<![CDATA[KATHRYN GROW ALLEN, PHD

<![CDATA[KATHRYN GROW ALLEN, PHD - Blog]]>Tue, 18 Aug 2026 07:52:05 -0700Weebly<![CDATA[Four Barriers to Change]]>Sun, 09 Aug 2026 10:23:11 GMThttps://www.kathryngrowallen.com/notes-on-heritage-blog/four-barriers-to-change

There is not a single industry in the world right now that does not need to master the art of change. Many professionals know this. But what about the heritage industry? What about those that deal with the past - isn’t the point to avoid change? Isn’t heritage about pushing back against the massive changes that are shape-shifting humans into a species unrecognizable by our ancestors?

Yes and no.

For a long time I thought heritage was only about preservation. Keeping something exactly the same. But more and more I see the importance of change in this industry too. Change is what threatens heritage... but it is also what can save it. Accepting we might need to do things differently to pass something on to the future is an important, if not difficult, idea to accept. Sometimes change is what can push through an otherwise lost cause.

In light of this, common business knowledge like understanding the barriers to change, something studied by business students, can be quite useful to heritage professionals. In a general business training, I was introduced to the four common barriers to change. These are general reasons why companies (or individuals) do not respond to change. Failure to change when its necessary is costly, sometimes detrimental. Understanding these barriers felt like a good use of my time. These are the four from that training, and my thoughts on their use in protecting and promoting the past.

Barrier to Change 1: Perception

A perception barrier happens when those immersed in a changing environment fail to understand the changes going on. They either underappreciated the scope of change, assuming its minor, or don't realize it exists at all. If you do not realize change is happening or your perception of that change is skewed, you likely won't respond accurately to it.

A general example of this would be those who think AI is not going to impact their industry. This is a dangerous assumption, no matter what industry you are in. Those who don't appreciate the scope of this disruptive technology are misinterpreting (or just missing) a major change going on. Because of that, their response to change will be to ignore it or fail to act at a level appropriate for its magnitude. Their perception of what is going on is off, and therefore their response will be off as well.

There are many major disruptions impacting heritage work these days. AI, climate change, wealth transfers impacting who your future customers or donors might be, generational trends, and the shifting winds of social media are a few that come to mind. All of these will impact heritage tourism, museums, historical societies, non-profits and government agencies whose missions include protecting and promoting the past. I would venture a guess that many who work in these types of organizations have a perception problem to one or more of these changes. They fail to grasp how these massive shifts in human communities and the global economy will trickle down to them. This is a dangerous mistake.

Barrier to Change 2: Knowledge

In some cases, resistance or failure to respond to change comes from a lack of knowledge. An organization might realize there is a change but not truly understand it. You might have an accurate perception of the impact AI could have, but if you lack the knowledge of what AI can actually do, you won't truly grasp where and how it will create change. We know change is happening, but we don't know enough about it to act appropriately.

People who choose to work for heritage organizations often do so because they love the past. They may not be willingly to spend time engaging with the technology or trends of the future. And yet they need to. You don't need to like AI, but you do need to understand it. Otherwise, your lack of knowledge will leave you unprepared to respond to its shock waves. Heritage organizations might focus on preserving and promoting the past but their business and legal structures are very much rooted in the present and the future. We need to understand how and where money is flowing, how and where technology is disrupting, and what legal and political winds are creating waves (just take a look at what is going on right now with Section 106, a key legal protector of America's historical sites). We need to do more than just acknowledge change; we need to learn about it...in great detail. And this learning is not a once-a-year workshop kind of deal. We need to make time every week to engage in the present and future if we want to protect and promote the past. Ironic, but true.

Barrier to Change 3: Motivation

Whether or not we have the right perception and knowledge is pointless if there is no motivation to respond to change. Motivation, a key determination in the success or failure of so many things, cannot be ignored. What happens when you have staff unwilling to change, even as things crash down around them? Maybe they have been doing something one way for decades. Maybe they are really attached to that old way. Maybe they are scared that their contributions will be considered obsolete if there is change, and those contributions make up a huge part of their identity. The psychological research on motivation is dense...and absolutely worth reading for anyone who is trying to understand and respond to change.

