Five Keys to Growing a Healthy Community-connected Museum

This is the text of a keynote speech given at the 48th Annual British Columbia Museums Association Conference, Nanaimo, B.C., Canada, October 2004. Chew spoke of the museum in Seattle, Wash., of which he is director. The conference theme was “Connecting to Our Community.”

When I first joined the Wing Luke Asian Museum 13 years ago, the institution was a typically tranquil historical society: $130,000 budget, barely enough money in good years to support and grossly underpay two and a half staff members and cover the rent, heat and electricity. The museum had a small core of senior volunteers with a great interest in the past, but few active community connections. The Museum made do by booking modest traveling exhibitions or repackaging some key objects from the collection in the back, and by structuring its public programs around its school tour program. Sound familiar?

The Museum now has a budget of about a million dollars, 16 full-time staff, 75 to 100 regular volunteers and a live community network that enables the institution to develop what have come to be called “community response” exhibitions that speak to issues happening here and now, exhibitions that reach and echo far beyond the Museum’s tiny 7,200-square-foot space.

Having outgrown our walls, we have now embarked on a $25-million capital campaign to transform a deteriorating old hotel in the heart of the neighborhood – the Chinatown-International District area – into a new museum. The new museum will be created by preserving and transforming the historic spaces once occupied by Asian laborers of the pre-World War II era: men who butchered fish in the salmon canneries of Bellingham and Alaska and picked crops in the fields of California and eastern Washington. Buoyed by the support of the small businesses, social-service activists and residents, we are hoping – and expecting – that this new museum will draw thousands of new visitors into the area and spur new public and private investments to save other deteriorating buildings all up and down the street.

So, how did this institutional change occur? What are the philosophical underpinnings of the museum’s work? What happened inside the gallery? And how did the community come to embrace the institution? Is the Wing Luke a model that can be duplicated at other museums, small or large, in the U.S. or in B.C.?

I have five suggestions, drawn from the lessons of the past 13 years at the Wing Luke Asian Museum. A few caveats: I am not a scholar – I just acquired my bachelor’s degree in communications last year. (A long story that I won’t go into here.) I am not a theoretician. I’ve barely mastered the lingo of museology. Don’t ask me what a latrine or a mount is. Don’t ask me anything about computers. Recently, it took me a week to figure out how to pull my voicemail off my cell phone. But I do know a little something about what works and what doesn’t. And I do know something about the power of community. I suspect many of you here are cut from the same cloth, especially those of you who work with smaller institutions and those who came to museum work somewhat by accident, as I did.

Five suggestions at the heart of a healthy, vibrant museum. I hope my ideas resonate, and that they can spark further creative discussion and the sharing of stories among you all here as this conference unfolds in Nanaimo today and tomorrow.

Point one: stretch the boundaries. Two, make the institution’s programs relevant to today’s issues and needs. Three, grow your diversity. Four, allow young people to rise to leadership. And five, invest in long-term relationships.

Point one: Stretch the boundaries

As museum professionals, we are trapped by the rigor of our academic training and our love of precedent. We do things a certain way because our colleagues do it a certain way. As museum professionals, we’re precise people. The captions have to be just right, all the way down to the fine detail, even if the visitors – except for that strange guy that visits the gallery every week – even if the visitors don’t give a hoot what genus the animal specimen is or whether the vase was fired during the Six Dynasties. Don’t you dare touch those old papers in the collection without the white gloves, lest you contribute to and accelerate the deterioration of a perishable treasure. We’re so afraid to depart from norms, to make mistakes – which is why we’re failing miserably at fostering the next generation of leadership in our profession. How can you nurture young people when you don’t give them the license to experiment by you yourself daring to experiment? Why do we always have to do it the way it was done in the past? Stretch the boundaries.

Don’t misunderstand me: I love and respect tradition as much as the next person. But in a rapidly changing world – linked by rapidly evolving information systems like the cell phone and the Internet – precedents, like achievements in sports competition, are meant to be supplanted by something even better. Yes, change is good. What Ichiro did is awesome and what Barry Bonds will do next year will be awesome, too.

In the first year or two after I came to the Wing Luke Asian Museum, a volunteer warned me, in a moment of pique, knowing that I was a former community activist, without museum training: “Remember, we’re a museum, not a community center.” She and other traditionalists thought I was going way too far by allowing community elders and students to take over control of programming and to plan the exhibitions, without the proper involvement and oversight of traditional academic scholars. Others worried that we would begin placing stories and oral histories at the center of the exhibitions rather than objects and carefully researched facts. They were right to worry; that’s just what we did.

