Phase Two of Readying The Museum is looking broadly at the present systemic structures that allocate resources, manage wealth, and organize power throughout the museum sector. Our aim is to clarify how these systems currently operate for greater awareness within the sector. A secondary aim is to advance new models that are challenging traditional approaches, including working frameworks for Landback and Reparations. 

In Phase Two, RTM deepens its work with an extended focus on philanthropy, policy, non-profit tax and private wealth management as they uphold and effect museum ecologies. Our current working groups, including patriarchy, whiteness, base-building are continuing their work with the addition of a working group focused on respectability politics. Composed of the Black, Brown, and Indigenous members of the cohort, the respectability politics working group is looking at inter-group class structures as they relate to imagining new accountability frameworks. 

In each working group we are utilizing the tools of our methodology; building lexicons, shared resources, and commissioning journal articles that deepen knowledge and clarify understanding for all those working in the sector. The cohort is also practicing its methodology to find ways of communicating and learning through current and evolving events and socio-political crises that are creating ruptures within museum communities. In this way we aim to model an approach for museum’s who have begun the process of “readying”  themselves to apply this methodology toward ruptures, internal and external to museums and those that have yet to occur. We believe this readying supports a more healthy ecosystem able to adapt and address cultural challenges as they arise.