Coming Home to Museums
Updated: 8 hours ago
Walking into a museum gives me a particular feeling. There’s the quiet of a gallery and the smell of an archive. And there’s the sense that someone decided these objects and stories were worth keeping. I felt it as a graduate student in Cooperstown, and I felt it for nearly fourteen years at the Minnesota Historical Society. I have missed it.
So I want to say this plainly, and with real joy: I am coming back to museums. Through One Pebble Change, I’m turning my work toward the institutions that shaped me: museums, historical organizations, and the cultural organizations that hold our shared stories. It feels like coming home.
What the last several years taught me
When I left the Minnesota Historical Society in 2019, I hadn’t stopped loving museums. The next chapter simply took me into state government and then healthcare. Both are systems far larger and more complex than any single institution.
As Chief Inclusion Officer for the State of Minnesota, I worked across two dozen state agencies and more than 55,000 employees spread across the whole state. In most of those agencies, nobody reported to me. If anything was going to change, it had to happen through influence. That meant earning the trust of commissioners and bringing together people who didn’t usually sit at the same table. It also meant building shared plans and quarterly reporting that made progress visible. During the state’s response to COVID-19, I helped build a tool to bring fairness into decisions made under enormous pressure. That season taught me how leaders decide when the stakes are high and the information is incomplete.
At Fairview Health Services, I led people experience and engagement in a health system where the work never stops. I built a new department out of existing teams. I created policy for how sensitive workforce data is used and protected. And I developed measures that helped leaders see where their efforts were working and where they weren’t.
Those years sharpened me. I learned to lead through ambiguity and to stay steady when others are anxious. I learned to turn values into structures, budgets and measures. And I learned to tell executives and boards the truth in a way they can hear. Above all, I learned that culture doesn’t change because of a statement. It changes through how people decide, operate, spend and measure. I’m bringing every bit of that back with me.
Why museums matter
Museums are among the few places where a community decides, out loud and in public, what it remembers. What we collect, what we exhibit and whose voice narrates the label all tell people who belongs in the story. In that sense, museums are keepers of our collective cultural identity. They help us understand where we came from, and they shape what we imagine is possible.
That gives museums real social power. A museum can bring people together across difference. It can make room for histories that were left out. It can help a young person see themselves in the past and, because of that, in the future. I’ve watched it happen throughout my career.
But the power to shape public identity comes with responsibility. And that responsibility doesn’t stop at the gallery door.
The work inside the walls
Here is what I’ve come to believe, through my own career and through my doctoral research with museum professionals. A museum cannot fully keep its public promise if its internal systems don’t live up to it.
We ask our exhibitions to be truthful, inclusive and courageous. Too often, we don’t ask the same of our hiring, our promotion paths, our pay, our board decisions or our daily culture. Staff feel that gap long before visitors see it. The people who bring the most to our institutions can end up carrying the heaviest burdens inside them. Talented professionals leave. Community trust wears thin. And the museum’s capacity for its most meaningful public work quietly shrinks.
Justice inside the institution isn’t a side project or a values statement. It is the condition that makes everything else possible. When people experience fairness in how decisions get made, and when they feel they belong, the work gets better. Collections grow richer. Programs grow braver. Partnerships last. The inside and the outside of a museum aren’t separate. They are one system.
That is the work I want to do with museum leaders now. I want to help them look honestly at who thrives in their organizations and who doesn’t, and understand why. Then I want to help them change how they lead, decide, operate and measure, so their institutions can become what they aspire to be.
Coming home
I don’t come back to museums with all the answers. I come back with more experience, more patience and a broader set of tools. And I bring the same love for this field I had when I started. I’ve seen what it takes to change large systems. I’ve also seen how much becomes possible when an organization’s inside matches its outside.
If you lead a museum, a historical organization or a cultural institution, you may be wrestling with these questions. They’re questions about culture, about fairness, and about whether your organization reflects the mission on your walls. If so, I would love to talk. Not to sell you a program, but to think alongside you.
It’s good to be home.
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