Following an introductory course that provides an orientation and overview (and is required), each course includes an organizational self-assessment tool, suggestions for team dialogue, ideas for taking action, potential barriers that might be faced, with accompanying solutions, and a worksheet where your team can set goals. Links to relevant resources are also included. Courses correspond to different areas of organizational dimensions such as vision/values, community engagement, people and operations, services and products, governance, leadership, resources and data collection.
These courses are offered in Adobe Learning Manager, an online learning platform. One member of your team will register to access the learning platform, which is available for free for the first 800 museums that register. We ask that only one member of your team access the course, to ensure that the free licenses can be distributed to different museums. That person will then project the courses for the full team. The courses are self-paced and designed for the full team of 4-6 people to engage with together.
We recommend creating a cross-departmental, cross job function team of 4-6 people from your museum. Ideally, someone from senior leadership will be involved, as we have found that transformational change happens more quickly and deeply when senior leaders are involved. As your team works through the course, you may find that you want to engage others from your organization in some of the dialogues as well.
We recommend that your team set aside 8-16 hours for each of these courses. This will include watching the narrated slides and videos of museum practitioners and the important dialogue that your team itself will engage in.
Following the introductory course, your team can decide if you want to do one, two, three or all of the courses. You may want to set aside a full year to engage in this work, and see how many courses you are able to complete. But remember, this is really about the process you will engage in as a team—the most important part of the work is the dialogue and alignment that you will engage in as a team. You may find that as you are engaging with questions in one course, you want to address another topic area. The resources are there for you to do that kind of realignment.
These courses are really designed to encourage your team to engage in conversation and dialogue about your current organizational practices and how you might shift them to be more inclusive and equitable. To this end, the courses encourage organizational self-analysis, using a diagnostic self-assessment tool, followed by a series of questions for you to ask yourselves as a team. It is through the dialogue in response to questions that you will then work as a team to identify potential actions (with ideas provided by us), create goals and set priorities as a team.
The courses also include video interviews from museum practitioners talking about their own equity and inclusion work. Following these videos, your team can discuss and learn from other museums’ approaches.
By the end of each of the courses, your museum team will have conducted organizational self-assessment, engaged in important dialogue, explored concepts of equity within various dimensions of organizational work and set goals and priorities for making change within your organizational practices toward being a more welcoming, inclusive and equitable museum. Along the way, you will have formed a strong team, involved stakeholders from various parts of your organization and community, and continued along the important journey of transformational change toward more equitable and community-focused institutions.
CCLI (Cultural Competence Learning Institute) was developed in 2013 and has been working with museums of many different sizes and types from across the United States, including science centers, children’s museums, natural history museums, aquariums, zoos, and art museums, to gather insights and test approaches. The content presented in these courses has proven relevant and applicable across the board for all of the museums who have participated. The courses have been designed to center your local experience and context, and the self-guided, self-paced approach allows each museum to make it their own.
If you are part of a smaller museum, you may find that you want to create a team of folks across your community or region to work on these courses together.
Yes, definitely! Feel free to use these resources with board members, volunteers, community partners and staff. Different perspectives will absolutely enrich your conversations!
This coursework is designed so that organizations can engage without a consultant. However, it will be helpful if you identify both a facilitator for your meetings, ideally someone skilled in helping to promote positive conversation, and a project manager who can help the group with accountability, scheduling and goal setting. In addition, some organizations have found that after doing this important initial work, they want additional support for the next steps in their equity journey.