Again here, I cannot help but think the nature of the heritage industry might be susceptible to this barrier. People who do this kind of work may be less motivated to react to change than other industries. Maybe they are against technology. Maybe they hate what social media has done to people and wont use it, meanwhile missing out on key forms of advertising and promotion, but also the place important news is shared ( everything I know about Section 106 changes is from following a State Historic Preservation Officer on LinkedIn). The desire to react to change must be present and widespread in order for a response to succeed.

Barrier to Change 4: Coordination/Capability

Finally, after we address perception, knowledge, and motivation, we must consider the final barrier that can stop us from reacting to change accordingly: capacity. Inability to coordinate a response and lack of capability to initiate changes can be HUGE barriers. If you lack the resources, staffing, technology, or data needed to respond to a change, it doesn't matter how perceptive, knowledgeable, or motivated you are. Your response will be weak at best.

This is the most heartbreaking barrier I see in heritage work. People understand they need change and they want to change, but they still can't get it done. So many organizations charged with protecting and promoting heritage are understaffed and lacking resources. They work so hard just to keep going. They don't have time to enact sweeping changes. In rural areas (like where I live) nonprofits are even more precarious. They are unlikely to have the capacity to react to what is going on right now. We don't see them leaning into AI, despite its ability to help get things done, because they don't have the time or energy to learn it. We don't see them using social media enough because they don't have the staff to create good content. And we didn't see them shift from grants to other forms of financial support when Federal agencies were emptied this year. They didn't have the capacity to launch private fundraising campaigns, create endowments from scratch, or design money-making endeavors ("disregarded entities") to funnel revenue through. They are underpaid and exhausted. Hard to coordinate much of anything in that state.

Likewise, heritage organizations often lack consistent leadership. This summer I saw many area Executive Director postings for nonprofits in general. When I read the job descriptions, I had a good idea why those spots were empty. Our EDs are loaded up with what should be two jobs (day-to-day operations manager and capacity-building leader should not be one person, in my opinion). So they leave. Their salaries are tiny (and they are often guilt-tripped away from asking for more money). So they leave. There is no space in their schedules to do things that could break down the barriers above - learn about change and experiment with ways to react to it. As a result, they feel like they are leading a sinking ship. So they leave.

Sometimes we can blame individuals for the barriers above. We can cite their resistance to change, unwillingness to learn about new things like AI, or lack of motivation as the barrier. We can blame the leaders too, saying no one has loyalty to an organization anymore. While that might be true in some regards, that ignores a system that is set up wrong. Many heritage organizations are stuck in a cycle producing barriers or pushing people towards the behaviors that built those barriers. Without accepting and changing the system, we wont be able to change the people. And if we don't change the people, we will never respond adequately to change. And if we don't respond to change, we won't build organizations that can break out of the old system.

Round and round we go.

Final Thoughts

I am not going to share any solutions or ideas at this point. But I wanted to point out these critical barriers. I also wanted to show how a basic business training can produce meaningful insight into heritage work. Heritage professionals should be paying attention to, and training in, business research. When I was a teacher, I told so many of my anthropology students to go take a class in the business school. I repeat that unsolicited advice for everyone who works in heritage. History might be your passion, but business acumen is what will allow you to do something with that passion. We need a whole lot more people who love heritage but have the skills of an entrepreneur, accountant, or MBA graduate. And we need them now.

Lead photo: setup from one of my deep work sessions. These are getting harder to schedule these days and my work suffers from it. If we want to understand, motivate, and enact change, we must find ways to find deep, uninterrupted work time.

