Funding Rural | Episode #14 | Season 2: Andy Mink “Belonging Insecurity”
The Smithsonian Institution has a long history as an iconic museum and hub of research, knowledge, and history in our Nation’s Capital and beyond. Nowadays, the Smithsonian has grown to encompass 21 museums, 40 research centers and the national zoo. It’s the world’s largest education and research community – and it is really inspiring to see this important institution prioritizing collaborating with rural America and giving back. Andy Mink is their first director of rural initiatives and he joins the show to share his vision of the democratization of storytelling, belonging security, and mutual respect.
“The question is, are we really ‘The Nation’s Museum’? Are we really serving communities across the nation? Are we really allowing people of all backgrounds to see themselves in our spaces?” –Andy Mink
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More about Andy Mink
Andrew T. Mink (Andy) is the director of the Smithsonian’s Rural Initiative. He provides leadership in shaping and growing the initiative in order to establish the programmatic and operational infrastructure necessary to execute pan-institutional collaborations that expand the reach of the Smithsonian’s resources, expertise and programming.
He joins the Office of the Undersecretary of Education after seven successful years as the vice president of education at the National Humanities Center (NHC). Recognized as the world’s only fully independent non-profit research center for humanities scholars, the center lacked a comprehensive education program. Under his leadership, the NHC served nearly 4 million K–12 and post-secondary educators in all 50 states and internationally each year through a variety of virtual and in-person programs and events.
Mink began his career in higher education in 2001 when he was hired as the director of education and outreach with the Virginia Center for Digital History at the University of Virginia. As access to digital resources transformed education, he worked throughout the nation to provide professional development that integrated emerging educational technology into hands-on, inquiry-based instruction.
He later served as the executive director of LEARN NC in the Peabody School of Education at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. This non-profit center provided educators with collaborative long-distance learning and teaching opportunities with a focus on teacher leadership, inquiry-based instructional design and place-based education models. This work capitalized on the emergence of Open Education Resources to address issues of equity and access in rural and underserved communities of the state.
After earning degrees in history from the University of Virginia and the University of South Carolina, he taught in a public middle school in central Virginia for 10 years. Mink has been named National K–12 Educator of the Year by the National Society of Experiential Education and Outstanding Support for Geography Education by the National Council for Geography Education during his work as an educator. He is currently listed as a Distinguished Lecturer by the Organization of American Historians.
Finally, Mink is a dedicated service leader. He has served on numerous local, regional and national Boards of Directors, including multiple terms on the National Council for the Social Studies, National Council for History Education and North Carolina Outward Bound School.
This background and wide-ranging set of professional experiences inform his deep commitment to community-based education.
A native of rural eastern Virginia, he lives in Durham, North Carolina, with his partner, Monica, and two children.
“We have a lot of people in communities around the country who have seen the Smithsonian show up and hand them a microphone to tell their own story…This is where the digital age is really beneficial for the democratization of storytelling.” –Andy Mink
Discussion Questions
- We are more connected than we ever have been, but yet many folks are experiencing what Andy calls, ‘belonging insecurity.’ How do we solve for that and what are the tools that we could give to the community to be able to support that?
- What cultural institutions does your organization support? Are they representative of rural and remote communities as well?
- In Oregon, The Oregon Heritage Commission recently completed The Oregon Heritage Vitality Study and found that the vast majority of cultural institutions across the state had budgets under $15,000/annually. How does your organization support small, often volunteer-run nonprofits?
- How do you partner with state and local agencies that support cultural institutions?
- Andy talks about the report he developed turning into action; how do you ensure research and listening sessions turn into action?
