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������Brittany Ashley
Spring 2025

Danielle Schulz is the Associate Director of Lifelong Learning and Accessibility at the Denver Art Museum (DAM), where she has worked for nearly a decade. She holds a Master’s in Art Education from The University of Texas at Austin. Schulz has worked at art institutions around the country, including the Blanton Museum of Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Dallas Museum of Art, and now the DAM.

In 2021, Schulz co-authored a book titled The Art of Access: A Practical Guide for Museum Accessibility with Heather Pressman from the Molly Brown House Museum. The book draws from Schulz’s years of experience working in museum accessibility. Her current role primarily engages older adults and promotes intergenerational programming. Schulz also works closely with community members who are disabled in order to address the barriers they face at the DAM. Her team recently won a  from the Institute of Museum and Library Services to work on designing for accessibility. Throughout our interview, Schulz references this grant as one of her newest community-engaged projects. Along with this amazing opportunity, we discussed the issue of turnover, the importance of upfront communication, and the added challenges (and blessings!) of working within a large institution.

How do you navigate your own positionality – identity, values, lived experience – alongside communities that are both similar and different to you? Especially with working in a larger institution, how do you manage the personal and the professional?

You have to really think about yourself and your role in it, especially in a larger institution. Stay very aware that no matter what we might try to do to break down barriers, we are still very much seen as an institution, and that can be a blessing and a curse. So, when I’m approaching communities, it’s really about being upfront with who I am and what experience I have, and being very transparent that I am a white, cis-gendered woman who is non-disabled, and this is the experience I have. 

I also really value transparency – what is the project, why are we reaching out, what are our goals – and then setting expectations and really listening. It’s important to give a very concrete frame to work within because that makes sure expectations are clear. We want to make sure people feel like their contributions are valued and that we are not asking too much of them. You want to be really organized – go in with questions, a framework – and then you also have to be super flexible and acknowledge that those plans might need to go out the window. Because if you are truly valuing the expertise and lived experience of communities to help inform the work that you are doing, you have to match where they are and what they need. 

For example, when working with older adults, you might plan a program of going into the gallery and looking at a few works of art, and then they might just want to sit with one and really explore it. If we’re really trying to learn more about the types of programs they’re looking for, what barriers they experience at the museum, then community members need to be co-creators with you. Because if not, then it’s inauthentic. 

That framework or boundary setting, though, is important because without it you’re not setting the project up for success. For example, in this grant we’re about to undertake, we’re looking at barriers of access to the museum. If we don’t set parameters that this is not using capital funds, and that we can’t make changes to the architecture of the building with the funds available through this grant, then if people give us feedback that we need to have more power assist doors (which we know is a barrier) and then we say “Oh, but we can’t actually do that with this project” then that erodes their trust. So, from the beginning, it’s peeling back the curtain and letting people know about the bureaucracy and the hierarchy and the things that aren’t as attractive, but they help people understand the different levels needed to make each decision. It’s explaining the reality in which we are working and saying here are the areas we can push and here are areas where it’s going to take a lot more time.

How do you find a community to work with? And then, what does equitable teamwork look like between the community and, in this case, a larger institution?

The best relationships that are long-term often come from a familiarity – whether through someone from the community who works here, or someone has visited the museum and made a great introduction – but that can also keep you in the same circles you’ve always been in. 

An example that I always give, that I think is so funny because it shows my naiveté a little bit, is when I first started working at the museum, I was new to Denver. I’m from Albuquerque originally but I’d been living in Dallas for the past three years, so when I came here and I was doing accessibility work, I didn’t know a lot of the communities here. So, I was just googling and essentially doing cold calls, just emailing or calling people and saying “Here’s my name, here’s my role, I’m in interested in building a relationship”. You have to be ready for people to be silent, or, again, a little suspect of why you’re reaching out to them [as an institution]. 

I also recognize that people have had really bad experiences with the museum in previous times. Someone I wanted to work with on a grant-funded project once asked me “Great, but are you going to stop working with us in three years when the grant money ends?” And that’s where it’s good practice to state “Here’s what we’re looking for. What are you looking for and how can we support you?” It’s creating a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) of our role, your role, your expectations for us that we will fulfill, and our expectations for you. Although it feels clinical, it helps with the turnover in nonprofits and if someone leaves, that relationship can still exist beyond that one person. The one-to-one intimate relationships are very important, but to have longevity, that professionalization can really work.

Over my fifteen years of doing community engaged work, what I have seen changing is compensation. I have been on both sides, where I have and have not compensated people for their time. I’ve had to look at my positionality, coming from a museum and getting paid to do this work, and that I’m asking people to give me their intellectual property, their feedback, and I’m not compensating them for it. And that has changed. That can look different for different sizes of organizations, but at a bigger organization, it is absolutely our responsibility to think about the compensation for what they’re doing. Making that part of the contract can elevate the importance of what communities are providing to the same level as the museum staff asking for their help. Especially working with folks with disabilities, who are across the board underemployed, that’s a way to support building a resume or building a body of work they can provide too.

How do you build a funding base for community-engaged scholarship?

A lot of community engaged work can end because it is so dependent on grants. Speaking of compensation and making participation in community-engaged work accessible, that costs a lot of money. So, when we were working on this grant proposal, we had to be thoughtful about the amount of money needed to provide ASL interpretation, real time captioning, compensation for focus group participation. That increased our grant a ton and we were nervous! But we could not take it out because it was necessary for us to have equitable participation.

