Crafting a Theory of Change for the Romare Bearden Graduate Museum Fellowship
Client: Saint Louis Art Museum | Location: Saint Louis, MO | Funding: Ford Foundation and Walton Family Foundation Diversity Art Museum Leadership Initiative
We measured the impact and effectiveness of the Saint Louis Art Museum’s long-running fellowship program, designed to create a pipeline for people of color who will work in and lead the museum field.
OVERVIEW
We partnered with SLAM to evaluate the Romare Bearden Graduate Museum Fellowship, one of the longest running diversity fellowships in the museum field.
Our evaluation came at a critical time when many museums began seriously reckoning with the lack of diversity among museum staff. Fellowship and internship programs are one strategy for increasing diversity, yet very little was known about their effectiveness.
APPROACH
We designed an evaluation with three distinct but interrelated parts:
A Theory of Change to articulate goals, actions, and underlying assumptions of the fellowship
A retrospective longitudinal study to explain the fellowship experience looking back over time
An environmental scan to identify characteristics of other diversity-focused museum fellowships
CLIENT TAKEAWAYS
We found that the Fellowship has a long-lasting effect on the fellows, with most successfully employed in museum or arts careers years later. The evaluation also highlighted questions about how to best support fellows in any kind of diversity fellowship. Together with SLAM, we realized some of the key ingredients of a fellowship are strong mentor relationships; support to feel comfortable navigating museums as professionals of color; strong peer networks; and most important, overall institutional prioritization of diversity, equity, access, and inclusion.
At the end of our partnership with SLAM we co-published a program guide that provides considerations for other museums to use in developing their own diversity-focused fellowship programs and co-presented the guide with SLAM in a national convening.
SLAM made improvements to the Fellowship in response to the evaluation findings, including changing it from one to two fellows at a time to allow for peer connection as well as structural changes within SLAM broadly that would prioritize recruiting staff of color across the institution.
