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Ben Garcia
Executive Director
American LGBTQ+ Museum
March 20, 2023
Thank you to the Museernes Formidlingskonference 2023 for having me.
My topic today is Diversity, Equity, Access, and Inclusion or DEAI. But really my
topic is about belonging. Because DEAI are simply a set of concepts that help us
create institutions that are spaces where our colleagues, our visitors and our
community members know they belong.
But why bring me to your conference to talk about a topic that requires nuanced
knowledge of local societal conditions to effectively address it? Possibly because
my work in museums has centered on decolonizing practices and operationalizing
racial, gender and disability justice. Though you have colleagues here in Denmark
doing that work too.
Possibly because the US, a former colony and a colonizing force is a country
where these concepts are ubiquitous. Attempting to find ways for people of
diverse backgrounds to find a shared identity; a sense of belonging is inherent to
those of us who live and work there. As is the inevitable backlash we are facing
today in my country by those who would not see children taught about racial
discrimination and LGBTQ+ lives.
I do not know if I believe that a universal experience of belonging is even an
achievable end for museums. I hope it is. But I have come to see that working
toward concepts of inclusion, justice and belonging is the only work worth doing
as a cultural worker.
I am the Executive Director of a museum that will open in New York City in three
years to tell the stories of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and Queer
Americans. People who have not felt they belonged in most of society’s
institutions for much of human history.
My talk starts with closer look at this project, as we are working to build a
museum on structures that are different than those of the museums I have

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worked in in the past. Structures that support anti-racism, gender equity and
disability justice. I will also touch upon the museum in San Diego where I worked
for five years to operationalize decolonization and we will have a broader
discussion of DEAI and decolonizing practices that will hopefully be valuable for
you to consider and apply to the work of your museums.
***
Growing up outside of New York, I was one of seven children. My parents moved
to the US in the 1950s from Argentina. My mother is an artist, and my father was
a journalist whose job led us around the US and the world.
We were a temperamental crew and easily distracted. Strongly opinionated and
rarely convinced by another’s position. We tended toward messiness. Half-drunk
cups of tea or coffee were scattered about. Half-read newspapers too. No
sentence was completed before others stacked theirs on to it. There was always
an argument in progress. Always someone in the place you hoped to be.
Like many closeted Queer kids, I was shy and cautious about making friends and
did most things on my own. One February morning at the age of fourteen I found
myself on the platform of the train station headed into New York City on my own
for the first time. My destination: a museum. One my mother, who was finishing
her undergraduate degree in art history at a local university, had told me about:
the Frick Museum housed in a 5th
Ave mansion.
I made my way from Grand Central Station to the museum feeling adult and
sophisticated in my long, black wool, 2nd
hand coat. Entering the Frick, I saw a face
I recognized: Thomas More in a Holbein portrait from my history textbook the
year before. I was excited and a little bewildered – I did not know that I knew this
person. But here I was, and I did. It was the first time that I recognized a painting
in a museum. It was the first time that I knew something about a painting in a
museum that did not come from a label or an adult.
I looked around for someone to make eye contact with, for someone who was
also experiencing this great moment, and realized that it was my moment alone. I
knew something about this painting that maybe no one else in that room knew.
My body relaxed, I happily breathed in the aroma of wood polish and dry warmth
of a central heating system that was no doubt set too high for the good of these

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art works. I felt smart and competent and confident as I moved on and turned the
corner into the former dining room.
There on the brown velvet-covered walls of the long gallery I was stopped in my
tracks by Bronzino’s portrait of a young Italian nobleman. This beautiful, arrogant
boy painted in saturated, acidic color, exuded a confident sexuality that took my
breath away. I believed that if I looked at the picture for too long, everyone
around me would realize how I was responding to it. But although I was
embarrassed by my attraction to the sitter, I could not move on. I spent the better
part of my visit walking back and forth in front of him, trying not to draw the
attention of others, but needing more time with this painting.
Heading home in the grey evening gloom, the saturated colors and the smell of
wood paneling stayed with me as the train passed housing developments and
rows of small houses, rain splattering on the window. I was headed back to a
chaotic home, to five more years in the closet. But a bright compartment had
opened inside of me that day. I had found place where I could dream of being free
and being myself fully. It looked like a museum and New York City.
That was when I fell in love with museums. And my professional career has been
dedicated to them for the past 22 years. To ensuring they can be places for self-
discovery for all members of our communities. Places that are individual and
universal.
Because I am aware that if I had been a brown-skinned boy my passage to and
through that museum might have been very different. I may still have fallen in
love with that arrogant young man in the painting. I may still have imagined a
Queer future for myself. But I know that I would not have seen anyone in any of
the artworks with brown skin. Would not have seen many other visitors of color.
Joining the American LGBTQ+ museum as Executive Director a year ago was a full-
circle moment. That adolescent dream, realized. A chance to build a museum
from the ground up.
A Museum that does not need to change to be inclusive, but one that includes all
the members of our community from its inception. I think about what this
museum might mean to future generations of queer youth, coming to New York,

