Building Opportunity and Access in the Cultural Sector

For an organization dedicated to preserving the region’s past, Historic New England spends a fair amount of time thinking about the future. Our annual Summit spotlights discussions about the trends and innovations shaping preservation and culture. Our Climate Action Plan anticipates how our teams will address the increasingly urgent challenges of climate change at our historic properties. 

And now, thanks to a recently awarded grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS), we are turning our attention to the future of the cultural sector workforce. Beginning this fall, Historic New England will offer paid internships in an effort to level the playing field and encourage greater diversity and representation among emerging museum professionals.

Cultural institutions across the country are embracing the value of greater diversity in staff hiring and retention, but the unpaid internship looms large as a barrier for those lacking the financial means to work—sometimes in a full-time capacity—for free. At the same time, internship experience is highly valued, if not required, in most museum studies, public history, and preservation programs. Providing internship opportunities that pay is a key step toward creating access to the field for individuals from underrepresented groups, including BIPOC, first generation to college, LGBTQ+, and people with disabilities.

The grant, one of eight awards made in IMLS’s 21st Century Museum Professionals Program this year, provides three years of funding to pilot and scale a paid internship program under the auspices of the Historic New England Study Center. We will hire up to seventy-six paid interns over the course of the grant period, with positions available across departments, including conservation and collections, property care, preservation, visitor experience, and administrative functions such as development and marketing. Each semester, the interns will meet as a cohort to share information about their projects, hear from Historic New England staff, and conduct site visits.

Dr. Alissa Butler, manager of the Study Center and supervisor to Historic New England’s Recovering New England’s Voices scholars, will direct the project. She frequently writes and speaks about equity and navigating a career in the museum field. The Historic New England internship pilot program is designed to address what she calls the “privilege funnel” that unpaid internships create. 

“While more and more institutions are recognizing the importance of paying interns,” Butler says, “low or no pay is still a norm.” She references a survey of more than two hundred MuseumNext users that found that 59% of respondents had completed an internship, but only 48% of those received any pay for their work. A 2022 study spearheaded by the Mellon Foundation found that while diversity among art museum staff has grown, those gains are in lower-level and public facing roles, while leadership positions remain disproportionately white and male. 

Historic New England is taking a 360-degree view of the issue, introducing paid internships and undertaking a thorough review of the systemic practices that reinforce bias in less obvious ways. One of those practices is recruitment. In the past, intern hiring has been decentralized, with individual department leaders often bringing on interns through word of mouth and personal connections to a handful of institutions. Moving forward, we will post internship positions publicly with special attention to sharing information with a broad range of schools. “Ensuring a diverse applicant pool means thinking beyond the more traditional and elite institutions,” says Butler. “We need to be building our relationships with state schools, HBCUs, and trade schools, for example.”

For students from underrepresented backgrounds, an internship is about more than building technical skills. It is a way to learn the (often unspoken) norms of working in a professional setting and collaborating across teams. “In the real world,” says Butler, “our interns are going to be interacting with colleagues who have very different roles and perspectives on the work. Exposing them to the full scope of operations at a cultural organization, and how those functions link together, will give them a competitive edge in the job market.” 

Another advantage? Networking. Convening intern cohorts is intended to facilitate connections and a sense of community within the field, establishing relationships that interns can take with them as they move forward in their careers.

Peter Gittleman, Team Leader for Visitor Experience, says that Historic New England has “an opportunity and an obligation” to take a leadership role in this work. “For well over a century we have been leaders in the preservation field. Developing and mentoring tomorrow’s museum professionals and ensuring that they represent the full diversity of the museum-going audience is critical to the continued impact and relevance of our cultural institutions.” 

The first intern cohort launches this fall. Historic New England will collect demographic and outcomes data on an ongoing basis, culminating in a white paper to be shared with peer institutions. An important part of this grant program is sharing what we learn with other museums. We want to better understand what knowledge gaps exist for students contemplating a museum career, particularly those from underrepresented backgrounds, and in what ways host sites or museums can bridge those gaps. What are effective strategies for recruiting and supporting interns from marginalized communities, and how can we apply those lessons to the hiring environment? What resources are necessary to build and sustain a paid internship program?
 
And perhaps the most important part is that this isn’t just about us. As Butler notes, our program matters beyond Historic New England and the interns we train, because “what we learn has the potential to create a real multiplier effect across the sector.”

Written by Victoria Stanton, Institutional Giving Officer