Resources
- Andy Mink | Smithsonian Institution
- Partner Spotlight: National Humanities Center with Andy Mink | Program in Education
- Oregon Heritage Vitality Study
- Smithsonian Stories 4-History Program
“We can talk about aspirations all day long, but you got to do the work too, and be prepared to do it and be there for the long term and handle all the challenges and help communities outside of our Smithsonian world understand how to navigate the systems and all those things. But we have to do it from a place of humility and a place of really shared and mutual respect.” –Andy Mink
Transcript: Episode #14 | Season 2: “Belonging Insecurity” with Andy Mink
Erin Borla 0:00
Welcome back to Funding Rural, a show that explores how philanthropy can better serve rural and indigenous communities. I’m Erin Borla with the Sisters, Oregon based Roundhouse Foundation, the Smithsonian has been called the nation’s Museum. It has a long history as an iconic institution and hub of knowledge and history in our nation’s capital and beyond. Nowadays, the Smithsonian has grown to encompass 21 museums, 40 research centers and the National Zoo. It’s the world’s largest education and research community, and it’s really inspiring to see this important institution, prioritizing collaborating with rural America and giving back. To that end, Andy Mink is the Director of Rural Initiatives there. He’s the first person to fill this role, and I’ve enjoyed getting to know him. He’s a rural kid, just like I am.
Andy Mink 0:57
I did grow up in a very small rural community in coastal Virginia on the Chesapeake Bay. Just recently, I went back to visit my parents, who are elderly. Now, they’re in their late 80s. They live in the same house I grew up in, and I asked the population of our small town, and they sort of counted in their head, counted on their fingers, and came up with 61 so it’s a small rural space. I also raised my children in rural Central Virginia and so rurality is definitely something. It’s a world view that I think is always informed who I am and infused the work that I’ve done. The Smithsonian though I think is is in a unique position as what we call ourselves as the nation’s Museum, to really treat that phrase, not as a slogan or a moniker, but to but to treat it as a promise, and also treat it as a question. And the question is, are we really the nation’s Museum? Are we really serving communities across the nation? Are we really allowing people of all backgrounds to see themselves in our spaces? Are we addressing what oftentimes is belonging insecurity when citizens don’t quite understand if their story is being represented, their stories being told, their perspective is being acknowledged. And so with the conception of this new office, it was really important to me to sort of pull together several of my own personal professional interests, one of which is to serve rural spaces and to serve them from a place of asset building, a place of capacity, building to recognize the unique characteristics of rural environments and the qualities that that that make them who they are and how they contribute to America and how they contribute to the world we live in, but also to now help this and be a part of an initiative at a at a globally recognized institution to make its work more available outside of DC. So this work, in some ways, is both internal and external, and I think there is a component of this, where internally, the Smithsonian is re-imagining how we present ourselves, how we engage our audiences, how we how we don’t restrict ourselves to the confines of 21 museums and 40 research centers, etc.
Erin Borla 3:15
That phrase belonging and security is such an interesting one we talk about authentic voice and narrative and storytelling, and who gets to tell the story, and whose story is being told and heard by whom. I’ve never heard it phrased like that. It’s really interesting, and I think it really highlights how I mean we are in a pretty divisive type of time right now where we don’t connect with one another. We are more connected than we ever have been, but are yet less connected, if that makes sense. Yeah. So it’s interesting to hear that phrasing of like, how do we solve that? How do we solve for that, that level of insecurity and that, and what are the tools that we could give to community to be able to support that?
Andy Mink 3:58
I agree. And you know, I think the word insecurity also implies that that that internally, for the audience, for many, many good reasons, there’s a notion that other people aren’t really ready to listen to us, and if they are, they’re really not going to do much about it. And so I think the insecurity comes from just distrust, just not quite understanding or believing or allowing yourself the imagination of knowing that others are there to celebrate and acknowledge and sit by side by side and really value what you bring to the table, versus coming in with a heavy handed prescribed, sorry rural space. You’re really just big cities unrealized, you just haven’t caught up with the rest of us, and we’re here to fix that. I think what the Smithsonian is embraced is a very, very different approach, and that is in that is to acknowledge the very unique characteristics of all of the spaces that we hope to work with and serve.