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or finding us online, and finding a place where they can be free and fully
themselves.
At the American LGBTQ+ Museum our vision is of a world in which all people work
toward and experience the joy of liberation. All people. Members of racial and
religious minorities. Immigrants and refugees. The incarcerated. The
impoverished.
The American LGBTQ+ museum will tell the stories of queer peoples in the United
States from its Indigenous beginnings to the present. Thousands of stories… that
haven’t been told before in museums. Stories brought to life through the work of
LGBTQ+ creatives and scholars.
It will be a beacon for people around the country and around the world who
haven’t yet tasted Queer liberation. We hope it will be a space of celebration,
connection, and deep meaning. And a space where the connection to our
ancestors will be strong.
LGBTQ+ people have always been part of history. Yet, because of stigma and
prejudice their contributions have often been ignored, erased, and denied. Today
same-sex relationships and gender nonconformity are criminalized in about 70
countries. More than two billion people live in countries where the punishment
for expressing their identity is imprisonment or death.
In the United States and other countries where Queer people successfully fought
for equal rights over the past half century, there are concerted movements to roll
back those recently won protections. Transgender and gender non-conforming
people are particularly vulnerable today in the US and elsewhere as political
parties in many democracies have made gender identity a wedge issue.
Denmark’s history in this regard is admirable. I hope the backlash is not taking
root here.
To date, despite progress on a range of LGBTQ+ issues, there are only a handful of
queer cultural destinations in the United States and around the world.
Furthermore, there remains a striking absence of queer representation in most
museums.

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Currently, there are more than 11 million Americans who identify as LGBTQ+. In
February 2022, a national Gallup poll found that 21 percent of US adults under 25
identified as LGBTQ+. Let me say that again, more than one-fifth of adults in the
US under 25 identified as Queer. Despite the attempt in some quarters to paint
Queer identity as a Western phenomenon, the simple fact is that queer people
live everywhere and have always lived everywhere.
At our groundbreaking, a board member, Imara Jones, an activist and CEO of
Translash Media, addressed the gathering and said:
“The reason we are here is we believe that in times like these, memory can ground
us… And we see the consequence of the erasure of memory… Too many people are
not here today because they did not see themselves in the world, no one told them
that they had a place; no one told them that they had a history; no one told them
that they had a memory.
Today we are [joined in] hope. Because an LGBTQ+ Museum done in the right way
is an act of restoration. An act of hope for people who have yet to be born. People
whose names we shall never know. People who will have the opportunity to thrive
because today we are giving them the gift of memory.”
As a start-up, the American LGBTQ+ Museum will not squander its opportunity to
reexamine the underlying assumptions of museum best practice and authority. In
all areas—governance, collections, operations, content—we are working to Queer
the museum form and set new possibilities for what museums might become.
This means we will engage in the conversation about how museums can live up to
the enormous trust research shows they engender. It means we will stand with
the “Museums are not Neutral” movement in confronting traditional notions of
neutrality and beneficence. And that we will generate public value, in part, by
advocating for the lives and dignity of queer people globally and providing crucial
and reliable understandings of LGBTQ+ history to support our case.
Because the work of DEAI and decolonization is political in the US today and so
museums cannot avoid the politicization that has replaced civic discourse in the
US and in many countries. Part of committing to these concepts is committing to
a position that will not be viewed as neutral by many.

