insiders to that room, your staff, your volunteers, your loved members and patrons, they have a key to that room. It is relevant to them. They know how to walk up that door, they take out their key, they unlock the door, they walk in, boom, they're having that great experience. But for people who are outside the room, they don't see the meaning, they don't see the good stuff. All they see is a locked door. And it's on us to figure out how we can use relevance to invite people to unlock that door so that they can access the power inside. This has led me over the last few years to really focus on this question of how we can invite outsiders into the work that we do. I've been thinking about this a lot this year because of the election. Everybody talks about who you support, but for me, the real story about presidential elections is how few eligible Americans vote. You know, it's somewhere between 30 and 50% of eligible adults don't vote. I don't think they don't vote because they're stupid. I think that people don't vote because they don't feel like it's relevant to them. The effort feels impossibly high or maybe the meaning feels very low. I have friends who don't vote and they say it's because they don't feel like they have a choice on something that matters to them. They don't feel like their vote matters. They don't see the meaning and they're not gonna unlock that door. And so if we wanna change that, we have to find ways to invite outsiders in for their own reasons. And I think it's actually incredibly powerful that we've now had two presidents elected who have found ways to invite outsiders into the meaning of voting. You know, eight years ago Barack Obama did it with art and music. And this year Donald Trump did it with hats and Twitter. And both of these guys' campaigns were laughed at by insiders who said, you're not gonna get those outsiders in for that. They're not gonna vote because of that. But they were able to make that meaningful connection that invited people into that door. I think we have this fallacious idea when we do this work that we are going to get more outsiders into our doors just by opening our doors wider. That we have the programs we have. We have this purple circle of experiences that our insiders love. And we're just gonna open it wider and those outsiders will come in. This doesn't work because this is predicated on the idea that the room is staying exactly where it is. Outsiders aren't avoiding us because they don't know where the door is. They're avoiding us because they don't see that door as relevant or meaningful to them. In our case, our change at the MA looked more like this. We had this small institution with a small group of insiders. And we took a perfectly nice set of walls and we said we are gonna turn those into doors and we are gonna invite outsiders in. Now there's a safe side and a scary side to this picture. The safe side is this. Most of the purple circle people stayed. Most of our insiders, most of our traditional museum lovers are thrilled to see young people in the museum. They're thrilled to see people of color in the museum. They're thrilled to see the museum they care about, solvent and thriving in our community. Fewer of them left than you would think. But here's the scary part. To have this growth, we had to re-center a lot of our programming outside where we had been before. We had to take those perfectly nice walls and turn them into doors. Let me give you an example of what that tension looked like. This is a flyer from the very first pop-up museum we ever did. A pop-up museum is a museum that people make themselves. People bring their own objects on a theme. They hand write labels about those objects and boom, you have an instant museum. So this was the very first one. It was the night before Valentine's Day. The theme was F my X. And the idea was that you brought an object from a failed relationship to a bar and we had this happy hour. People wrote their stories. It was great. I think you can probably imagine looking at this flyer, how this flyer was a key to a door of meaning that many people in our community did not know existed before. There were, especially in this case, young people in our community who saw this flyer and said, whoa, I didn't know we had a museum. Wow, this looks fun. I'm gonna go do that. I think you can also imagine that we had some insiders, some purple circle people who saw this flyer and were distressed. Not just by the letter F, which I've learned is just a no, no. But the irreverence and the ephemerality of this program ran counter to what they saw a museum as being all about. And so because of this quote unquote controversy, we wrote a blog post about this and we got this really interesting comment in from this guy who said, I'm closer to the stodgy traditional museum supporter than to the audiences you're currently trying to reach. But I strongly support your outreach and attempts to involve new communities. It's precisely because of that outreach that I finally became a museum member last year. There was no reason to do so before since in this guy's opinion, the museum was doing nothing. I still have little occasion to go to the museum, but I'm willing to support it as an important community resource. I think it's so fascinating because this guy who's saying I'm a purple circle person and the museum as that purple circle museum meant nothing to me. And now I'm a supporter because you are building these doors in our community in new ways. And obviously this is the positive story, but there are a lot of other stories underneath this. Tensions that we still deal with five and a half years later into this change between insiders and outsiders as we open up. Sometimes insiders express themselves in ways that are angry, discriminatory, racist. When people express themselves in these ways, it's actually pretty easy for us. When they go low, we say goodbye. But what's harder for us to deal with actually is when insiders express confusion. I remember when we were developing that theory of change and we were talking about art and history as vehicles for empowerment. And one of our trustees said, well, I don't go to a museum to be empowered. And I had to turn to her and say, Cynthia, you're the mayor of Santa Cruz. I'm pretty sure you have a lot of opportunities to be