What's Stopping us from Building More Inclusive Nonprofits?
Nina Simon ponders about the range of efforts to increase diversity, equity, and inclusion in the cultural sector. There are funding initiatives. Grassroots activism. Academic research. Conferences and white papers and toolkits and blogs. And yet, very little seems to change. The enthusiasm is high. The voices are in the room. Even people in power seem to care. So why aren’t more organizations changing?
I am a Historian I Make Exhibits
Who are exhibits for, and what difference does that make? A visual blog post.
In Order Have Social Impact, They Had To Kill The Social Impact Statement
Joe Patti discusses how the Oakland Museum of California developed and then abandoned their social impact statement.
What's Empathy Got to Do With It?
Feeling disconnected from your colleagues and staff, or even your own family? Long days of stacked meetings and pressures to innovate and pivot on a dime can do that. Turns out empathy is a muscle that we need to take the time to exercise. This article from MindTools offers some steps to follow to help (re)build our empathy stamina, including the simple act of using someone's name when you speak with them.
In Museums We Trust. Here’s How Much (Data Updated)
What role do museums play in today’s world of mixed messages and “alternative facts?” A pretty big and important one, according to research.
How Do You Track Accomplishments and Make Meaning from Them?
When someone asks what you do, what do you say? If you’re a curator, an education curator, a digital curator or museum director how do you explain your job to your great aunt or that family friend whose children are surgeons and investment bankers? And having explained your work life in two sentences and gotten a look of pure puzzlement, do you know what you actually do?
Of Pink Collar Professions and Museum Pay
Joan Baldwin discusses the recent GEMM (the Gender Equity in Museums Movement) white paper, Museums as a Pink Collar Profession. GEMM’s paper poses some complex questions about our field. Among other things, it asks whether our long struggle with poor pay has its roots in issues of deep-seated bias, in many cases, benevolent bias. And, it asks whether that bias produced today’s workforce. I suspect the answer is yes.
Take an intentional walk — and experience your community in a whole new way
Try these five strategies to step out of your routine and wake up to the life around you, says urban explorer Eugene Quinn.
The Top 20 Ways to Say What You Really Think
We all have those days that you want to speak your mind. Find out 20 tips to say what you are really thinking.
Report Identifies Barriers to Nonprofit Advancement for Women of Color
In a new report by the Building Movement Project, researchers uncovered something many women of color in the nonprofit sector intuitively know and find intimately familiar: Due to gender and race-based discrimination, women of color encounter significantly more barriers to advancement than white women and men of color.
“That Depends on How You Define It”: Reflections on Inclusivity Language as a Flashpoint in Museum Staff and Docent Development
NAEA Museum Education blog post explores how the language of inclusivity can catalyze a pedagogical flashpoint, a situation in which sociocultural differences and the structures that produce those differences erupt into the foreground of conscious thought.