]]><![CDATA[Where Did It Begin?]]>Sun, 02 Aug 2026 17:18:47 GMThttps://www.kathryngrowallen.com/notes-on-heritage-blog/where-did-it-begin

I think about heritage more days than not. Ideas surrounding what we inherited from the past (and the heritage we will leave to the future) fill my head. So much so that in the busiest stage of my life, I decided to start writing again. The desire for others to realize we can live better, steward better, and create something far more wonderful to leave our children is pushing me in new directions, professionally and personally. Writing out where my interest in all this came from has helped me understand myself a bit better. Sharing it here.

When Did This Passion Start?

I thought it was in Greenland. In 2021, I had the opportunity to attend Greenland Science Week and travel around this Arctic country. While there, I interviewed and connected with Greenlanders as a part of a small team. My work was meant to focus on tangible heritage (think, really old sites and archaeological artifacts). This is what archaeologists typically care about. But what really captured my attention was actually something else.

I discovered the intangible past. I had always respected its importance but did little to learn more about it. And I certainly didn’t realize it was just as (if not more) impactful. Intangible heritage includes traditions, knowledge of craft, ancient practices, longstanding rituals...things that require an understanding of something we cannot physically touch. Like artifacts and heirlooms, they too are passed through time, but in a very different way. Their survival across generations is dependent on very different factors (soil chemistry not a major concern here). This type of heritage clearly connected communities in Greenland. It provided meaning and happiness in a way I don't think physical artifacts do. In a harsh environment like the Arctic Circle, intangible heritage also provided the knowledge of how to survive (and thrive) in an extreme environment.

It was in Greenland I got to explore the meaning of both tangible and intangible heritage at a new level. I could see just how meaningful they both were, especially in the face of significant future change.

This is where I thought my passion for heritage beyond artifacts, history beyond academic study, was born.

Boarding the plane to Greenland in October 2021

But recently I started to wonder if that’s the whole truth.

I spent most summers of my 20s in Romania, an Eastern European country I still insist is the best kept secret in Europe. Romania is a land of stunning beauty, filled with rich heritage and tradition. Medieval mountain and plain towns dot idyllic countrysides. Places look ancient, but that doesn’t mean you can’t easily find air-conditioned hotels and excellent wifi. Modern industries coexist with antiquated ones. Cars share the road with horse-drawn carts, both willing to stop for a hitchhiking grandma (surprisingly common).

Romania helped me see how lovely keeping the old ways can be. While poverty is an unfortunate explanation for some of the traditional ways, there was also a culture-wide desire to elevate these links to the past. There was a clear interest in protecting heritage, tangible and intangible, while still building a modern economy. During my years in Romania, I could see the past and the present trying to merge in a way that really impacted me.

While I spent most of my time in Romania, work in the region allowed me to experience the heritage of places like Hungary, Croatia, and Russia as well. Their shared history as former Eastern Bloc countries resulted in a slower conversion to modernity. This had some pleasant (if unintended) results, preserving even more historical spaces and lifeways than the Western side of the continent. My time in these places very much shaped my ideas and love of heritage.

So... I really can't say my passion started years later in the Arctic.

A 2016 photo I took in Romania

Greenland and Romania are obvious answers for where my deep interest in heritage was activated. Likewise, I could point to other places I visited as a student or archaeologist (excavations on a Spanish island, the Swedish countryside, the Ohio River Valley; travel to Greece and Italy). But as I explore my own history, I think my interest actually started far earlier. I wonder whether my love was born much closer (and less exotic): the two places my parents were born.

Growing up, I spent a lot of time visiting relatives where my ancestors had set down roots. This was a small town on the Pennsylvania border of New York State for my mother's side. On my father’s side, it was the North Country, the farthest reaches of New York State before you enter Canada. I loved traveling to these places and not just to visit family. There was something older in both, something that felt decidedly different.

I do think that, even as a little kid, I was aware my family had lived in these places for generations. That creates a clear feeling of connection. But other elements of small-town life drew me in as well, those that reflect how people lived for generations. Mom-and-pop stores thrived. Businesses like Ted Clark's Busy Market feature more prominently in my childhood memory than a grocery store should. These places had true downtowns, neighbors known to each other, and overall strong communities. These characteristics that have defined small towns and Rural America for generations were noticeable to me, even as a kid. I loved them.

