This recording is from the Future of Museums Summit held November 1-2, 2023.

Half of museums are experiencing difficulty filling open positions. What are job seekers looking for, and how can museums attract and retain the staff they need? This session reviews proven strategies including revising assumptions about job qualifications, adjusting pay and benefits, improving workplace culture, and recruiting from underemployed communities, including people with disabilities, and formerly incarcerated.

Moderator: Ayanna Reed, Senior Director Human Resources & Administration, San Francisco Foundation  

Panelists: 

• Dana Hundley, Head of Coaching & Content, Allspring 
• Jerome Loach, Supervisor of Education and Partnerships, Eastern State Penitentiary History Site 
• Lauren Zalut, Director of Education and Tour Programs, Eastern State Penitentiary History Site

Transcript

Ayanna Reed: Hello, and welcome to Navigating the Non‑Profit Labor Shortage. My name is Ayanna Reed, she/her pronouns and I will be your moderator today.

I currently work as the head of Human Resources and administration at the San Francisco Foundation. Previously, I was the chief of HR at the Oakland Museum of California, thus my love for museums and cultural arts. Joining us today we have Dana Hundley, she/her. A wave, Dana. She has a broad range of talent, acquisition and people development experience and is currently the talent acquisition manager, emission clean energy. Dana was an account director and recruiter at Nathan Recruiting Group building its temporary division. She was also the program manager at the Oakland Museum of California where I had the pleasure of working with her where she managed the paid internship program and special talent programs. She cofounded career cooperative, a consulting firm that provided employee development recruiting strategy and individual career coaching, to name a few roles. Her fun fact is that she loves to read. And she likes to read about a book a week. That’s a lot of reading, Dana. Great.

Also with us we have Lauren Zalut. Lauren works as the Director of Education and Tour Programs at Eastern State Penitentiary Historic Site, an abandoned prison turned criminal justice museum in Philadelphia. In this role, she oversees education and community engagement programs, guided tours, as well as family and school programming. Using the historic site as a catalyst for conversation on contemporary social issues, Lauren has worked to incorporate dialogue, facilitation, lived experience in prison and content about mass incarceration into all education programs. She has led Eastern State’s Fair Chance Hiring Initiative which she’ll talk about today, recruiting and hiring formerly incarcerated people in a variety of roles. Lauren’s fun fact is she’s an aspiring backyard farmer including most recently keeping bees and chickens.

And last but not least, we have Jerome Loach. Exonerated after serving over a decade in prison, Jerome is a motivational speaker, activist, and a leader in our community who currently serves as a Supervisor for Education and Partnerships at Eastern State Penitentiary Historic Site. He studies psychology at the University of Pittsburgh and is a minister in African spirituality as well as a licensed barber manager. Jerome has volunteered with organizations like stop the violence, get out the vote and mothers in charge. He is also a member of the DEA’s office racial injustice committee. And Jerome’s fun fact is that as a youth, Jerome wanted to be a police officer.

So, as you can see, we have a very diverse and interesting panel today and we’re excited to be with you. I am going to set the stage by sharing a little bit of context before we get into conversation with our panelists and we’re going to have more of a fireside chat here.

So, the Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell stated that prepandemic and now post‑pandemic even though the pandemic still has some aftereffects, approximately 3.5 million workers are, quote, unquote, missing from the workforce. So, there are a lot of positions that may be available where people who are not currently seeking those opportunities. Much of this is due to a short fall with retirement with the baby boomers retiring; childcare shortage, especially post‑pandemic; automation of jobs; illness and so people choosing not to go back into the workforce due to illness; financial wellness and savings, some people were able to save enough money to leave the workforce intentionally; reduction in public transportation, limiting access to some jobs; and some companies moved to remote work temporarily where they could in some jobs, not all jobs, as we know, were able to be remote, but now that they are requesting people to come back many people are choosing not to go back into the workforce due to lack of remote work.

So wanted to share a little bit of context before we speak with our panels ‑‑ our panelists today. So, I’m going to start with Dana. So, Dana, as a recruiter, what are some of the things that you recommend museums think about related to their recruitment strategy in this type of market and what are candidates looking for today that maybe they weren’t looking for before?

Dana Hundley: Yeah, so I’m going to start with your candidate question of what candidates are looking for. And I think there are similarities across the board pre-pandemic, post‑pandemic regardless of industry. People are absolutely looking for a fair and living wage, depending on where they live in any industry that they’re in. They’re looking for employee support. So as Ayanna mentioned, there’s a lot of post‑pandemic, there’s a lot more challenges to getting to work, having access to work. A lot of that has to do with your personal circumstance. And employers really need to think about, OK, how do we create the most ‑‑ I’m going to say, like, welcoming environment, accessible environment for employees for potential talent and talent that is currently within your organization.