empowered. This is the hard thing about doing this work, right? That as you are building this construction site to open the doors for outsiders, the outsiders are not there saying thank you yet. They don't know you exist yet. All you have are insiders who are saying, why did you take that perfectly nice wall and turn it into a door that I don't understand? And so we are always trying at our institution to focus on the outsiders, even if they don't exist yet. Because in our case, we found that when we built the doors, they did come and they did exist. And there are people like Jasmine Avila. Jasmine's a young Latina librarian in Santa Cruz County. This is a piece from an email she sent to our members last year where she says, growing up in LA, I was surrounded by my culture. There were constant reminders of who I am. Santa Cruz always felt like something was missing. The parts of me were missing even after living here for seven years. The maw is special to me because it fills that gap. It reflects my story, my history, and my culture. And Jasmine goes on to talk about how as a young Latina, she's found her place culturally at the museum. And when I have to decide and I have to think about and hear from insiders who are confused and unhappy and uncertain about those new doors, people who are saying, why are we doing this? This doesn't make sense for what I need. I'm always thinking of the Jasmine's, whether they exist yet or not, who are going to come through those doors and have an experience that matters for them. Where do you find Jasmine's of this world? Leave your building. Go outside to the communities of interest for you because fundamentally, relevance is not about us imagining what somebody wants or selling to somebody. It's about really empathizing with somebody's needs, interests, fears, desires, the things they're proud of, the things they're curious about, the things that say welcome and the things that say keep out. And for me, my greatest heroes are those outsiders who I have the privilege to work with as volunteers, as partners, as staff, as trustees, who help me identify what says welcome in, what says keep out. I want to introduce you to two of those heroes. The first is Betty Reed-Soskin. Anybody here know who she is? All right, yeah, you all should know who she is because she's a history hero in this country. Betty Reed-Soskin is the oldest interpretive park ranger in the National Park Service. She's probably the oldest ranger of any kind in the park service. She's in her 90s, she's in Richmond, California, and she joined the park service in her 80s to interpret a site where she had worked during World War II as part of the home front effort. Incredible woman, incredible story. But the reason I bring her up now is because Betty joined the park service in her 80s and she does something unusual which is she wears her uniform not just while she's at the park, but all over the streets of Richmond and Oakland. And Betty says, when I wear my uniform on the streets of the city, I am announcing to young people of color a career path and an opportunity that I didn't know existed till I was in my 80s. And Lord knows I don't want other people to have to wait that long to figure it out. Betty is a bridge walker. She is holding open a door and using her uniform as a key to say, come on in, this is for you too. But what's interesting, of course, is that every community is different and I want to introduce you to another one of my heroes in the park service. This is Cam Juarez. Cam works in Tucson, Arizona at Seguaro National Park. And Cam was hired as a community organizer specifically to work with local Latino communities in Tucson. And Cam said, you know, for my community, Latinos living near the border, this uniform is not an open door. This uniform does not say, come on in. And as we're working with communities in our own places, we have to find these cams, these beddies who can help us understand what says welcome and what says keep out. For us at our small museum, that has meant lots of partnerships with different people throughout our county. These are 40 of the people in our creative leadership network in our county, representatives of so many different communities. So that I know who to call if I want to understand more about what it means to be an undocumented O'Kalkan in our community. I know who to call if it's a young tech entrepreneur. And I know who to call in the bike messenger world or the farmer's market world to understand how we can invite people into the work that we do. You know, I was just in St. Paul a couple of weeks ago at a museum that had a cop in the lobby. And I asked them, why do you have a cop in the lobby? And they said, well, we've talked to our visitors and we've surveyed them and visiting families say they feel more welcome and more comfortable here if there's a cop in the lobby. And I said to them, well, you know, I know that you're interested in inviting in some other communities from St. Paul. Have you asked them how they feel about a cop in the lobby? Because things that are a welcome in sign for some people are a keep out sign for others. And I think the hardest thing to do is when you hear from those beddies, those cams, those community partners, hey, this is a problem for me. You have to decide, are we going to take that cop out of the lobby? Are we going to take off that uniform? Are we going to change what we do to really welcome in the people we care about engaging? I want to share a story of an institution that's done that in a powerful way. This is the State Library of Queensland in Brisbane, Australia. Has anybody been there? Such a big group, I would think. Okay, you should go. It's beautiful. And I was lucky enough to be there right after open. It is one of the most beautiful libraries I've ever seen. It is contemporary, white, gleaming, open plan, incredible space. And I was there because after they opened, they were working to plan a piece that they hadn't been able to open with the full library initially, which was this thing called Curledoggin, an indigenous knowledge center. And so I was there along with other designers, architects, librarians, and indigenous and Aboriginal leaders to figure out how we could build this indigenous knowledge center into this library. And we're sitting in this white, gleaming, open