RADICAL EQUITY CONSULTANT: People & Culture
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Request for Proposals
Balboa Art Conservation Center
Radical Equity Consultant: People & Culture
The Balboa Art Conservation Center seeks a radical equity consultant to:
Conduct an equity assessment for our organization’s people, culture, and policies, and develop a strategy for reshaping our internal policies and practices to be reflective of our radically inclusive and equitable organizational aspirations.
Project Timeline:
RFP release: August 12, 2022
RFP Due: September 5, 2022
Contracting: Sept 15-30
Contract Period: October 1, 2022 - December 7, 2022
(Estimated project budget: $10,000 - $12,000)
How to Submit a Proposal:
Send your proposal for this work to Leticia Gomez Franco, Executive Director, via email lgomezfranco@bacc.org no later than 11:59pm on Monday, September 5, 2022. We expect to select a consultant by late September with work to begin by October 1, 2022, and to be completed by December 7, 2022. If you have questions regarding work completed to date or any other inquiries regarding this proposal, please submit them to lgomezfranco@bacc.org.
Your proposal should include:
1. Scope of work and timeline.
2. Summary of your qualifications (and those of your team if submitting as a team), including your approach, expertise, and interest in the scope of work outlined above.
3. Budget and cost breakdown.
4. Three references including contact name, email, and telephone number.
About BACC
BACC is a nonprofit organization established in 1975 and located in San Diego, CA. We currently have 7 full-time people on staff with plans to grow to 12 staff members by July 2023. Our annual operating budget is $837,000 and our employee handbook was last updated January 2021.
History: The Balboa Art Conservation Center was founded in the 1970s as part of a national movement to create regional conservation centers that would serve collecting institutions within a certain geography. The goal was to centralize conservation and preservation services, bringing relief to museums, historical centers, libraries, etc., fulfilling their conservation needs without having to replicate the administrative, equipment, staffing and resources needed to run an entire conservation lab at every single institution. There are fewer than a dozen of these nonprofit regional conservation centers in the country and BACC is the only regional conservation center on the west coast, with the next closest regional center located 2,000 miles away. BACC is located in San Diego, CA on the ancestral homelands of the Kumeyaay Nation and our geographic area includes California, Arizona, Nevada, Utah, New Mexico, Hawaii, Oregon, Washington, Colorado and Alaska. We are currently a mighty seven member team, in a four thousand square foot facility in a historical building in beautiful Balboa Park.
For more than 45 years, BACC has been fulfilling our mission as a conservation lab to provide conservation and preservation services for cultural institutions and private collectors for their works of art, cultural objects, and historic artifacts. In accordance with the American Institute of Conservation’s Code of Ethics and Guidelines for Practice, our highly trained conservators offer a rigorous and scientific approach to the preservation, examination, and treatment of cultural heritage objects. BACC has various scientific and technological equipment to aid in the examination of works including Infrared Reflectography, X-radiography, and X-Ray Fluorescence Spectrometry (XRF).
In addition to conservation treatment, collections care services, and research + analysis, BACC also boasts a strong commitment to the professional development and training of conservation professionals as this is a major element of our existence and relevance as a nonprofit organization. We strive to be an impactful support system for training and growth for emerging and mid-career professionals in the field of conservation and preservation.
Responding to the Field: Like many other sectors, the field of art conservation is plagued with historical barriers to access and inequities. In 2018, The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation conducted an Art Museum Staff Demographic Survey and found that 89% of the conservation workforce is White, and the rate of change is painfully slow (with only a 1% increase since its previous survey in 2015). Unfortunately, the lack of diversity is not just limited to the staffing of institutions, it permeates every aspect of our cultural ecosystem. It contributes to lower representation of diverse stories and art in White-dominant collecting museums, preservation practices and policies that are not culturally relevant, and a disconnect between the field and the communities and collections that should be equally represented.
BACC acknowledges that the collections care field is culturally homogeneous and we have challenged ourselves to answer the question: What growth and advances are we missing out on by not nurturing diversity and inclusion in collections, conservation, and institutions? We know that structural discrimination has limited educational and professional opportunities to under-represented communities and a change in the overall representation of our cultural sector requires a change in every single component of it. We acknowledge our role in the creation of our current state, and we are stepping up to the opportunity to enact change within our organization’s philosophy and policies.