And then when you get past, like, the basic needs, right, because what I just talked about are basic needs, we know that a lot of candidates and employees are looking for an opportunity to grow their skills, their career within an organization. They’re looking for, like I mentioned, flexibility, they’re looking for opportunity to build and that’s something that employees, you know, really need to take into consideration when they are ‑‑ everything from creating a position and writing the job description to hiring to then retaining their internal talent.

What can employers do to attract talent? Make sure they ‑‑ make sure they are addressing all of these needs of their employers. Sometimes that can look like doing ‑‑ getting really in‑depth with your employees to understand their needs and desires to help you not only retain them but to also look ‑‑ how you can attract talent and get talent in. And something that I think is incredibly important that employers need to do is figure all this out before they put a job description out. If we’re talking about how to attract talent, how to ‑‑ and just attracting talent is getting them to your website and having them apply ‑‑ having them look at a job description and have them be excited and have them apply for the job and how you get them through the process is that you have to know all these things before going into it. It’s a competitive market for talent. Yes, there are a lot of people looking for jobs right now, but they’re more in tune with what they need and what they want. And so in order to really be attractive to talent through the entire recruitment process you’ve got to have your ducks in a row is coming to mind, that’s not what ‑‑ you’ve got to have your stuff figured out, you have to know what your process looks like, you have to know what you’re welcoming employees into and then you have to understand how you’re going to grow and retain them as well.

Ayanna Reed: OK, thank you. Would you say that most employees or future employees are looking at the employee life cycle upfront, they’re really thinking about what their experience will be overall upfront?

Dana Hundley: Yeah, I would love for them to. I think that’s incredibly important. I do think that when you’re in a tight labor market or when you have an immediate need or maybe you’re in a competitive market, sometimes it’s go, go, go, let’s get someone through the door and they’re not thinking about the total life ‑‑ total employee life cycle so I encourage employers to think about that and I encourage candidates to ask pointed questions during the interview process about that so they know they’re being set up for success.

Ayanna Reed: Thank you. So Jerome, going to move to you. What practices are you putting in place in your organization to attract and retain what may be considered elsewhere non‑traditional museum staff and why is it important to your organization?

Jerome Loach: I think some of the practice that Eastern State has basically put into practice is being able to put together a diverse hiring committee. You know, within the organization. To be able to seek out that type of talent, you know, and be able to bring in the type of talent that reflects, you know, not just the museum feel but the community as a whole, right?

I think that Eastern State, you know, and looking at the hiring practice, you know, sees a ‑‑ sees that there’s a very good market, let’s say, for those ‑‑ for museums basically to be able to engage those returning citizens to bring out some real raw talent, you know, that goes beyond just, you know, what your credit, you know, certificates may be, right? Because a lot of people use certifications as reasons to deny you, you know, that opportunity to be able to get into certain fields, you know.

But one thing that, you know, a lot of museums can learn from is that lived experience, you know, you can’t get that, you know, by going to Harvard, you know, lived experience come by way of lived experience, you know. And you can go to college and, you know, on the streets we say you can be so smart, you can be stupid, you know, because you don’t know how to navigate street life or be able to community with the community, you know.

And today, you know, Eastern State is in a unique position because it was or it is one of the oldest prisons, you know, that basically really started mass incarceration, you know, this is like the foundation, you know, where a lot of that begot, you know, and it’s only right that Eastern State takes the lead, takes the charge, you know, trying to show museums the direction that it should go and look at that type of talent.

And so what we are doing is, you know, we are tapping right into the source, you know, by going into the prisons, you know, getting real talent, you know, individuals who want to engage in the community, individuals who are looking forward to making a change in their lives and dispel the misconceptions that a lot of people have about returning citizens. We can talk more about that, you know.

But it’s one thing to talk the talk, you’ve got to be able to walk the walk and you’ve got to be able to show and represent what you’re talking about because it’s like a person saying, you know, when they’re crying, you’re just crying crocodile tears, right? And so you’ve got to be able to represent that. And people are going to call you out when they see that you’re not representing what you’re talking about, you know.

