Good rant, Julia, and it sounds familiar to me
somehow.... Oh yeah, that was me talking not so long ago!
This is related to the tales of woe about finding
paid positions that move one forward professionally, as well as paying
salaries that are livable and help one pay back all the debt accrued
getting the advanced degrees that these badly-paid jobs require.
Work is work. If it is important enough to
get done at all -- from cleaning the premises to cataloguing objects to
interacting with the public to curating shows, management and fundraising --
then it is important enough to pay salaries so that the people who perform
these functions can be made accountable. Volunteers are simply not really
accountable or reliable (a thousand pardons to the fabulous and unusual
volunteers out there who are the soul of professionalism...).
Moreover, volunteers (and interns) require a
special kind of supervision, and that supervision is itself a job (as Julia so
eloquently pointed out in her rant).
Most of us ended up connected to museums because
this is where our hearts led us: we are inspired by our intellectual
disciplines, dedicated to the preservation of information and objects, and
passionate partisans of education. For all that this is morally
commendable, it doesn't change the fact that we are asked to do a skilled
kind of work and aggressively upgrade our scholarship, our administrative
skills, and our technological skills constantly, ostensibly to pursue the
museum's mission.
Solution to the volunteer dilemma? There
isn't one, or at least not one that fits all museums. As long as a
museum-type institution is a "not-for-profit" organization, it will not
offer for-profit-style profits or for-profit-style wages, nor will it, for
those very reasons, be amenable to whatever faddish "management style" happens
to be current. In business, the quid pro quo is $$$ for effective and
productive completion of one's assigned tasks. In museums, the quid pro
quo is you might get to keep your job and you are encouraged to squeeze
whatever personal satisfaction out of your work that is appropriate for
you.
It was my own policy to refuse to take on work
I knew I could not do in a complete and worthy manner, and to
resist work weeks that exceeded 45 hours. Productivity does not
have to involve running yourself and your staff into the ground; nor does the
productive museum have to hold itself to the questionable standard of
"faster, bigger, cheaper." In
the end, I wasn't being paid anywhere near enough to justify sacrificing
myself, my life and my family's lives to any museum.
By the way, I am not speaking from bitterness -- I
believe that this is simply the truth.
So go easy on the hair-pulling, Julia.
:-)
Ellen B. Cutler
LNB Associates: Writing, Editing, Research
Services
731 Clayton Street
Aberdeen, MD 21001
----- Original Message -----
Sent: Friday, July 13, 2001 9:40 AM
Subject: Re: volunteers at museums
I am
writing on list because I have a particular rant on this
topic.
The money
is typically so short in museums and the number of services we are expected to
provide are increasing so exponentially, that we must rely on volunteers to
help us meet minimum service levels instead of hiring additional staff.
The kind of thing we need done by people other than ourselves is rarely
exciting enough to hold the interest of skilled volunteers (who are well aware
of their worth anyway and are always looking for paid opportunities), yet the
volunteers who could be trained have erratic schedules and are apt to up and
leave anyway. We find that to continually invest our time in training
volunteers takes away from our other duties, and once trained their major
motivation is hanging out and socializing with us---hardly conducive to
getting our own work done.
Typically
a job or program starts out being done by a motivated, skilled
volunteer, then it becomes so invaluable that we allot $ to it to make it a
part-time position once the volunteer threatens to quit. It then gets
integrated into our operations to the extent that it becomes a full-time
position. The total elapsed time to get this accomplished is about 5
years. We have a staff of 22 full-time people and 6-8 part-time
people--the institution was all-volunteer from 1934 to 1976, when it got a
total of one full-time paid person. Today our volunteers are
used as docents, supplementary office help in all departments
and installation assistants--we tried to have a volunteer
coordinate our volunteer efforts but...you got it...it got
turned into a paid job once it started to entail some real
work.
End of
rant. But you see what I mean?
Julia
Moore
Director
of Exhibitions and Artist Services
Indianapolis Art Center
-----Original
Message-----
From: Museum discussion list
[mailto:[log in to unmask]]On Behalf Of
[log in to unmask]
Sent: Wednesday, July 04, 2001 8:59
AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: volunteers at
museums
Hello. I am
writing an article for Museums Journal, the journal of the
Museums
Association in London, on volunteers and their expectations of
working
at museums. I am interested in what museums professionals around the
world do to encourage participation by volunteers, what has been
particularly
successful to lure and keep volunteers, and what kinds of
things volunteers
expect to do or experience when the work in a museums.
Excitement? Drama?
Doing the curator's job?
I would be happy to have
responses off list, and would like to hear from
professionals or
volunteers who may be on this list.
Thank you,
Lise Hull
Wales
Correspondent
Museums Journal