BACC Today: BACC’s Southern California headquarters and large geographic region mean that we are working with an area that is culturally diverse with a rich, multi-layered, and sometimes contested historical narrative. Because of this, the collections in Western region institutions are incredibly varied. They include, but are not limited to, traditional collections of paintings, drawings, and sculpture; three-dimensional objects like baskets, stoneware, leather, and beadwork; photograph and film negatives collections; time-based, electronic, and computer-based media; outdoor sculpture and metals; and furniture and musical instrument collections; the breadth of arts and humanities collections from the institutions in our region is vast, and we look forward to engaging with these diverse collections with the expanded capacity BACC will achieve through organizational and inclusive growth.
In the last year, BACC has begun what promises to be a radical and transformative shift, as we center our commitment to equity and inclusion as the core of our new identity. Our commitment to nourish cultural equity and inclusion and the use of the arts as a vehicle to do so positions the important work of art conservation and cultural preservation as an integral part of this success. As the only regional conservation center in the western region, BACC has a responsibility to foster deep-seated change in both conservation as a professional field and in the access to and impact of conservation knowledge from communities historically underrepresented in museum collections and the American cultural canon. BACC is committed to shifting the way regional conservation centers engage with collections and communities. We are putting this vision into practice through intentional inclusive conservation programs which will extend access to service as well as by supporting training and education opportunities, partnering with stewards of community cultural collections, expanding the existing knowledge base to include culturally conscious and responsive methods of conservation, and learning from and dialoguing with artists and caretakers of diverse cultural heritage and ancestral collections.
This work is of most importance because it comes in response to a historical exclusion and underinvestment in communities of color by the field of conservation. The majority of advanced conservation training, regional conservation centers, and major art institutions are located in the East Coast, allowing populations there to have access to conservation recruitment, awareness, education, and service, leaving the west coast and its diverse communities significantly underrepresented in these efforts.
About this RFP
As part of our shift into a radically inclusive conservation nonprofit, we bring the understanding that an organization can only be as strong in its external service as it is in its internal organizational culture. We seek to build a positive and equitable workplace culture by investing in the livelihood and leadership development of our current and future team and becoming a model for the re-envisioning of human resource policy, compensation, and hiring and retention practices from an anti-racism and equity lens. BACC has plans to grow its organizational capacity in the coming year. Our goal is not just to introduce diversity into our organization and our field, but to do so in a way that challenges the colonial and White privilege embedded deep in our history and practice. Building non-toxic spaces that acknowledge, serve, and nourish members of all communities is critical to building truly inclusive workplaces.
The Balboa Art Conservation Center seeks to engage the services of a People and Culture consultant who specializes in anti-racism and equity to analyze BACC’s current HR practices. Outcomes will include a recommended People and Culture focused re-envisioning of policy and process (compensation, hiring practices, retention, culture, etc) to bring BACC into being the radically inclusive organization we wish to be externally, internally as well.
A successful proposal will demonstrate competence in each of the following areas:
● Organizational equity assessment, including hiring, retention, and other policies and procedures, and also assessment of equity and barriers within organizational culture. Experience with nonprofits preferred.
● An understanding of the barriers to access to the field of cultural preservation and conservation for under-represented communities
● Experience with particular market and field factors (organizational and financial capacity, field comparatives, San Diego comparatives, etc)
Some of the areas to consider:
Compensation
Salary
Benefits
Promotions
Hiring Practices
Position Descriptions
Recruitment
Interview Process
Hiring and Onboarding
Performance Reviews & Measures
Exit Process
Retention
Professional Development
Workplace culture
Remote Work options
Part-time/full time options
Work/Life balance
Mental & Physical wellness
People Management
Organizational/Leadership distribution
Complaint/Grievance process
Additional considerations:
An understanding of decolonization efforts in the arts and in cultural preservation. A commitment to crafting a vision for an inclusive future in a field that is predominantly White. Willing to be responsive to questions and information from BACC staff and board is essential to do this work well. We are seeking not only to come out of this process with a envisioning of our policies and culture, but also to develop internal capacity for implementing recommendations and embedding them into the core of our organizational identity.
###
The Balboa Art Conservation Center is an equal opportunity employer and considers all candidates for employment regardless of race, color, sex, age, national origin, creed, disability, marital status, sexual orientation or political affiliation. Applicants from historically underrepresented communities are encouraged to apply.