plan space. And the very first thing that the Aboriginal elders say is, you know, the way we share knowledge is not really around books. It's primarily through music and dance. It's intergenerational, and it's got to be colorful. It can't be so sterile and white everywhere, like a hospital. You can see librarians looking around at their gleaming library that they were so proud of with new eyes. And then the Aboriginal elders said, you know, and the most important way we share knowledge is around a fire. I don't know if you know any librarians. But they were at this moment where they had to decide, were we for real when we said we wanted to invite indigenous people to make this their library too? Or were we just secretly hoping that they would come through the doors we already built to this place that we are proud of and thank us for the opportunity to do so? And to their great credit, they decided they were for real. And they took one of those white gleaming spaces and made it a colorful intergenerational space for music and dance. And they found an outdoor space where they were able to build this fire pit. This is an international indigenous youth Congress happening here at this library because it was created to be a meaningful space for them. And so I invite you, as you think and talk over these next few days about the work you do to invite in community members to think about the room of the work that you do, to think about the doors that exist that welcome people into it and the doors that say keep out. I invite you to think about the historic doors that we've had, the doors that communicated welcome and power and happiness and pride to a particular people at a particular time, but may not communicate that to other people now in our time. I invite you also to think about whether, as you grow, you are accidentally building a motel. I see this a lot, especially in big institutions, that we end up saying, okay, we're gonna build this room and this door for youth programs, this room and this door for the archives, the development department will be over here, and each one is gonna be a different experience targeted for a different kind of person. I think these motels, I understand why they happen, but I think they're very problematic. They're problematic for visitors because we are tracking people narrowly into one narrow slice of all of the meaning and good stuff we have, and they're problematic for us institutionally because we end up in these constant battles about which room is the real room and which room are we gonna put new furniture in and which room are we gonna decommission. Of course, this isn't actually the worst thing we do. I think sometimes the worst thing we do is we paint fake doors on the outsides of walls and we invite people, we entice people to run towards them and they bang their heads and they're walking away rubbing their heads wondering what the heck just happened and we're sitting there saying, oh, why didn't they come back? Or maybe we have a door that we open just for a short period. Oh, this weekend, it's Dragon Festival. Chinese families, come in. Oh, okay, now we're closing that door. Wait till next year. Or maybe you have a door that only opens into a very narrow vestibule of the experiences that you offer. I firmly believe that the meaning and value in the work that we do, in the sights that we steward is full of richness and goodness for everybody in our community. But I believe to invite people into that, we can't be satisfied with the doors we already have. We have to be willing to look at those beautiful old walls and say, let's build a door here and here and here. And as we do that, as we invite people in through those doors, we invite them in together to a bridge space to experience all the meaning inside. And I truly believe if we can do that, if we can open these doors, we can build bigger rooms and more meaning together. Thank you. And now, please welcome to the stage our Trust Live Responders, Justin Albert, Sean Kelly, and Annie Pollan, and once again, Catherine Malone-France, who will be our moderator. Thank you. Well, we've heard a little bit from a wonderful presentation from Nina on achieving relevance at her institution, but I wonder if our other three panelists has a way to introduce themselves and their institutions. If you might talk a little bit about how your institution builds and maintains relevance. Start with Sean. Okay. Well, you already gave us a nice introduction. We, starting about five years ago, we wrote a interpretive plan that made us realize that even after partnering with artists to talk about issues around race, justice in the United States, we were silent on issues like race and the criminal justice system ourselves. And we started by building a giant graph, a 16-foot graph tracking the rate of incarceration throughout US history and fairly late in the process, made one side of that graph also reflect the racial breakdown of our prison population over time. The racial breakdown of our prison population has actually been pretty consistent. It's just the entire system has grown so much. From the graph, we built an exhibit and the building exhibit forced us to recognize that remaining neutral in some of these subjects was really disingenuous in patronizing to our visitors to say that on the one hand, there's this one thing, but on the other hand, there's this other. There are aspects of our criminal justice system that are not working and our board of directors knows it and we know it, our staff knows it. And so we finally just said, we built the new exhibit around the statement that mass incarceration isn't working. Our board of directors, to their enormous credit, began really looking at what the makeup of the board. And we now have someone on our board of directors who spent 12 years in prison himself. And this past spring, as you mentioned already, we hired four people who were recently incarcerated to tell their stories. The ethics around this are really complex. I would be happy to talk to you about it later. I know that not everyone loves the idea that we're hiring people to talk about their own personal trauma to our audience, which is mostly white. So this is tough work, particularly for the people who are staff members who have to do it, but we are getting somewhere. And until 