So perhaps it was there that my interest was born. In these places where the past ways were still prominent.

Where I couldn't go for a drive without being shown my great-grandparent’s farmhouse or the spot of my great-grandfather's prohibition bar.

Where neighbors and friends had decades of connection.

Where kids at the community pool knew your family had so many generations in one place, they could charge your grandma's tab at the snack shack without anyone noticing.

Where businesses were so loved they never needed to update ascetically. It felt like stepping back in time when you passed through their doors.

While others might see these places as too stuck in the past, I loved them. I think this is where it all started for me, something I truly didn’t appreciate until recently.

My family planting new growth on old family land in the North Country. Heritage from the past shaped to ensure heritage for the future.

Final Thoughts.

Reflecting on where it all began is interesting (if only to me). But regardless of why or where, this is the work I am meant to do. I want to encourage people to look back, while they are looking forward. I want to keep building a life and a career that prioritizes a return to things forgotten or abandoned and find ways to combine them with the modern world. This was the focus of so much of my past work and will remain a priority for my future.

I think heritage is a solution for so many problems. It's a path that can bring individuals and entire communities great happiness. In a world where the future is at our doorstep, and everything threatens to change, I am here to push back a bit.

I want to remind people, companies, local municipalities, anyone who will listen that we have inherited much and have the capacity to protect and promote it.

This doesn’t mean we should halt development. We can protect heritage and we can build it. Modernity AND tradition, the latter inspiring the former and making sure change feels good to the humans who will live with it. If we put heritage and history on the table and amplify what humans have already created, the world will feel more aligned. Plow ahead without considering this heritage, however, will leave us lost. We will continue on disconnected from who we are and where we came from. Not much good can come from that.

Luckily, there’s another way.

Lead photo: an Adirondack sunrise from this spring. Heading to the mountains often causes spontaneous reflections on life and work.

]]><![CDATA[How Heritage Can Save Us.]]>Sun, 19 Jul 2026 12:54:59 GMThttps://www.kathryngrowallen.com/notes-on-heritage-blog/how-heritage-can-save-us

I think heritage can save us. This is a dramatic sentence, one that has bounced around my head for years. I’ve never put it out there like this. Perhaps I didn't fully understand the thought, but more likely, I feared criticism. For years I have fallen prey to the overly cautious nature that putting ideas into the world has taken on. But something recently has shifted. I find myself wanting to be bolder with what I say, with the ideas I put into the world.

So...I think heritage can save us.

Heritage is what we inherit from the past and what we leave to the future. It describes places, objects, and activities. But it’s also a mindset. It’s a deeper understanding that our current state has been heavily influenced by history. It’s a realization that we let things from the past go that maybe we shouldn’t have. And it’s a consciousness of what we are leaving for our descendants to inherit. Heritage is not just about what we have to gain, but what we have to give.

Heritage was my passion before I knew the word to describe it. Something about artifacts and heirlooms always called to me, but so did buildings with complex histories, towns you could feel the past on every street, and knowledge passed down, linking people across time. I became an archaeologist and cultural heritage professional to study the past. But lately I have wanted to push beyond study. I want to do more than just understand and preserve. Heritage is more powerful than we realize and when mobilized, it can have a great impact on humans. That is the kind of heritage work I want to do.

A glance inside boxed heirlooms of mine. These dishes, once used daily by my grandparents, will bring such joy when my kids get older and I can safely bring them back out.

I am not the only one.

Lately, you can't help but notice the explosion of trends that look to the past more than the future. They are impacting everything from hobbies and parenting to daily routines and even clothing styles. More people are talking about the things we have lost than the greatness of what we’ve gained. They want to recreate childhoods, summers, communities, and whole lives to look like they did before the world careened into something we hardly recognize. Social media accounts highlighting ways to bring back heritage life ways now have millions of followers.

