Redesigning Libraries, Archives & Museums Post- ̶C̶O̶V̶I̶D̶-̶1̶9̶ 2020
By: Jon Voss
Tags: Cultural Memory, Libraries, Cultural Heritage, Archive, Museums

This story was published May 5, 2020, just weeks before protests and uprisings around the world began in response to the murder of George Floyd by police in Minneapolis. Since then, it seems as everything has changed. These five recommendations still hold true to me, though I may add a few more, as they are rooted in making change in cultural memory institutions that help move us toward greater equity. The urgent need for these types of changes has never been more clear.

Long before this spring, many people were already facing the fact that a lot of the prevalent ways of working in cultural memory have failed us. Within the arts and culture landscape, vast inequities have been so baked into the design of our institutions that a reboot seemed necessary. That reboot may be here, though it’s come at an unimaginable cost of life and security, laying bare economic and social disparities the world over. There will be no “return to normal.” While there is much to grieve, there is also an opportunity to rebuild and redesign something better.

What does this new world look like for cultural memory organizations, and how can we adapt to this new reality and support each other in creativity and connection? As we’ve seen in disasters of the past, after we’ve met the short term needs of survival, we will have an opportunity, if we act decisively, to put better systems in place. Here are 5 ideas based on our shared work at Shift over the past decade in community memory and cultural heritage.

1. Prioritize investment in small organizations embedded in local communities

Cultural and cultural memory organizations have the opportunity to improve the quality of life for local communities and can be a lifeline in times of crisis or disaster. Those with deep ties to community are often the first to reach people to insure safety or disseminate critical information. This was exemplified in the months and years following the federal levee failures during Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans in 2005. Organizations like Ashé Cultural Arts Center, House of Dance and Feathers, Backstreet Cultural Museum and many other community-based archives and cultural organizations had central leadership roles in getting African American residents back to their homes and neighborhoods, and ensuring that the cultural fabric of these neighborhoods remained intact in the months and years of recovery.

Unfortunately, recent research has shown just how underfunded these types of organizations are. Currently, funding in arts and culture vastly favors wealthy organizations focused primarily on Western European fine arts traditions, a fact that is not improving despite many efforts to change. According to the Helicon Collaborative, just 2% of all cultural institutions receive nearly 60 percent of all contributed revenue, up approximately five percentage points over a decade. Furthermore, only 4% of foundation arts funding goes towards organizations serving communities of color, less than 3% to organizations focused on serving low income populations, and less than 2% to organizations focused on serving rural populations.

We can and must do better and these metrics should be our baseline in what we bring back in the post-COVID-19 economic recovery and our measure of success. Funding and investment priorities must take into account these statistics and be measured not on how much “diversity and inclusion” has been incorporated into a proposal but who gets the money and who has the power. Additionally, these small community-based archives need investment in organizational development (stronger boards, governance, financial systems, etc) and we need to foster peer networks for mutual aid and support and exchange of ideas. Funding can and should be tied to equity audits that produce statistics not only about collections and underrepresented communities, but also staffing and salary data. Until more money is going to smaller, community-based arts and culture organizations than to endowed old-money giants, we are talking about window dressing and not the structural change that we need.

We’re working hard to change this through co-design and research to support community-based archives with Architecting Sustainable Futures, and advocating for increased direct funding to these types of organizations. Already, funders like the Mellon Foundation have pledged $2.2 million in direct support of community-based archives. The Compton Foundation has gone further, spending down their endowment over the next 7 years and encouraging other funders to do the same. They said in December, “we believe that our practices — giving unrestricted multi-year grants, simplifying grant processes, moving to 100% mission-aligned investing, and even spending out our financial assets — should be common practice at foundations dedicated to justice and democracy.”

2. Adapt digital to the needs and culture of specific communities

Digital is not a save-all, one-size-fits-all option you can throw at any problem. Ideally, digital solutions are tailored to the needs of specific communities, with thoughtful co-creation and co-design. At Shift, our cultural memory team uses a methodology of Community-Centered Design that engages a variety of stakeholders to understand the needs of a particular community before formulating any design prototypes together. This is an opportunity to examine how digital fits within the culture and values of any given community. For instance, when we first started collaborating with Native American communities around Historypin, we found it necessary to first step back to better understand what they needed from digital projects in general and how their values might be expressed in our digital offerings. In the days since COVID-19, I’ve personally been involved in helping Zen Buddhist communities migrate their meditation and community gatherings to an online setting–which has been as much about understanding cultural needs as technical in order to come up with creative solutions.