And so, I appreciate the opportunity to come here and on Eastern State’s behalf represent that we are making those changes, we are walking that walk and we’re going to continue to walk that walk by bringing those in with lived experience. And lived experience, let me clarify, doesn’t necessarily mean that you have to, per se, come directly from prison. Lived experience is just those individuals who may be of a minority group, you know, that can’t have those type of, you know, opportunities, you know what I mean? That one who may not have gone to Yale or Stanford or one of these other esteemed colleges. So it just so happened that we are talking about those who are extremely disproportionate and those are returning citizens, you know, and so there’s a need that, you know, HR and everybody else, you know, do away with the old typical, you know, if you got anything on your background, then, you know, we got to call into question now, we don’t want them in the museum because he might steal the art, you know, some crazy notion. A lot of people ‑‑ statistics have said that some of these men and women become some of the most loyal individuals in the work field because their whole objective is trying to get back into society, you know.

So, I can go on, trust me.

[LAUGHTER]

Ayanna Reed: Thank you, thank you. That’s an important thing to really pay attention to our biases across where people come from as we’re trying to diversify the field and pay attention to a non‑profit labor shortage. So, Lauren, Jerome spoke to going right to the source. Can you speak to ways that organizations that may be interested in hiring returning citizens, what is kind of the first step and process for them to get access to the source, per se? And what legal, financial, and cultural considerations did you have to undertake in your organization and as you communicate with other organizations to move this practice forward?

Lauren Zalut: Sorry, Jerome and I have to do a mute game because we’re in the same room.

Yeah, I mean, so to get access, we had relationships with the department of corrections already because of a number of different ways in which we had to reincorporate, if you will, experience into advisory roles on a lot of projects but also because we as a staff go and we visit active facilities as part of our learning and professional development. And so we ‑‑ Jerome and I are both cleared for state‑wide clearance in any department of corrections facility in the state of Pennsylvania. And that’s one piece of our recruitment plan for our lead fellowship program which is specifically about bringing folks home and into the museum field via program at Eastern State that Jerome runs.

So, when we, you know, when I arrived at Eastern State there was really this push to connect more deeply with corn temporary issues so we began to really work in and around groups that were either working inside of prisons or welcoming people home through a reentry. And it was through a lot of that relationship‑building that we ended up having this recruitment just occur organically and then we realized that we had to learn a lot more through reentry leaders, through advisers in prison and then look at our hiring practices and really get specific and understand the law.

So ban the box legislation is an ordinance in the city of Philadelphia, it’s also a federal law but not everybody follows it so Jerome really referred to this idea that you disclose your record in an interview or it gets pulled after an offer is made and there’s ways in which you cannot discriminate against people with criminal records, yet this happens constantly to people with criminal records.

And so, I’ve met a lot of folks along the way who have been rejected for, you know, tens of jobs just because they disclose that in an interview. And so we had to engage attorneys who could help us navigate that and that meant that we also had to overhaul our recruitment strategy and our interviewing strategy.

And then also the onboarding strategy. So when we’re specifically seeking out people with lived experience and also connecting criminal background checks which I assume most people on this webinar are doing in their onboarding at museums, we have to build in extra skills via attorneys and HR professionals to know how to navigate an individual assessment process to not judge a person by their past, but truly look at what does this person’s criminal record, you know, say within the context of the specific role that we’re hiring them for.

So how can we look at each person as an individual with the understanding that people are not defined by these actions. And so we’re, you know, building this, you know ‑‑ like I had another museum come to me and say but, like, my HR department isn’t interested in this because it’s so much extra work., well, I’m here to tell you that it’s going to be worth the work every single time and it’s not really that much it’s just having the understanding and the right people on your team. Because as Jerome already said folks coming home, there’s a ton of evidence out there that they are extraordinarily motivated and can be your most loyal workers.

I think that another piece that I wanted to lift up is just kind of the cultural shift that we have to make and that we are continuing to make because there is so much stigma around having a record and we really have to work hard as an institution and other museums who want to do this, you know, you have to really hire somebody, and I’m not talking about back‑of‑house positions.

We have to exam our biases and acknowledge that incarceration doesn’t impact every group equitably and so we have to really be aware of these biases as recruiters, interviewers, coworkers, and these are like all of the building blocks that we had to bring together and that we continue to refine. Jerome and I are constantly it rating what we are doing and we are here to convince you all on this call to do this too. This has to happen for our fields, it’s the right thing to do.

Ayanna Reed: Yes, Jerome?

Jerome Loach: Yes, and I just want to echo one more time, right? I think that it’s so important, it’s extremely important ‑‑ technical difficulties (.

