It’s November, and that means we start looking around nervously at our fabulous fall semester interns and worrying about all the light that will go out of the world when they head back to school, home countries, etc. If you’re interested in interning w…
The following articles were authored by Nina Simon
At my grocery store, if you bring your own shopping bag, they give you tokens that you can use to donate money to local nonprofits. As I drop 5 cent tokens into my slots of choice, I often wonder: could my museum be on this list? Would it be appropriat…
We’ve been doing a little experiment at our museum with labels. The Santa Cruz Surfing Museum recently loaned us some fabulous surfboards that tell the co-mingled history of surfing and redwood trees in Santa Cruz. In our quest to make the public are…
This week, the National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy released a new paper by Holly Sidford called Fusing Arts, Culture, and Social Change. The title may sound innocuous. The paper is anything but. Sidford makes a clear, well-researched, and pe…
I’m working on a keynote address for next week’s Mid-Atlantic Association of Museums conference in Baltimore. The speech is in memory of Stephen Weil, one of the giants of contemporary American museum thinking–a radical in a bowtie who strove to “make…
It’s a Saturday night when I get the email. “Sharon D. Payne,” member of the incredibly popular Santa Cruz roller derby team, wants to pitch a partnership with our museum. She doesn’t have a specific idea for a partner event or exhibit, but she feels l…
Last Friday night, my museum hosted a fabulous (in my biased opinion) event called Race Through Time. It was a local history urban scavenger hunt that sent teams of 2-5 people out into the city to track down as many historic checkpoints as they could o…
“Fundraising is about relationships.”"The key to fundraising is listening.”"Development works when you are responsive to the donor’s needs, not just presenting your own.”Anyone who has worked in fundraising has likely heard these missives again and aga…
This guest post was written by Joël Tan, Director of Community Engagement at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (YBCA) in San Francisco, CA. I’ve always admired Joël’s creativity and was curious about the personalized YBCA:YOU membership program that st…
Psst… want to move to Santa Cruz and work at my museum? Or do you know someone who might be perfect for this job?
We are looking for an obsessively detail-oriented, highly resourceful, financially savvy, culture-loving individual to be the Administr…
There is a long interview with me in this week’s Good Times (Santa Cruz’s leading weekly). I had a wonderful conversation with Geoffrey Dunn and he did a great job pushing the conversation all over the cultural and educational map. We talked Paulo Frie…
Many people (Paul Orselli, Linda Norris, Pete Newcurator) in the museum field have written about the question of museum “tribes”–based partly on Seth Godin’s book, partly on the longstanding fan culture that pervades our lives through sport, celebrit…
Note: Thanks to Lisa Hochstein for allowing me to quote her emails in this post. She is a fabulous and thoughtful artist. You can learn more about her work here.
Two weeks ago, we inaugurated a Creativity Lounge on the third floor of our museum. It’s a…
We just opened new exhibitions at The Museum of Art & History, including one on woodworking that includes QR codes. For those who don’t know, a QR (“quick response”) code is a two-dimensional matrix that can embed more complicated information than …
Yesterday, I had lunch with Monica Martinez, the ED of Homeless Services for Santa Cruz county. I was amazed not only by her energy and intelligence but by her simple, transformative goal: to end homelessness. As she said (and I’m paraphrasing):We’re n…
