By Rita Deedrick and Walter Staveloz 

MuseumExpert.org is a community of people who are passionate about museums, value one another as the essential connection between museums and communities, and want to make a difference in their organizations so they can better serve their communities. Conceived in 2020 in reaction to the COVID-19 pandemic, MuseumExpert.org is an all-volunteer, not-for-profit organization that invites and welcomes “museum people” from all types of informal learning environments, in all kinds of roles, and with every level of experience. In its brief existence, MuseumExpert. org has reached nearly 3,000 individuals through its online programming including monthly webinars and e-newsletter. As a grassroots organization, we are able to access a wide range of real, lived experiences in order to provide informed reflection on the museum field’s organizational practices. We recently sat down together to discuss how MuseumExpert.org is addressing contemporary issues for people working in and with museums and other informal learning environments. 

Rita Deedrick: What is the MuseumExpert.org origin story, and what are some things you want people to know about MuseumExpert.org? 

Walter Staveloz: Along with the fact that it’s a volunteer organization, it’s important to know that we are not funded by or affiliated with any single organization or entity. Because of this, we are able to bring everybody to the table and the only thing we ask is for people to say their opinion and to share with the rest of the field. 

RD: So how did it all start? 

WS: There are two aspects to it. The first one is personal—I had lost my job eight months before the pandemic started because the priorities of my employer changed. It was not because I had done something wrong, the circumstances changed. So when COVID hit, I felt the pain of the people who lost their jobs. They were in the same position as me, out of work for circumstantial reasons. They were good people. They had not done anything wrong, but suddenly this thing happened and people were without a job with no time to react to the separation. So I felt some personal connection with that situation. 

The second thing is that in speaking with a number of people who remained in museums (during the pandemic) I found that they had to do all kinds of things to keep the doors open, things that were beyond the reach of their expertise and that of the staff that had been kept behind. There were vice presidents doing ticketing at the door, you know, things like that. 

RD: Yes, I remember in one of our webinars talking with an HR director who had to feed the giraffes at his zoo! 

WS: Right, so I thought there was a sort of discrepancy — we have all these skills and competencies of people who want nothing more than to go in and help, and then we have those who are still in the museums just trying to keep things running. I thought we could create some kind of platform where these people meet each other, a kind of dating site where people out of work could meet those who needed help. It was not necessarily about finding jobs, but about helping out in the short term. 

RD: We’ve used the dating site analogy before, but it just occurred to me that we really were just trying to get 

people to “date” and not necessarily “get married”. That’s what made MuseumExpert.org different from existing job search platforms. 

WS: Yes, so if a museum had some type of temporary need, they could go to the MuseumExpert.org website to find someone with museum experience. 

RD: In some ways 2020 seems so long ago. Did you envision MuseumExpert.org being what it is today? 

WS: First of all, I did not necessarily think that it would go beyond the pandemic. Also, I think we overestimated the need for museums to go find people for temporary help and underestimated the technical difficulties of making a platform that would work well to spark the connections. 

So these things together – to be totally honest – I did not see. While the original idea itself did not work out so 

much, what did work out was that a lot of people gathered around it because there was certainly the need to have conversations that were not being held anywhere else, or were happening like once a year at a conference. So that was a platform we could create where at least once a month people could go and find some inspiration about a number of ideas. We tried to “walk on two legs,” one was helping people to get back into the workforce with tools they could learn and use, but at the same time, to think about what was happening in the museum field. We began to ask, what changes does this (pandemic) trigger? What will museums look like after the pandemic? How can we help you prepare yourself to go back to the field? We wanted to be clear about what changes were happening so people could fit into new situations. Over time, that aspect has taken on more importance than the original one. I did not expect us to be identifying the big problems in the field. We moved from how to help people go back into the workforce to helping individuals envision their roles in a changing field. 

RD: I know that we had at least a handful of successful dating stories, but MuseumExpert.org quickly became something very different. At first there was such a sense of urgency around things, but now we’re able to sort of breathe in what’s happening in the field and develop programming around that. So let’s talk about the state of the museum field. What do you know now that you wish you had known in 2020 when this was all coming together? 

WS: That we needed to add another dimension. During COVID, although they had a lot of trouble, museums started some new practices that were imposed by the situation and by the communities where they were located. They were actually reflecting on conversations that happened before (the pandemic) but it took a situation like COVID to move forward. People saw more and more museums as having a role in the community, not necessarily as a unique educational role, but by providing comfort to the community. For example, people who could not get to school and had no computers at home could attend online lessons housed at the museum. Museums used their maker spaces to create masks for people who worked in health care. Was that a role for a museum before? No, but that was something that appeared. Museums were seeing this reality of their community, something they may have seen before but not acted upon. I thought how is that going to be maintained? How are we going to say this is now a given for us, something that we need to continue doing? Then, unfortunately, what I’m feeling is that was a moment that is now fading away. 