Ayanna Reed: Right.

Jerome Loach: We want them sitting at the table.

Ayanna Reed: Thank you. As we know, the cultural arts really leads the change in the world and so we have the opportunity to do that in our field. And Dana, can you speak a little bit to your experience at the Oakland Museum when you were managing the internship program about identifying people with lived experience, ensuring that the panels and the managers and the team internally was prepared culturally, Lauren spoke to this, prepared cultural to take on and welcome, fully welcome people that were not traditionally hired in museums.

Lauren Zalut: Yeah, I’m so glad you’re asking this and I want to second what Lauren and Jerome said about looking at people’s backgrounds and sometimes there can be pushback from employers where we don’t have the time to, like, think about this or we don’t have the time to think about recruiting in a more creative way, let’s just post the job and see what comes in and the pushback, well, do you have the time to rehire? Do you have the time to, like, do you have the time to lose out on an opportunity because you brought in someone because of their lived experience, communities proud of in their organizations that are supposed to be a reflection of the community that they live in themselves, that they represent? So, yes, this was a big part of our goal with the internship program at the Oakland museum was how do we look long‑term at diversifying the entire museum and cultural institutions face and we start with an internship program and something that I think goes across the board whenever you’re recruiting for a role is, sure, you want to lay out the specs of here’s what we need for someone to be successful here, here’s maybe traditionally what we’ve hired before, here’s backgrounds that we think could be interesting, maybe that’s a certain degree, certification, maybe that’s a direct correlation of an industry or a title.

Great, write it down, that’s important. Then toss it out.

Because for about 20 minutes you should live in a world of, like, cool, now what else, let’s strip down what people are going to do in this role, the training we have available, and let’s get creative about what would be valuable in this. And I think any organization that holds very tight without an open mind to a certain educational background or a certain certification or a certain career path is doing I was a huge disservice and is silly. Because lived experience is incredibly valuable and if you are looking at someone who we need four years of experience in this particular proficiency. Great, let’s look at this education space, let’s look at this school that has a great program that does it., well, here’s someone that’s worked for 15 years or was part of this community or was part of this and they don’t have a degree or they may not have the exact title.

But when you strip down what will make someone actually successful in this, they check this box and this box and this box and how cool is that that they’re going to come in and have a different perspective. I feel like I went on a tangent and didn’t answer your question. How do we do this at the museum. This was another part of looking at how do we really, like, break down preconceived notions on the candidate side of what it’s like to work at a museum to truly diversify the museum work space and cultural institutions, that was one of my favorite parts of the program is that we hired across the board from our tech team, of course, we had our curators, I had a lot of fun working on the back end with curation and collections, I thought that was interesting for myself because I never had access to it, we had one on our HR team. And we were able to work with every single hiring manager to have really frank consideration conversations, this is what we want, what can that look like.

So, having those very frank conversations, transparent conversations and Jerome to your point, like, having someone there to point back, oh, that’s interesting, why do you say that you need this? Oh, that’s interesting, tell me more about why this person should have X, Y, and Z.

And you can have a dialogue around it and you can have a conversation and not necessarily come out and be, like, you’re missing out, that’s not how we’re thinking about this, right, because no one wants to hear that we want to understand why we’re thinking that way so we can point it out and come to a fruitful solution.

Part of my job in the recruiting space is now how do we have the incoming talent when we’re looking at our big talent pool how do we have a rich mix of experiences and skill sets and backgrounds that when we’re actually looking at this we can be really open‑minded so it’s not just posting a job, handshake fantastic, internship, bells and whistles, recommend it, great intern specific sites but then it’s what are the other communities we should be tapping into? What are the other not just job size LinkedIn groups, valuable and be part of your strategy ‑‑ but what about the clubs and communities people are a part of? And another part of being able to have this really rich talent pool and, frankly, in any type of organization you always want a pipeline of incoming talent who are interested in your organization even if there isn’t an open role for them is you’ve got to have more people put on their recruiter hat.

Everyone is a recruiter at a company, whether they want to believe it or not, you represent the org, people are making decisions about whether they’re interested in your industry the minute they meet you so use it. Getting the hiring managers and their teams involved. What are the communities that you can tap into, what are the spaces that you’re a part of that you think could have good talent or who do you know who has someone but broadening out your reach so you have that rich, incoming talent and then getting really precise on your interview process and when you’re able to ‑‑ and, again, Lauren, there’s so much pushback, we don’t have time for this, we don’t have the resources for this, you can’t just interview 10 people back‑to‑back to back and make a decision because you’re not in a good place to do that, to the extent you can have a thoughtful process and have multiple people on panels so you’re getting different point of views, not just one person I didn’t like that one person because they didn’t answer the question correctly, were you hungry, stressed out by work, we make silly decisions when we aren’t taking care of ourselves, panel interviews are stressful for candidates, you have different people who hear it in different ways and you can all talk about it together.

