How Do You Create Meaningful and Fulfilling Community Partnerships?
What makes a community partnership effective? How do you build genuine, reciprocal relationships with your visitors and local organizations? How do you work toward a common goal with your local community? I have been invested in these questions throughout my career—as an intern at museums and now as a researcher at a museum evaluation firm.
In this blog post, I reflect on what I have learned about community partnerships. I hope to think about “success” and “impact” not just in terms of numbers but also how partnerships can create fulfilling and meaningful experiences for those participating. I can’t cover everything, but I can ponder and reflect.
My reflections below are NOT a checklist, where you check one thing off and you’re done. The considerations in this blog post are ever present—at times, linear, expanding through precise connections (like a web) AND nonlinear, rising and waning again and again (like a tide).
When working towards a community partnership, I found it helps to consider the following ideas.
Models of Participation or Collaboration
I’ve often turned to Nina Simon’s models of public participation when reflecting on how the public engages with institutions. As Simon explains in Chapter Five of The Participatory Museum, cultural institutions can ask themselves which engagement models best fit their community engagement goals. In particular, Simon describes “collaborative projects” as projects where “visitors are invited to serve as active partners in the creation of institutional projects that are originated and ultimately controlled by the institution.” However, in “co-creative projects,” “community members work together with institutional staff members from the beginning to define the project’s goals and to generate the program or exhibit based on community interests.”
In my opinion, ideally, a partnership should be “co-creative.” Though, in reality, partnerships may arguably range from “collaborative” to “co-creative.” Additionally, within a partnership there may be both collaborative and co-creative elements. Nevertheless, reflecting on these models with your fellow staff members can help align your partnership’s language, goals, and capacity with a model of collaboration (see Simon’s participatory model table here).
Institutional Reflection
There must be time for internal reflection before beginning community partnerships. Why does your organization or institution want to partner with community members or local organizations? Do you have your house in order? As an organization, do you have the infrastructure (staff, time, resources, power) to truly support community engagement efforts? As an institution, have you done the necessary internal work of centering diversity, inclusion, accessibility, equity, and justice? Have you asked what “decolonization” looks like in your organization, and identified concrete practices and steps to make amends and (re)prioritize resources? (Helpful resources for institutional reflection on decolonization include Adrienne Lalli Hills and Margaret Middleton’s “Resisting the Colonial Imagination,” which focuses on exhibition design, and Dr. Elizabeth (Dori) Tunstall’s Decolonizing Design: A Cultural Justice Guidebook.)
For example, the Migration Museum’s publication “A Toolkit for Co-Created Community Engagement Projects” articulates the following reflective, internal questions for organizations when undertaking community engagement projects: “What motivates you [as a museum]? Have you considered the values that you embody in your own practice? Are you trying to meet a community need or issue? And if so, what is it? Do you fully understand the needs of your community?”
Community and Shared Purpose
When bringing together several people, it helps to clarify terms like “community” and “purpose.” Who do you seek to partner with, and WHY? How are you defining “community”? Demographics can be a helpful starting point for defining and identifying “community.” In particular, demographics may be important for acknowledging injustices within a community and, thus, the importance of partnering with historically underrepresented or underserved communities. However, I think a community should not be defined only by demographics.
Working with museum clients, I have enjoyed digging deeper into what “community” means to their visitors and colleagues. These conversations have led to what we all know to be true, but is often forgotten and/or deliberately erased in institutional frameworks and hierarchical systems: that “community” is not nebulous. Your visitor is not simply a visitor but your neighbor down the street, who has three kids and gives you a slight nod of recognition at the post office. Any form of community engagement or partnership begins with recognizing that humanity.
And to recognize people’s humanity, we must also ask about their values, passions, and interests. In our audience research and evaluative projects, we often help clients identify audiences by asking what their audiences care about. What motivates them? What do they value? (For example, we dove into audience interests during our Impact Strategy work with the Smithsonian’s Anacostia Community Museum.) These inquiries are vital because they also lead to your partnership’s shared purpose. How does your partnership and organization’s mission align with your partners’ motivations and values? What shared goal are you and your partner working toward? (The idea of shared purpose also arose in conversations with our client, the International Coalition of Sites of Conscience - check out ICSC’s resources for helping sites and their communities find a shared purpose.)
Answering these questions requires specific knowledge of a community (not assumptions). And exploring these inquiries may mean talking to your neighbors, conducting focus groups, collecting surveys, attending community events, having lunch with fellow community leaders, and more. These formal and informal modes of connection help us delve into these questions and recognize each other as human beings, each with our own lives and desires.
Trust
Certainly, trust is one of the hardest things to accomplish in a partnership. In my work, in and outside of evaluation, I discovered that partnerships may operate at different levels of trust (e.g., I trust you with my vision and ideas vs. I trust you to execute a pre-designed program well). There are also significant distinctions between trusting individuals who work at an organization and trusting an entire organization. In other words, as a visitor or community member, I may be on a first-name basis with a docent, front desk staff, or an educator—I have seen them at fellow community events, collaborated with them on community projects, or maybe even had coffee with them. I trust them. But, I may be hesitant about entrusting their organization with a large-scale community project.
