The Museums have offered a variety of free programs and services that cater to the needs of PWD since 1986, including free general admission to all PWD and a companion. One may ask, why launch an Access membership when PWD are always granted free general admission to the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco? In addition to free admission, members also receive discounts, early access, and invitations to special events. In return, they provide an annual gift to the Museums, and they also are our most engaged audience (both in person and online).
Members were the first to visit the de Young and Legion of Honor when we reopened our doors following COVID-related closures in 2020 and 2021. They are our biggest fans and our most thoughtful critics, providing us essential feedback and often serving as a barometer for our successes and opportunities to improve. Membership is more than just free admission: membership is a relationship. An Access membership would give PWD the opportunity to deepen their relationship with the Museums.
It also makes good business sense to offer an Access membership level. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, there are a reported 61 million adults in the United States who live with a disability, which is the equivalent of 25 percent (1 in 4) who have a disability that impacts one or more major life activities. A recent report from the San Francisco Office of Economic and Workplace Development stated that in San Francisco alone, there are 94,000 people who report a disability (1 in 10). Almost half of the PWD in San Francisco are under 65. Meanwhile, according to the Population Reference Bureau, the number of Americans 65 and older is on course to more than double, from 46 million today to over 98 million by 2060, and mobility issues and disability increase with age. According to data in 2019, the number of PWD who live below the poverty line is 25.9 percent, as opposed to those not living with a disability at 11.4 percent. Therefore, these statistics support investing in the disability community.
To develop this new membership level, Karen worked with Danielle Hobart (former associate director of Membership) throughout 2019 to brainstorm member benefits for Access members. At first this seemed like an opportunity to develop exclusive, bespoke benefits for Access members, but we quickly realized that most of the benefits we could think of were already offered by the Museums to PWD, free of charge, by advance request, including ASL interpretation for Deaf visitors, highly descriptive tours for visitors who have low vision or are blind, and Veteran’s Personal Response Tours, among others. We weren’t going to put any of these programs behind a membership paywall. Instead, we decided to offer Access members the same benefits as Individual-level members and include more benefits for PWD (like live closed-captioning during programs) into all membership levels.
In summer 2020, when the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco pledged to become an anti-racist organization that centers diversity, inclusivity, equity, and access, every department across the Museums looked inward and sought ways to make our work more inclusive. This was a perfect time to restart the launch of Access membership.
Launching a new membership level takes support from many people across the Museums, and there were competing priorities in 2020 and 2021 as we worked to safely reopen the de Young and Legion of Honor. For Meghan McCauley (director of Membership), it was important that the process of launching a new inclusive membership level was also as inclusive as possible internally, and Meghan worked across teams to develop a schedule for launch that accommodated each department’s varying priorities. We wouldn’t have been successful without the work of our colleagues in Data Information Services, the Museum Store, Marketing and Communications, and Visitor Experience.
As project leaders, Karen and Meghan also worked across teams to develop staff training, soliciting feedback from our visitor- and member-facing colleagues, who helped us anticipate questions that people might ask: Why should I become a member? What “counts” as a disability? Karen was called upon often to answer questions and help create talking points that, in turn, increased visibility of her extensive work with the disability community and our existing Access programs. As we became more educated, we helped educate our colleagues. We became more familiar with how to talk about Access membership and living with disabilities. We are now excited to welcome these members of our community to deepen their relationship to the Museums through membership.
Though the new level has only recently launched, it’s helped ignite an excitement and optimism internally to see what’s possible when we work together to make the Museums more accessible. We learned that the disability community’s diverse visitor needs are often ones we share—adding closed captioning to member events, for example, is a benefit that many people find useful regardless of whether they identify as having a disability.
