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Hi my name is José Manriquez-Hernandez. I am an undergraduate at the University of Colorado Boulder majoring in Leadership/community engagement and History, and I am also minoring in education. I have had some experiences working in research, teaching, and in community environments, such as museum exhibit building and organizations like YAASPA that work for the Aurora community supporting youth education. While I aspire to become a teacher, I am open to other environments such as museum work or community work. I’ve done work in the past helping teach at summer camps such as Aquetza and through a program called ��������ƵPS (��������Ƶ Pre-Health Scholars). I’m always looking for more opportunities that utilize teaching, but I am open to any possibilities involving community work.

On being a Changemaker...

As students explored their definitions of success, some of the main facets of “success” that came up for this group were: (1) finding balance, (2) being a changemaker, (3) embracing life pivots, and (4) overcoming obstacles. In preparing for their final showcase, students reflected on one of these aspects and how they related to this aspect of success. 

What is your story around this topic?
My story of being a change maker revolves around my drive to want to better the community that I came from, and being able to change the systems like education and museums that have often not represented POC. I want to be able to make these places better than the experiences that I have had with them, and doing so requires change. I want to be able to go into museums and create more opportunities for them to engage in the community and reach out more to the POC in their community. Within education, I at the very least want to be a role model for young Latinx students that are struggling to find a sense of belonging or sense of self. 

What have you struggled with in regards to this aspect of success?
In regards to making change, it's hard to in the first place get into places that are able to make a change. I want to change those spaces that have done me a disservice like education and museums growing up. Having teachers that tell my mom and me during parent-teacher conferences that I wasn’t worth teaching cause I would just end up a janitor, really weighed heavy on my conscious but I knew that I wanted to prove her wrong so the following years are when I started taking my education more seriously. While the Change Collective is a place where we can make change, there aren't enough opportunities like it around the globe that give people the chance to make a change. But slowly and steadily I think more opportunities like this one are becoming available to youth and young adults—and that's why there needs to be more information spread on what museums are doing to innovate their role with their community and help benefit education as well.

Where have you shined on this aspect of success?
I have shined in being a part of programs that work with education and museums. I have worked with the Museum of Boulder to create a Latinx exhibit for youth to be able to share their voices and represent themselves in their community. I have also been working within education programs like Public Achievement, which has allowed me to work with youth to tackle topics like ethnic studies or racial justice, and get kids into civic engagement earlier than when I was introduced in college. I have been able to create a safe space within my classrooms that allows students to speak out about how they feel and giving them the opportunity to speak about their diversity, which is something that I felt that I needed going through the K-12 system.

What tools have you found to be helpful in navigating this aspect of success? 
The People! This is a running joke that one of my groups says, but it's the honest truth—people have been one of the biggest influences in my life; they help open up new opportunities for me to be able to be that changemaker. Learning all of these skills from the Change Collective about professional development and communication skills has been essential in my networking and making friendships.

CHANGE Collective program reflections

Embarking on this program

The team sessions felt great. I like the variety of people that we have from a variety of fields and I am extremely excited to see how we can all put together the different fields that we come from. I never would have expected some of the majors that were said but it makes me all the more eager to see how we work together. I have nothing that I am feeling nervous about. I am hoping to gain more experience working with others and seeing how it is that our audience is impacted by the work that we produce.

Mid-year reflection

I always believe that it's the people that you work with that make the job a better place and I can say that I always love when we get into big teams and meet up together. I love the career diverseness that the group brings as everyone is always thinking in a different way about the same thing. This has been such a good experience and I can't wait to see what great ideas we get from the brainstorm.

I really enjoy the work-on-your-own-time method—it's nice for when I have only small breaks in between my other work to get some stuff done. I really enjoy in-person stuff—it definitely has me a lot more focused and hope for more of it.

I could really use a bit more organization within the different assignments and materials that are sent out. There are a lot of emails and would be nice to have maybe one email thread for one week and start a new one for another that way we can see what was discussed for what week and know what we need to have done and ready by what day and time. 

I feel like I have been understanding a little bit of the research aspect of museums and what it's like to try to pave a new way for museums to move forward. I think that it's incredibly important to keep up to date, and I like the challenge of trying to find new innovative ideas for museums to explore.

I know this is too much to ask for, but I wish I could dedicate more time to this but I feel like everyone is in the same predicament of trying to balance school, life, and work and for some reason, it just hasn't been the same since Covid, and it takes away from the experience. I wish we could try to incorporate a little more of everyone's work together as I enjoyed being able to talk with Tiffany about her experience and I would like to see what some others are up to.

Final program reflection

In thinking about your involvement in the Change Collective program this year.....

What are you most proud of?
My brother has not been the most supportive of my decisions going into education or the museum field as he has always felt like it would never pay well, which he isn’t wrong about, but that shouldn’t be the reason that you should be basing all of your decisions off of. I still am passionate about this work as I realized the potential that museums have to influence their communities. While we didn’t spend much time on it, I really enjoyed researching about museums and seeing their impact through our work with the Change Collective to engage the community in the midst of the pandemic.

My brother always argued that museums won’t last because of the pandemic, but I knew that museums will stick around. Putting on events with some attendance was still very nice to see. I am happy about the work that we were able to do, as it’s hard to engage our communities right now more than ever, and being able to show off to my brother that my work here is not meaningless is what I am most proud of.

