Mary Foster
Heritage and Cultural Arts Program Manager
Allen, Texas, United States
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Mary Foster is the Heritage and Cultural Arts Program Manager for the City of Allen, Texas, where she oversees programming and interpretation at Allen Heritage Village and supports preservation and interpretation efforts at the historic Allen Cemetery. Her work brings together historic preservation, public programming, community engagement, and parks and recreation to connect residents with the history of their community.
Foster holds a bachelor’s degree in History from the University of Texas at Tyler and previously served as a museum curator at the 1859 Goodman-LeGrand House and Museum, where she curated exhibits and developed educational programs. She also served as Campaign Director for United Way of Smith County, supporting fundraising efforts for 26 local nonprofit organizations.
With nearly a decade of experience working across museums, history, parks and recreation, and nonprofit organizations, Foster is particularly interested in local and recent history, historic cemeteries, urban archaeology, and finding creative ways to make history meaningful and accessible to the communities where it happened.
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Doing the Work of Five: Sustainable Strategies for Museum Professionals
Small museums and solo professionals routinely manage responsibilities that larger institutions would divide among multiple departments. Their versatility is one of the small museum sector's greatest strengths, but it can also hide unsustainable organizational expectations. When passion, professional commitment, and a willingness to "make it work" repeatedly fill gaps in staffing and resources, the individual becomes part of the institution's operating model.
This session challenges the assumption that museum professionals simply need better time-management skills. Instead, participants will examine the passion tax that encourages museum workers to absorb organizational shortfalls and learn practical strategies to make invisible labor visible, evaluate competing responsibilities, and build more sustainable workloads.
Participants will learn to map their own responsibilities, distinguish mission-critical work from inherited and low-impact obligations, and practice a workload-balancing framework for deciding what to do, defer, delegate, redesign, reduce, or stop. They will also explore ways to document workload and translate that information into evidence for conversations with supervisors, boards, governing bodies, and other decision-makers.
The goal isn't to teach museum professionals how to accomplish more. It's to help them make better decisions about what one person can reasonably be expected to accomplish.
Presented by three small museum directors in North Texas: the Collin County Farm Museum, Allen Heritage Village, and Interurban Railway Museum.
Mary Foster
Heritage and Cultural Arts Program Manager
Allen, Texas, United States
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