So, how is trust built? There is no guidebook to trust; trust may not be linear either. It takes little steps—showing that you truly care and are passionate about your community’s history and needs. For example, clearly communicate your appreciation for their work, advocate for their needs (if they need something, step up and advocate for them) and be transparent with your partner (don’t over promise; be clear about the power you wield within the institution and the limits of the project).
And, if trust can be built between you and those you hope to partner with, you must ask yourself: Does the project scale match the trust between you and your potential partner? Does it make more sense to start with informal conversations or a smaller program (and gradually move toward larger projects as the years progress)? I have seen how community partnerships with a firm basis in trust, even with only one or two organizations or individuals, lead to tremendously successful long-term or multi-partner collaborations.
Safety and Care
Does your community partner feel safe at your museum? It is a question that staff members and leadership must grapple with before the partnership—it’s your responsibility to make your museum spaces safe, welcoming, and accessible and check in with partners not once but throughout the partnership.
For me, visiting museums has been (and still is) an exercise in hypervigilance. The rules are as follows: keep quiet, whisper, look but don’t touch. Also, as a Black person, I am aware that I am Black operating in often white spaces; I never truly let my guard down. Thus, for your partners and visitors, you have to understand if they feel welcome, which may mean reconsidering staff interactions and design. As this Design Museum Magazine issue illustrates, policing manifests in design.
Moreover, internal reflections on diversity, justice, and inclusion efforts are necessary to ensure psychological safety. Psychological safety occurs when staff members feel “safe to be their full selves at work, in addition to feeling safe to voice opinions, thoughts, or ideas in a collaborative atmosphere,” and “an important part of psychological safety is valuing diversity, equity, and inclusion.” Thus, any partnership must have measures in place to nurture and foster psychological safety–in practice, this may look like antiracism training for staff, trust-building sessions with third-party facilitators, community agreements to allow for feedback without repercussions, trauma-informed practices, and more.
Lastly, in museums, we often talk about collections care. At the same time, how you care for your visitors and community is paramount as well. For example, museums have used music and food to care for their community members and partners. In 2021, the Wexner Center for the Arts cared for their community and sought to platform youth voices through “All Day Blackness: Black History and Black Futures,” an audio program and partnership with Verge.fm, a local online radio station. Curated by artist and DJ Reg Zehner, All Day Blackness and its partnership offered an accessible way for community members to access celebratory Blackness, a way to heal and communicate after the height of the pandemic. Additionally, as the Migration Museum describes in their toolkit for co-created community projects, food can also be an act of care. While still considering dietary restrictions, partnership meetings may also offer food from local restaurants as a way to care for partners and support the community around the museum.
Shared Expectations and Goals
As expected, in evaluating community partnerships, shared expectations and goals were key. Everyone enters a partnership with their expectations and wants. Additionally, an institution will have certain priorities and expectations that may or may not align with community needs and values. It’s important to recognize different expectations and, in doing so, clarify as a group what you all hope to achieve.
Clarifying shared expectations and goals at the beginning can help get everyone on the same page. In one sentence, what impact or effect do you want your co-created project to have? What short-term, mid-term, and long-term outcomes might the project have? Does your collaboration have a logic model? If so, have all partners seen it and are you on the same page about your intended outcomes? If you are co-creating a program, have you designed the logic model together? (Given granting schedules and deadlines, this may be difficult; however, when a project starts it is important to share these expectations and remain flexible if, in conversation with partners, these goals need to shift.)
Program Structure and Community Needs
Once you clarify the partnership’s audience and purpose, the partnership structure must also align with community partners’ needs and time commitments. For example, what is your funding system for compensating your partners? Does this funding system align with partners’ needs and timelines? Do the meeting times align with partners’ schedules (might it make sense to meet in the evenings or on the weekends)? Does your grant timeline allow enough time for relationship building between you and your partner?
Similarly, when planning community events, you can collaborate with your partner to make sure you effectively address peoples’ needs, like language interpretation, transportation, childcare, and food. For an example of a community partnership that contemplates community needs, check our work with the Science Museum of Virginia and the museum’s NOAA partnership with multiple partners: Groundwork RVA, Happily Natural Day, Southside ReLeaf, Virginia Community Voice, and City of Richmond’s Office of Sustainability. Each partner brought vital feedback and expertise; the partnership’s resulting climate forums integrated clear program elements, like transportation and childcare, to create a welcoming environment for participants (see “Building Climate Resilience for a Hotter Wetter Virginia Summit” and their climate resilience forum for the Hispanic community, conducted in Spanish and co-organized with Virginia Community Voice’s Leadership Academy Director, Veronica Reid) .
Evaluation
And, of course, evaluation! Yes, I may be biased in this regard, but I also mention evaluation for good reason. In my experience, evaluation helps museums, organizations, and community partners reflect on their collaborative process. A chance to reflect is powerful. Evaluation, especially when created with your partner, is a valuable tool for documenting work processes, collecting feedback on collaborative efforts, and pinpointing partnership successes and challenges.
Community partnerships are difficult things to achieve, no doubt. However, continued and reflective engagement is a commitment and a practice. Community partnership simply may mean starting small and asking yourself what you can do differently today or this week.
And, indeed, I have not covered every aspect of what helps create a thriving community partnership. I simply hoped to share what common threads have emerged in my evaluation projects and my personal community engagement work. As a lifelong learner, I certainly do not have all the answers, and I look forward to learning more. So, what have you learned about community partnerships?
