During my summer at the Brooklyn Museum, I primarily worked on supporting the museum with its capital project strategy. The Brooklyn Museum received a large capital grant from the City of New York to transform its gallery spaces on the fourth and fifth floor. The capital grant would support new interiors and climate-control systems, which allows the Brooklyn Museum to further its mission of “bring[ing] people together through art and experiences that inspire celebration, compassion, courage, and the will to act.” My work focused on documenting the status of the capital grants received, examining the requirements to unlock the funding granted, and providing a high-level funding strategy for the museum. This process culminated with a capital projects workshop for senior leaders at the Brooklyn Museum, which I co-lead with Sophia Krohn, the strategy fellow in the directors office.

As a dual urban planning and MBA student, working at the Brooklyn Museum was a great opportunity to apply a range of skills that I have learned in both programs. Two courses from Columbia GSAPP were particularly helpful: Planning the Cultural Space and Community Development Finance. Planning the Cultural Space first introduced me to the important role cultural institutions have in shaping the urban environment including the impact such institutions have on communities and how cultural institutions have been impacted by the pandemic. The course helped frame the work I was doing over the summer and understanding what was driving many of the decisions the museum was making. The focus of the Community Development Finance course is the financing of nonprofits, including the role of public policy in supporting economic activities in low-income neighborhoods. Exposure to these frameworks made understanding and evaluating the range of capital financing options easier.

Anne Pasternak, a director of the Brooklyn Museum, has often described the museum as a 200-year old startup, and it certainly felt like that. The Brooklyn Museum has historically been under-resourced, which makes operating an institution on this scale and impact challenging. One challenge I faced during the internship was finding the relevant information I needed for a couple of reasons. Firstly, the information lived in different places and teams have traditionally operated in their own silos. Secondly, the museum's infrastructure is aging and the legacy systems are not fully integrated across the board. Finally, there have been a lot of changes in teams. This meant I had to be quite resourceful in locating and synthesizing information I gathered, which meant I needed to work across a range of departments to do so.

I thoroughly enjoyed my summer at the Brooklyn Museum. It was my first time working in the nonprofit sector and in a museum. Within my first couple of weeks, I started to appreciate how complicated a museum's business model is. It is a nonprofit institution that is funded primarily through operating and capital grants; a real estate business when you consider how the gallery, storage, and retail spaces are managed; an educational and curatorial institution; and entertainment/hospitality business. All of this is centered around art. I felt fortunate to be able to experience the impact the museum has on the local community and how important the institution is to the general public.