Meet Beth Nevarez of Beth Nevarez Historical Consulting

Today we’d like to introduce you to Beth Nevarez.

Hi Beth, thanks for joining us today. We’d love for you to start by introducing yourself. 
I’m a public historian, museum professional, and freelance consultant. Since college, I knew I wanted to work in history, and I imagined I would end up working as a curator in a museum. However, I didn’t fully realize just how tough of a field it is to break into and to find full-time work. I took as many internships as I could during college, and I pursued my master’s degree in public history right after undergrad. After job searching for several months after graduate school, I ended up taking a corporate archivist job. It was similar enough to what I wanted to do that it provided great experience. However, it wasn’t a perfect fit. I missed working with museums, doing historical research, and sharing history with the public. After a few years, I decided to strike out on my own and offer consulting services to museums. I knew that many museums didn’t have the resources to hire full-time employees but could use my services for short-term projects. Thanks to some connections I had made as a college intern, I was able to contract with my first two clients, leave my archivist job, and start consulting full-time. I’ve now been operating my business, Beth Nevarez Historical Consulting, for four years, and I work with a variety of clients including museums, municipalities, universities, companies that want to document the history of their business, and design firms that create museum exhibits. My business has grown faster than I ever imagined it would, and I love that I get to work with a variety of types of clients and with such a variety of historical topics. It makes every project and every day a little different, which is exciting. 

Would you say it’s been a smooth road, and if not, what are some of the biggest challenges you’ve faced along the way?
Building a business can be difficult, and as a sole proprietor, I have to manage all aspects of the business, not just the historical consulting. I’m grateful that my previous archivist position included media work as I have a grounding in social media management and basic website design that I’ve been able to use to promote my business. I’ve also learned more about business management, accounting, IT, and more along the way. 

We’ve been impressed with Beth Nevarez Historical Consulting, but for folks who might not be as familiar, what can you share with them about what you do and what sets you apart from others?
I offer historical consulting services to museums, organizations, and businesses. This includes historical research, oral history interviews, exhibit writing, and archives and collections management. I help museum clients organize their artifact collections, advise them on the best ways to preserve and manage their collection, and help them curate artifacts for exhibits. I also do historical research in order to plan and write museum exhibits. I help companies set up their own corporate archives to preserve their brand history and stories. I also conduct oral history interviews for both corporate and museum clients. I sometimes use my historical research and writing skills to write blogs and social media posts for clients as opposed to exhibits. In a nutshell, I help my clients to discover, preserve, and share their stories from the past with others. 

I enjoy sharing diverse and marginalized stories most of all, helping communities to gather the information that has long been left out of the main narrative. I am most proud when my work helps someone in the present to connect not only to the past but to their neighbors today by understanding more of how the past has impacted our present. 

So maybe we end on discussing what matters most to you and why?
Being able to help my clients to tell a full, inclusive story matters the most to me. I always want to be sure I’m helping them to uncover a complete picture of their story and accurately document and present it. It’s also important to me that my projects rely on different viewpoints and the voices of those who lived the history whenever possible. I think knowing and understanding history is so important for our society and that history as a subject is crucial to the development of critical thinking skills, empathy, and tolerance. In the classroom, history can become stale and boring, but in museums and other settings, history can come alive. I want my work to help people to connect to history, if only for a moment. To do that, I try to focus on the big picture of why a particular historical fact or story is important – why it matters to us today. 

Contact Info:

• Website: www.bethnevarez.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/bethnevarezhistory/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/bethnevarezhistory/
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/bethbullocknevarez/