Museum of Life and Science
The comunalidad framework—and the work by Cambio faculty Isabel Hawkins and community elder Doña Maria de Avila to make this concrete—was incredibly powerful for us in considering our own unique institutional approach to our work.
Museum of Life and Science
Annual operating budget: $5 million–$9.9 million
Total number of employees: 200
Annual visitorship: 650,000–750,000
**Numbers reported at time of participation
Our plan: Face challenging conversations with bravery
Our plan was to identify and begin to address the structural and systemic barriers to visiting MLS faced by our local Hispanic families. We needed to acknowledge that we likely perpetuated some of these invisible cultural barriers to meaningful participation. Engaging in brave, vulnerable, open internal dialogue was a way to start breaking down those barriers, as was learning from our established partners, all in service of our ultimate end-users: our visitors.
To that end, there needed to be a shift at MLS towards increased visibility, better mechanisms for disseminating knowledge, and creating safe, celebratory spaces for staff to come together. By changing our internal professional practices and more closely aligning our expectations, values, and practices with those of our partners, we hoped to better meet those partners, and our own staff, where they are.
Our projects: A commitment to reciprocity and learning
Our activities revolved around living our values and embodying equity. One project aimed to better meet our Latino community’s needs in part by collaborating more deeply on Celebremos, a bilingual celebration of scientists, engineers, and artists held on Durham Community Day. We also strengthened our reciprocal relationship with El Futuro, a mental health organization serving the local Latino community. MLS participated in El Futuro’s kermes festivities, while El Futuro offered to support MLS staff mental health efforts. It was imperative to us that MLS properly compensate our external partners for their expertise, labor, guidance, insight, and time.
Ongoing projects include staff conversations with local experts from El Centro Hispano, Full Circle Translation, UNC Chapel Hill, and Duke University. These sobremesa-style (“around the table”) conversations uplifted existing external partners and perspectives that the institution had long cultivated, but that were traditionally siloed within specific departments. These efforts to disseminate information and share with staff represented a key part of an institutional move toward transparency and shared learning.
Our takeaways: We can’t do it alone
Participating in Cambio was incredibly powerful for us. The comunalidad framework—and the work by Cambio faculty Isabel Hawkins and community elder Doña Maria de Avila to make this concrete—was incredibly powerful for us in considering our own unique institutional approach to our work. We’re carrying what we learned with us as we evolve our institutional framework for engaging with visitors:
- a sense of personal invitation makes visitors feel fully welcomed and wanted
- embracing the role of learner vs expert as museum professionals requires courage and pays dividends
- unstructured, flexible, inclusive spaces foster brave conversations internally.
MLS will continue to work toward helping all Durham residents feel more connected to science and invested in playful learning as a way of understanding and enriching ourselves and our world. Creating this vision will require continued vigilance, flexibility, communication, and openness to change. Hacerlo juntos—doing it together—is the only way.
To read other museums’ stories of change, visit our Cambio Stories page.