10 days ago, I felt really confident that we're making a lot of progress in advocating for a compassionate outcomes-based set of policies in the United States around criminal justice. So we haven't given up, but I'm definitely having a sort of an out-of-body experience this whole conference talking about this stuff in light of what the America of 2016 late November. Thanks, Sean. Annie? Yeah, has anyone heard the word immigration lately? It's been five years. So the Tenement Museum interprets immigration through a tenement building on the lower east side of New York, an iconic neighborhood where waves of immigrants have passed through. And early on, the decision was made not to interpret just one moment in the building's history and not to interpret just one experience of one immigrant group, but rather take the building from 1863 when it was built to 1935 when it closed to residents and use different points at time to talk about the diverse ways of immigrants that came to the lower east side. And we're really excited now, especially because we'll be opening up a new tenement that brings a story forward, a tenement down the block that was not closed in 1935 and was there to welcome waves of Puerto Ricans, Chinese, and also refugees. And so we'll be refugees from World War II. So we'll be telling those stories. I think we also may remain relevant, not just in terms of the content that we share. We remain relevant because people like hearing the stories of people who lived in the buildings that they're in and we only tell real stories. We also remain relevant through our methodology, which is we don't have people walk around this space with headphones on. Everyone who enters the building and there's about 225,000 people go through with an educator. So the educator uses storytelling and uses even what I have started to term messy storytelling. Storytelling that's open, storytelling that's porous, having people interpret primary sources together, inviting people to share their own experiences. And so I think that storytelling, that messy storytelling keeps things relevant. And finally, and I mean, another thing about those tours is that each tour then becomes a focus group of sorts testing out that content. Finally, we're trying to invite our visitors in in a new way, not just by hearing the stories of people who lived at 97 Orchard and commenting on that and trying to tell that story, but by physically giving us their stories, not physically, but virtually giving us their stories through a website in which we invite and create programs for people to share their own immigration and migration history through objects. And the key to that is not just collecting it on a website, but creating bricks and mortar programming around it. So those are some of the things that we work on both traditional and new. Justin. Hi, I'm Justin Arben, and I got something to admit. I worked for the National Trust. And until about 10 years ago, a meeting you were working for the National Trust was an alter embarrassment. It meant you were probably over 80. It probably meant you voted right wing. It probably meant that you dressed badly and didn't bathe enough. And we were so irrelevant and this is an organization with 4 million members looking after castles and chattos. You think about the National Trust and you think boring and stiff and big, beautiful places but no soul, no heart. And we realized this about 10 years ago. So what did we do? We actually went to one of your great people, Freeman Tilden, and we sort of took him to heart and we realized, yes, we are gonna provoke. We're not going to interpret. We're gonna provoke people. And we started doing this in a small way around the Trust. 200 properties. We took one grade one list of property of immense value and painted all the walls white until anyone who came in there to write whatever they wanted on the wall. We bought and were given the Beatles houses. We started taking landscape and realizing that beauty was incredibly important to have and we interpreted beauty. So we said to hell with the big house. We'll have, we'll use the outdoors and suddenly our demographic went from an average age of 70 to an average age of 35 by concentrating on the idea of beauty and challenge. We're getting there, long way to go, we're getting there. Each of your institutions clearly has a commitment to relevance but I wonder if you might talk about a time when that commitment to relevance was tested and how you got through that. Can we start with Nina? Well, I think, I mean, any of us could say it's being tested right now. Our organization immediately, and well, I'd like to think for a minute about an example that isn't as hot as that. I guess I would say that we hit a point a couple of years into doing this work where we suddenly ended up getting a lot of critique. There we had some honeymoon time that was about like, ooh, the museum isn't dying. Somebody's going there and people were kind of game and then once people really saw, oh, it's oriented in this direction, the community building direction. It was a really interesting moment when people both who loved what we were doing and who were critical of what we were doing said the same thing, which is that museum is a community center and if you love the museum, you are thrilled about that and if you were upset about it, you thought that was pejorative and that was a real diminishment of the museum. And I think for us actually, just as that initial financial crisis gave us an urgency and an opportunity to act, getting a lot of outside critique also focused our board and staff on saying, are we for real about this or were we kind of hedging? And as we got more confident about saying, no, we're proud to be a community center, it really changed the way that we leaned into challenging situations that came up. I think about when we reopened our history gallery that interprets the county history and there was an editorial sent into the paper that said, oh, they've taken out all the good stuff and it's just victims history now and those people own the town now anyway. I just really remember this because I was out of town and when you're executive director, you're out of town and you see this email that goes to all staff from somebody saying, hey, look what was in the paper today and you're like, oh, I'm