Rebellious person that I am, I went back into the collections department and intentionally began touching objects without the white gloves. In part, I did it because I wanted to get the attention of this volunteer – I was after all, the executive director, the first Asian-American director in the institution’s history, and I wanted everyone to start getting used to that change. But more important, I wanted to make the point that these things that had passed into our care – immigration papers, discarded cultural artifacts, family heirlooms – once belonged to people, were created and touched by human hands, imbued with life through the stories they told and continue to tell. As important as its role as caretaker of the stuff is, the museum has an obligation to also caretake the stories, the living pieces of our cultural legacy, memories that unite one family to another, that weave families into the fabric of community, connecting the generations. Stretch the boundaries.

Lesson number two: Make the institution’s programs relevant to today’s issues and needs

In 1992, a year after I was hired at the Museum, I began working on my very first major exhibition project, which became the model for every later exhibition at our institution. It was a project titled, “Executive Order 9066: 50 Years Before and 50 Years After” – a community-curated exhibition, created on occasion of the 50th anniversary of the federal order which authorized the forced removal and imprisonment of 110,000 Japanese Americans from the West Coast.

Over 100 Japanese Americans – representing four generations – came together to plan and build this exhibition, in the process, documenting untold stories and healing profound emotional wounds in the community. The “Executive Order 9066” exhibition challenged visitors to think about the issue of preserving precious civil liberties and freedoms during times of war. This project helped prepare our institution, in this post-911 era, to develop a number of strong partnerships among the Japanese-American community and the Arab-American and South-Asian communities, which are now living in the shadow of recurring problems of racial profiling and abuses of civil liberties.

Exhibitions, we have found, can remind us how far, as a society, we have come and how far, as a civilization, we have yet still to go in the quest for social justice. Exhibitions can and should speak to issues. At the Wing Luke Asian Museum, we coined the term “community response” exhibition. During the American civil-rights movement, African-American churches were the catalyst and conveners of the masses in the struggle to eradicate segregation. Today, in like manner, museums, as respected educational institutions, have the power to shape public opinion, promote tolerance, advocate for social justice and help improve the quality of life for community residents. We shouldn’t be shy to use our authority.

Lesson number three: Grow your diversity

At the Wing Luke Asian Museum, our mission is clear: to engage Asian Pacific Americans and the public in exploring issues related to Asian Pacific American history, culture and art. Very clear mission. But the Asian Pacific American community, 13 million strong in the United States, consists of at least 30 to 40 distinct ethnic groups, each with their own customs, language and unique history. We are third-generation Chinese with roots in peasant villages outside of Guangzhou, American-bred second generation Japanese-American survivors of the World War II internment camps, Korean-American adoptees raised by European-American families, Sikh youth searching for identity in the gudwaras, Cambodian refugee survivors of Pol Pot’s infamous Killing Fields, fifth-generation Native Hawaiians descended from the pioneer settlers who helped navigate the first British merchant ships to the Pacific Northwest over 200 years ago.

How do we represent such diversity in our programming, let alone with our staff, board of trustees and volunteers? There are vast divides we have to cross and negotiate every day to make real our ideal of truly being representative.

What we’ve done is to first recognize – and then begin to address – the need to be inclusive in our hiring of staff members and appointment of board members. Are race and ethnicity and age factors in our hiring? Yes, absolutely. How can we establish linkages to the community – and I would argue that a museum without many community linkages is neither healthy nor enduring – if the face of the institution does not represent those it purports to serve?

Take a look around you, inside your institution, then outside at whom you serve. I’m reminded of a line in a kid’s movie that my two boys – six and nine – have watched about 20 times. The movie is called “The Iron Giant,” about an indestructible robot from outer space, which lands on Earth and learns – from a little boy – the meaning of friendship, love, sacrifice and courage. In a dramatic moment near the end of the film, the boy prevents the robot from firing his powerful guns in retaliation with these powerful words, “You are what you choose to be.” “You are what you choose to be.” Powerful words.

Lesson number four: Allow young people to rise to leadership.

