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Making The New England Aquarium Accessible To Minority Communities

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The New England Aquarium had a difficult dilemma. The organization wanted to become an entity representative of the city of Boston and characterize its ethnic, racial, and economic diversity. However, since the late 1960's, the aquarium was considered inaccessible by minority communities. As such, its board of trustees wanted to change this image. In the early 1990's, they developed a plan to "attract and involve" populations previously underrepresented. At the same time, the education department began to implement programs targeting minority youth. Despite the good intentions, these efforts proved unsuccessful and jeopardized the cohesion of the department. The experiences of the youth programs in the education department demonstrate …show more content…

This division between vision and implementation undermines the efforts of the governing board by executive staff. The integration or division of labor is poorly demonstrated in this case study. We see management unable to address strategic goals due to a changing staff environment. For instance, turnover and conflict among educators forced the youth programs to be relegated under the volunteer operations. Further, as associate director of programs and exhibitions Alan Hankin states, that the lack of line-item funding suggests insufficient commitment to the diversity efforts in the youth program by administrators. A method of improving the long-term standing could be by creating a dialogue between administrators of how they’d like to see the goals of the board being implemented. A strategy session, or perhaps a strategic retreat, would allow educators to share stated and taboo goals. Another main point of conflict features the differentiation and integration of work and responsibilities. The aquarium’s management created staff positions for minority youth but didn’t create a structure that included job descriptions or a defined role in the organization, assigning them to work with older, unpaid volunteers. The differentiation issues created hostilities since both groups were initially working as guides. A resolution to this problem could be addressed by creating job descriptions and responsibilities for the minority youth workers.

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