Staff Reflects on 20 Years of the Philadelphia Stewardship Program
Since last fall, WUDPAC Preventive Conservation Fellow Margalit Schindler has worked to support the efforts of CCAHA's Preservation Services Office, which administers the Philadelphia Stewardship Program. In this post, Margalit offers some reflections on the concept of stewardship as it relates to our mission at CCAHA in general and the Philadelphia Stewardship Program specifically.
stewardship
stew·ard·ship | \ ˈstü-ərd-ˌship , ˈstyü-; ˈst(y)u̇rd- \
1: the office, duties, and obligations of a steward
2: the conducting, supervising, or managing of something
especially: the careful and responsible management of something entrusted to one's care
Roberto Bedoya of the Tucson Pima Arts Council writes, “Stewardship is the responsibility for taking care: taking care of property, finances, the needs of others, taking care of something that one does not own… Cultural stewardship concerns itself with tending the work of imagination, the realm that embodies both the aesthetic and ethical experiences of being in community, in relationship to one another.” Stewardship, then, is a concept, an ethic that embodies responsible planning and management of resources.
As stewards of cultural heritage, museums, libraries, historical societies, and the like have accepted a responsibility to take care of the information and materials left in their keep. The Conservation Center for Art & Historic Artifacts (CCAHA) aims to support these organizations in their stewardship duties through conservation and preservation. By examining the material science, technical art history, and sustainable collections care, CCAHA staff can advise and assist on a wide variety of projects.
As a regional lab, CCAHA has a vested commitment to the Greater Philadelphia Area in particular. To that end, the Philadelphia Stewardship Program began in 2002 as a comprehensive approach to preservation planning for local institutions. Generously funded by the William Penn Foundation, the Stewardship Program calls for applications annually, and is open to nonprofit cultural collecting institutions in six counties: Philadelphia, Bucks, Chester, Delaware, Montgomery, and Camden (NJ). CCAHA works with accepted applicants over time to assess their preservation needs and develop long-range plans to address them, while centering the ideas of accessibility, feasibility, and sustainability.
In 2022, the program celebrates its 20th Anniversary. In those two decades, CCAHA has assisted nearly 100 Philadelphia institutions with surveys, assessments, preservation planning, and more. The final reports have been used to apply for grant funding, aid in strategic development, and as support for planning conversations. Additionally, recipients have noted the benefits of written documentation during periods of staff turnover, when consistency in practice is most at risk.
Figure 1. Stewardship Program Participants in the Philadelphia Area. Credit: Margalit Schindler.
However, the Philadelphia Stewardship Program paused during the COVID-19 pandemic, which shut down most institutions in March 2020 and continues to affect our daily movement and interactions. That time afforded CCAHA the opportunity to reexamine and relaunch the program with the goal of revamping the existing series. In addition to support for new Philadelphia applicants, this includes updating older reports of previous participants and expanding the demographic to include community-based and non-institutional collections.
To pilot this endeavor, CCAHA has partnered with Archives For Black Lives in Philadelphia (A4BLiP), which identifies as “a loose association of archivists, librarians, and allied professionals [in the Philly area] responding to the issues raised by the Black Lives Matter movement.” The group is a volunteer-run alliance, inspired by Jarrett Drake, formerly Digital Archivist at Princeton University, and his work to end archives’ erasure of Black lives.
Their recent work includes:
-
Publishing a statement of principles advocating for just policies around records of police violence, affirming the importance of documenting Black lives in the historical record, and acknowledging the need to make the archival profession more inclusive of archivists of color;
-
Processing community-based archival collections and seeking opportunities to advise organizations serving Black communities on archival and records management questions.
-
Devising standards for anti-oppressive archival description and procedures for auditing repositories’ description for racist language.
This collaborative partnership will combine the archival and records management expertise of A4BLiP with the materials-based preservation knowledge of CCAHA staff. The goal of the joint effort is to educate and strengthen collections that may lack institutional infrastructure and support. Additionally, the cohort-based network hopes to connect like-minded peers with similar collection challenges.
The Philadelphia Stewardship Program will open a new round of applications beginning January 18, 2022. Click here to access the application, which requires providing a short narrative, answering multiple-choice questions, and uploading several supporting documents. For additional questions, please contact CCAHA Preservation Services Coordinator Alanna Shaffer at ashaffer@ccaha.org.
On this journey of communal cultural stewardship, CCAHA aspires to support ventures in “tending to the work of imagination, the realm of experiences of being in community.” We look forward to hearing from you!