Erin Borla 4:58
Yeah, and that’s I love, that. Asset Based right, instead of talking about what’s wrong, talking about what’s right, and how to build off of what’s right, and sometimes that brings in, how do we better enhance the things that are maybe challenges? You have a couple of exhibits that are already developed around like Crossroads is one Spark Places of innovation is another. Talk a little bit about how you develop those current exhibitions that you have and they’re traveling so they can go to different places, right,
Andy Mink 5:26
Correct? Yeah. And you know, the the other sort of reality of this work is that the Smithsonian has has been working in service of rural spaces and communities for a long while, and probably our signature program, Museum on Main Street, which we affectionately call MOMS internally, MOMS has for quite literally 30 years, developed deep relationships in small towns in rural America by creating traveling exhibits that reflect content of our museums, but do so in a way that positions the rural space as a central player. The topics that have been chosen generally are agnostic to the space. So we want, we want them to be the big picture questions, things like innovation or water or one voice is one vote kind of, kind of topics. And then we work with the State Humanities Council Network, those State Humanities Councils then receive applications from small towns in their state, and those small towns then host these exhibits for anywhere from six to eight weeks at a time. What we found is that these exhibits, as I think good museum exhibits do, really inspire conversation. They inspire discussion and discourse, and so we have numerous stories and anecdotes and photographs of the communities coming together in public spaces, perhaps a library, perhaps a school cafeteria, perhaps, you know, some other central space interacting with these exhibits, but doing so through the lens of their local storytelling. So people start to remember, they start to tell the stories. This isn’t nostalgia. This is exhibits as prompts for local storytelling that’s centered in a national narrative. That program is so successful that I want to say that our exhibits are booked through 2030 at this point,we are they’re extremely popular. Communities want them, they want them back. What it’s also done, though, and what I’m trying to take advantage of is building on those relationships. So we have a lot of goodwill. We have a lot of people who in communities around the country have seen the Smithsonian show up and hand them a microphone to tell their own story. And what I want to do is build on that and really focused on this work as you know, it happens at the pace of trust, but a lot of trust is built, and so we want to try to to maximize that. This is where the digital age is really beneficial for the democratization of storytelling, right? We can, we can offer people technology and digital means to tell that story. The MOMS team is, for example, the MOMS team has recently been developing what we call starter kits, which are, they’re not paid by numbers, but they are definitely it’s a curriculum in which local communities can then contribute their stories to the MOMs exhibits as they tour, as they travel. We’re not quite there yet, but I think we imagine being able to develop a repository of these crowdsource snapshots, so that if you know, if, if the water exhibit is in my small town on the Chesapeake Bay, then you’ve got 61 people ready to tell a story and offer an object that contextualizes that in the Chesapeake Bay region, and then it moves on and perhaps collects other voices,
Erin Borla 8:44
Yeah, yeah. You taught in a public high school, right?
Andy Mink 8:48
Public Middle School. Can you believe it? Middle Schools, 14 year olds, absolutely.
Erin Borla 8:53
Oh, my goodness. Well, and you’re up for sainthood for things like that. I would say the same of them. Yes. So was that in a rural space?
Andy Mink 9:04
It was, so, yeah, right after grad school, I found myself in a realizing that I wanted to teach, and I found a position at just a wonderful Middle School in central Virginia, just north of Charlottesville, and it was a rural space, but like all rural spaces, it has nuance. And to your point, it’s not a monolith. I certainly had students and families and members of my community who came to school every day with kids who came to school every day with, you know, mud on their knees from milking the cows and they sat next to Professor kids who went to University of Virginia. So, you know, rurality is such a fluid thing, and it it, you know, where you’re located has so much to do with it, but it’s also the combination the collection of people who are there and the perspectives they bring. But yeah, and my kids were raised there until they they were high school age.