not there. But then what I saw was that email after email among staff and board was like, boy, do we wish that native Aloni people and Mexican farm workers and Chinese laborers own the town and isn't it great that we have created a place to empower these stories that weren't told previously? That's what we were trying to do. We must have achieved that. But I think that even though we all say critical feedback means you know you're actually having an impact, we don't like it when it happens. And so I think that we had to learn to when that happened, see the power in it and not see the pain in it. Right. So Sean, you've introduced some really new things at your site. I mean, I wonder, has there been any testing of your commitment to relevance? To the degree that we have, you know, the fact that I can't give you a better answer to that makes me wonder if we've been trying hard enough. I don't have a specific example top of my head at a moment when I thought our relevance was tested. I think it takes a long time to find your voice and it took us a long time to find our voice. I was pretty convinced that our audience didn't want to talk about criminal justice policy and didn't want to talk about, our audience is mostly white. It's a leisure audience. You know, they're traveling. They're mostly tourists. The vast majority of our audience, 75%, are tourists of Philadelphia. They're seeing us, they're gonna go to the Liberty Bell next and they'll be in New York by dinner. And I was convinced that they didn't want to talk about race in the criminal justice system. And I was just wrong. You know, I look back at the times when we've not made bold choices and honestly, as often as not, it was my voice. Or it was my voice predicting the pushback we were gonna get either by this phantom visitor who definitely shows up. Like there are knuckleheads out there who show up and say obnoxious things, but really rarely. Or the board member who is gonna have a real problem with this. You know, and I think it takes some effort to realize that, you know, that to snap yourself out of that. And I think maybe we haven't done enough. Our attendance has grown enormously in the last 10 years. We've, we're 400% growth, four times the size. We were 10 years ago. And there was this real moment when we built the graph. When we start talking to every single, every visitor experiences that graph, bring a second grade class to Eastern state. We're gonna ask why are there racial disparity in the prison population in the United States so stubbornly consistent, even as the entire system has grown so much. You know, there was this moment when I thought if our attendance begins to drop after all these years of growth, then we're gonna have a real moment to decide whether we want relevance or whether we want reach. You know, like how much do you pick your battles? And I'm sure there is a moment in which the one really would begin to affect the other. But we haven't found it yet. And I think, I don't have a great answer for you. I think the fact that I don't have a great answer probably shows that we should be doing more. Annie. I think relevance is tested every day. I mean, I think that on a very basic level, what we try to do is elevate the stories of ordinary people in order to inspire connections past and present so that when people visit and they hear the story of the Irish and they hear the story of how the Irish experienced nativism in the 1860s or the 1870s that they, that they're able to make that connection to today and think about being welcoming to new immigrants who arrive, but that doesn't always happen. And further, that tests our methodology in the sense that we aim to create a safe space for people to have a conversation. But in doing so inevitably, you're also creating a safe space for someone to say something that is intolerant and runs counter to the mission. And there's no answer. There's no way to do that. But I think that keeping that tension alive and figuring out how to deal with it means that we're trying to get that process of relevancy going. Right. Justin, what about yours across that portfolio of sites? It's interesting. We have a dichotomy and we haven't worked it out. We're still figuring it out. On one side we want our places to be places of sanctuary, spiritual release. So the opposite to a hospital where you have, you know, you break your arm, you go to the hospital, but you want some kind of spiritual release within this chaotic, messed up world, go to these places of beauty. On the other hand, we are the largest conservation charity in Europe. Four and a half million members, we have a real clout politically. We never used it. We used it two years ago. And it had a ramification on how people perceived us. So there was a moment about relevance. Were we right to do it? We're now deciding now with Brexit. A, quite frankly, disastrous decision to leave the world and think that we can make China British again and keep the British flag in India going. And the same crisis you may be having in America. What's the role of a heritage organization in interpreting a mood of a nation? And that's where we're struggling right now. At the same time, we have to give these safe places of people to come to and escape from the stuff we're having to deal with. So I don't have an answer either, but we are struggling with it at the moment. I'm thinking about Sean, what you were saying. And one of the things I really learned in talking to people in writing this book was that I think we often think about it in terms of we have a neutral state of what we've always been doing and then we could be more relevant. And I think that when you think about outsiders and the reason they're not coming, it's because they perceive that neutral space as either not relevant or potentially even offensive. And I just think about how many people I talk to, specifically about historic houses where it's particularly young people of color going to historic houses in the South and saying, how can they not talk about this aspect of the history of this place, which by leaving it out, they're not only being less historically accurate, but they are not being relevant to my experience. And I find that offensive. And I think that similarly, Eastern State historically, there was this idea that it was entertaining to