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my name is Ellie McKinney and i'm the assistant director of visitor services here
at the walker and I manage the visitor services department as well as
interface with each programming department about visitor interaction
in the museum space. And often
we reference the MoMA because the moma is kind of comparable to us as far as
what kind of art they present and their programming is somewhat similar so and
they also have you know pretty amazing funding to support some of their programs
they have a really great accessibility website and they've just got an entire
group of people on staff to deal with some of these issues that's really nice
to have this museum that's a little more funded than us that we can kind of you know
check for language and check for ideas and try to find out so
on a monthly basis we have front-line managers group of folks to get together.
So it's everybody who deals with the public, with folks from education myself
people who work in the shop and the security staff
and we meet on a monthly basis and we prepare for trainings and we train
approximately the whole front line staff approximately
every six months and we address topics you know for instance ages ago we had
A Chuck Close exhibit and so we knew that we were going to be having more visitors
who were coming in wheelchairs and so that became a topic for this every six months
meeting where we said
we want everyone to get in a wheelchair and navigate through them the building
and it ended up being a really fun activity it turned into almost like
wheelchair races we have some hills handsome have steep inclines in our
building and it was really important to get our staff in a physical wheelchair
and see if you don't have a ton of arm strength it's really hard
to get yourself up-and-down that incline that we have in the building
and so then we talked about kind of empowering the staff to do the right
thing to offer your assistance in that "can i help you kind of way."