Erin Borla 9:57
Yeah,I am a big fan of middle school I do, it tends to get forgotten in the middle, right? We talk about career readiness at the high school level, we talk about early literacy at the elementary level, and we forget about those sweet kiddos, because sometimes they’re not so sweet, but that’s okay, they’ll get there, but I would imagine that experience helped to inform your work now, right as to how you how you approach this level of work that you’re doing,
Andy Mink 10:25
Absolutely, I, as a matter of fact, I would say, in 35 years of you know, professional life, that’s probably the the most influential part of my professional career is, is working for that decade with with families and students, and many of whom I now know as you know, late, 30, early, 40 year olds raising their own kids. I think part of it, though, to your point earlier, about about that middle school culture, is that kids that age, if they have one thing in mind in my experience, and that is their identity, who am I? How do I relate to others? How do other people see me, what’s the perception that I’m of the presentation I’m giving? If I do this, what kind of response am I going to get if I do that? Is it going to be a different one? And that’s both negative and positive. And I think you know that that sort of identity, which I think can be loosely structured under health in general, is also what communities go through. Right? Who are we? How do we fit in? How can we prioritize and acknowledge our identity, our uniqueness, but also allow for new voices and perspectives and growth and change and all these kinds of things? And I found that many rural spaces, including the one I grew up in, really struggles sometimes in a positive way, I mean, struggle in a growth way. Struggles with destigmatizing that living, you know, it’s okay to live in a small town, you’re not going to be cut off from perspectives and experiences and opportunities others might have just because you’re living here, you can have both. It can be an and/or.
Erin Borla 11:57
Yeah, well, and that leads in. You know that this podcast is really about how philanthropy can serve rural and remote spaces, and oftentimes those bigger philanthropic institutions, much like the Smithsonian, are concentrated in larger, more urban centers, and as is a lot of the wealth that’s been developed, even if the wealth has been developed in more rural places, It’s now concentrated in these urban centers, which has made it hard for those dollars to get redistributed back out to those communities. And I think it’s hard for folks that live in places that are not rural, for to understand how to engage or connect with those places and in ways that I think are valid and not harmful is that I know that’s something that you’re really working on at this and now that you have, you have this newer initiative where you’re doing listening sessions and other things. I’m not sure to what level you can share about those types of things, or what advice you would have for folks that are trying to get out and trying to do that support work.
Andy Mink 12:59
Absolutely, and I’ll speak specifically from the Smithsonian’s perspective in my my experience there. And that did start as this office is being developed. That did start with a full commitment to a national rural need, sensing research body of work. And so we contracted with an external researcher and began the process of trying to collect as many voices and perspectives from rural stakeholders as we could, just to get a snapshot of of how best we can trans transform ourselves from Smithsonian, the destination to Smithsonian the public service, how we can be seen that way and to our points earlier. We always try to engage these conversations from an asset perspective and also with an acknowledgement that rural is different everywhere. And so we did this in three phases. We started in mid spring, and in each of these examples, these phases, I identified an advocate in that region. The advocate was somebody either I had a prior relationship with, or was introduced to by somebody I knew, or somehow could be that gatekeeper that could make sure that the right people were in the room for the for the first round of conversations. And these were in person focus groups. We brought together, you know, as many as 12, 15, 18 stakeholders from a particular region. The first one was in northeastern North Carolina that’s traditionally known as the Black Belt of North Carolina. You know, certainly on the east coast and in the American South, communities are very close together. So it was relatively easy to bring 15 people from, let’s say, six or seven adjacent counties together. These included education leaders, of course, because schools play such an outsized role in small towns and rural spaces, but also included elected officials and faith based leaders and chambers of commerce and business leaders, etc, and we just quite literally talked to them for two and a half hours and asked questions about their space, their perspective, their realities, their goals, their aspirations. Tried to get a real snapshot of that particular place. We replicated that then in five more communities, one in Central Maine, one that really stemmed from Lincoln Nebraska. I know Lincoln’s not necessarily seen as a traditionally and classically defined rural space, but it does serve a rural population. It’s rural adjacent and also the Bentonville, Arkansas, Springdale area, which is the lower Ozarks. And our final one was actually with Navajo Nation in Window