So just being really mindful of, like, what you can do to create a really strategic streamlined but thoughtful process. And all of this, again, should start when you’re imagining what the role looks like so everyone’s on the same page about it. Did I understand your question?

Ayanna Reed: Yeah. Thank you, thank you, thank you. I’d like to ask, because we ‑‑ we know there are all these candidates that we’re often looking for externally but we have great candidates internally, people who want to grow within an organization and how do we tap that pipeline that’s internal and look at upskilling and developing, people who may not be quite ready for the role but we know that with some professional development, they can get ready, or maybe we take a chance on them in the role.

Would each of you say a few words about your ideas around upskilling and developing people for roles within the organization? Lauren, why don’t we start with you.

Lauren Zalut: I mean, I think a lot about the need fellowship when I think about upskilling because that’s what it is. It’s about providing people with lots of different skills and on‑the‑job training to learn about different components of museum work. And I would say, like, in general, as in my role as director of education and hiring manager and promoter, et cetera, I feel like my job is to bring out the best in people and find projects that, where they can like stretch and reach and grow and see how that lands. I think that’s a really ‑‑ I feel like education is just ‑‑ is baked into everything I do because I’m an educator so that’s really the framework that I come to when I think about promoting and I’m happy to say that a lot of people that have been promoted inside Eastern State have come from the education department. And so, I think it’s because we use that framework in our team.

Ayanna Reed: Jerome? Jerome, thoughts?

Jerome Loach: Yeah, Jerome, Jerome gets in trouble sometimes.

[LAUGHTER]

You know, but for me, yeah. So I think that in any organization, the museum field particularly, you know, hiring within, you know, is very important. It’s very important to give individuals an opportunity to show their true talent, right?

And not have what I look at as a glass ceiling, you know. Far too long, you know, we used that glass ceiling as a cap, you know, when you looking in ‑‑ I think, if I’m going directly to your question, when you have positions such as either it’s a CEO, vice president, director, or things of this nature, you know, where an individual may have been in a position in a museum and yet you will overlook that person and bring somebody else in, OK?

And, again, for me, I see that as a form of unconscious bias, you know. For whatever reason, you want to pass this person up. We can go into all the nuances and things of that nature. But I think that all museums should look internally first, you know, but then looking internally, now, that does not mean that we keep it as, you know, this lily party where we can’t diversify.

I think that diversification is very important.

So when we look at that ‑‑ even that class or that group that’s above that glass window, if it’s not a true representation of the community that it is sitting in, if it doesn’t have someone of lived experience that, you know, you may be engaged in or having a conversation about then I think it’s time for that glass ceiling to be broke and I think you’ve got to move someone into the position that can show that you are walking the walk. It all comes back to walking that walk, you know what I mean?

I’m, you know, we ‑‑ we’re going to touch on this trauma thing too, right?

Ayanna Reed: Yes.

Jerome Loach: But we have to walk that walk, you know. It’s not enough just to say that, you know, you can go from a janitor to an educator to some other ministerial position that doesn’t really give you a voice. We have to really represent what we’re talking about, right? And one of the things that I might get some pushback, I know I’m going to get some pushback now with what I’m about to say but one of ‑‑ of the things that I feel when I go around the country and I speak to a lot of museums and units, I become real hurt, you know, traumatized, so to speak, right? Because I see a lot of museums that is coming from the white community. And I don’t see no African American museums stepping up to the plate to represent this conversation that’s being pushed out today about returning citizens, you know. That hurts me. You know, a lot of my speaking engagements, you know, maybe 90 ‑‑ matter of fact, hundred percent, I ain’t going to give a percentage in that, has all been towards colleges and universities and panels outside of my family, the AAM, triple AAM, they definitely have me there, you know, it has been not representing that hiring process for returning citizens and, you know, like, giving those individuals with real experience an opportunity to be heard. I think that that hurts me to the core when I’m advocating out here, you know, and I see sisters like yourself, Ayanna and other sisters that’s really trying to push the agenda, I don’t see these big organizations and colleges and museums, you know, doing the same thing, you know. If they is, I’m not aware of it and I should be because my voice is being heard out here.

