A museum or cultural center needs staff in order to carry out its mission. The types and number of staff members vary according to the size, resources, and ambitions of the museum. Some small museums get by solely with volunteers and perhaps only one or two staff. Other large institutions, like the National Museum of the American Indian at the Smithsonian Institution, employ hundreds of staff members. Your museum may use paid employees or you may choose to use volunteers, but what both of these support roles require is clear position descriptions, responsibilities, and regular performance appraisals.

Staff at the Weatherspoon Art Museum prepare a new display.

The first employee of most museums is the Executive Director. At a tribal museum or cultural center, the Executive Director might report to tribal authorities or a committee. If the museum or cultural center is a separate entity, the Executive Director would report to a board of directors, who are responsible for hiring, directing, and evaluating the performance of the Director. This is the single most important hire that the tribal authorities or board will make, as the Executive Director will do all subsequent hiring and chart the direction for the institution. The text, Starting Right, has a very detailed description of the process through which you will hire your first Executive Director. It is critical that the person is well-qualified for the position-and while political savvy will be a necessary skill for the Director to have, politics should have no bearing on the actual selection and hiring of your Director.

The second position of great importance and which you might consider hiring after the Executive Director is a Facilities Manager. It may seem premature, but having someone whose responsibility it is to oversee your facility is incredibly important. This person will either carry out, or supervise staff (paid or unpaid) to keep up with regular cleaning (restrooms, floor, windows), grounds keeping (mowing, sweeping sidewalks, snow shoveling, tree trimming, and gardening plus maintaining any outdoor program space you may have designated),and periodic maintenance (deep cleaning, battery changes, bulb changes, etc.). Your facility will give all visitors that important good first impression, and is critical to success.

Following a facility manager, it is important to have some administrative assistance. If the Executive Director is carrying out the duties of curator, program manager, development officer, and public relations person in addition to those of the Director, that person will need someone to help manage volunteers, do routine tasks like correspondence and making bank deposits, and stand in line at the post office. If you are paying your Executive Director well, you will not want their valuable time to be taken up with necessary, but time-consuming, routine tasks.

If you can hire a development director or grant writer, you would be wise to do so. No matter what the funding of your institution, grants can be a critical part of your funding mix. Grant writing requires a very specific skill set: great writing skills, plus the ability to align your existing or dream programs with the funding interests of foundations, corporations, or government entities. A development director would work more broadly on securing funding for your institution. In smaller museums, much of the fundraising responsibility rests with the Executive Director. If your size or ambitions permit, one of these two staff members might allow you to grow faster or maintain your momentum.

If your new museum/cultural center has an ambitious agenda, and will have a collection, you will want to consider hiring support staff to serve as Curator, and Program Manager (or Educator). These positions will be responsible for the chief programmatic responsibilities of your institution.

The Curator, or related position (even if titled differently) will have chief responsibility for the collection. In tribal communities this is a critical role. Museum collections are expected to be held in perpetuity-and in non-tribal museums, this generally means that artifacts will rarely, if ever, be used for their original purpose because use is considered damaging. However, in tribal museums, it is likely that many artifacts will remain in ritual use. For a tribal museum, an ideal curator would be well-versed, if not expert, at the material culture of the tribe, culturally aware, trained in museum work, and adept at balancing competing, but equal, concerns.

Ideally, the position of Program Manager or Educator would have the primary responsibility for all of the public programming that goes on at the museum. Depending on your goals for the museum/cultural center, you may be conducting programs for your community as well as for the general public. School tours are an excellent way to teach young people about your history and culture in an environment where the message is created and controlled. For the youth in the community, it might be an opportunity to see things that they had only heard about before. This same staff member could also supervise the volunteers who work in the galleries and those who give tours.

Beyond these positions, you might wish to consider employing people who would open the museum and staff it beyond the normal work week, particularly weekends and holidays. It is helpful for volunteers who work in the museum during off hours to have a paid staff member present to take charge when something happens, and to be responsible for opening and closing the museum.

A "Docent" is a specific type of volunteer. The word has come to mean museum teacher. Docents ordinarily lead tours through gallery spaces, but can also be stationed in galleries to work with touring visitors. Like other positions, this is fairly specialized, requiring gregarious types who are willing to engage visitors, and have the patience to also work with children. Aside from the paid staff, these are generally the volunteers that need the most training and supplemental material to read, because they get more specific questions about the museum and its collections than just about anyone else. It is not necessary to call tour guides or gallery attendants "docents"-usually this term is always used in art museums, but history and cultural museums may or may not use the term.

The paradigm for staffing small museums for the last 50 years in the United States has been to use a minimal number of paid staff, and supplement that staff with unpaid volunteers. This paradigm has shifted (and some time ago), but most museums have not yet caught up. If you think that you can recruit, train, and retain volunteers to staff your galleries, or to serve as a receptionist, do it. It would be advisable to figure out how to involve community members, leaders and elders, especially in programming. An Elders Board might be a wonderful way to involve those who know the most. It is up to you whether you use unpaid staff, but they can certainly help stretch scarce resources to allow you to provide more programs

By Sue Near

Long-range planning session at Gallaudet University.

Strategies are broad, overall priorities or directions adopted by an organization. Strategies are choices about how best to accomplish an organization's mission. To illustrate the point here are some sample strategies: 

• At least 50% of our exhibitions will be from other museums' collections
• Focus our art collecting on 20th century California artists

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