Job Posting: Arab American National Museum (AANM) Director

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Mar 28, 2018
Job Posting: Arab American National Museum (AANM) Director

Job Posting: Arab American National Museum (AANM) Director

By : Jadaliyya Reports

Job Title: Director, Arab American National Museum


Employment Status: Full-Time

The Arab American National Museum (AANM) - the first and only museum in the United States devoted to Arab American history, culture and contributions - is currently seeking candidates for the high-profile position of AANM Director. This prominent position requires an inspirational leader with passion, vision and an entrepreneurial spirit, to direct this locally and nationally significant institution. The ideal candidate will have a solid understanding of both nonprofit management and arts and culture, a powerful leadership presence, exhibit confidence and enthusiasm, and have an appreciation and passion for serving the Arab American community.

AANM - one of three national institutions of ACCESS - is accredited by the American Alliance of Museums, is an Affiliate of the Smithsonian Institution, and is a founding member of the Immigration and Civil Rights Network of the International Coalition of Sites of Conscience. By bringing the voices and faces of Arab Americans to mainstream audiences, the Museum dispels misconceptions about Arab Americans and other marginalized communities. Since opening its doors in 2005, this exceptional institution has shed light on the shared experiences of immigrants and ethnic groups, paying tribute to the diversity of our nation.  If you are the charismatic, inspirational and motivational leader we are seeking, please click here to submit your application.  

Job Summary: Under general direction with a high level of autonomy, uses extensive knowledge of Arab American history and skills obtained through education and experience, to visualize and develop the future of the Arab American National Museum (AANM).  This job requires an inspirational leader with passion, vision and an entrepreneurial spirit for an institution with national significance. Creates strategic direction and oversees the development of tactical plans. Responsible for the financial growth and sustainability of the museum and provides high level direction for educational and programming events. Extensive contact with senior leadership of the organization, ACCESS Board of Directors, AANM National Advisory Board, donors, foundations, corporations, government agencies, individual benefactors and other philanthropic sources is required to meet goals and objectives.

Essential Duties and Responsibilities:

  • Partner with Executive Director, Deputy Executive Director, and Chief Operating Officer to determine strategic direction, vision and mission of AANM and translating these things into actionable items.

  • Accountable for building, attracting and developing a highly effective and functional team.

  • Lead and inspire the AANM staff to work collaboratively to develop and implement strategic plans that actualize the institution’s mission, vision, and core values. Lead the organization, setting vision and direction for future growth and success

  • Manage financial oversight and monitoring for the AANM, including budget discipline, timely, accurate and comprehensive development of an annual budget and its implementation

  • Develop and oversee a robust fundraising plan to ensure the financial stability and sustainability of the museum including building the endowment and its unrestricted revenue streams

  • Establish, sustain, and expand relationships with foundations, corporations, government agencies, and private donors

  • Strengthen the relationship of the AANM with local and national cultural institutions

  • Reviews performance and evaluates results achieved by subordinates

  • Coaches and mentors subordinates.

  • Lead the AANM to develop exciting and quality exhibitions and educational, cultural, and artistic programming that both serves the museum’s mission and expands and diversifies its audiences and support base

  • Work with the National Advisory Board to further the museum’s mission and reach into the community throughout the nation

  • Form strategic alliances and partnerships with other local/national museums, cultural and educational institutions, and community-based organizations to achieve the museum’s goals

  • Operates standard office equipment and uses required software applications.

  • Performs other duties and responsibilities as assigned.


Knowledge, Skills, and Abilities:

Knowledge of:

  • Advanced concepts, principles and practices of business or non-profit operations and non-profit fundraising.

  • Technology resources used in managing and promoting an organization.

  • Budget management, including creating and maintaining a budget.

  • Arab American history, culture and diversity of the community.

  • Intermediate to advanced concepts, practices and procedures of new business startup techniques.

  • Community resources including other organizations and services designed to support program networks.

  • Processes, rules and regulations of various services and funding agencies surrounding the eligibility and maintenance of the services being received.


Skill in:

  • Operating standard office equipments and using required software applications, including Microsoft Office.


Ability to:

  • Partner with other functional areas to accomplish objectives.

  • Facilitate meetings, ensuring that all viewpoints, ideas and problems are addressed.

  • Incorporate needs, wants and goals from different business unit perspectives into a single, defined approach.

  • Attend to detail while maintaining a big picture orientation.

