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DEI Toolkit

New York State Office of Cultural Education

Recruitment and Retention

Organizational and sector readiness, developing a robust workforce pipeline, addressing the Civil Service “problem,” and evaluating progress are all strategies for developing recruitment and retention grounded in diversity, equity, inclusion, accessibility, antiracism, and justice.

Organizational and Sector Readiness

In order to create welcoming organizations where every person feels safe, comfortable, and wanted, our organizations need to prepare. This preparation includes individual, organizational, and structural evaluations of our policies, systems, and practices.

  • How do my own practices uphold or dismantle oppression? How do the systems and policies of my organization uphold or dismantle oppression?
  • How does my organization understand its own history?
  • Who is privileged and heard by our current policies, systems, and practices? Who is silenced or ignored?
  • What are the systemic or structural barriers to inclusion and justice in my field?

Who is modeling safe, inclusive, and accessible policies, systems, and practices in my community? Throughout the state and my field?

Workforce Pipeline

A more inclusive and diverse volunteer and paid workforce pipeline is essential to sustainable recruitment and retention of enthusiastic, qualified workers. There is widespread acknowledgement that credentialing and requiring advanced degrees creates barriers to entry in our field5. Solutions to this concern include:

  • Establishing mentor relationships early with young people who may be interested in building a career in our sector. Organizations who are currently doing this partner with secondary schools, colleges, and universities to identify young people interested in our sector and create opportunities for those young people to engage.
  • Creating more opportunity to develop the workforce pipeline by providing paid internships for young people to learn on the job6.

5 National Public Radio. (2021). No College, No Problem. Retrieved from: https://www.npr.org/2021/04/29/990274681/no-college-no-problem-some-employers-drop-degree- requirements-to-diversify-staff

6 Pay Our Interns. Retrieved from: https://payourinterns.org/

Compensation

Concern over pervasively low pay across the sector and the length of time it takes for practitioners to reach livable and thriving wages also causes concern.

  • Some organizations in our sector are partnering with their Friends group or sole support organization to provide additional pay for positions where the original pay is too low to sustain and retain talented professionals.
  • Organizations without robust fundraising capacity or sole support organizations are reconsidering job requirements to raise wages and create manageable scopes of work.

Recruitment

Organizations in our sector may struggle to recruit volunteers based on small community populations (such as in rural areas) or lack of relationship to the communities they wish to recruit (such as in urban communities where staff and collections may not reflect the lived experiences of neighbors).

  • In communities where populations are smaller and spread out, organizations have worked together to share a pool of volunteers, coordinating across the organizations and within the volunteer pool7.
  • In organizations whose staff and/or collections do not reflect the lived experiences and cultural norms of their neighbors, they have addressed the internal and organizational work necessary to reach hard to reach communities.

7 DHPSNY Dialogue. (January 12, 2023). Centering Indigenous Perspectives in Collecting Organizations.

The Civil Service Problem

Although the Civil Service is an important employment program with essential benefits, requiring certain municipally funded positions be Civil Service qualified is a barrier to entry for many practitioners.

  • Organizations partner with their Friends or sole support organization to hire staff while they prepare for the Civil Service exam and hiring process.
  • Civil Service employees work with museum, archive, and library science students to prepare them for the exam and process.

Evaluating Progress

There is a dearth of formal evaluation processes for gauging motivations to enter and exit the field, or to institute process improvements at the organizational level:

  • Create staff and volunteer polling that addresses what makes them feel welcome and comfortable in their position, what could be improved to better serve their needs, and their motivations for leaving the organization before their exit.
  • Identify teams of people to analyze and understand the data, then share their learnings with the people responsible for recruitment and retention.

Sources

American Alliance of Museums. (2022). Hiring Into Pathways for Advancement. Retrieved from: https://www.aam-us.org/2022/01/26/hiring-into-pathways-for- advancement/

American Institute of Certified Public Accountants. Recruitment and Retention Toolkit. Retrieved from: https://us.aicpa.org/content/dam/aicpa/career/diversityinitiatives/downloadabledocument s/recruitment-retention-toolkit.pdf

American Library Association. Library Staff Statistics. Retrieved from: https://www.ala.org/tools/research/librarystaffstats

Art.gov. (2019). Findings on Artists and Other Cultural Workers. Retrieved from: https://www.arts.gov/news/press-releases/2019/new-report-reveals-findings-artists-and- other-cultural-workers

Dunn, T. (2021). Creative industry workers suffer the most stolen wages, according to UNESCO. Retrieved from: https://boingboing.net/2021/02/10/creative-industry-workers- suffer-the-most-stolen-wages-according-to-unesco.html

Society for American Archivists. (2022). A*Census II for All Archivists. Retrieved from: https://www2.archivists.org/news/2022/read-the-acensus-ii-all-archivists-survey-report

Syracuse University School of Information Studies and American Library Association. (2022). Pathways to Librarianship. Retrieved from: https://www.imls.gov/grants/awarded/re-252365-ols-22

U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. (2021). Occupational Outlook Handbook: Archivists, Curators, and Museum Workers. Retrieved from: https://www.bls.gov/ooh/education- training-and-library/curators-museum-technicians-and-conservators.htm

Velie, E. (2022). NYC Salary Transparency Law Exposes Art World’s Lowest Wages. Retrieved from: https://hyperallergic.com/778496/nyc-salary-transparency-law-exposes- art-worlds-lowest-wages/