It started here…
OF/BY/FOR ALL was born from an urgent need to change.
In 2011, Nina Simon was a brand-new museum director with a big problem.
Her institution, the Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History (MAH), was on the brink of closure. The MAH didn’t matter to enough people, or to the right people, to succeed. Most of the community didn’t even know it existed. Like many museums and libraries, theaters and universities, parks and churches, the MAH struggled for funding, relevance, participation, and support.
Under Nina’s leadership, the MAH team started learning what mattered to our diverse community. The staff listened to new voices and opened our doors widely to new visitors, partners, and experiences. The team made hard decisions, experimented, and changed.
The result was transformative.
Within one year, attendance had doubled and the budget was back on track.
In seven years, the MAH increased attendance by 9x, membership by 3x, and budget by 4x. Participants, staff, trustees, and supporters became dramatically more diverse, growing representative of the full age, income, and ethnic diversity of the county. The people walking through the museum’s doors--as visitors, volunteers, collaborators, and donors--started reflecting the full diversity of our community. The MAH became OF, BY, and FOR Santa Cruz County.
We wanted to share our model.
While leading change at the MAH, Nina met professionals in other civic and cultural organizations around the world struggling with the same challenges—and other innovators who were changing the game.
So many organizations’ participants, staff, and donors do not reflect the population as a whole. Many want to meaningfully engage their diverse communities but don't know how to do it. Nina wrote a book, The Art of Relevance, but it wasn’t enough. She wanted to do more to help accelerate the movement for more relevant, inclusive, thriving community organizations.
So in 2018, with the blessing of the MAH board and the wisdom of global advisors, Nina launched OF/BY/FOR ALL. Initially, we thought this would be a program of the museum—a way to share some of the MAH’s innovative practices. But it quickly became clear that OF/BY/FOR ALL should be its own organization, working in a distributed way to connect, strengthen, and accelerate inclusive practice around the world. And Nina realized she couldn’t be a great museum director and a great global activist at the same time.
In 2018 and 2019, the MAH worked with Nina to spin out OF/BY/FOR ALL as its own independent 501(c)3 organization. We made a clean separation with no museum funds involved in the spinout. OF/BY/FOR ALL will always be grateful to the MAH as its incubator, even as we grow to represent and share inclusive practices from many more organizations around the world.
We tested it out.
We ran three experimental pilots of the Change Network in 2018-2019 with 47 organizations in 9 countries and 10 time zones: museums, libraries, performing arts organizations, parks, community centers, health centers, and cultural centers, with budgets from under $100,000 to over $15,000,000. 1/3 of these organizations are led by people of color or indigenous people. All of us experimented together on the path to deepening community involvement. We worked with the research team at Slover Linett Audience Research to understand what worked and what didn’t in each of these pilots, and we used that research to build the full-scale version of the Change Network that exists today. We honor and are grateful to everyone who was part of our early testing.
The First Wave launched in fall of 2018 and included:
Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History in Santa Cruz, CA, USA (host site)
National Hispanic Cultural Center in Albuquerque, NM, USA
Techniquest in Cardiff, Wales, UK
HistoryMiami Museum in Miami, FL, USA
Niagara Falls Underground Railroad Heritage Center in Niagara Falls, NY, USA
Immigration Museum in Melbourne, VIC, Australia
Te Manawa in Palmerston North, Aotearoa, NZ
Stedelijk Museum Schiedam in Schiedam, Netherlands
Trinity Repertory Company in Providence, RI, USA
Oakland Symphony in Oakland, CA, USA
Marfa Public Radio in Marfa, TX, USA
Laundromat Project in New York, NY, USA
ARTZ Philadelphia in Philadelphia, PA, USA
Oakland Public Library in Oakland, CA, USA
St. Joseph County Public Library in South Bend, IN, USA
Dakota County Library in Eagan, MN, USA
Los Angeles River State Park Partners in Los Angeles, CA, USA
Divis and Black Mountain in Belfast, Northern Ireland, UK
Movement BE in San Diego, CA, USA
Minnesota Transgender Health Coalition in Minneapolis, MN, USA
Genesis Centre in Calgary, AB, Canada
The Second Wave launched in spring of 2019 and included:
Museum of Work & Culture in Woonsocket, RI, USA
Vizcaya Museum and Gardens in Miami, FL, USA
Minnesota Children’s Museum in St. Paul and Rochester, MN, USA
Friends of Santa Cruz County Parks in Santa Cruz, CA, USA
Epping Forest District Museum in Waltham Abbey, England, UK
2 Museos, Bellas Artes y MAC in Bahia Blanca, Buenos Aires, Argentina
Claremore Museum of History in Claremore, OK, USA
National Justice Museum in Nottingham, England, UK
Filament Theatre in Chicago, IL, USA
Jackson Hole Historical Society and Museum in Jackson, WY, USA
Tullie House Museum & Art Gallery in Carlisle, England, UK
Corning Museum of Glass in Corning, NY, USA
Rotorua Arts Village Trust in Rotorua, Aotearoa New Zealand
Centre of Democracy in Adelaide, SA, Australia
Nevada County Arts Council in Nevada City, CA, USA
Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto, ON, Canada
The Third Wave launched in fall of 2019 and included:
Inside Out Theatre, Calgary, AB, CAN
Marshall M. Fredericks Sculpture Museum, University Center, MI, USA
Mt. Cuba Center, Hockessin, DE, USA
Pink Palace Family of Museums, Memphis, TN, USA
San Mateo County Libraries, San Mateo, CA, USA
Scurry County Museum, Snyder, TX, USA
The Dickens Project, international/Santa Cruz, CA, USA
The Modern Quilt Guild, Los Angeles, CA, USA
Woburn Public Library, Woburn, MA, USA
San Jose Quilts and Textiles Museum, San Jose, CA, USA
Let’s fly together.
Today, OF/BY/FOR ALL is an independent nonprofit organization, sharing and spreading innovative practices for community-driven institutional change. We have a plan to grow to fuel inclusive change at 200+ organizations in the Change Network by 2022… and we’d like to invite you to get involved.
We’re only as strong as our growing network of partners. If you want to become more inclusive, we can help you with a structured process to support your growth.
We’ve already seen many Change Network members make amazing inclusive leaps with our help. Their stories are not the same as Nina’s in Santa Cruz—but they all share common themes of strengthened community partnership. They have build meaningful relationships with underrepresented communities, broken down institutional barriers to inclusion, and increased relevance and value. Their stories are our story now. You can meet them and read some of their inspiring stories here.