Rock, Arizona. So while we tried to have indigenous voices in all of our focus groups, that one specifically with a geopolitically defined nation, we wanted to get their unique perspective. So we did this with with five and then we, after that, structured eight more virtual focus groups that followed the same format, except as you move to different parts of the country, it’s much harder to bring people together face to face. In Montana, it’s just too far in your Alaska, you’re not going to come down for a three hour meeting, so we convened people in a virtual space to have the same kinds of conversations. At the conclusion of that, we developed a survey that reflected the lessons learned and then sort of the key points of those focus group conversations, and distributed that in a double blind format so it wasn’t attached to the Smithsonian name to about 2100 rural stakeholders across the nation. At the conclusion of this, we have had voices from every state, as well as Puerto Rico, and we’re taking all of that qualitative and quantitative data and developing essentially a final report that that we can then use to activate our work in rural spaces. It can be a guidepost internally. It’s going to give me a lot of good feedback that I can share with museums and directors at the Smithsonian as they develop their rural outreach kind of work. I’m sorry again. I’m going to resist using the word outreach our rural collaborations, but I’m also going to use it to to begin conversations in rural spaces around work we can do locally and regionally. So this was a really important part of the rural initiative in general, that we have this spine of evidence and research behind it. Of course, it’s not comprehensive. I mean this, we’re complicated people, and these are snapshots of areas that give us guidance, that give us something to evolve from. But it’s, it’s really going to be an important part of 2025-26
Erin Borla 17:35
No, I think it’s really interesting how you’ve chosen to go to those different places and collaborate with those communities. Can I ask just a brief question? Yeah, of course. What’s the resistance to the word outreach? Because I think it’s super good for other folks to hear that.
Andy Mink 17:52
Yeah, you know, this is part of what came up in the focus groups. And again, it’s, you know, I don’t mean to backfill evidence. I’m not trying to hear the things that I want to now be able to say to you and to others. But, you know, I think, I think rural spaces, I think any community always begins with, if not suspicious, at least guarded, optimistic interaction with people from the outside. For people not from here, you know, where I grew up, anybody not from there was a come over, like you came across the bay to be there. And because I wasn’t born there, I moved there when I was three, I’m still a come over. So, yeah, you have to, you have to sort of get that, that validation. And what I have heard in all of these focus groups is a real belief that any attempt, particularly by Washington, DC, and even though the Smithsonian is a different kind of federal institution, the Smithsonian itself, any attempt to come in from that perspective and save us or help us, or bring you know, bring your world here meets with resistance. And the word outreach itself implies, to some people, implies that kind of most patronizing content, sort of a content being condescending about it. You know, it’s the it’s the old, it’s the old commercial that you and I heard when we were kids. You know, where’s that from? New York City, that nobody wants that city stuff coming in unless you, unless you prove your worth, unless you prove that you’re here for the right reasons.
Erin Borla 19:27
Yeah, we say, unless you have dirt on your boots, right? 52% of US cultural organizations are in small towns or rural communities. 82% of rural cultural organizations have an annual budget of under $25,000. That’s right. How are we getting the information from the Smithsonian to folks that are probably volunteer led, like, or, how do those volunteers access those resources? What’s the connection point?
Andy Mink 19:52
Yeah, it’s a great point. And, and you know this, this will bring us back a little bit to the report that we discussed. Uh. A few moments ago, because it’s really my intention, our intention, that this report not be just a static PDF that’s in my file and we can feel good about or a book on the shelf, so to speak, but rather we activate it in local and regional public service. And so as I’m as I’m going through all the data and I’m reviewing the report itself, I’m seeing key themes, key goals, that are emerging from most, if not all, small towns and rural spaces, things that they have in common. Of course, individually and in unique places, they’re going to have their own sort of variables in that but, but many of them are saying things like, wow, we have we care so much about our local identity. We care so much about our material culture and our history. And to your point, we have these museums or small cultural organizations, but they’re woefully under sourced. Their capacity as staff is limited, maybe by training, maybe by access to materials and resources, whatever it may be. What are we going to do about that? So our plan is to take this report and bring out, let’s say, a menu of six, eight, even ten, of these key themes, these key stated goals, and then match them with what the Smithsonian does really well. Then find a local partner, a regional partner and host. You know, I’m bouncing back and forth there, and I used to