If you are a follower of our blog posts you will know that members of Museums & Race were in Charlotte, NC recently, as panelists for the annual conference for Association of Science and Technology Centers. Our session for the conference was very well attended, and we were heartened by the sense of energy among the attendees! Joe Imholte of the Bakken Museum and Allison Campbell of UMMNH who presented along with us, shared their experiences of using the M&R Report Card within their organizations. After each response from Joe and Allison, the attendees in the room had a chance to discuss the same question at their tables, and the sense of energy in the room was palpable.
Joe and Allison also received a number of follow up questions. The attendees for this session, a majority of whom were from middle management to senior staff of their institutions, were particularly keen to understand how Joe and Allison had implemented the rubrics of the Report Card, given that both of their institutions were at a different stage of the institutional DEAI process. The resulting discussion was deep and engaging, and perhaps not unsurprisingly there was a common thread to many of the questions raised during the discussion. Though the questions were numerous, many sought to understand the details of financial support, board and staff buy-in, or how Joe and Allison laid out the groundwork for this work to even begin at their institutions. Many of the questions raised were also about how accountability could be achieved or built within the organization, to ensure that DEAI practices were integrated as a part of the work culture going forward.
The follow up discussion was spirited and we would have liked more time to get into the contexts for some of the questions raised, but unfortunately the allocated time wasn’t long enough for us to have the depth of engagement which many of the questions deserved. Therefore we collected the attendees’ questions in a google form, and we will be sharing responses in a future blog post on our website here. So be on the lookout for an upcoming post here which has a more detailed breakdown on some of the queries mentioned above. We want to create a community of like minded practitioners through our work, and the resulting discussion from the ASTC conference will be a valuable way for us to find the commonalities in each other’s practice and to grow both as individuals and as organizations.
Museums & Race 