Community Health: Young People & Adults

Marsha Semmel (00:01):
Hello, I'm Marsha Semmel. I've worked with museums and in museums for quite some time, specializing in partnerships. In fact, I even wrote a book called Partnership Power: Essential Museum Strategies for Today's Networked World. I think the Vaccines & US Program is very, very important for our communities, and provides an opportunity for museums to use their status as trusted community sources to create partnerships that can really help address what is a complex, wicked problem today around vaccine hesitancy.

Marsha Semmel (00:45):
And, my advice would be the importance of building trust with the people, the individuals, and the partner organizations with whom you're working – the importance of making sure that, you allow enough time for trusted relationships to, be established. The importance of listening to your partners and listening to the communities. There's so many nuanced issues around vaccine hesitancy that this is a really, really good time to recognize that as much knowledge and facts and basic information that the museum might have and will have, that's really not enough. The opportunity would be to bring that kind of knowledge and information to, your partners, and recognize the gifts in the room that they have. Recognize the knowledge that you might not have, and be able to learn together to achieve some success.

Marsha Semmel (01:55):
Partnership takes time. One of the axioms that I believe is that progress will proceed in a partnership at the rate of trust, and so I wish you all the best. I think it's important, again, to continue to listen, to hear, to redirect and revise what your partnership relationships are as necessary. And I think if that happens, you're sure to succeed.