Onboarding Starter Kit

Onboarding Starter Kit, CCL's third publication aiming to empower curators and museum directors with best practices in leadership and management tailored to museums, addresses staff retention as one strategy for fostering more inclusive and successful workplaces. As museums seek to expand and diversify their workforce, they increasingly face the challenge of applicant pools that may not have directly applicable managerial experience, which can often lead to frustration and staff turnover. Onboarding Starter Kit proposes ways to better structure a new recruit’s first experiences to ensure comfort and transparency and foster feelings of belonging, value, and authentic engagement.

Onboarding Starter Kit is written by CCL alumnae Maggie Adler, Curator of Paintings, Sculpture, and Works on Paper at the Amon Carter Museum of American Art, Wassan Al-Khudhairi, an independent curator who was recently appointed curator for the 2025 Hawai'i Triennial, and Shawnya L. Harris, the Larry D. and Brenda A. Thompson Curator of African American and African Diasporic Art at the Georgia Museum of Art. The booklet originated from the three authors’ group practicum exercise in their 2021 CCL Fellowship.