RD: Museums saw very personal needs and reacted. The origin of MuseumExpert.org was really on that personal level. To go back to that for a moment, we’ve heard a lot of stories from a lot of museum people over the past three years. What about those stories sticks with you the most? 

WS: What sticks with me the most is that people are passionate about the work that they do. In their minds, 

working in a museum is an important place to be, to deliver something that is important for society in general. When you are in a situation where your creativity is not recognized, where you’re not associated with the

conversation about how you can do your work to the best possible extent, or where you’re not associated with decision making on the next steps for the museum, you create a situation where people are feeling abused. I think that is what bothers me the most. People who have ideas and can be creative are not in the position to actually contribute to the conversation. 

RD: Yes, and I’ve seen passion colliding with this new realization that there is life beyond work and people struggle to blend these together. They ask if their skills are being used appropriately, but they also ask if they are being taken advantage of. How have you seen this change over the past three years? 

WS: Things were very diffused and confused in the beginning. People were feeling unhappy about their situation but may not have been able to define it clearly three years ago. People didn’t feel okay, but they blamed COVID. Now they don’t feel okay, but they understand that it’s not only a temporary disruption. They now recognize that there are problems (beyond COVID). The thinking and programming that MuseumExpert.org has been doing have enabled us to achieve a level of understanding of what’s going on in today’s workforce. 

RD: We’ve talked a lot about community in MuseumExpert.org. In fact, it’s part of the mission statement. I want to visit that a bit during this conversation. What does community mean to you and what does it have to do with addressing these issues, these workforce issues in the museum field? 

WS: Yeah, it’s very complex. 

RD: I didn’t say it was going to be easy. 

WS: When we think about situations in global terms, we see contradictions between ideologies and political points of view. There’ll always be contradictions on the community level as well. From my point of view, when an organization says it has a role in the community, it needs to make choices about what it is that it actually supports in the community. That is not what we normally do because it’s tough to process. I think that is one of the reasons it’s so difficult for museums to play a role in the community even though they say that they want to serve the community. 

It’s not that easy because there are so many contradictions that are not recognized or just left at the side. 

When we want to build a community in the workplace, we also have to make these choices about what that means for us. The best example of this topic is, of course, inclusion and equity. The fact that we must be inclusive is absolutely clear, yet we hear many of our people in webinars saying that it’s going only to a certain level. Do you really change the policy of your institution based on new voices that have come in? It is really a tough question, and my position is that building community means recognizing the contradictions and then opening the conversation about that— not just ignoring it. 

RD: I think that’s an interesting perspective. Community building is hard work, whether it’s internal or external. Do you think that museums have the capacity to do this work? 

WS: I’m going to give you an example why I think that’s difficult. When I think about climate change, conversations are very limited in the museum field to things that relate to mitigation and resilience, not so much about who is responsible, who is actually doing what, and what should actually change. Who are the people continuously putting money into denying climate change? When museums speak about climate change, they speak about mitigation and how to adapt and not about the causes and the responsibilities. On the other hand, you have the Climate Justice Alliance Black Caucus (1 https://climatejusticealliance.org) who are working on climate change. First they focus on the role of colonialism, then they inform on the role of imperialism and then on the oil industry. They want to go to the court. I have not seen any program where museums bring that voice to the table. It looks to me that museums are like the activist who take a private plane to go to the COP28 in Dubai (2, CGTN.com). 

We speak about museums serving external communities, but the reality is that root causes are not addressed properly. We saw change during COVID – this higher responsibility toward the community and serving people who usually do not come to the museum. How can museums learn from that to shift the demographics of their visitor base? For me, one of the biggest mistakes is that while we have seen this dynamic going on, and we have seen what was working, museums are now holding back, not bringing together programs that actually address these (new audiences) directly. Museums say they have to build on the traditional visitorship, which is another way of saying doing business as usual. 

RD: It’s as though we keep treating symptoms without acknowledging the disease. It feels like so many organizations are in a constant state of urgency. How can museums find it within themselves to pause long enough to do the work to get to that core of the problems? 

