 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 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. 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 going to 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 going to be relevant to us. We think there's going to be some meaning here, whether we're going to learn, whether we're going to connect with colleagues, whether we're going to 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 going to get out of this thing? How much effort is it going to 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, you know, 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 like 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, OK, I got the information, but I'm not going to change what I do. We can laugh about this because 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 going to unlock that door. And so if we want to 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 going to get those outsiders in for that. They're not going to 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 and that our insiders love. And we're just going to 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 of 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 going to turn those into doors, and we are going to 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 recenter 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 going to 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 said 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-Suskin. 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-Suskin 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 are 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 Betteys, those cams, those community partners, hey, this is a problem for me. You have to decide, are we gonna take that cop out of the lobby? Are we gonna take off that uniform? Are we gonna change what we do to really welcome in the people we care about engaging? And I wanna 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? Wait, that's 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 Curl Doggin, 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 gotta 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 opened 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 sites 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. Thank you.