Speaking with funders, a lot of it is storytelling. Doing it in a way that is still very respectful to the communities you’re working with. Some of the best grants that we’ve written have been when we partnered with people and had them write letters of recommendation for projects where we were going to work together.

It’s also talking about impact. Evaluating the project and its successes and being very clear and concrete about what success looks like. How does each conversation or activity have those outcomes and deliverables in mind? What has been the impact on the communities (but that can become very one-sided, and you don’t want to bring in the savior complex) and what has been the impact on the museum – how has this project made us a better organization, how has it increased who feels comfortable or seen here. You can share with funders what you did and why you did it and what you learned and how it impacted your institution.

With grants, annual grants are great but can sometimes be unsustainable because funders can shift their priorities and that means you are no longer being funded. So, trying to build it into the operating budget and getting the entire organization to see the importance of your work, that can take time, but it’s important to have multi-year visions because if you’re looking one year at a time, you’re just going to be constantly chasing funding and not focusing on the work and it becomes a hamster wheel.

How do you discuss projects that often have a non-financial profitability or impact with funders? What are the different kinds of funders you might interact with?

I’m glad you guys are thinking about this now – when I first started out, I did not understand. It can sometimes be very transactional – we have a big sponsor whose contract requests a certain amount of visitor touchpoints by displaying their product in the museum. We see that more with for-profits. 

Then there are other funders who really want to know how many people we are reaching and what the evaluation and impact is. Then they could tell their funders that they had given x amount of money, and their work has touched x amount of people. It’s about being organized and keeping statistics, quotes, and other evidence of a bigger transformative change and wanting to do good.

Then there can be individual funders, and they can be tricky, because they can be very narrowly focused, and they often have specific requests. They want their name on the program or on this new space, and so you have to translate the work you’re doing to support that. Honestly, the hardest thing to get funding for is staff to do the work. Building the funding base is having to be smart about writing staff time into projects and getting people to fund projects that are already in motion, not just new and flashy things. You have to understand the budgeting and accounting side because that’s how you can be smart with what you’re doing and be creative.  

So that’s pre-project planning, what about post-project feedback? For example, surveys are one of the most popular forms of feedback for grants but also are a source of apprehension for many.

Make surveys simple and quick and straight-forward so it’s easy for people to complete. You do incentivize, which isn’t a lot, but adds up over time. We had a project where we needed to know some nuts-and-bolts information and we handed out $10 gift certificates for feedback. We also do listening sessions in-person or hybrid to increase access. 

We have found success in working with organizations who already work with the community. If we have a trusted partner, then the people will trust us. For example, the Center on Colfax is a LGBTQIA+ organization in Denver and they have a West of 50 program for older adults. We work with Jason Eaton-Lynch, their amazing program director. We often ask him to distribute surveys and things, but we also talk to him about his perception of what the community needs. We try to go to them, give lunch, be generous, and make it as easy as possible for people to give feedback.

We’ve also done visitor observations - studying people in programs and using their behavior as signs of their engagement with the information. We have an open-door phone number and email address where people can submit feedback at any time. We have comment cards at the front, so people can write their experiences down. I would be interested to see what other people have been doing!

How do you negotiate between the community work you may want to do and what is possible/desired by the institution?

It is so, so tricky. It’s a dance between being pragmatic and being imaginative. You have to balance what can be done now and what can be done in the future, then try to figure out when to ask the question “Well, why can’t we do that?” This is where we’ve shifted a lot of our feedback strategies to focus on appreciative inquiry versus more negative “What don’t you like about…” questions. It’s that pie-in-the-sky, what would you love to see happen, because that can help open your eyes to things that you might not have even known were possible. If you’re engaging with a community, it’s not saying “No, we can’t do this,” but instead saying “Okay, what would this really take, because it’s really just this, this and this or it could be done if these things happen first.” 

I think especially with accessibility and other things that feel huge and insurmountable, you have to break it into smaller steps over time because that’s how you build buy-in, funds, and space to be more creative or adapt to new policies and procedures. But also, how do we find those low hanging fruits to begin with so you can have successes and keep the momentum going? Because if it’s only big-picture, long-term, people will get fatigued. But with small wins, people feel like their goals are being met and the project remains reciprocal. Too many museums have swooped in to work with communities and then left, which has left such a bad taste in people’s mouths. When I look back at our museum, our strongest relationships are ones that have weathered change because we’ve been able to say, “We are still here and we still want to honor this commitment with you” and vice versa. It’s the long run, and that’s how it should be.

You have to be so comfortable with being uncomfortable and not knowing how something’s going to happen. Being ready for something to go way out in left field, that is not comfortable for a lot of people to exist and work in, not knowing what the outcome will be. I think that’s why I’m so set on my lists for meetings, these huge to-do lists that show I have the framework, but then you have to just be willing to not follow that and see how it goes.

That’s how my mom and I describe our travel mindset – we have a very detailed itinerary and then we can deviate from that.

Exactly! That’s where intergenerational teams are important – there is value in institutional knowledge and expertise and there is also equal value in the new ideas and creative thinking brought in by people new to the field or by people in the communities you’re working with.