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Other marginalized groups in the US have erected museums and monuments to
honor their history, educate future generations, and protect their hard-won
progress. A new museum dedicated to preserving, researching, and sharing
LGBTQ+ history and culture will allow us to tell our evolving histories in our own
voices.
I am curious about identity museums here in Denmark. In the US there is an
established tradition of them to address the historical absence of certain stories
and kinds of cultural production in US museums. Our national museum, the
Smithsonian Institution has authorized museums of American Indian, African
American, and recently Women’s and Latino history. With one on Asian American
history expected. Our museum will be in line with this tradition but with an
intersectional focus.
Our case for this museum is built on data and research. We spoke with leaders of
the LGBTQ+ movement, heads of museums and cultural organizations, academic
and public historians, and cohorts of queer New Yorkers. We hired a market
research firm to conduct a survey of 40,000 LGBTQ+ households across the United
States and received almost 4,000 responses back.
Here is some of what we learned in this process in the areas of content,
collections, and community engagement. You will see how we are working to
build in contexts of DEAI as we plan:
First, Content:
The specific plans for exhibitions, programs, and educational initiatives that we
will co-create with partners for our physical and digital spaces are yet to be
determined. We know that everything we create, every program, product or
exhibition will be co-created with partners outside the museum. Experience
development and design will begin in earnest this fall. We expect that our
museum will do four things across our exhibitions and programs:
1. Interpret and document the movement for LGBTQ+ equality in the United
States with a particular focus on New York—home of Stonewall and the Gay
Liberation Front; Ballroom and Act Up.

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2. Educate our visitors about the current fight for LGBTQ+ liberation and self-
determination in places across the United States and the globe. And equip
them to take action on behalf of their queer brethren.
3. Celebrate the contributions of LGBTQ+ Americans to all aspects of society:
the arts and literature, media, athletics, enterprise, science, religion, and
government.
4. And commemorate and memorialize our queer ancestors. Those who died
as a result of prejudice and persecution; those who we knew; those who
inspire us; and all those upon whose shoulders we stand.
Second, Collections:
As a museum veteran I have dedicated much of my career to decolonizing
museum collecting practices. And have long despaired over the acquisitive
imperative of many museums.
Museums that will gladly pay millions to secure a work of art while cutting staff
and community outreach programs. Museums that have histories of extraction
without consent. Museums that partnered with industry and educational and
religious bodies to strip cultures of their tangible heritage while trampling the
intangible.
Museums that spend huge sums on ensuring artifacts are well housed while
ignoring the people outside their very walls who are unhoused. Museums that
only recently have been dragged reluctantly to some small level of accountability
for these actions and attitudes. Our collections are where some of the deepest
sins of our field reside.
Starting a collections program from scratch means that, in addition to obtaining
documented consent in this time for holding a person’s belongings (the standard
we should be moving to as a field), and creating contexts of ongoing consent for
holding artifacts, we can set a culture where we collect as a last resort rather than
as a first assumption.
There is an urgency around collecting Queer ephemera that the archivists,
librarians, and museum professionals I have been in contact with all recognize.
The second wave of LGBTQ+ activists and leaders, those that participated in the
movements for equal rights in the 70s-2000s are aging. Unless we capture their

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recollections and stories, and secure their documents and artifacts, we will lose
crucial information about the movement for Queer liberation.
There are about 200 LGBTQ+ archives in the US today, some community run, and
many at universities and libraries. Additionally, many major museums and history
organizations now seek to build collections of artifacts related to LGBTQ+ history.
Therefore, we made the decision to only collect items that will be on view in our
core exhibition.
We will not be a research collection or a collecting institution beyond that. We
hope to collaborate rather than compete with existing institutions and
organizations and use our resources to borrow items from existing archives and
collections. We will support the existing network of collecting entities by serving
as an intermediary to connect private collections with public archives.
Third, Community Engagement
As one member of our board reflected, institutions like our museum are
frequently associated with “traumas of exclusion” and therefore efforts to be
inclusive must be both bold and delicate. All parties involved in our research
called for the museum to be intersectional and collaborative in its approach—
both in this planning process and in the structure and execution of the museum’s
goals.
Outreach to community groups in neighborhoods across New York City and across
the country was urged. Many participants suggested the museum endeavor to
flatten hierarchies by engaging community members at all levels of the planning
and curatorial processes, including the creation of community advisory panels.
Physical and economic accessibility were paramount for many, and specific
requirements of proximity to public transit, free admission, and all-gender
bathrooms were mentioned frequently. Additionally, transparency was
encouraged across all the museum’s activities.
As a museum of American history, we will need to identify partners around the
country so that the contributions of queer activists living in Lima, Ohio, Tucson,
Arizona, or Birmingham, Alabama are included alongside those from San
Francisco and New York.