  • Read, interpret, analyze and apply information from current events and pending legislation.

  • Incite enthusiasm and influence, motivate and persuade others to achieve desired outcomes.

  • Interpret and apply policies and identify and recommend changes as appropriate.

  • Organize, manage and track multiple detailed tasks and assignments with frequently changing priorities in a fast-paced work environment.

  • Communicate effectively, both orally and in writing.

  • Work independently as well as collaboratively within a team environment.

  • Handle stressful situations and provide a high level of customer service in a calm and professional manner.

  • Establish and maintain effective working relationships.


Educational/Previous Experience Requirements:

  • Minimum Degree Required: Master’s degree, PhD preferred.  

  • Required Disciplines: Arab Studies or Museum Studies, or a related field; and...

  • At least 5 years management experience in a senior leadership position or any equivalent combination of experience, education, and/or training approved by Human Resources. Previous fundraising experience is required. Prior museum management experience is a must.


Licenses/Certifications:

  • Licenses/Certifications Required at Date of Hire: None


Working Conditions:

Hours: Normal business hours and some additional hours are required.

Travel Required: 20 – 25%

Working Environment: Climate controlled office environment


ABOUT DEARBORN and DETROIT, MICHIGAN

Metro Detroit is a fascinating place to live and work, a dynamic region where a dedicated individual can enjoy an excellent quality of life amidst a unique and diverse cultural landscape.

While Detroit is known globally as the Motor City for putting the world on wheels and is credited as being the birthplace of musical movements, including Motown and techno, its impactful history is a proper prologue to the current era of innovation, creativity and drive.

The area features affordable housing; major-market amenities including world-class entertainment options and cultural institutions; abundant park systems; the proximity to the Detroit River, Lake St. Clair, the majestic Great Lakes and plenty of natural beauty; a burgeoning dining scene; and major league sports franchises.

Active grassroots communities are present around coworking, technology, entrepreneurship, arts and culture, social justice and business and community development. The largest Arab American community nonprofit, ACCESS, is the parent organization of the Arab American National Museum and is a leader among regional and national nonprofits and an innovator in capacity-building, organizing and philanthropy.

Arab Americans will find appealing, welcoming places to work and play, amidst a variety of urban and suburban settings. Inner-ring suburb Dearborn – home to the Arab American National Museum and Ford World Headquarters – is also home to the largest concentration of Arab Americans in the United States and the markets, bakeries, butchers and retail outlets that serve them. The cultural diversity of the greater region’s population is similarly reflected throughout the area.

“The good news is that Detroiters are perhaps Detroit’s greatest asset. They have never stopped innovating and caring…”



-New York Times, “Detroit: The Most Exciting City in America?”

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/20/travel/detroit-michigan-downtown.html


Lonely Planet “The American comeback city”

https://www.lonelyplanet.com/best-in-travel/cities#2


Toronto Star “Detroit is America’s Great Comeback Story”

https://www.thestar.com/life/travel/2016/09/10/detroit-is-americas-great-comeback-story.html


National Geographic “6 Unexpected Cities for the Food Lover”

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/travel/features/best-food-cities-2017/


Zagat “The 26 Hottest Food Cities” (No. 13)

https://www.zagat.com/b/the-26-hottest-food-cities-of-2016

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Feb 16, 2011 Lebanon
Jadaliyya Reports By :
Jadaliyya Reports

Past is Present: Settler Colonialism Matters!

On 5-6 March 2011, the Palestine Society at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in London will hold its seventh annual conference, "Past is Present: Settler Colonialism in Palestine." This year`s conference aims to understand Zionism as a settler colonial project which has, for more than a century, subjected Palestine and Palestinians to a structural and violent form of destruction, dispossession, land appropriation and erasure in the pursuit of a new Jewish Israeli society. By organizing this conference, we hope to reclaim and revive the settler colonial paradigm and to outline its potential to inform and guide political strategy and mobilization.

