Sustain

You want to sell stuff, but you also want to teach people stuff in the process and you could just use brand marketing, all the... Unfortunately all the human brainpower that's gone into how to sell people, stuff you could use all of that knowledge, and apply it to science communication in a commercial setting. And I think that exists. So there's a part of me that wants to push back a little bit and just say, "Hey, like guys, we could discuss this all right now." And try to figure it out, but I don't want to reinvent the wheel because I know that wheel is really smoothly grease then is running all the time, all around us to try and sell us stuff. So, why don't we bring in those people, if that is really our primary goal to sell stuff. And in that process, teach people something, because that's what advertising has been doing since mad men era. And we should probably just hop on that commercial bandwagon if we really want to do this well, and not in a way that's, I don't use the word amateur, but when we do that and we don't acknowledge that that expertise already exists in the world,

I reached out to all these different groups. And there were a lot of people that either wouldn't respond. And I felt very sensitive as far as like, "Hey, I'm a stranger, can you do a favor for me?" I'm trying to build this relationship. And I felt excited at the fact that at least coming out of this, we developed a lot of relationships that I think we can build meaningfully and work on something together in the future.

And anything that only happens once a year, it's really hard to get a handle on it. Because it's the buildup, it happens, and then it's gone. It takes a while to move through the different spaces of it. I think, there's real value in being able to leave the booth, and see what are all the different things that are going on there, and what are some of the different ways to engage it?

this whole thing sparked for me, at the very beginning, when I was doing outreach with the MIT Museum, I've been doing Museum of Science Center outreach for a long time. Had the keys to the van. At every institution I've gone to. But I had the chance to be part of this outreach, and not have to do anything. I got to show up, see what was going on, and then walk away from the table, walk away from the tent. And when you start walking away from the table, and walk away from the tent, and this is not a metaphor, they had tables and tents, and they're down, and they're intense, and they're in their activity. And they're in their space. And that's great. But then you step back, and you look at, "Well, there's the tent. Look at everything else, swirling around. Look at all the other things. And why are people here? What are people doing at this particular fair, at this particular festival?" That you hadn't seen the cosplay awards before, that's fine. I'm not putting any judgment on that. But to me, that was the first spark, is being able to handle this, because you were working. You were busy. That it's completely natural, that you would have thought, that there's this opportunity over there. And maybe the wrestling, you might not have even thought of, except for that you happened to be right next to it, so you couldn't avoid it. But I there's something about, maybe Helen could speak up just a little bit, for the value of just letting yourself be a participant at times as opposed to being on on on and being a producer.

And I do want to point out too, that after that event, I actually reached out to the rest of the people, and said, "Let's get some space themed wrestling matches happening." And that was in the works, but then again, we haven't done... We did one convention, two and a half months after that, so they do two a year. Just for context. They do a Fall, and a Winter one. We did one the very beginning of January, which is a smaller show, so the wrestling wasn't there, but this past September 2020, we were going to try to get some astronauts fighting aliens, or some scientists fighting each other, or something like that, but we haven't been back since unfortunately. We were trying to find ways to integrate into that as well. Pluto, versus Neil deGrasse Tyson, was the big hit at our science wrestling event. People lost their minds. That, and also Watson and Crick, versus Rosalind Franklin. I don't know if you can extend it to that, but it worked.

It's like going over the top with this, or having things be bolder, and louder and bigger is super cool in this kind of a venue. It's so visually loud from all the individuals coming in the door primarily through what's some of the spectacle that's there already, so I could just raise that up. And that being part of the creative process for the Space Center to take on, and I immediately thought of here are some grant opportunities that they could pursue that would allow them to do this in a venue that is primed for... You've got literally thousands and thousands of people who love this content or who would love this content if they were to engage in it more, so it's grabbing more people.

Yeah. I think having a bigger presence on the exhibit hall too, the planetarium and some of these little booth things were good and the tabling activities, but just ramp that up, you see the potential of being able to get more people engaged. And as Bart says, it's a good base there but if you doubled or tripled the resources that went into it, you'd get at least double or triple, you'd probably get five or six times the number of people engaged.

I feel like I've just got a real learning point from this in terms of practicality. I put that in bold here in my notes of the importance of doing this more than once because- Sorry. I mean, I've heard from, I think that in each of the recordings I've done with people about who've done this sort of a thing, like flags, sorry, St. Petersburg effort, they really stepped it up the second time. They kind of were like, we're ready for this. The first time, they're like, "I'm not sure why we're doing this. Where do we get a trailer from? How's this going to?" Well, yes. Then, the second time they're like, "Right, you know how this goes."

I agree that having seen some of the participants during the parade, where we leave some big organizations unnamed in this, for the fact that they just showed up with a Jeep and a banner on the float, I personally was turned off by that. And when you know it's a big and well-funded organization, and you think, "Really, guys, that's the best you could do?" So honestly, it demonstrates how much effort you put into doing this. So there's a little bit of go big or go home. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, or at least put in effort to show that you care.

It does take a bit of effort to create a sophisticated [inaudible], but I think it's important that we do have a float much like the other major floats that are there and not just a flatbed trailer from U-Haul. Nothing against that, but it decrees a different presence, I should say.

it's by doing it that you figure out how to do it better. And that it is an iterative process, inherently and it's also by doing it that you build some of those relationships and then you can imagine ways to strengthen that or to look in new directions for partners. So I just think that that. Yeah. I think just recognizing that, that it's a practice that's potentially very different from the other work that you're doing the rest of the year, I don't know. So if you weren't previously a festival maker or parade maker, you are learning how to do it by doing it and with your own goals. And I think that all festival makers and parade makers do that.

I think one thing across the two conversations I saw connection was that is tough to do, I guess in the mandate is to go into communities that are underserved and do this work of creating awareness and adding resources or capacity building within those neighborhoods. I think it's the way that I guess the time constraints on it undermines the mission in a sense, because I think what we've determined from Atlanta and New Haven is that to really build that capacity and do that work that I think people are earnestly trying to do with it, it takes a long time because these are structural things that have emerged over a long time. I think that so much pressure gets put on people who put on these events to do X, Y, Z, and A, B and C. And I think that oftentimes when it's like that, it's hard to grapple with the reality of the everyday politics of just building rapport with people, as you're trying to actually communicate with organizers and events and then integrate with another ongoing event. You're really integrating into that with Atlanta, for example. So that made it so much tougher to even do all of that. And it was a hope that I think the other organization would do some community building work that they didn't seem interested in doing that kind of work. So I think that it made me think about how these initiatives are structured and how, I guess maybe funding cycles or grant cycles are structured and how many ways the structure of the grant cycle and the accountability measures of the short, measurable time grant cycle that undermines the overall mission of building capacity in neighborhoods and communities. And I think that maybe, with recovery to think about it is just alternative approaches to I think nonprofits or philanthropy efforts or whatever that I think that oftentimes there's constraints of budget, the timeline, get it done. And I think that if there's a commitment to trying to wither away at the structural inequalities, that won't happen in the funding cycle and that it's going to have starts and stops. And I think that may be an overall approach to this work has to change on that level too.