come to see this prison where these historic kind of bad boys of history had been housed. And that is relevant for somebody who wants a novel entertaining experience, but it could be seen as missing the mark grossly for some people for whom I'm sure what you're doing now is newly relevant. So I think that you may be doing that shifting of who those people are as you are expanding relevance in a different direction. Yeah, Jess. Just once more to the granular along that line, we have a house called Penrin, which is a century house. I mentioned this morning it's 162 rooms, a vast place. No one locally would go there. It was built from slave money from Jamaica. Then the family moved to Wales and they took over the slate mines. And there was, I think it was the longest, most brutal and bloody industrial action we've had in Europe that happened 120 years ago. We couldn't get anyone there. But we did in the end, we did it by making it relevant to our language. I'm employing people locally. The great granddaughter for the head of the strike came along there. And giving the place back, there's now the single biggest success story we have almost anywhere in Britain is that this house that was the house of hell coming back and being owned by that community. Now as a tourist, if you as an American, as a Frenchman going there, you will still see the beautiful paintings and the stunning stuff. If you're local, you'll see a different interpretation like the Holocaust Museum in Washington, the Great Museum I think around there. If you're under five foot, you have a different experience than if you're over five foot. And we do the same thing, two levels of interpretation that keep it relevant for two different groups. So some of you have talked about increases in visitation and in changes you talked about your budget and things like that. I mean, can we measure relevance? How do we measure relevance if we can? I mean, what are the, are there metrics that we use or is it something else, something less quantitative? We were talking about this earlier. Actually preparing for this, but Amy and I really got into this earlier, Annie and I really got into this earlier. My name is irrelevant. Yeah. Fair. That was very fair. I'm of two minds about it. I mean, if you're not wondering is this work, is this work worthwhile this week, then you're just, I mean, you're different than I am. But I wonder like, why are we doing this and is this work? But this was, we were talking about doing this, you know, six months ago, about now that we've built this exhibit, now that we've changed our board of directors, now that we've changed the kind of voices that we're putting forward, so what? So it doesn't work. And, Annie was talking about whether or not what we're doing can be measured. And there's something about that, I still feel like there must be some way to measure something. But maybe not. I don't know. I don't think it's either or. I think there are certain things that can be counted that give us ideas of things. But I think that, I think the quote, Einstein is attributed to saying that everything that counts can't be counted and that everything that counts counts, something to that effect. But that there are these things that are intangible that motivate us every day to do our work. And sometimes that's seeing a comment that a school child says at the end, smiles of children, also tears from people. So there are sometimes these emotional reactions to the work that we do that we know that we're important. And I don't know how to measure that. And to me, that has been what has always kind of mattered. But I think that there are other things that can be measured. Attendance is one of them. But I guess I've also found that focus groups where you're sitting down with people and you're talking about things. And when you can let focus groups and what you learn from visitors go back and influence the content that you're presenting, that's not quite the same thing as measurement, but it's trying to bring in the outside voices or the inside voices even into the content that new people can experience. But I don't know that it's either or. I think there are some things that can be measured and some things that can't. We tried, for years, centuries, it seems, every time you leave a property, you're given a form and you'd like it very much. And it had no relevance to the experience at all. So what we tried to do is figure out what we wanted to achieve. We want people to come, they want to move, we want to teach, we want to inspire. Those are the three matrix we want to do. And what we're trying now is focus groups. So we're going around the country and doing random focus groups just to give the various properties an understanding of how well or bad they're doing. Not, I say, a way to moderate, but just an indicative way. Are they engaging? Well, is a service culture there? Is there relevance in the experience? And I'll share the research with you. It's quite a wide-ranging two-year experiment in asking people about the experience. That isn't exactly that question. Is it relevant? Nina? Yeah, we're kind of research-obsessed at our organization. And I think there are two pieces. One is, for us, the things that we measured to what Justin was just saying, we looked at our theory of change and said, okay, this is the outcomes, this is the path we want to see happen. We're only going to measure this. We're not going to ask you if you liked it because enjoyment's not on here. We're not going to ask you what you learned because learning is not on here. But we are going to find out, are you feeling more empowered? Are you bridging socially? And so then we said, how do you heck do you measure those things? And then we discovered, okay, we need to talk to, in our case, social psychologists who have been studying for years how, what are the indicators that lead towards feeling civically or creatively empowered? What are the indicators that lead to building cross-cultural bridges? And it actually was easier than we initially thought to be able to develop surveys to these more atypical for a museum outcomes because social psychologists, somebody is studying, whatever outcome you want, somebody is studying it somewhere. But you asked about measuring relevance and because I've come to really use this doors and keys