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Starting a museum (or working in an established museum) in this moment
requires true humility and a listening stance. As does the work of DEAI. We have
much to prove and trust to build. We will need to own our inevitable mistakes
and learn from them, accept external criticism, be transparent, and act mindfully.
While honoring our physical home in New York, we need to avoid situating it as
the center of the queer universe. And we need to be truthful about the structural
racism and misogyny that was, and still is, part of our communities.
The progression of LGBTQ+ liberation is powerful. However, as we see in the
United States and around the globe, that progress is not universal—nor is it
guaranteed. All of us, and none more so than our transgender and non-binary
siblings continue to weather attacks from those who fear us. And so more than
anything, we need museums to serve as sites for recharging. Because if we have
learned anything in this new century, it is that the pendulum continues to swing.
And progress we see in one year will be under threat a decade (or five) later.
Queer museums (and I suspect all museums) need to equip visitors for a life
where the work of liberation, the work of achieving belonging is a daily one. We
need to mix inspiration, knowledge of the past, hard truths, connection with our
ancestors, and ideas for how to maintain progress. In spaces like the one we are
envisioning in New York. And in your museum spaces so that we can all benefit
from the beauty and power of diverse perspectives and creativity, the power of
resilience, and a bit of Queer magic.
***
So, let’s dig into some of the specifics of Diversity, Equity, Accessibility, and
Inclusion. These four concepts are crucial for building museums that values and
respects all individuals, regardless of their race, gender, ability, economic status,
geographic origin, or other characteristics.
I want to begin by acknowledging that DEAI is not just a buzzword or a trend. It's a
movement that requires a deep understanding of the systemic inequalities that
exist in our society and the willingness to challenge them head-on. It's about
recognizing that equity, accessibility, and inclusion are not just nice-to-haves but
are essential for creating a fair and just world.

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Diversity is a concept that sits differently than the others as diversity is not a
practice like the others. Diversity is simply a state of being. Diverse systems are
strong systems. We see this in the natural world. We see this in financial
portfolios. In society, diversity is desirable as a means to a greater set of options
for how to live, for how to solve problems, for how to be. There is another “D”
word though that I we’ll look at and that is also a practice much like equity,
access, and inclusion. That is decolonization and we’ll come back to it.
When we say we need to do diversity work it is usually because we see that our
institutions have become places of belonging for only a subset of our larger
communities. That people of certain genders or races and ethnicities, of certain
geographic or economic backgrounds feel comfortable there and so our
institutions may look very white or very urban or very affluent.
So, diversity is also a goal, we want to see a greater diversity of people experience
belonging in our museum. And the work we do to get there is inclusion.
Inclusion is about creating cultures with a sense of belonging for all individuals,
regardless of their background or identity. It's about recognizing the unique
contributions that each person brings to the table and creating an environment
where everyone feels valued and supported. Inclusion is the work of making
space at the table for others with different interests and ways of navigating the
world, belonging is being able to set the table.
Abraham Maslow believed that human beings are driven by a hierarchy of needs,
and belonging is a basic need that must be fulfilled before an individual can
achieve higher levels of self-actualization.
At its core, belonging refers to our need to form and maintain strong relationships
with others. This can take many forms, including close friendships, family
connections, and social groups or communities. These help us feel accepted,
supported, and valued. This, in turn, allows us to develop a stronger sense of self-
esteem and self-confidence, which are essential for personal growth and success.
Maslow found that the desire for belonging is so strong that it often overrides
other needs, such as personal safety or physical comfort. (Stonewall riot example)

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Equity is about ensuring that everyone has access to the same opportunities,
regardless of their background or circumstances. It is different from equality
where everyone is treated equally. Equity recognizes that systemic barriers exist,
such as poverty, racism, and ableism, that prevent some individuals from
achieving their full potential.
Equity is an important step on the way to Justice. Justice work is dismantling and
rebuilding work. Those structural barriers that equity work seeks to work around
are directly changed in contexts of Justice and new frameworks are built in their
place.
Accessibility is about creating environments and systems that are welcoming and
accommodating to everyone, regardless of how they physically, cognitively, and
neurologically navigate the world.
This includes universal design practices such as ramps and closed captioning, but
also thinking about the needs of neurodivergent people in relationship to stimulii.
Accessibility also encompasses emotional accessibility by creating spaces where
people can safely have an emotional reaction.
***
I told you a story about how I fell in love with museums earlier. I am going to tell
you a story now about how my relationship status with museums moved to “it’s
complicated.”
The year was 2010. It was my first day on the job as head of interpretation at the
Phoebe A. Hearst Museum of Anthropology, and I had just asked my director
what the priorities were. I was not prepared for her response to my question. I
did not even understand it. It was one of those moments where you understand
each individual word in a sentence but cannot conceive of what they mean all
together.
"We have a collection of about ten thousand human remains in the basement of
the swimming pool next door. Mostly Native American. Getting them into an
appropriate, respectful collections facility is our first job."