call these convenings. I’m starting to think of them more as accelerators or incubators, but essentially, go to a rural region, and focus on one of those topics, bring in Smithsonian expertise and resources and invite local stakeholders to develop the project, to address that goal. And then we bring in the opportunity for funding of that project. So as an example, we identify a region or a small town, a rural space that really wants to work on improving its cultural organizations, because they just don’t have the resources they need, because there are new people moving into their town, and they want them to understand the long heritage of this place. They want to integrate them and their perspectives. And we set up a two day incubator, two day accelerator, and we bring the right people in the room and say, What could this look like? This might look like professional development for your staff, or this might look like an internship where you send staff to the Smithsonian, fully paid, and they learn the best practices of archival work or cultural preservation, or we want to create a course at the local community college that focuses on whatever, whatever the solution is that they come up with, and then we’re there as partners, and so we can begin to address locally these stated goals by giving them actual project work. And it’s not one offs, it’s long term relationship building. That’s the goal of the of the report, and I suspect that there’ll be many spaces that want to do some kind of cultural preservation work. In particular, I’ve just recently had conversations with good colleagues in western North Carolina who are interested in disaster preparedness and disaster recovery preservation work after Hurricane Helene, imagine all the rural spaces with fires and hurricanes and storms and all the things that are going on, and they’re maybe starting to think about like we should probably do some cultural preservation work before it happens, not after we lose all of the, you know, the material culture of our history and our place. So we’re planning to address that very directly. Of course, we also have America 250 coming up, and we’re hoping that a lot of small towns who have interest in seeing how they can commemorate that will see us as public service partners.
Erin Borla 23:51
Yeah, that is coming up. Oh my goodness. Well, and here in Oregon, the Heritage Commission just released their vitality study, which was was talking with all of our regional cultural museums and projects, and that’s definitely something that came up, was the disaster preparedness. And when you smaller organizations that are often volunteer led, and we have high risk of fire, we have high risk of flood and other things on our coastal communities, it’s how do we prepare those folks? And maybe they’re not as technologically savvy, even if our state office has those tools, or the Smithsonian has the tools, how do we provide them that next step? And that’s something that maybe philanthropy could step in on as well. If there are ways to even if those tools exist, help spread the word, help connect folks. Are there other things that you see where philanthropy could provide sort of that bridge or that gap opportunity?
Andy Mink 24:41
Yeah, that’s a great bridge to to this part of the conversation. Because, you know, if you take the example I just gave, and we invited cultural organizations of a region to come together and start to identify their needs and their goals, I think just as you said. Adjusted, they probably would fall into various buckets. One would be training, professional development sorts of things. One might be materials and resource and access to the to the stuff of preservation. The other might be experiential. It might be things like internships in Washington. My job, the job of rural initiative, is to connect that those interested partners with the the experts we have. For example, one of our units is called the museum Conservation Institute, and it does a lot of work in communities all over the country of exactly what you’re suggesting. How do we train, particularly in the face of disasters, in with the acknowledgement that disaster is going to happen, and disaster, by the way, happens in in short term and long term. So there’s the disaster of the fire, there’s the disaster of generations lose touch. Elder folk die, people you know, evolve, whatever it may be. So there’s lots of different ways to address that, and what I would do is work directly with the MCI team and that community to develop the program that matters. And that’s where local philanthropists matter. The Smithsonian would not work with them to receive money, but we would work with the local philanthropists to invest in those local initiatives, to really invest in their local communities. And what we found as well is that in many small towns, and this is just a product of capacity and experience, they don’t always, they don’t always know or have the staff to write a grant, manage a grant, handle all the architecture and infrastructure of receiving a big chunk of money. So we would also be there to provide that kind of guidance and work with local foundations, donors, philanthropists, to to match them up. It’s not Shark Tank, but it kind of is right. You’re you’re designing a project, you’ve got all the right partners in place, you’ve got the stated goal, clear outcomes, clear need, clear benefit. And then you’re sharing it with a potential funder, and they then can see where their local investments can really make a difference and move the needle.
