DECIDING ON THE PUBLIC PROGRAMMING

As one of the main requirements of the grant, the public programming had a dual purpose: first, to increase community involvement in the institution and secondly, to showcase or highlight the new exhibit made possible by the grant. In order to accomplish these goals with the greatest possible effect, each institution had to base its public programming on the kind of community, institution, resources, and exhibit it was planning. In essence, each institution had to decide: 1) how many programs it wanted to produce; 2) what professionals it would need to recruit, if any, as consultants or presenters; 3) who was to be targeted as audience members for the program(s); 4) over what length of time its programs would run; 5) how, and how extensively, the program(s) would be publicized; and 6) how the program(s) would reflect the institution's overall mission.

The Friends of Arrow Rock and the Black World History Museum took drastically different approaches in arriving at these decisions. In part, these approaches arose from the basic institutional differences that separate the two organizations. As an urban institution, for example, the Black World History Museum had more immediate access to community resources than a rural institution. Therefore, it could structure its public programming based on the ongoing involvement of the student interns and on ready access to members of the community. Advanced planning and publicity efforts were not, then, as essential to the museum as they were to the Friends of Arrow Rock. Resources could be targeted to a series of programs for the interns and one or two public programs given for community members. Conversely, the Friends of Arrow Rock faced the logistical challenges of drawing a large crowd to a small town with limited resources. Therefore, planning and sustained publicity efforts became fundamental considerations and, later, components of the Friends' conceptualization and implementation of its public programs. In this way, the Friends of Arrow Rock arrived at the idea of one major weekend event that would be publicized extensively and rely on a mixture of well-known and regional professionals to draw a wide and varied audience to the town.