What was the best thing you gained from this program?
I gained an understanding of what it’s like to work in a museum and try to plan events during one of the hardest times to get people together. I learned a lot of helpful reflection skills to be mindful of, how to put those reflections into good use, and changing my approaches and decisions that I make. I’m happy to say that I’m glad that I met everyone in the Change Collective, as it’s been a pleasure to get to know everyone and see everyone grow in their own ways this year. I want to hold onto the connections that I’ve been able to make this year and keep in touch with everyone in the Change Collective. Not only that, I know what expectations I have working with a group, as being in the Leadership major I want to work well with my coworkers, and through the assignments and team-building exercises, I’ve learned a lot about how to make a team work well together. On top of that, I’ve learned about realistic expectations when it comes to this line of work in terms of attendance or event planning. While things don’t always work out how we would like them to, we still are able to learn a lot from the work that we’ve done and use it to better prepare for future events.

If you were to recommend changes to the program, what would you recommend? What didn't work so well for you? Feel free to consider the structure of your museum job, the bi-weekly sessions, the microcredential requirements, how you were hired.
I wish we were able to meet up a bit more, especially in person, but due to the pandemic I understand why we weren’t able to do so. I really liked when we were able to work with our co-workers more, but I definitely think that we should have gotten to spend more time learning about each others’ work, as I was only able to work with Tiffany. I would have liked to see what Jeremy and Rachel were up to, as well as the work that Emily had to do, so that we could all learn from each other, more about our roles, and more ways that we could combine our skills to come up with more events. I also would have liked more events… maybe we could have some already planned so that the next Change Collective can see what to expect for when they start to plan their events. I would have liked to see some more structure for the co-creation squad, as I feel like we were bouncing all over the place looking at the next thing to do but never having time to reflect on the work we just did, like on the research that we did initially about museums.

What about this program would you recommend keeping the same? What worked really well for you?
I loved the team building exercises. Everyone that was selected for this program I was happy to work with, and the fact that there were people from different majors was an amazing idea, as we all got to show off our skills in different capacities working through the project. The meetings with our coworkers were phenomenal as building that community was so much fun and beneficial to us being able to work great together. I really enjoyed the reflections that we were able to make as they gave us the time to think about questions that people don’t normally think about. I would definitely recommend keeping the interviews with inspiring people, and might even recommend being able to do at least one more as they were super insightful! I thought as well that getting to talk to the professional panel was so cool and felt really affirming to know that people a bit older than us were all experiencing similar things and also providing such helpful resources and advice. All of the professional development was so helpful and should be kept!

How do you hope to build upon what you've gained from this program (including any insights around the types of work or experiences that did not work for you)?
I really feel like museums have so much ability to create fun events, opportunities, and other activities for the community to engage with. I’m not sure if I’m going to work in a museum anytime soon but I know that if I do, I will want to think creatively and try to come up with innovative ways to engage the community around them. I have learned that museums need to constantly innovate and create events and exhibits that their community can engage with, and it’s even more important to pay attention to what your community may want… like how we tailored our Sustainable Futures Fest to students at Boulder. I also realized what it’s like to work in a job that actually cares about you beyond your work and realized what kind of standards for treatment and support I should look for in a work environment. I also learned about adaptability from this work, as we know that we may not have had as many people as we would like at our events—it’s still nice to be able to reflect on these experiences and think about them in a good way and learn from what we have made.

How was your experience with the Sustainable Futures Fest? What felt successful? What would you have changed? 
The Sustainable Futures Fest was a lot of fun! While we didn’t get the volume of participation that I would have wanted for the videos, I still liked the responses that we were able to receive. The questions we asked were very thought-provoking and I think that it would be fun to have had us interview ��������Ƶ Boulder students like our friends to record their responses to these questions instead of mainly professors and professionals. Doing so would have made it feel like it included more people from our community. I think it would be nice to include and show that video in other places. I just wish there were more places to advertise the museum—it’s crazy how many people who attend the university don’t know about the museum. I really enjoyed getting to talk with some of the attendees at Sustainable Futures Fest, however, as we were able to bond over some nostalgic things such as the Nintendo Wii Sports theme music, childhood cartoons, and some sustainability questions over what we were drawing. I thought that it was still successful, all things considered, but I think that we would have had more attendance if we did this during the week and we put up some signs outside the museum inviting people to come join our event.

How was your experience with the Showcase/Open House? What felt successful? What would you have changed?
I loved the Showcase! I felt so happy to be able to present and speak in front of my peers, friends, and other people like Emily Zinn, which made the showcase so much more meaningful to me! I would definitely recommend for next time to send an invite to the inspiring people that we interviewed, so that Change Collective members could have their role models watch them speak, which I think would make for a nice surprise and cool experience! I really enjoyed our ability to do our speeches, which was so amazing. I would have definitely been okay to speak more, but I’m not sure how others would feel. It could be that we pick one or two assignments that we have done over the year, and present on what we thought of those assignments and why they were so important to us and to other work-study jobs. I also think that this showcase would have been beneficial for employers of work-study jobs to see what they could do to improve the work environment for their work-study students.

I liked how the presentation was scheduled, but after we did our presentation I really liked the idea that we had of sitting at tables and discussing our different “aspects of success” with audiences (mine on “being change maker”). While I liked that idea, I think that it was better that we just invited people to stick around and hang out like we did—that way just felt more natural. We were able to talk to the people that we wanted to engage with, and maybe even network with! I felt successful after the event as I went to go talk to my friends. They had said that I had them tearing up with my speech as it really hit home for some of them, which made me feel like I did a good job presenting. I wonder as well about other people that could benefit from the showcase, as I really liked the question that  Emily Zinn posed about how to make a better environment for her workers. I think that employers here at ��������Ƶ could benefit, and other nearby museum curators could benefit from listening to the showcase to make better work environments for everyone.