Balboa Art Conservation Center
Radical Equity Consultant: People & Culture
The Balboa Art Conservation Center seeks a radical equity consultant to:
Conduct an equity assessment for our organization’s people, culture, and policies, and develop a strategy for reshaping our internal policies and practices to be reflective of our radically inclusive and equitable organizational aspirations.
Project Timeline:
RFP release: August 12, 2022
RFP Due: September 5, 2022
Contracting: Sept 15-30
Contract Period: October 1, 2022 - December 7, 2022
(Estimated project budget: $10,000 - $12,000)
How to Submit a Proposal:
Send your proposal for this work to Leticia Gomez Franco, Executive Director, via email lgomezfranco@bacc.org no later than 11:59pm on Monday, September 5, 2022. We expect to select a consultant by late September with work to begin by October 1, 2022, and to be completed by December 7, 2022. If you have questions regarding work completed to date or any other inquiries regarding this proposal, please submit them to lgomezfranco@bacc.org.
Your proposal should include:
1. Scope of work and timeline.
2. Summary of your qualifications (and those of your team if submitting as a team), including your approach, expertise, and interest in the scope of work outlined above.
3. Budget and cost breakdown.
4. Three references including contact name, email, and telephone number.
About BACC
BACC is a nonprofit organization established in 1975 and located in San Diego, CA. We currently have 7 full-time people on staff with plans to grow to 12 staff members by July 2023. Our annual operating budget is $837,000 and our employee handbook was last updated January 2021.
History: The Balboa Art Conservation Center was founded in the 1970s as part of a national movement to create regional conservation centers that would serve collecting institutions within a certain geography. The goal was to centralize conservation and preservation services, bringing relief to museums, historical centers, libraries, etc., fulfilling their conservation needs without having to replicate the administrative, equipment, staffing and resources needed to run an entire conservation lab at every single institution. There are fewer than a dozen of these nonprofit regional conservation centers in the country and BACC is the only regional conservation center on the west coast, with the next closest regional center located 2,000 miles away. BACC is located in San Diego, CA on the ancestral homelands of the Kumeyaay Nation and our geographic area includes California, Arizona, Nevada, Utah, New Mexico, Hawaii, Oregon, Washington, Colorado and Alaska. We are currently a mighty seven member team, in a four thousand square foot facility in a historical building in beautiful Balboa Park.
For more than 45 years, BACC has been fulfilling our mission as a conservation lab to provide conservation and preservation services for cultural institutions and private collectors for their works of art, cultural objects, and historic artifacts. In accordance with the American Institute of Conservation’s Code of Ethics and Guidelines for Practice, our highly trained conservators offer a rigorous and scientific approach to the preservation, examination, and treatment of cultural heritage objects. BACC has various scientific and technological equipment to aid in the examination of works including Infrared Reflectography, X-radiography, and X-Ray Fluorescence Spectrometry (XRF).
In addition to conservation treatment, collections care services, and research + analysis, BACC also boasts a strong commitment to the professional development and training of conservation professionals as this is a major element of our existence and relevance as a nonprofit organization. We strive to be an impactful support system for training and growth for emerging and mid-career professionals in the field of conservation and preservation.
Responding to the Field: Like many other sectors, the field of art conservation is plagued with historical barriers to access and inequities. In 2018, The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation conducted an Art Museum Staff Demographic Survey and found that 89% of the conservation workforce is White, and the rate of change is painfully slow (with only a 1% increase since its previous survey in 2015). Unfortunately, the lack of diversity is not just limited to the staffing of institutions, it permeates every aspect of our cultural ecosystem. It contributes to lower representation of diverse stories and art in White-dominant collecting museums, preservation practices and policies that are not culturally relevant, and a disconnect between the field and the communities and collections that should be equally represented.
BACC acknowledges that the collections care field is culturally homogeneous and we have challenged ourselves to answer the question: What growth and advances are we missing out on by not nurturing diversity and inclusion in collections, conservation, and institutions? We know that structural discrimination has limited educational and professional opportunities to under-represented communities and a change in the overall representation of our cultural sector requires a change in every single component of it. We acknowledge our role in the creation of our current state, and we are stepping up to the opportunity to enact change within our organization’s philosophy and policies.
