Memory and Future – Dr. Matthew Naylor, PhD | President & CEO of The National World War I Museum and Memorial

Ethan Whitehill: Hello everyone. I’m Ethan Whitehill, President and Chief Strategy Officer at Crux, the un-agency that offers fractional experts for intentional growth. We have a special episode of To the Point today. This one was recorded live during our Crux Cocktail connection in April when we sat down with Dr. Matthew Naylor, President and CEO of the National World War I Museum and Memorial. Matt has led the Museum and Memorial since 2013 and brings more than 30 years of nonprofit leadership to his role. Under his direction, the institution has reached unprecedented levels of attendance, philanthropy, and community engagement while expanding its impact through education, digital learning, and major guest experience upgrades. Often described as Kansas City’s front porch, the Museum and Memorial has become a gathering place for the region, hosting everything from championship parades and Independence Day celebrations to hundreds of thousands of visitors during the NFL draft and the upcoming FIFA World Cup Fan Festival. Matt holds a PhD from Curtin University in Australia and serves on several civic and educational boards. His leadership has been widely recognized, including honors as nonprofit executive of the year in Outstanding Kansas Citian. And, Matt has recently announced that he will be stepping down from his role in 2027 but is committed to seeing the organization through its centennial year and ensuring a smooth transition for the Museum and Memorial’s next leader. Please join me in welcoming Dr. Matt Naylor.

It’s wonderful that you were able to join us and spend this time with us today, and we’re gonna dive into some questions. How does that sound?

Matt Naylor: Great. Terrific.

Ethan Whitehill: First one, you’ve talked about the Museum and Memorial as a neutral voice, and that’s an interesting position for you today, especially in light of the centennial and the 250th anniversary of the country. And why is that role so important right now? So just to put everything in perspective, you know, that we’re talking, what does this teach us about decision making?

Matt Naylor: You know, the data tells us that museums are one of the most trusted institutions in the United States. That’s arguably the case in other countries as well. I’m really concerned that we not take that for granted. Therefore, we’ve got to be really good stewards of what we have. The challenge though is how do you speak to important social or political issues in a way that doesn’t appear to be partisan? Because it’s not about being silent, and, to be silent, the institution can lose its voice and consequently lose its trust. But the challenge is to navigate that in a way which still brings people along with you and enables people to keep listening and participating in a conversation, and I don’t want to underestimate or somehow suggest that that is not an enormously difficult challenge. It’s also, there’s some very practical issues around that. Institutions such as ours are reliant upon an earned income—people buying tickets—we don’t receive federal funding despite the name “National,” all the glory of the name with no money, but equally no bureaucracy that comes with that either—and also philanthropy is central to what we do. Perhaps last year, 75% of our revenues were from philanthropy, so one needs to also ensure that it’s a big tent or a big table. My goal is to bring as many people around the table as you can, but at the same time still speak to important issues for the centennial. We’ve really leaned into this saying, “Is there something for us to say in the midst of a particularly difficult time nationally, but also internationally for us?” And so, we looked to the architecture of the building to inform us, and our forebears carved into the top of the tower of four guardians that watch over the memorial, and they represent what I’ve learned to call aspirational ideals. Honor, courage, sacrifice, and patriotism (or love of country) and those and the memorial, itself, is a beacon for democracy. If we accept the argument of Woodrow Wilson that he made, that the U.S. entered World War I for the purpose of helping make the world safe for democracy, then it’s reasonable for us to conclude then that the memorial is itself then a beacon for democracy, a call for us to democratic ideals. So, we have chosen, Ethan, as the board has chosen, for us to really lean into these ideals for our centennial to, for us to think about what does this mean for us as Americans and our role in the world? What do these virtues, these ideals, how might they inform us? And I would hope that they are broadly nonpartisan. They rise above the partisan rancor. It’s in their application that partisanship gets expressed. But if we are able to speak more broadly to them, then I think that we can engage people in a broader conversation. And we seek to do this then in our public programming, in our exhibition design, that we would seek to engage people in discussions which lean into sometimes simply historic facts. Other times, we would seek to assert certain values, which are core to who we are and we also believe are nonpartisan—but let’s not pretend that it’s not really hard ’cause it is.

