This post is part of a series examining the concepts of the Museums & Race Report Card. This series is intended to help readers more effectively use the Report Card by increasing their understanding of each key concept in light of justice and equity work. Each post has been written by a member of the Museums & Race Steering Committee with feedback from the group.
As we enter 2025, the landscape of anti-racism work is facing uncertainty and museums face pressures to change their language and approaches. Museums & Race stands unwavering in our vision and we send encouragement to all the change-makers in the museum field who share our continued commitment to making museums sites of hope and liberation for BIPOC visitors, workers, partners, and community members.
In times of uncertainty, it can be helpful to turn to things that ground us and keep us oriented towards our goals. The Museums & Race Report Card serves this purpose for us. So, this post will mark the beginning of a new blog series that will explore each section of the Report Card in depth: today we address the topic of funding.
About the Museums & Race Report Card
The Museums & Race Report Card is designed to provide a holistic assessment of a museum’s anti-racist journey towards sustained systemic transformation. Organizations can use the Report Card to evaluate where they stand, to make goals for improvement, and to assess evidence of change over time. The Report Card covers seven categories of museum operations. For each category, it maps out stages of a maturity model (“graded” on a scale from F to A), with evidence of what each stage looks like within a museum.
What the Report Card says about Funding
The screenshot from the Report Card below shows the section dedicated to funding, including the following levels of the maturity model:
- No effort/denial (F): No funding has been allocated to support this work.
- Emerging (D-C): DEAI activities are supported primarily by short-term grants and/or soft money.
- Developing (C-B): DEAI activities are helped partially with a permanent line in the administration budget.
- Transforming (A): DEAI activities are supported primarily with operational funding and are a permanent line item in the administration budget.
The Need for Resources
A core underlying assumption for this maturity model is that change within an organization does not happen on its own; the work of structural transformation for racial justice in our museums needs to be supported financially. In many organizations, employees who care deeply about anti-racism take on the work even though it may not be within their job descriptions and often requires extra, unpaid hours on their part. BIPOC people are especially likely to take on this work—sometimes feeling forced into it by white colleagues who abdicate responsibility. This exacerbates inequities, with BIPOC workers taking on unpaid, emotionally taxing work that their white colleagues don’t do. For racial justice work to be sustainable, the people doing it need to be fairly compensated.
While every museum is different, here are some common arguments we’ve heard about why museums do not allocate resources to racial justice work, as well as some possible rebuttals to these arguments:
- We just don’t have the money: Yes, finances can often be tight in museums and there are many priorities competing for funds. It can be helpful to turn the conversation towards the impact that allocated funding will have on strengthening the organization’s mission, expanding the museum’s audience, supporting more visitors to feel a sense of belonging in the museum, and more. As the next section describes, it can be helpful to think broadly about potential funding sources if existing funders seem hesitant to fund anti-racism efforts.
- This should already be part of everyone’s job: Many museums have argued that, rather than dedicating funding or a specific position to anti-racism work, it should be incorporated into every museum employee’s duties. While this perspective can sometimes sound persuasive (and we do believe that everyone has a role to play in structural transformation), unless the museums are actively removing other duties or increasing people’s hours and wages, status quo is likely to persist.
- It didn’t work last time or we already did that: Racial justice work is hard and messy. Some museums, after experimenting with the work, have realized that it can cause discomfort—and that the work isn’t easily or quickly “solved.” Finding evidence of the positives of change (even when things may not have been completely successful), fostering a culture of healing that embraces discomfort, and clearly articulating goals and next steps (rather than broadly asking for funding for ambiguous improvement) can help address these concerns.
Where does the money come from?
Beyond whether or not there is funding for racial justice work in museums, the Report Card focuses on the type of funding that supports it. There are several factors that may be relevant to consider in this regard, including:
- Sustainability of funds: The primary focus in the Report Card’s maturity model for funding is about whether the funding for anti-racism is short-term (grants, soft-money, etc.) or a permanent line in the organization’s operating budget. Projects that depend on short-term funding spend substantial time securing the next cycle of support—time that could be spent on the actual work, instead. Short-term funding also tends to lead to shifting priorities based on funders’ interests, whereas racial justice work often benefits from long-term relationship building that responds to partners’ and community members’ interests rather than funders’ desires. One of the most effective ways of ensuring sustained funding is having a permanent line item in an organization’s operating budget, which represents a long-term commitment that doing anti-racism work is a vital component of the museum’s operations. Endowments with a stated purpose can also be tremendously powerful revenue-generators for this work.
- Source: Whether short- or long-term, funding comes from somewhere. Organizations often grapple with questions around what counts as “good money” or when it might be unethical to accept money from a source that opposes that organization’s values. Unfortunately, a thorough investigation into the background of most funding sources will uncover a complicated and/or problematic racial history. This is where transparency and accountability (other categories in the Report Card) can come into play: organizations should collectively and transparently share and discuss where money comes from and how those decisions align with their missions and values.
- Diversity: As is the case in many contexts, it can be valuable to support an organization’s racial justice efforts with a diversified funding stream. For instance, although above we discussed how grants’ short timelines can make sustained work challenging, during the pandemic when attendance dropped off, many grant-funded efforts were able to continue while work that depended on ticket revenue was cut. Museums tend to go to the same funders repeatedly—and those funders have been supporting what is now the status quo. So, racial justice advocates may benefit from finding new sources of revenue from people who are not invested in that status quo but who share in the visions of a transformed, racially just museum. Assembling a diverse portfolio of funding sources helps ensure that the work can continue even when revenue in one area weakens.
Transformative Change through Funding
Working for sustained, structural transformation is hard work and the people who do it need to be compensated! More importantly, it is imperative that organizations understand that a budget is a moral document. By transparently building a diverse funding portfolio of sustained funding and integrating this funding into lasting structures like operating budgets and endowments, museums set themselves up to continue the work even when certain trends and pressures arise that try to divert our attention elsewhere. Uncertainty and change are constants in our world but we can create structures that propel us through the change with the support we need to keep moving.
Museums & Race 