BACC Today: BACC’s Southern California headquarters and large geographic region mean that we are working with an area that is culturally diverse with a rich, multi-layered, and sometimes contested historical narrative. Because of this, the collections in Western region institutions are incredibly varied. They include, but are not limited to, traditional collections of paintings, drawings, and sculpture; three-dimensional objects like baskets, stoneware, leather, and beadwork; photograph and film negatives collections; time-based, electronic, and computer-based media; outdoor sculpture and metals; and furniture and musical instrument collections; the breadth of arts and humanities collections from the institutions in our region is vast, and we look forward to engaging with these diverse collections with the expanded capacity BACC will achieve through organizational and inclusive growth.
In the last year, BACC has begun what promises to be a radical and transformative shift, as we center our commitment to equity and inclusion as the core of our new identity. Our commitment to nourish cultural equity and inclusion and the use of the arts as a vehicle to do so positions the important work of art conservation and cultural preservation as an integral part of this success. As the only regional conservation center in the western region, BACC has a responsibility to foster deep-seated change in both conservation as a professional field and in the access to and impact of conservation knowledge from communities historically underrepresented in museum collections and the American cultural canon. BACC is committed to shifting the way regional conservation centers engage with collections and communities. We are putting this vision into practice through intentional inclusive conservation programs which will extend access to service as well as by supporting training and education opportunities, partnering with stewards of community cultural collections, expanding the existing knowledge base to include culturally conscious and responsive methods of conservation, and learning from and dialoguing with artists and caretakers of diverse cultural heritage and ancestral collections.
This work is of most importance because it comes in response to a historical exclusion and underinvestment in communities of color by the field of conservation. The majority of advanced conservation training, regional conservation centers, and major art institutions are located in the East Coast, allowing populations there to have access to conservation recruitment, awareness, education, and service, leaving the west coast and its diverse communities significantly underrepresented in these efforts.
About this RFP
As part of our shift into a radically inclusive conservation nonprofit, we bring the understanding that an organization can only be as strong in its external service as it is in its internal organizational culture. We seek to build a positive and equitable workplace culture by investing in the livelihood and leadership development of our current and future team and becoming a model for the re-envisioning of human resource policy, compensation, and hiring and retention practices from an anti-racism and equity lens. BACC has plans to grow its organizational capacity in the coming year. Our goal is not just to introduce diversity into our organization and our field, but to do so in a way that challenges the colonial and White privilege embedded deep in our history and practice. Building non-toxic spaces that acknowledge, serve, and nourish members of all communities is critical to building truly inclusive workplaces.
The Balboa Art Conservation Center seeks to engage the services of a People and Culture consultant who specializes in anti-racism and equity to analyze BACC’s current HR practices. Outcomes will include a recommended People and Culture focused re-envisioning of policy and process (compensation, hiring practices, retention, culture, etc) to bring BACC into being the radically inclusive organization we wish to be externally, internally as well.
A successful proposal will demonstrate competence in each of the following areas:
● Organizational equity assessment, including hiring, retention, and other policies and procedures, and also assessment of equity and barriers within organizational culture. Experience with nonprofits preferred.
● An understanding of the barriers to access to the field of cultural preservation and conservation for under-represented communities
● Experience with particular market and field factors (organizational and financial capacity, field comparatives, San Diego comparatives, etc)
Some of the areas to consider:
Compensation
Salary
Benefits
Promotions
Hiring Practices
Position Descriptions
Recruitment
Interview Process
Hiring and Onboarding
Performance Reviews & Measures
Exit Process
Retention
Professional Development
Workplace culture
Remote Work options
Part-time/full time options
Work/Life balance
Mental & Physical wellness
People Management
Organizational/Leadership distribution
Complaint/Grievance process
Additional considerations:
An understanding of decolonization efforts in the arts and in cultural preservation. A commitment to crafting a vision for an inclusive future in a field that is predominantly White. Willing to be responsive to questions and information from BACC staff and board is essential to do this work well. We are seeking not only to come out of this process with a envisioning of our policies and culture, but also to develop internal capacity for implementing recommendations and embedding them into the core of our organizational identity.
###
The Balboa Art Conservation Center is an equal opportunity employer and considers all candidates for employment regardless of race, color, sex, age, national origin, creed, disability, marital status, sexual orientation or political affiliation. Applicants from historically underrepresented communities are encouraged to apply.