Erin Borla 27:04
Yeah, and it’s building those connections and on offering those opportunities. I think, you know, I was on a board for a really long time, a fundraising board, and they asked me at one point, it was a big board. There were like 30 folks, and they said you should come and ask, teach everyone how to ask for money you’re good at, yeah, because I used to be a fundraiser in the past, and I said, Well, it’s not hard. You don’t go in and just say, I need money. You go in and you’re on this board because you’re passionate about the project, you’re passionate about the work that you do, and if you share that passion, the Ask becomes very easy. That’s right. And it’s kind of coaching folks where they think, and it’s this constant ask, it’s this sharing of your passion, and whether that’s passion of community, passion of culture, passion of the museum, but then also this opportunity to say, and here’s what we need, that’s right, we need our roof repaired. We need to digitize all of our photographs. We need the opportunity to connect it with greater institutions outside of our community, or share our story. And I think that’s been a really interesting component, is one, being able to encourage folks to share that message that their story has has validity beyond their community, beyond their region. And I think you you phrased it before with looking over the horizon, and there’s that moment of like it, what you do is important.
Andy Mink 28:29
That’s right, and and that’s where the speed bump of belonging insecurity crops up all of a sudden, when, exactly as you described, you know, seeing, seeing the value, knowing that others will see it as well, and then hitting that perceived challenge of, well, they kind of don’t, or my story is not important enough. Or why would they give me money to do these things that they’re important? One of one of the things that came up in the quantitative side of our research is that the Smithsonian brand and name is very well recognized across the nation in rural spaces, and generally has a very, very positive association by very, I mean upper 80 percents. And so if, even if they don’t always know what it is and what it does and what its purpose is. So I think we’re also hoping and believing that the Smithsonian itself, the brand itself, can be a catalyst in these conversations, that just simply being in those in these conversations, being at these convenings, and offering our side by side support will will begin to open those eyes, as you’re suggesting, to why this is important to other people in other places. We asked many of the members of our focus groups to describe their community and sort of to, you know, give us their impressions of what it meant to live there. And it was very, very common, if not unanimous, that we heard stories of people saying, you know, I will, I’m there to help you if you need help. If I drive by your your truck and it’s in the ditch, I’m not going to look to see what bumper sticker you have on, you know, what political identity you have, I’m not going to see, you know, how old you are. I’m going to stop and I’m going to help you out of the ditch. All those other things aren’t what define the way that in many of our projects. We call it the little D democracy, right? It’s the ways that people get along. It’s just living together in a civil environment. And I think rural spaces do that as well as, or maybe even better than, most, because, because we have to, because you are in each other’s lives in all ways. And yeah, you have to figure it out.
Erin Borla 30:44
Yeah, yea you see each other at the post office. You see each other store the pickup line for school. And I don’t know, I always use the phrase of you know, regardless of what signs in your yard, if your barn’s on fire, will be there exactly first of the door with a casserole or whatever you need. What you so you grew up rural, and you now you’re in DCish, I mean, you travel back and forth. Have a role that’s in DC. What advice do you have for folks that want to do this work, want to begin this work in rural places, whether they’re philanthropists, whether they’re institutions similar to yours, like, what’s the best first step and second step? Maybe?
Andy Mink 31:29
Yeah. So you know, I’ve got my own impressions, which I’m pleased are being verified and certified and justified through this rural need sensing report. But, but I think one of them certainly is that you have to go to these places, Zoom meetings, virtual meetings, digital communication. You know, that’s great when you start doing the work, but you’ve got to go places and sit with people and walk the streets and see the world and really be willing to invest that time. I think that’s one of the first critical pieces. I also think that we as an institution always need advocates. That isn’t always a single person, oftentimes it’s another institution, the library, the school, the, you know, the church in many places, but there needs to be someone or some institution that can understand and partner and vouch and code switch for that the uniqueness of that place, so that when the Smithsonian is there, that that we’re being introduced to, to the right conversations. And by right, I mean inclusive, well represented, authentic conversations. I think it’s important for institutions of the size of the Smithsonian to to really work hard to understand what we’re doing in communities. It’s very easy to have eight or ten different units all doing things and sort of forgetting that we’re the same places sometimes, and there’s nothing more you don’t lose credibility anymore than when you show up in a place and you realize, oh, wait a minute, there was a Smithsonian something here a month ago, and I didn’t know about it. I think that’s really important.