metaphor, I actually really think about measuring relevance in a pretty concrete way, which is the first step is attendance because did you walk through the door? But then the bigger question is, did you unlock meaning? So did the, and for us, that's about after that first experience, what did you do next? Did you get more involved with us? Did you get more involved with somebody else in the community? It's obviously pretty hard for us to track if you came and you connected with somebody who was doing this poetry for incarcerated people project and then became a volunteer with them out in the community. It's easier for us to track if you became a member, a volunteer, a participant at the museum. But we do look at that sense that that first time in the door, you are personally deciding, I think this is relevant to me, and then the question is, did we put enough welcome mats and enough opportunities for you to find meaning there or did you hit your head and walk away and you're not gonna come back? Right, yeah. Nina also spoke so eloquently about removing barriers and that as part of relevance. So I wonder if you might each talk a little bit about removing those barriers at your institutions. What barrier you might have removed and feels most significant? I'll jump into this here. In two things we did. One, we took away thousands of miles of ropes and we burnt them in a bonfire. Thousands of miles. And secondly, we realized that if you have a house or property and we're blessed in Britain because we have land around it, 100,000 people can go to that property but that's the limit you can go in. Another 400,000 can go to the landscape around it and that broke down the community barrier and the age barrier because there is a block if you go to a historic house. No matter how hard you try and interpret it and put spray paints and neon and dancing dogs and shit like that, they're not gonna go in there. But the outdoors and the paths, the interpretation certainly opens a door to age, culture, and that's what we've done. That's where we've seen our membership go from a million to four and a half million from 10 million visitors to 120 million visits a year. It's been the outdoors and opening up and saying you don't have to like the places but come and see the beauty of the outdoors. I think sometimes people think our educators are barriers in the sense that people have the expectation of walking through a museum without accompaniment. And so when they first arrive and they learn that their ticket means they have to be in a, they can't do that, they can't have that freedom, they can't look at the whole building. At first that's viewed as a barrier but then the experience of being in a group of strangers with an educator actually serves to open up more doors. And I think another way to think about barrier is that even as we're opening this new exhibit this summer that's going to take us into the mid to late 20th century that's still finite, that still ends. And the story of immigration and migration continues and there are way more ethnic immigrant, migrant groups that we can represent in any of the buildings we have. So in some ways our greatest strength, our buildings are our barrier. Our site specificity is a barrier and so we're experimenting with that now with this New York story, our story website. But to get a website, this is a website and how many museums have started websites to create user generated content and it dies out within six months when the funding is gone. But we're really trying to kind of break through that barrier and create something that is generated and keeps building excitement by creating programs and partnering with other museums across the country and hopefully other trust sites. And please talk to me if you'd like to partner to create the programs that have people share their immigration and migration stories and make connections between past and present. So sometimes barriers are also strengths when you can around them. Sean? Well, I was bragging a second ago about how our attendance has grown. The easy answer would be to say the big barrier for us was we weren't open enough and we're now open 361 days a year and we have really tried to think about the first line of our mission statement is that we're open to the public and so just taking that very literally. I mean, I don't have the language to talk about this in a way that will sound graceful so forgive me if I don't have the right language for this and I mean this with all respect. Our audience is mostly white. The subject we're talking about is a subject that affects people of color more directly than it affects white Americans and it simply is the truth. I thought that as we continued to grow and as we began to tell a more like dramatically more complex story about exactly what the causes are or not, I mean we don't get into what the causes are but we certainly try to host a conversation honest conversations about what causes are of the extraordinary number of people in prison in the United States and the racial disparity within that population and especially with the kind of voices that we've been trying to bring forward. We had this whole discussion about why do people of color not visit us more and we actually got a grant at one point we're gonna try to do this marketing campaign as we open this new exhibit about mass incarceration and the more we thought about it, the more we thought like so we're gonna go what to church basements and be like, hey, built an exhibit about prisons thought of you guys. Like we decided that that was really insincere and patronizing in that the work was gonna speak for itself and that we would have to change the nature of who we hire and who runs the organization and that over time it would take care of itself. It is not taking care of itself, it's getting worse. Our audience is actually more monolithically white now than it was three years ago and for a while I was saying, well it must be because that our visitors are mostly tourist to Philadelphia and tourist to Philadelphia are mostly white and then it turns out the more you dig into that that's not even clear that's true. People who stay at hotels in Philadelphia are mostly white but does that mean it gets very complicated but I gotta just say that being asked to talk about when we knock down a