Ethan Whitehill: So in terms of those messages that you’re sending, the centennial gives you this really unique moment to send something very specific and say something specific. And I think it’s referenced in the screen right here, “Remember Forward,” and that’s the campaign line for the centennial celebration. Talk to us a little bit about how you arrived at that line and how you got this wonderful balance between memory and future.

Matt Naylor: So you just used these terms, memory and future. So, the two sphinx on the courtyard are named Memory and Future. One of them is facing the battlefields with its eyes covered because of the horror of war. The other is facing the future with its eyes covered because of the unknown future. It’s like these architects were geniuses who created this memorial that on the freeze, if you, on the north side, when you look there on the left, there are various images that speak of war’s horror and war’s courage. And then there’s the angel in the middle. And then to the right, the hope of a prosperous future is what an industry and agriculture and so forth is there. So, our forebears imagined a memorial that honored those who served and also spoke to a yearned for peace. Remembering that this was opened just eight years since the Armistice—now, the freeze wasn’t open until like the early 1930s, but still we weren’t quite at that place yet, like in the latter part of the thirties—so already as part of our role of the memorial, I think is this willingness to hold these things in tension of the honor and courage of those who served. And at the same time, confess war’s horror with one another. And do that sort of work. Is it not a rah-rah America museum? We honor those who served. We speak of their bravery and extraordinary acts of valor, but we take no pride in the horror of war. That’s why when you walk in, there are 9,000 poppy blooms that you walk over both an exhibition of grand beauty and awfulness all at the same time. Each poppy representing a thousand combatant deaths—a poppy filled, which is beautiful, but represents 9 million dead. So we talk about all these things with a Crux crew, and they didn’t run this through AI and just come up with a really good slogan, and they did a whole lot of work talking to us, talking to our stakeholders about what’s important, about who we are, about what our role is, about what our contribution is, and then they workshop that with us, and we went back and forwards, back and forwards, and then landed on this idea of “Remember Forward,” which I was walking around the block with my wife, Teri, and I said, “So today, the team came to us with this idea of remember forward.” She says, “I get it,” and then she described to me what it meant. I mean, isn’t that fabulous. And it’s not just a slick slogan. It seeks to represent something deep about our work: Memory is most meaningful when we carry it forward. Otherwise, why do the work of memory? It’s true for all of us, isn’t it? When we think about people important in our lives, that we take those memories—good and bad—into the future to shape our own futures, and, surely, we must do that with cataclysmic events such as the global catastrophe of World War I, but also the good things that come from that as well, of which there are many. So Ethan, that’s probably much more grand than perhaps you had intended, but I think that this is one of those moments when marketing and purpose really intersect. When you’re able to really get to the nub of really important moments and express it in language that resonates with people. That’s really good communications work.

Ethan Whitehill: You know, I’m reminded of the brief that we used that led to this and you mentioned stakeholders, I think that’s important to talk about too. Like who is the audience of the Museum and Memorial?