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As embarrassing as it is to admit, I had never heard the term "human remains"
before that day. After spending nine years working in an art museum and a Jewish
history museum and completing a graduate program in museum education; after
attending dozens of museum conferences, I had managed to entirely miss the
issue.
At that point I had never considered the fact that museums held collections of
human remains. I had not connected the Egyptian mummies I saw with that term.
In that moment I felt both revulsion at the thought of all those displaced people
and profound embarrassment for what I realized immediately was a huge and
inexcusable deficit in my education. Later I would feel anger at a museum field
that so deliberately avoided associating the lives, feelings, and humanity of most
of the world’s population with the displays of ethnographic or archaeological
items in museums.
In the three-second gap between her words and my response, I realized that I was
supposed to be okay with this; that I was supposed to be professional and worldly
enough to talk about this task objectively and unemotionally. And so, I faked the
ease that I did not feel and asked how the collections had come to the museum
and what the plan was.
We walked across the street and entered the facility. That was where I saw what a
storage room holding close to 12,000 human remains looked like (she had
undercounted). Bones piled in open shelves and spilling out of drawers. It was a
moment of cognitive dissonance: I knew I had walked into a site of mass atrocity,
but everyone working there walked around as though nothing out of the ordinary
was happening.
That was the moment when I began to understand that museums, those safe
havens and magical realms of my life to date, were also sites of anguish and
cruelty to many people.
That was the moment when my critical awakening happened and my work in
museums changed. Since 2010 my work has been about examining and finding
ways to heal the structures of racism, patriarchy, violence, and inhumanity of our
field.

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I found a community of others doing this work and 14 years later, that community
has grown exponentially so that today virtually no museum can avoid this work of
healing and justice any longer.
Understanding the full impact of settler and global colonization is work that
requires ongoing self-reflection and truth-telling. Today we recognize that this can
only authentically occur in a context of transparency about the ways that
museums participated in the colonial enterprise.
For the greater part of our histories, in the US, here in Denmark, and around the
world museums willingly accepted trophies of war. We washed the blood
(metaphorical or literal) off artifacts and human remains (or we chose not to) and
displayed them in contexts of education and social betterment.
We led the expeditions to regions most devasted by colonization and extracted
the bodies and belongings of Indigenous peoples and their ancestors, filling our
warehouses and display cases and telling the stories that made most sense to us.
We used poisons to preserve organic material ensuring that the textiles and
baskets needed for cultural practice would never be safely used for their intended
purpose again.
In 2014 I moved to San Diego to work at the Museum of Man, now called the
Museum of Us and there, in a region with 18 American Indian sovereign nations
we undertook a process of decolonizing our wok through consultation and sharing
decision-making with local tribal representatives.
For a vast majority of museums, the transactions that caused artifacts or bodies
to leave Indigenous communities or former colonies are often obscured by a lack
of transparent or available documentation within our records. Labeled with a
donor or purchase acknowledgment and displayed in our galleries, museums
effectively erase the genocide, warfare, displacement, and oppression
perpetrated against Indigenous communities by not naming those histories in
relation to the bodies and belongings we steward.
Furthermore, by rarely including Indigenous voice in decisions made about the
presentation of their ancestors and belongings, our institutions perpetuate the
ongoing colonization and appropriation of Indigenous cultures.

