You never know what will happen at SMA!

If you’ve never attended the SMA Winter Conference, you are in for a treat, and if you have, well, you know how fun it can be. But you never know how the conference will change your life!

My first conference was back in 2002. I’d been to some of the larger conferences out there (AAM, MAAM), but I never felt that they really addressed the issues that I was facing at the various small museums I’d been working with. So when I was awarded a Scholarship to attend the SMA conference, I was thrilled.

The conference proved to be all I had hoped for and more – I attended sessions where I finally felt like the presenters really got what it meant to be a small museum. I met all kinds of great people, and learned a lot. But how, you might ask, did this change my life??

Well, one group of people that I met at that conference were staff and board members of the Greenbelt Museum. My husband and I had been looking for a place to live in the DC area, and had been going to the Greenbelt movie theater for awhile, but it was chatting with the folks from the Greenbelt Museum at the SMA conference that got me seriously thinking about Greenbelt as our future home. Soon after that conference, we moved into the community, I joined the museum board, and we’ve been there ever since! And I’ve been coming to the SMA Winter Conference ever since too, and now serve on the conference committee! 

So how with the SMA Conference change your life? Or has it already? Hope to see you there!

- Jen Ruffner, Speakers Coordinator