So back on the subject, you know, yeah, we have to break that glass ceiling. You know, people of minority, you know, when I speak of minority I’m not just speaking about people of color, I’m talking about those that are less fortunate than the other that cannot get in, you know, they need to have some people on that stage being represented so…

Ayanna Reed:, well, thank you so much. In the interest of time, we have a little less than five minutes, I’d love to have each of you just share a practical take‑away that the audience can start to think about or implement when they go back to their workplace. Dana, why don’t we start with you.

Dana Hundley:  Yeah. Something that I spoke to a little bit before but I just want to kind of hammer home in terms of something practical that you can do that won’t take up too much time but can open a lot of minds and communities from a hiring community and organization in general is when you really are writing a job description or really thinking about what someone needs to be successful in this role to allow for 10 minutes, 20 minutes, set a timer to just brainstorm, great, we’ve got all of our traditional stuff, we’ve got all of our OK, this really makes sense, this is really transferable and then live in a space of what else can it look like, what are fields that can transfer, can be interesting, what other perspectives are we interested in look learning about, take the time to really speak that, write it down and you’ll unearth some ideas to run on and you’ll create a more open mind when you’re looking at applications and when you’re interviewing that’s going to allow you to diversify your talent pool and make really good hires.

Ayanna Reed: Great, thank you. Lauren?

Lauren Zalut: OK. So I’m going to drop this in the chat but I recommend a three 10‑hour at your own pace certificate offered by the society for HR management that’s called getting talent back to work which is everything you need to know about how to get started hiring people with records. It’s everything from finding your why as an organization, thinking about recruitment, interviewing, onboarding, retention, and how to change your organizational culture so I’m going to drop that in the chat for all of you, Jerome and I are both certified.

Ayanna Reed: That’s awesome. And you heard that, free, everyone, free, no excuses, free, just taking the time to put the right people in the courses. Jerome, I’m going to leave you with the last word. Anything you’d like to share with the trauma and form work, we’re running out of time but share what you’re doing.

Jerome Loach: Quickly, one of the things I’d like those to take away, those who are lived experience and those in the museum field we all have our little trauma, right, but trauma can be empowering and empowering what I mean by that is if we give individuals a voice, a say, reassurance, you know, confirmations, you know, in their work, you know, that trauma can also be an aid towards helping the museum field, you know, better understand the talent that basically they’re about to get, right?

So, don’t be afraid, you know, don’t prejudge, don’t look at a person as though something is wrong with them, you know, should I do this, should ‑‑ no, we’re just humans like everybody else, we just ‑‑ we see the bull crap when it comes at us, right?

So just be real and just try to have someone, you know, if you can, you know, on your committee that has lived experience. Lived experience program, like I said, that we run here, it’s a beautiful program. You know, we, you know, going to the museums, like others said, we recruit men and women, we go to the female facilities as well, served many years, longest have served 40 years incarcerated. All of them have went on from this program to work at other museums, get jobs in carpentry, in factories, so this is the program, this is the work we do, outside of just showing, treating the work that we do inside museums, a lot of them come back, they do speaking engagements, things of that nature. And all of them has been very empowering in this program, a person looking at coming back into a prison can be traumatizing but yet when they leave here, they feel so much resilience, you know, so much power, you know, they gain their voice back as they would say, they gain their identity back, you know. That can be empowering for all museums, right?

Allowing these individuals, returning citizens to come back and give them an opportunity to hear their voice. Y’all can reach out to myself or Liz, I mean, LZ if you want to learn more about the lead fellowship but I want to turn it back over to my girl Ayanna and give her the last word.

Ayanna Reed: I just want to say thank you to all of you for such an enriching dialogue today and really walking the walk and talking the talk, all of you I know are doing that in the field and building people not only for the museum field but that go out into community and ‑‑ and really support their communities in a wonderful way. So thank you for your time today and you’ve mentioned that people can get in contact with you. How can they get in contact with you? Would you like to drop your e‑mail or LinkedIn in the chat for people to get in contact with you? Feel free to do so. And thank you, audience, I hope there were some great take‑aways for you, for all of you.

Jerome Loach: LZ just dropped our e‑mails in the chat so just hit us up.

Dana Hundley:  Feel free to get in touch with me via LinkedIn.

Lauren Zalut: Me as well.

Ayanna Reed: Have a wonderful conference, everyone.

Dana Hundley:  Thank you, everyone.