Matt Naylor: I would invite Dave Renz to come into boards that I was working for and speak about the role of boards. And I liked it because Dave—you know, he’s from UMKC Block School of Nonprofit Leadership and was the Dean there for many, many years—because they would always say to the board, “You need to understand that running a $10 million nonprofit is many, many more times complicated or complex than running a $10 million for-profit enterprise.” I liked it when he would say that. But it is, Ethan, because of the many stakeholders that are so important to our work. No, not because it’s a transactional relationship, but because we occupy the place in civil society in order to serve a different sort of mission. And so, the need for us to be respectful of our stakeholders is really important. So when I came to the Museum of Memorial, I think there was a bit of a perception that we were a military history museum, and that’s a really important part of our work, but I think that there’s this much of an audience still there. So we recast our mission: America’s leading institution dedicated to interpreting, remembering and understanding the Great War and its enduring impact. So the enduring impact thing gave us a whole big canvas to paint on that was authentic to mission. Not because we twisted the mission to fit, but because we’re able to more powerfully express what happened during those years and how the world was transformed. So therefore, I sometimes conceive of ourselves as a social history museum that tells the story through the lens of World War I, so we still do the military stuff, but we do a bunch of other stuff as well. So there’s an audience of people who are interested in that, but then we occupy a civic role here in the community as Kansas City’s front porch. We occupy a role as a cultural center that employers are interested in because to attract and retain good staff, you need really strong cultural pillars—and we seek to be one of those. And so, there’s that as well. People who want to be philanthropically involved, that’s another stakeholder group. So they’re all audiences that we serve. And so, when we think about what we’re going to do during the centennial, there’s so many stakeholders that we would seek to somehow be responsive to and to include in this grand celebration of what Kansas City has done. It’s a great Kansas City story. It’s a uniquely American story as well.

Ethan Whitehill: Let’s go into the Kansas City. Why Kansas City? Why this museum in Kansas City? How was it chosen?

Matt Naylor: Soon after the Armistice of 1918, group of community leaders came together to say, “What can we do to honor the war dead of the region of which there were 441 and create a tribute for peace?” Then in 1919, there was a 10-day fundraising campaign. They used pledge cards. So arguably there would’ve been one per household, perhaps 83,000 households in a community of 250,000 people raised 2.5 million dollars in 10 days, which is equivalent today of close to $50 million. Isn’t that fantastic? A lot of that was coins—just kids raising funds—but then also some major donors as well that then led to the five Allied commanders from Belgium, France, Italy, the United Kingdom, and the United States coming to Kansas City in 1921. So this is not a time where you can just get on a plane and fly here. This is a big journey. They’d never been together before. We have not been able to find any historic evidence they were ever together again. The records show that there was a parade down Main Street that 350,000 people turned out to see these five Allied commanders. And then a hundred thousand people gathered on the south side of Union Station—north side of the Museum property—where there was a podium built, and they addressed the crowds. And then in 1926—Vice President Coolidge was there in 21—he came back in ‘26 and he addressed the crowd for the opening. 150,000 people were there. So local initiative, locally funded locally controlled. Some periods of, you know, decline, resurrection, decline, closed up in the late eighties like a lot of civic buildings, and then the community made a decision to restore it and, in its understructure, build a new museum. There was always a museum, but a new museum worthy of its collection—the most diverse collection of World War I archival materials in the world. Most institutions of our type collect parochially of their country or even their local region. We collect from all of the countries involved, so we are very diverse. And then the last numbers of years, extraordinary upgrades, refresh new galleries and so forth. So that’s a Kansas City story, but it’s also uniquely American because our peers around the world that we convene annually—we see that as part of our role, we are meeting Germany this year in September—they’re all initiated by the federal or the state authorities, and we do things differently here in the United States. So people of goodwill gather around missions that are meaningful and matter. And they do this, you know, this is the American approach and that’s what the people of Kansas City did with this, but it also demonstrates important American values that we collectively have responsibility for the American experiment, that it’s not for somebody else to do.

Ethan Whitehill: So you’ve used the phrase, front porch—Kansas City’s front porch. You’re gonna have a lot of people on your front porch in a little more than a month. What is that gonna look like?

