In August 2018, the board members of the Museum Education Roundtable (MER) gathered for its annual retreat with an important item on the agenda. Naomi Ostwald Kawamura, Margaret Middleton, and Lauren Monsein Rhodes had requested time to consider how the MER Board, which through its outward-facing statements espoused a dedication to inclusive practice, was not embodying or enacting these values through its internal workings. They brought forth personal and structural examples of feeling that the board did not center them, or others who hold historically marginalized identities. The time allocated to addressing or begin redressing MER’s disconnect between intent and outcome was far too short to make immediate permanent organizational change. However, it did open the door to new discussions which ranged from constructive, to at times defensive and tense. Some incoming board members brought additional urgency to the discussions because they were eager to ensure that they were joining a board that they wanted to be a part of, one that lived up to the frank discussion of relevant issues—from anti-racist museum pedagogy to gender inclusivity—published in the board’s core product, the Journal of Museum Education (JME). Ultimately, this led to a critical reflection of our organizational practices and a recognition that we have not met our own aspirations in countering inequities or supporting inclusivity within our organization. Without transforming ourselves from within, our ability to connect meaningfully with the larger national and global conversations on museums would be limited.

With a true range of emotions and understanding of the issues at hand, board members named several key areas that needed attention: board nominations and recruitment; potential barriers to joining MER; the decision making process around locations for the board’s annual retreats; who writes, edits, and reviews articles in the JME; and our aspiration for an equity statement that would lay the foundation and framing for all the work to come. By the end of retreat, we had established a shared desire to move forward in the work, with a commitment to further define priorities and courses of action.

To that end, we concluded the retreat by forming an equity task force charged with taking all of these projects and making action plans. Members of this task force included Sonal Bhatt (Brooklyn Botanic Garden), Abbie Diaz (Wisconsin Maritime Museum), Taylor Jeremos (The Martin House), Naomi Kawamura (Nikkei Place Foundation/Canada), Braden Paynter (Sites of Conscience), and Emily Potter-Ndiaye (Mead Art Museum). The primary goals for this task force were to first critically reflect on the inner workings of the organization, its external communications, and ultimately consider our responsibility to the broader field. Over the course of the next year, the task force and related groups worked carefully through the list, reassessing as needed, and gathered momentum with the majority of members on the board and in leadership roles, to build towards making lasting and substantive organizational change.

Establishing a shared vision for change: Equity Statement

The task force first focused on drafting an equity statement to define terms and outline specific goals as a framework for action. Through writing the equity statement, we were able to clearly articulate our vision as an organization. The authors of this article were the initial authors of the statement, which was then presented to the Equity Task Force for review. At this time, Braden Paynter joined as a third author. Following discussions and suggestions, a final draft was then presented to the full board and adopted. We also needed a short-version to be included in external communications, most notably, the recruitment materials for new board members. Taylor Jeremos and Sonal Bhatt created that edit for external audiences, which we include here: 

The Museum Education Roundtable (MER) is a nonprofit organization that publishes the Journal of Museum Education (JME). MER is committed to the core values of diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility. We believe that as an organization, we have a professional responsibility to address the intersecting histories of oppression and resistance that shape hierarchies of privilege and power related to race, gender identity, class, sexuality, ethnicity, religion, ability and national origin and their role in museum education. We are committed to serving as advocates for these values to the wider field and through the Journal of Museum Education. 

It was important to us that the statement is grounded in our work as museum educators, and that responds to the histories in our own field that created inequity.

Building Inclusive and Intentional Community

One of our greatest challenges is in building an intentional community in a satellite organization, with members spread across the globe, and crafting organizational norms for an ever-shifting cohort of board members. In recognizing this challenge, we focused our energies internally, specifically on who serves on our board, our current recruitment and nomination process, our leadership make-up, and on our organizational culture. 

Many members of the equity task force brought strategies we use in our home institutions and communities for making social change in museums. Our process was deeply informed and enhanced by methodologies from organizations such as Race Forward, Sites of Conscience, and MASS Action. We began by adopting an “equity lens,” in particular during key decision-making points, and by increasing transparency in our recruitment and leadership succession. The Board Recruitment Task Force, led by the efforts of Lauren Monsein Rhodes, Braden Paynter, and Sarah Sims, made two important changes. One was to greatly increase the networks through which we publicize openings for new board members, acknowledging that MER’s board network is limited by the current white majority of its makeup. Therefore, we consciously reached out to organizations, educational institutions, and influencers with a wider and different reach. The other change was the development of a rubric for assessing candidates that brought greater transparency to the process of vetting and selecting board members. We were heartened that these changes led to receiving over two dozen outstanding applications for the four open positions. 

Through re-examining our processes for bringing in new board members, we felt it was also important to then review our onboarding processes. We decided revised onboarding practices would provide an opportunity to set explicit norms for the group that center equity, ensuring that the labor of equity work was neither performative nor solely the responsibility of board members of color.

We diversified the manner in which we facilitate meetings, to ensure full participation from all of our board members. This coincided with designing more moments for cultivating personal connections among board members. Practically, this means more small-group discussion, allowing for discussions to continue over email or document sharing, switching from a traditional conference call to a video chat format for meetings, and planning extra field trips and gatherings to allow board members to socialize.  And, beginning with our 2019 annual retreat, we will open the meeting and our public forum with a land acknowledgement as a way to offer recognition and respect to Native communities, to remember the histories that have brought us to our current moment, and to the ongoing realities of colonization.

We are also piloting measures that increase the transparency of our leadership succession planning. Traditionally the outgoing president, with the advice of the Leadership Team, selects their successor, who then appoints the next vice presidents. While the board has to vote to approve the leadership slate, most board members have only a partial understanding of how their new president has come to be appointed. This year, as outgoing President Amanda Thompson Rundahl began the process of identifying her replacement, she worked with the equity task force to make the nomination process more open and understood by the board membership. 

Next Steps 

Moving forward in this upcoming year, we will continue to do the internal work. We also will be expanding our efforts further outward, considering our audiences, our authors, reviewers, guest editors, and so forth. MER is also working on embedding alt text (short descriptions of images) into the digital versions of all JME articles so that we can provide an accessible experience to all readers, including those who utilize a screen reader. By working with our publishing partner, Taylor & Francis, we are now incorporating alt text into our production timeline and scope of work. We have conducted surveys of our membership that we will be utilizing to examine any barriers to participation—as a member, a reader, an author, or a guest editor—and have also formed an exploratory taskforce to identify any financial barriers for participation in MER board service. We will also continue to set aside dedicated time during our annual retreats for ongoing reflection and planning to ensure that our organization will be able to sustain these new commitments into the future.

Conclusion 

Change is an inevitable part of MER leadership. MER has fixed term limits ranging from three to five years for its board so the organization experiences an out flux and influx of members annually. However, we hope that this current organizational change will remain a long-lasting organizational commitment. We believe that transforming the culture of MER—a practice-driven organization that encourages leadership, research, and scholarship in the area of museum education—would, in turn, contribute to centering the values of diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility in the broader field of museum education. We acknowledge that there is no model or singular process that will nullify the reproduction of oppressive structures in organizations such as MER. Rather, our strategy is to methodically make equitable change the focus and goal, so that MER can become an inclusive and joyful entity that supports museum education and museum educators by seeking out and working to improve our practices, one meeting at a time.