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is often described as unique and exceptional with little resemblance to other historical or ongoing colonial conflicts. Yet, for Zionism, like other settler colonial projects such as the British colonization of Ireland or European settlement of North America, South Africa or Australia, the imperative is to control the land and its resources -- and to displace the original inhabitants. Indeed, as conference keynote speaker Patrick Wolfe, one of the foremost scholars on settler colonialism and professor at La Trobe University in Victoria, Australia, argues, "the logic of this project, a sustained institutional tendency to eliminate the Indigenous population, informs a range of historical practices that might otherwise appear distinct--invasion is a structure not an event."[i]

Therefore, the classification of the Zionist movement as a settler colonial project, and the Israeli state as its manifestation, is not merely intended as a statement on the historical origins of Israel, nor as a rhetorical or polemical device. Rather, the aim is to highlight Zionism`s structural continuities and the ideology which informs Israeli policies and practices in Palestine and toward Palestinians everywhere. Thus, the Nakba -- whether viewed as a spontaneous, violent episode in war, or the implementation of a preconceived master plan -- should be understood as both the precondition for the creation of Israel and the logical outcome of Zionist settlement in Palestine.

Moreover, it is this same logic that sustains the continuation of the Nakba today. As remarked by Benny Morris, “had he [David Ben Gurion] carried out full expulsion--rather than partial--he would have stabilised the State of Israel for generations.”[ii] Yet, plagued by an “instability”--defined by the very existence of the Palestinian nation--Israel continues its daily state practices in its quest to fulfill Zionism’s logic to maximize the amount of land under its control with the minimum number of Palestinians on it. These practices take a painful array of manifestations: aerial and maritime bombardment, massacre and invasion, house demolitions, land theft, identity card confiscation, racist laws and loyalty tests, the wall, the siege on Gaza, cultural appropriation, and the dependence on willing (or unwilling) native collaboration and security arrangements, all with the continued support and backing of imperial power. 

Despite these enduring practices however, the settler colonial paradigm has largely fallen into disuse. As a paradigm, it once served as a primary ideological and political framework for all Palestinian political factions and trends, and informed the intellectual work of committed academics and revolutionary scholars, both Palestinians and Jews.

The conference thus asks where and why the settler colonial paradigm was lost, both in scholarship on Palestine and in politics; how do current analyses and theoretical trends that have arisen in its place address present and historical realities? While acknowledging the creativity of these new interpretations, we must nonetheless ask: when exactly did Palestinian natives find themselves in a "post-colonial" condition? When did the ongoing struggle over land become a "post-conflict" situation? When did Israel become a "post-Zionist" society? And when did the fortification of Palestinian ghettos and reservations become "state-building"?

In outlining settler colonialism as a central paradigm from which to understand Palestine, this conference re-invigorates it as a tool by which to analyze the present situation. In doing so, it contests solutions which accommodate Zionism, and more significantly, builds settler colonialism as a political analysis that can embolden and inform a strategy of active, mutual, and principled Palestinian alignment with the Arab struggle for self-determination, and indigenous struggles in the US, Latin America, Oceania, and elsewhere.

Such an alignment would expand the tools available to Palestinians and their solidarity movement, and reconnect the struggle to its own history of anti-colonial internationalism. At its core, this internationalism asserts that the Palestinian struggle against Zionist settler colonialism can only be won when it is embedded within, and empowered by, the broader Arab movement for emancipation and the indigenous, anti-racist and anti-colonial movement--from Arizona to Auckland.

SOAS Palestine Society invites everyone to join us at what promises to be a significant intervention in Palestine activism and scholarship.

For over 30 years, SOAS Palestine Society has heightened awareness and understanding of the Palestinian people, their rights, culture, and struggle for self-determination, amongst students, faculty, staff, and the broader public. SOAS Palestine society aims to continuously push the frontiers of discourse in an effort to make provocative arguments and to stimulate debate and organizing for justice in Palestine through relevant conferences, and events ranging from the intellectual and political impact of Edward Said`s life and work (2004), international law and the Palestine question (2005), the economy of Palestine and its occupation (2006), the one state (2007), 60 Years of Nakba, 60 Years of Resistance (2009), and most recently, the Left in Palestine (2010).

For more information on the SOAS Palestine Society 7th annual conference, Past is Present: Settler Colonialism in Palestine: www.soaspalsoc.org

SOAS Palestine Society Organizing Collective is a group of committed students that has undertaken to organize annual academic conferences on Palestine since 2003.

 

[i] Patrick Wolfe, Settler Colonialism and the Transformation of Anthropology: The Politics and Poetics of an Ethnographic Event, Cassell, London, p. 163

[ii] Interview with Benny Morris, Survival of the Fittest, Haaretz, 9. January 2004, http://cosmos.ucc.ie/cs1064/jabowen/IPSC/php/art.php?aid=5412