Erin Borla 33:13
We see that a lot with institutions like higher ed, absolutely, because it’s very siloed, even within the institution, to say, Oh, well, someone was just here from XYZ University, really, I didn’t know that.
Andy Mink 33:25
That’s exactly right. Yeah, that’s exactly right. And I think just in general, I think any of these conversations, because they’re all designed to become actionable work. We can talk about aspirations all day long, but you got to do the work too, and be prepared to do it and be there for the long term and handle all the challenges and help communities outside of our Smithsonian world understand how to navigate the systems and all those things. But we have to do it from a place of humility and a place of really shared and mutual respect. And you know, I think what the Smithsonian does really well is tell stories with respect, in a non divisive, in a in a meaningful way in Washington. And now we’re, we’re, as we move into spaces across the nation, I think we’re bringing that same perspective.
Erin Borla 34:17
So in 10 years, where do you think this office that you’re you’re sitting in, is going to be.
Andy Mink 34:26
Well, I always want to make myself indispensable. So this is not the right answer for me personally, but I hope it’s invisible. And what I mean by that is I hope that this notion of working in support of and in service of communities across the nation is just embedded in the ways that the Smithsonian sees its work, imagines its new projects and programs, makes connections across the country that we build on. I would love to see that to perhaps be represented in different ways we manage our work. For example, what if we began to think about. placing Smithsonian employees, not in DC, but in these communities. What if there was a Smithsonian employee placed in Oregon to help with culture burns, with the indigenous population, or whatever it may be. So when I say invisible, what I mean is that it’s just part of the way that we see our work, rather than being so intentional right now I hope, I hope it becomes much more natural.
Erin Borla 35:28
We talk about that a lot as we’re as folks are building, you know, have a convening, and you’re building a panel, and you’re making sure the panel is diverse in a variety of ways, that geographic diversity is also a really important piece, in a very simple way, to include rural voice, because different things impact communities that are smaller or further away from where decisions are made or where where resources are differently. So that’s, I think, just a beautiful way to be more invisible. I love that. Well, thanks for taking time to chat today. I love learn. I love being connected to the work that you’re doing and hearing all about what’s happening in the Smithsonian and the work that you’re doing beyond DC and beyond the walls of the institutions and the research center. So thank you for spending time.
Andy Mink 36:18
Erin. Thank you so much, not only for having me, but for doing this work. And you know, what I found is that work like this podcast and the conversations that we’re trying to inspire, it really does come from just continuing to move the move the discussion forward just a little bit. And I’m, I’m hopeful that this will be the, the first of many times that we talk.
Erin Borla 36:52
We talked a lot throughout different episodes on this show about how to communicate with rural folks, how to get to rural places, and we hear time and time again, just go, go show up. Be sit with folks, go to places, meet the right folks, or find the gatekeepers who are the true community leaders, walk the streets, go have a cup of coffee, enjoy happy hour. There’s all sorts of ways to get involved, and it’s that’s the first step, is showing up. Andy mentioned even maybe putting employees in some of those places. That’s another thing we’ve talked about on this show. How do we drive new staff for our organizations from rural communities to show up or work from different places? One thing that I think we touched on quite a bit in this episode is talking about the story of us as a country, and what the Smithsonian is doing is trying to tell that story that both connects urban and rural Americans. As Americans, we have so much more in common than in opposition. I also wanted to touch on, I think, the really important piece that the preservation component. As we face several natural disasters, whether it’s wildfire or flood or hurricanes, we really need to look at preserving some of those, those heritage items. And so how do we do that? What are ways philanthropy can step in and help some technical assistance, professional development, providing resources on how to digitize photographs or other materials. Those are things that I think we really need to think about sooner, rather than later, as a collective. And lastly, belonging insecurity. What a fantastic phrase, and how does it impact so many different people and so many different topics, and how are we all drawn together with that one phrase, thanks for listening. Check out all of our resources at FundingRural.com.
Transcribed by A.I.