barrier, I feel like this is a barrier that we simply can't get at and that it's getting worse in a way out of the very moment we wanna make ourselves relevant to a part of American society that is most heavily impacted by this somewhere in the messaging somewhere and maybe I'm the wrong person to be sitting on the stage trying to deliver this message maybe that's part of the problem but there is something about some very stubborn barriers and it can't be the only one in this audience who thinks that it's harder than it seems and so that's it I guess well I would say that's the barrier that has been the most stubborn and that we are still really struggling with. To add to that we have a barrier and that is the cost of admission so our ticket prices are in my opinion high I mean the market bears it out and people will pay and we depend on that money to stay open but one way we've worked around that is to try really thoughtfully to create programs to offer tours to communities who couldn't otherwise afford it and so that's working but then the other issue is how do we bring these different sectors into conversation with one another too. You know to that one of the policies that has been simple but helpful for us in that way and it works because we're small is a policy called spontaneous free so we have a policy that if you come in and you take out your wallet and you're ready to give us money we're gonna take it but if you come in you're kind of like what is this building, what's going on here? Our frontline staff are all trained to say oh have you ever been here before? Welcome, come on in, be my guest, enjoy the museum, let me know what you think at the end and I learned this from a librarian friend of mine who said the best way I can make a library patron for life is to waive their fines and he said by turning something that's seen as a means test or a stress moment into a gift you're changing the relationship that happens and we've tried wherever we can to use the fact that we are small and kind of grassroots to do things that would be impossible if we had a million visitors a year if we had very structured tour system but where we can be informal and be flexible so that we can play with those barriers in ways that may be kind of on a more grassroots level. We definitely try and make sure that within our urban properties if you live within that postcode you'd never pay to come in so that within four or five blocks around them for five dollars a year you have a pass that gives you access. It kind of works but also kind of makes it too exclusive but it does mean that there's more accessibility. Right. I wonder to finish up when we just have a few minutes left to go back to where I started with Nina this idea of relevance and hope and how do your places bring hope? How do they through their relevance bring hope? Annie? Well, I've shared the story a couple times this week already but we had planned an event for Wednesday evening right after the election to celebrate great women in history. So clearly we had- How did that work out? Well, I mean, so I have to say and none of my staff had slept that night and everyone comes over and we really do this and I had even made a joke the week before that if Trump is elected we're just calling this off but we didn't and we had a professor who discussed Shirley Tism the first African-American congresswoman. We had Bella Abzug's daughter, Bella Abzug had been the I think the second Jewish-American congresswoman and Geraldine Ferraro's daughter, Donna Zuccaro was there and the conversation was amazing because at the end of the day these women are still there. These women that we could look up to are still there to inspire us and more importantly the people in the audience people who came needed that. I mean, and one woman in the audience who was, you know, she raised her hand and she spoke, she said, I'm Asian-American and I don't feel welcome in this country based on what happened and everyone of course reassured her and there were other moments like this but I think to be able to create safe spaces for people to think and for people to reflect and for people to learn from one another's experiences that I know, Sean you don't wanna hear this again but in some ways our work is more important than ever because it does sound trite but I do try to think about the amazing opportunities we have with these vessels of history that in these, our vessels, our buildings have withstood many, many different elections, many different regimes, many different walls to immigration in the form of laws and other things they've survived the trauma that people brought to them so our buildings in many ways can perhaps serve as safe spaces in this time of real question about American identity for hopefully people of all different backgrounds and thoughts to come together and have conversations so I guess that's the kind of the hope that I have going forward. We're really out of time but I'd love to bring it back to Nina for one more thought on that idea of relevance and hope. For me the radical hope comes in the social bridging and in the opportunity for people to have a real encounter with somebody who's very different from them whether that be a wealthy woman in a homeless guy whether that be people across cultures we hear again and again from people that that's the most powerful thing that's happening for them. I'll also say for our institutions and maybe this is my management hat on to me there's huge hope in the fact that while some people might see as what we did as risky we have access to more money and more power because we are being a community builder and because we are relevant in a new way than we were when we were a traditional museum and I think that often when we talk about things like community engagement it's seen as all risk and all cost and in our case it has been risk but it's been extraordinary in terms of what it has unlocked for us to write our future as an institution that can lead change and community relevance in Santa Cruz County. Perfect, well thank you all for a very hopeful conversation I think and Annie, I'm not Annie Nina will be signing her book The Art of Relevance which is fantastic I think we've all read it on the panel and loved it she'll be signing her book right after this here so thank you all. Outside. Bye.