The Natural Science Collections Facility: Building community with South African museums and herbaria

The Natural Science Collections Facility (NSCF) is a South African initiative to develop a network of museum and herbarium institutions, to secure the collections under their care, and to ensure collections are used for research that is relevant to local and global priorities. A key component of the NSCF work is community building. In the past, institutions have operated independently and fall under a range of national, provincial, and local governance structures. Many collections are understaffed and resources for collections care are limited. Differing organizational cultures, histories, and sometimes individual personalities, present significant obstacles to transformation, network building and progress. In 2018, shortly after its inauguration, transformation consultants joined the NSCF to facilitate the community building process. Emphasis shifted away from a purely business-oriented focus to a ‘softer’, people-centric orientation. The consultants introduced a wide range of social technologies such as meeting check-ins, active listening, rich pictures and a range of tools from the Liberating Structures framework, as well as new leadership paradigms and a new theory of organizational change to catalyze transformation from the bottom up. Importantly, the change paradigm is non-deterministic, and removes any requirements for goals, objectives, and timelines. Instead it prioritizes change that arises organically and spontaneously as a result of greater interpersonal engagement, breaking down barriers imposed by traditional hierarchy, bringing previously unheard voices to the fore, and engaging deeply with difficult, uncomfortable problems. Given South Africa’s socio-political history, race is one such difficult problem and remains a central topic in this transformation journey. Race-related problems are still deeply entrenched within South African institutions and often reflect historical privilege of whites over people of colour despite extensive equity target-based efforts to address them. The NSCF transformation process has highlighted the importance of confronting these issues, which are often opaque to historically privileged groups within organizations. Given the sensitivity of such issues, processes of engaging with them are deep, must be appropriately contained, and focus on uncovering new insights and illuminating new information or points of view. The community building process has in many ways been successful. A sense of community and camaraderi