3. Create smaller, more authentic opportunities for connection

Gone are the days of the massive conference, and that model was dying anyway. While opportunities for connection exist, large conferences often serve as junkets for staff at the most resourced organizations, and invest little in local communities or provide economically diverse access. With social distancing as part of our reality for the foreseeable future, even gallery openings and packed museums will be prohibitive.

This gives us the opportunity to be creative and to explore more meaningful and intimate experiences with community and connection at the heart. When large conferences have come to New Orleans in recent years, we’ve been surprised at how little they engage the local community or invite local culture bearers to participate, and instead choose to extract from or exploit the New Orleans community. In an effort to improve this, we’ve helped create collaborative events that benefit all participants and end up providing a much richer experience. The Library Make’n’Shake brought librarians and community initiatives together in a uniquely New Orleans setting in 2018. The 2019 Culture Lab Cooperative explored the future of museums through a 1.5 day design-centered immersive experience with 25 participants. While these were in-person events, they could certainly be creatively adapted to be virtual.

Increasingly we’ll need to come up with virtual experiences to engage colleagues and communities. The central opportunity to create intimate and authentic connections remains, and the barrier to entry for these gatherings through technology is as low as it’s ever been. The key is finding the best examples of innovative and inclusive narrative, and adapting them to smaller audiences in ways that can also scale to reach more people over time. Just one example is the 2018 award-winning, and timely, production, The Stranger Disease, which brought new life into the historic house museum by creating an intimate staged production that took on the often overlooked complexities of class and race which played out in the 1878 yellow fever outbreak in New Orleans.

4. Engage with equity and access in mind

Technological solutions can certainly help us get together in times when physical proximity is not an option, but they also have their limits. As we come back to digital solutions and get creative with how we connect and engage our audiences, now is a perfect time to build for equity and access for as wide of a range of people as possible. We can consider the digital divide and limitations of broadband access to particular communities as we roll out new solutions, and find ways to reach people who may not have easy access to computers. This challenge has been faced in cities across the country that have had to provide not only new methods for distance teaching, but the procurement of computers and WiFi hotspots for large populations of low-income residents. Cultural memory organizations have shown that they can be a gateway for access and a leader in providing content and connection through a variety of methods. We can make equity and accessibility a measure of our impact and success.

5. Leverage assets to combine cultural memory centers with community needs like affordable housing

Now more than ever, we are reconsidering our public and private spaces, and how we can safely live and work together. Along with creating smaller, more authentic engagements, so too can we consider scaled down versions of cultural centers embedded within a variety of community housing solutions. While we’ll be feeling the pain of massive cuts to civic and municipal spending for years to come, we have the opportunity to leverage public and private assets to address multiple community needs. Shift calls it Knowledge-Centered Community Living, and imagines affordable housing built around diverse cultural organizations and community memory institutions. Many examples are starting to emerge, primarily with affordable senior housing, including public libraries in Chicago and Brooklyn, and a civil rights museum in New Orleans, to name a few. We believe there are many opportunities in smaller market cities for this type of development. Furthermore, we know through preliminary research as part of our work focused on community-based archives (see Architecting Sustainable Futures), that one common thread to a cultural organization’s longevity is property ownership. While this still requires seldom-funded capital expenditures for upkeep and maintenance, it keeps long-term funds in local communities rather than locked in the managed endowments of foundations.

These are just five ways that we can be sure that we do not return to normal, and that, if we act quickly, we can rebuild the cultural sector in ways that better reflect the values of an equitable society. Inequity has not happened by accident, it has been designed into our civic structure over a very long history. This will not be changed by cosmetic fixes to long-standing cultural institutions, but instead by a combination of long-term structural change within and a quantifiable shift to support community-based cultural organizations that embody a more just and equitable cultural landscape. This is our opportunity to rebuild with these values at the center.