Five years ago, I left the consulting world to take the helm at the Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History (MAH) at a time of crisis and change. We went through a dramatic turnaround. We started bootstrapping growth. Now, we're on the doorstep of a major expansion. It's exciting and tiring and rewarding as ever. As I did at the  one-year  and  three-year  mark, here are some of the things I'm most proud of, mistakes I've made, and questions on my mind as we head into the next five years. THINGS I'M PROUD OF: Building a rigorous strategic framework under our creative, community-based work.  In my first few years, it was all about getting the programming moving, experimenting, and exploring the possibilities with our community. Three years ago, we decided to put in the work to create foundational documents--a new  mission statement , values, engagement goals , survey methodology, and most importantly, a theory of change--to ground our work in shared lan...

Blessing of the Replica Boards, July 19, 2015, 8am. Photo by Jon Bailiff. Relevance is not an end unto itself. It is a bridge. When you open the path, people flood in. You open the potential for something more. But a bridge to nowhere is quickly abandoned. Relevance only leads to deep meaning if it leads to something significant. Killer content. Substantive programming. Muscle and bone. This summer, we opened two exhibitions at my museum that are highly relevant to local culture. One is about the Grateful Dead ( Dear Jerry ), the other about the dawn of surfing in the Americas ( Princes of Surf ). Dear Jerry is relevant because Santa Cruz is a hippie town, UC Santa Cruz maintains the Grateful Dead Archive, and the Dead did their final tour this summer. Princes of Surf is about the young Hawaiian princes who brought surfing to the Americas 130 years ago--relevant because they did it in Santa Cruz, with boards shaped from local wood, on waves I bike by every week. Both of these exhibi...