Generational change is normal and likely always came with a dose of nostalgia. But this feels decidedly different. A lot of the growth in these movements is fueled by people too young to remember aspects of the past the nostalgic trends link to. But they crave what the past had that the present is starved of. These heritage trends are filled with things that create real community, connection, rest, and authentic beauty. They reflect a near-desperation to turn back the clock to the way things were. This is more than just nostalgia.

Today's change is happening so fast that what people are feeling is more than a fleeting attraction to nostalgic things. Its a strong sense that we must do more than just talk about things from the past. We should actively return to them. These feelings are pressed by a foreboding sense that we are being swept away in the mad dash to a more modern future; that the essence of humanity is disappearing.

Trends everywhere seem to hint at this deep yearning for things we once considered simply 'interesting history'. Who could have foreseen such a resurgence in producing bread at home, both time consuming and expensive compared to the store-bought version? Meanwhile, the hot parenting style is remaking the old experience of childhood, even if your kid is dangerously unsupervised, full of ticks, and bleeding from both knees (far preferable to the modern mindless screen-zombie).

Craftsmanship once shunned as overpriced is now coveted, as those with the money to do so want homes filled with things that actually last, objects forged from imperfect but inspired human hands. Secondhand versions of just about everything, once collecting dust, are in high demand. Granny hobbies like knitting and letter writing are surging. I felt a strange sense of joy when I discovered my third grader was learning cursive in school. I thought this had been removed from the curriculum. Too antiquated to matter. And yet there it is...back again.

It is not just on the home front that heritage seems to be taking over. Travel is focusing more on engaging with the past in the places people visit. Heritage tourism is now a $600 billion industry because “travelers have deeper needs to be met.” Increasingly, people want to use their time off to learn more about the world and themselves, rather than relax at the beach.

No matter where you look, its clear. We are looking back to figure out how to move forward.

Being a heritage tourist in Romania.

Mobilizing heritage.

So as more people see the value in heritage, this feels like the time to amplify it. Mobilize it. Grab the attention and interest and show even more people how heritage can make life better. Turn to heritage to look for solutions to problems we are struggling to solve. While the list is long (and I hope to explore more in this blog)...my immediate thoughts where a heritage approach can have outsized impacts include:

Environmental problems
Childhood (and adult) mental health crises
Epidemics of loneliness
Dangerous food industries
The disconnect between humans and nature
Aging populations lacking social support
The loss of vibrant communities in rural (and other) places
Joblessness or purposelessness caused by AI and other trends
House and home crises

Heritage offers novel solutions and interesting options. When we look back, we see that anatomically modern humans have walked earth for hundreds of thousands of years. In that time, they explored and experimented many times over. They created. They crafted. They learned.

Of course, some aspects of our human heritage didn't work or wouldn't work if revived today. There is plenty of heritage to leave in the past (here’s looking at you, mumia). But some of it did work. We know some of it impacted humans in a way that we would (and should) welcome today. It’s time to bring that heritage back.

As disturbing trends ripple through humanity, as disconnection festers, we need to do something, and we need to do it fast. Malaise and exhaustion are encouraged, intentionally or not, by those who benefit from people too zoned out to change. We need to push back like our lives depend on it. Perhaps they do.

The smell of local strawberries, heritage of a New York State summer.

Final thoughts

I’ve known for a long time that I wanted to focus my energy on heritage, on bringing forth aspects of the past to solve problems and make life joyful. I’ve wanted to push people (and myself) to consider deeply what we let go of, but also what we are forming for the future. This is the work I need to do. So I am starting to write again, here on this blog. I hope it inspires those who read it. I hope it also helps me stay dedicated to the work I love.

Join me. Read, learn, do something small to bring back heritage that feels good. Teach your kids, your friends, or yourself something that is decidedly old school. Resurrect a ritual from your family or culture that has disappeared. Bake some bread. Write a letter. See how it feels to turn back time a little. I know you will be enlightened by it. This is how, slowly, heritage can save us.

Magistra Vitae.

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