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We began a process of decolonizing our institutional practices in line with Ho-
Chunk scholar, Amy Lonetree’s, work in her seminal book, Decolonizing Museums
(2012). Based on her recommendations, we set about to do three things:
1. include Indigenous decision-making at all levels of the organization; 2.
truthfully address the histories and legacies of colonization in its policies,
practices, exhibits, and programs; and 3. present the work of Indigenous scholars,
traditional knowledge holders, and creatives.
We chose to begin a decolonizing process by addressing internal policies and
practices so that our outward-facing initiatives would come to be built on a
foundation of deep institutional commitment to change and to tenets of DEAI.
We had all experienced working in museums where outward-facing partnerships
with Indigenous or community groups (usually in the form of exhibitions or
educational and public programs) masked internal colonized structures and
power disparities.
True partnering, in our view, required balanced power. We recognized that,
perhaps, the greatest imbalance in museum/Indigenous relationships is caused by
museums’ claim of ownership over their ancestors’ bodies and their belongings.
And so, we began with the policies related to collections, what the Museum now
calls cultural resources (in recognition of their true value: as resources for
Indigenous cultural continuity and not as possessions of collectors).
Our museum had long prevented the return of ancestral remains and cultural
resources to Indigenous communities. We complied with the letter of a federal
law established in 1991 that required limited consultation and repatriation in
certain cases and benefitted from both the ambiguities and the limited number of
communities with which we were compelled to consult.
In 2018 after a 3-year process of board and staff education, the Museum passed a
Colonial Pathways Policy. This policy provided a process for all Indigenous
descendant communities around the world to find a way home for their ancestors
and belongings through deaccession and transfer.
Building on the work of our colleagues at the National Museum of New Zealand
and others, we applied a standard of continuing consent for stewarding

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Indigenous bodies and belongings. This meant that at any time a community
could change its mind and have their belongings returned.
It also means respecting indigenous knowledge and authority in naming and
defining their ancestors and cultural heritage items.
Implementing these policies will be the work for the Museum of Us for the next
several decades, as about 80% of the Museum’s approximately 75,000
ethnographic items and archival and audio-visual material, as well as all the
archaeology from more than 1,000 sites, will require consultation with
descendant communities. And all of it will be made available for repatriation.
They are a mid-sized museum with an operating budget of about $3mm and a
staff that numbers about 30. This work will take time, given their capacity. We
decided to begin with our homeland communities and prioritize the work with US
tribes.
However, that museum no longer views the process of decolonizing collections as
a task to check off a to-do list. Rather, it is central to their identity and work
moving forward. Six years later, their outward-facing work now reflects new
internal values and policies. Their new name, website, exhibitions, and
communications reflect a decolonial and anti-racist approach to their work.
***
The examples at the American LGBTQ+ Museum and the Museum of Us show
what the work of DDEAI can look like. To close I will touch on some of the areas
where museums can do the work of justice and create conditions for belonging
for a diverse and representative set of staff and visitors.
Transparency: Museums engender trust when staff and external stakeholders
understand how decisions are made. When budgets are shared across the
institution. When priorities are shared across the institution. When institutional
history is known and leadership models accountability and truthfulness about it.
When staff do not need to be the keepers of family secrets.

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Equitable and just hiring and employment practices: Compensation needs to
address the true cost of living in a community. If we want people who have not
traditionally had access to museum work to thrive in our teams, we need to pay
enough so that people who do not come from generational wealth can enter our
field. And we need to value professional and educational backgrounds that are
different from the accepted best practice. More time and money is required to
identify and hire people who do not already see museums as places where they
might belong.
Co-creation and partnering: Working with organizations that are addressing the
basic needs of community members will help museums better understand how
they might be able to welcome and serve the real needs of people who do not
currently visit.
Ceding authority is “seeding” authority: internal: flattening hierarchies; including
the largest viable number of people in processes; moving away from heroic
leaders as the model and external: Change your language to the language of your
partners.
Understanding that our “neutral” notions of best professional practice are rooted
in a system that evolved to privilege a few and exploit the majority. These
common values keep people feeling like they are continually failing and do not
allow for other ways of working.
***
I want to acknowledge that this work is not easy and it can feel overwhelming. It
requires us to constantly examine our biases and privileges, to be willing to make
mistakes and learn from them, and to challenge the status quo. But the benefits
are immense. When we create environments that are diverse, through practices
of equity and justice, inclusion and belonging, accessibility, we unlock the full
potential of our value to individuals and communities.
Our work in this era is to ensure we do not pass these inequities and harms that
we inherited to the next generation of museum workers and communities. This is
our work moving forward and it moves at the speed of repairing the world. It
moves at the speed of ceding authority. It moves at the speed of trust.