The museum community takes on board diversity
The American Alliance of Museums (AAM) is kicking off a $4 million initiative to improve museum board diversity. This might be the most exciting move from AAM in recent years and definitely the one with the most financial backing. AAM’s holistic approach will involve establishing standards for the field, putting those standards into practice at 50 lucky museums, making governance resources accessible to the entire museum community, and providing a mechanism by which museums can find prospective board members.
This last bit is particularly interesting. In the corporate world, there are pay-for-service companies like Women in the Boardroom that will connect members with empty board seats. Nonprofits use sites such as boardnetUSA and LinkedIn to advertise vacancies. But there hasn’t been anything museum-specific or this transparent before.
There’s a perception in the museum community that board members have to be ultra high net worth, and it helps if their family name is on the building. We love those board members and the dedication and resources that they bring to their museums, but museums who are interested in bringing in fresh ideas and more diverse perspectives should be thrilled with this development. I think this will be a huge boon to younger prospective trustees like me who might not have the same depth of relationship with an institution or network that more experienced board members might have. Where do I sign up?!
I suspect that AAM’s initiative will also have a board leadership training aspect to it too, presumably utilizing resources from BoardSource, with whom AAM collaborated on its 2017 report on museum board leadership. I can’t wait to see the update to the report three years from now. This initiative will give museums the resources and guidance to be more deliberate in their approach to diversity and will help to standardize board recruitment practices across the field. Longterm, this will change the landscape, because diversity at the top, like good leadership, trickles down.