WS: That’s where we come in. We have no agenda for any of the different components of the institutions. The only incentive that we have is we believe that museums are important and that they can play a role in the communities where they are. One of the things that they need to do is have the difficult conversations first. To be able to serve the community in the right way, they have to recognize the contradictions that are everywhere, outside and inside the institution. And that contradictions are not there to be conflictual, necessarily. They are there to clarify what your mission is and where you want to go. So we believe that for whatever reason, there are obstacles within institutions that prevent open and fruitful conversation on these issues. We understand that there are financial burdens for institutions. We understand that it’s difficult for CEOs to deal with the new hybrid careers that people want and all of that. We understand, but that cannot prevent the dialogue with people and listening to the complaints and the wishes. MuseumExpert.org sees the need to be a catalyst to bring institutions into dialogue with themselves. I think that’s what we can do because of our exclusive position. 

RD: So what’s at stake if things don’t change within museums? 

WS: One model is that museums continue to be places where people go and have a good time and then they go home. They will see dinosaurs and scientific phenomena and the fantastic paintings. We will always have content and people love the social experience of doing things together. After that, what do we have? We say museums are important, but we don’t use the importance of museums to actually make change in communities. We pretend to, but we don’t give ourselves the tools to do it because we are afraid that whatever we come out with, there will always be someone who is going to disagree with it. And then we think that we are right when no one disagrees, but that’s not true. No one disagrees when we have a very low level of discourse when we address big issues in a very deep way. 

An example is the recent PISA figures— whatever we have been doing in science museums, it certainly isn’t a lot better. The OECD publication on International Student Assessment shows recent lower achievement in many countries (3 Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development). Learning and especially informal learning is a social process. If we do not address the families, the situation of the families, the social issues, and the social fabric in which they operate, they will not be successful at science. If kids are not supported by the family and their community, and if you do not work with that community to make that happen, it’s not going to happen. So you need to change your vision, the message that you carry out there about who you are, who you are addressing, and why you are involved. If we think that we can just go forward with the people who already visit us, we will stay where we are. 

RD: Let’s take a few minutes to talk about what MuseumExpert.org is doing programming-wise and how we think that will bring some of these issues to the forefront and maybe even effect change. 

WS: Museums will not be able to address these critical issues in their communities if they don’t have motivated teams inside of their institutions. The motivated teams inside of the institutions can only be created if people feel that they are respected and that they can develop and advance when they work in a museum. On the other 

hand, if they have a feeling that whatever it is that they do doesn’t help, then nothing is going to come out of that. 

Our Community in the Workplace series that started last November began by discussing workplace issues that are universal so that museum people know they are not alone. You’re told that there are problems in the workforce. There is a problem with culture in the workplace, and that is true for many, many nonprofits and beyond that. So that’s one thing, but we believe there are solutions. There is a way to bring conversation into the culture to address these issues. 

Our objective is to fine tune issues to what is happening in museums and explore barriers that exist to overcoming the issues. Perhaps then we can suggest a number of very practical steps forward. We want to actually facilitate this rebuilding of a healthy culture in the workplace. It’s a big ambition, but if we stick to that program and we clarify the purpose, we can build from there and become a resource for museums. 

RD: And speaking of building, what MuseumExpert.org needs is the community of museum people to support this work. We’re volunteers and we each have some expertise, but we don’t know at all. So how can people get involved with MuseumExpert.org? 

WS: The first thing is that we want to hear from museum people. We are at the stage where we have set a

framework for conversation and now we need contributors. If you think that you can contribute with your story, with your opinion, we want to hear from you. Bring that to the table, and if you want to go beyond that because you have capacity or expertise, let us know; we are happy to bring you in to help facilitate our continuing conversations. So it’s very simple. We want to move from a top down type of activity of delivering messages and webinars to the field to a bottom up type of approach where we now can actually work with our museum community to identify these barriers and the potential solutions. 

RD: Is there anything else we should talk about before we draw this conversation to a close? 

WS: Well, the thing is of course the financial aspect of our organization. Every speaker and facilitator is a volunteer, but we may need financial help to move beyond what we do now. We want to keep our programs free of charge to participants, so we will continue to seek partners and potential sponsors. 

RD: The evolution of MuseumExpert.org continues. Thank you, Walter, I look forward to seeing what’s next for the organization. 

For more information about MuseumExpert.org or to get involved, visit the website at museumexpert.org. 

ENDNOTES 

1 See https://climatejusticealliance.org/workgroup/black-caucus/. 

2 CGTN.com “Climate thinktanks boss criticizes use of private jets by COP28 delegates.” https://newseu.cgtn.com/news/2023-12-02/Climate-thinktank-criticizes-use-of-pri- vate-jets-by-COP28-delegates-1pdflC5Bo76/index.html, accessed December 13, 2023. 

3 Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development 

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