The Wing Luke Asian Museum is an unusually young museum. What do I mean by that? Thanks to the support of a grant from the Ford Foundation in 2001, we conducted our first official visitorship survey ever. We positioned volunteers near the front of the museum with cookies and prizes to entice visitors to fill out forms. We looked at the data. A surprising result. Forty-nine percent of our visitors were between the ages of 18 and 29. The consultant was more surprised than we were. We don’t have a marketing budget – like many of you here – and we don’t have a ton of visitors, probably 20,000 to 30,000 a year. Most of them come to the museum for specific programs and receptions. We knew, just by observation, that there were a lot of younger folks coming into our museum, many of whom were college students studying American ethnic history. The consultant told us, “The good news is that you’re clearly connecting with the next generation, something that isn’t happening at other museums. You have a bright future. The bad news is that these people have no money. Yet.”

How did this visitorship profile emerge? It really starts at the core: with the staff. About half our staff are between the ages of 18 and 29. They create programming that resonates among their peers. Because they believe in what they do, they invite their friends to visit the museum. “You are what you choose to be.”

Our young people are, quite simply, the future leaders. We develop them as leaders by allowing them to be involved in key decision-making. Over time, these youth become the personal links to older community members. They help document the struggles of their parents and grandparents and they help chart a fresh vision, uncorrupted by the cynicism of middle age. Many Museum staff who started out as volunteers and student interns have now become permanent employees at the Museum. There is a seasoned generation of individuals – now in their early 30s – emerging as leaders.

Our program director, a young woman from the neighborhood, began working as a part-time employee in our collections department while she was pursuing her degree in art history. She was very young – and very quiet – when she began over 10 years ago, and she’s still very young today, in comparison to others in like positions of responsibility at other museums. She’s not quiet anymore. Our capital campaign manager, the one responsible for helping us raise $25 million for the new museum, is in her early 30s. We formally began our fundraising efforts about a year ago. To date, under her leadership, we’ve raised $7.8 million. [$11.8 million as of 1/20/05]

The final lesson – lesson number five: Invest in long-term relationships

How long does it take to develop trust? Usually, a long time. Museums are notorious for creating token community advisory committees that lack real power, that serve to rubberstamp internal decisions that had already been made and that the institution wanted buy off on. I’ve been on too many of those committees in my lifetime, and so have you. There’s some exhibition text – or a storyline – that was prepared by such-and-such staff member or consultant. “Does that sound right to you? Did we miss anything? Are there cultural insensitivities in the use of certain phrases? Can you provide a quote or story for us to use – that relates to this theme?”

Not that I’m asking for more work. What museum director in the midst of a capital campaign in his right mind would ask for more work? But it would be nice to be given some real power, invited to participate at the very outset and not because the institution needed a Chinese American – or whatever species of person was needed to provide credibility and weight to the advisory panel. It would be nice to be valued for the other talents I potentially bring to the planning of a program or even to the strategic development of a sister institution.

It usually takes more than a few encounters, in different settings, to get to know someone well enough to open up and establish a mutually beneficial relationship. As I stand in front of you all here, I’m certainly not going to bare the most intimate details of my personal life, unless I’m a complete fool, which could mean that you didn’t pick the person you thought you picked to be this year’s keynote speaker. Not that I don’t do foolish things from time to time, but the point is that relationships are built, one encounter after another, a piece at a time, as people get to know one another in a power-sharing relationship.

At the Wing Luke Asian Museum, we look to hire people with a past track record of community involvement, strong people skills, experience working with volunteers, committees and in collaborative arrangements. These are powerful skills, as important as the academic credentials and subject expertise that those who don’t “stretch the boundaries” tend to value more. Our staff are then placed at the core of the relationship building, armed with the tools they need. They understand that the work is never done.

Can the Wing Luke model be duplicated at other institutions? Of course, it can. Some of you here in this very same room have similar stories of experimentation and success and, likewise, have become institutional anchors for your neighborhood and for your community. Some of you here – rebels like myself, outsiders who have become insiders – have taken the incredible leap of faith of moving past the physical collections and directly to the story gathering and long-term relationship building that is the cornerstone of vibrant museums. Still others of you have successfully engaged young people at the front line of your program work and have begun building a sustainable future for your institution.

My hope is that those of us who have moved into this bright new era of what the American Association of Museums has called “Museums and Communities,” can come together in these settings – whether at the Western Museums Association meeting last week in Tacoma, Washington or here in BC today– and share openly and honestly both the lessons of what we have learned and the powerful spirit of how this work can change the heart of a community.

Thank you for giving me the honor of addressing you all here today.

Ron Chew is executive director of Wing Luke Asian Museum in Seattle, Wash. He recently won a Leadership in a changing World award from the Ford Foundation.

Visit the Web for more information on Wing Luke Asian Museum.

Original CAN/API publication: February 2005