Matt Naylor: We’ve really embraced this idea that we are Kansas City’s front porch. Arguably, our core activity is about the work of memory and learning and so on around World War I, but we also play a civic function as a 47-acre park that we have responsibility for and is really important for the community. In October last year, I had a news clipping from 1985 from The Kansas City Star, and it was a report of two men who drove to the Memorial, believing that there was a party and wanting to go and join the party, only to find that the folks having a party were gay men. So they got outta the car with bats and bottles, and they beat up six gay men. They were all arrested—so that’s on my desk. July 1985. And then, about October 7th, 2025, an article for The Kansas City Star, and it was subtitled, “I felt so safe,” and it was a story of a young lesbian woman who was at the Chapell Roan concert who was saying, “I just felt so safe being here at this event.” And it made my heart warm that here we have this 40 year period, something has changed, that this experience was had. The city owns the park and the city—for reasons of security—decided that there should be an ordinance that parks should close at midnight and not open till five in the morning. So a number of years ago, this security team came to me and said, “Matt, how do you want us to bring this into effect?” I said, “I don’t. We are gonna stay open 24 hours a day. If people want to come here at two in the morning when they’re coming from the airport or they’re coming from a nightclub and they want to look around or propose or go and look at the view or whatever, they can do that here. And if there’s an issue, the cops can pull that ordinance out and move people along, but we are not going to police that because this place belongs to the community, and we want people to feel welcome.” So that’s all to say, when we were told that the World Cup Fan Fest was gonna be on property, we embrace that and say, “Now, what are we gonna do to weave ourselves into the story?” And so our team said, “Well, mission aligned is to create an exhibition about soccer in World War I ’cause soccer played a really significant role in the war, and you can come to the exhibition and see that.” So, we’ve created an exhibition called “The Beautiful Game” where we talk about the global story of soccer and World War I and the impact that it had following the war as part of our attempt to be able to weave ourselves into the story—find out when things are gonna happen here on the grounds, how we can weave ourselves into that. You know, the the recent orbit around the moon and coming back in, they tell me that there’s multiple points of entry back into the Earth’s atmosphere. Too often, museums only have one point of entry—they only have one. You’ve gotta have these sort of discipline disinterest, and so we seek to have many points of entry into the conversation of World War I and its enduring impact, and that includes being able to use the grounds

Ethan Whitehill: As part of the board orientation, you get a tour into the belly of the building, and it’s pretty spectacular. When he talks about renovations—just the lengths they’ve gone through just to bring the memorial and keep the museum and the shape that it’s in. Talk a little bit about the operation ’cause it’s impressive.

Matt Naylor: We have close to 400,000 objects, and they’re all stored on site, and they’re in a secure climate-controlled area, which until recently was about at hundred-percent capacity ’cause we began collecting in 1920—and the last 20 years have been especially ferocious in our collecting ’cause “What was granddad’s stuff that was in the trunk?” We wanna make sure that we get that stuff and that it’s preserved for the future. So last year, we accessioned or formally took into the collection nearly 8,000 objects, so we’re very active in collecting. Well, actually, coming out of the global commemoration of World War I from 2014 to 2018, we asked ourselves—it was almost an existential question—which is, “Who are we post commemoration?” There’s a natural lift during moments like that, but then what’s it mean? So we did a lot of work and articulated three big ideas: That our galleries would be more immersive and our collection more accessible; that we would ensure the stories of communities of color, of women and of indigenous peoples would be prioritized through collecting and exhibition initiatives; and that we would devise strategies in order to be able to take our collection globally to the international community through digital strategies. So these three big ideas then they then guided us going to COVID and all through, and it’s been absolutely extraordinarily helpful for us in all sorts of ways. But that also led for us to say, now what about the galleries? Are they immersive? Is there enough of the exhibition? Is it accessible? And so we brought back our original gallery designers who are Ralph Applebaum Associates—they designed the Smithsonian African American Museum of Culture. Spectacular—so we brought Applebaum back. Ralph himself came back multiple times. He would say to me, “Matt, why are you looking to do this? Why are you looking to do a refresh when attendance is so strong?” I said, “Ralph, my concern is not this year. It’s in five years. It’s in seven years time. We’ve gotta be sure that we’re a placed that people want to be at—a must-see destination.” And I said, “So Ralph, what’s it like being invited back to do a refresh of a national institution like this?” He said, “Matt, it’s great.” I said, “Have you ever done it before?” He said, “Never.” He said, “Usually they go to somebody else because they don’t want you to do it again.” But we brought Ralph back, then we put the band back together. We brought all of the vendors partners except for one who’d gone outta business. One of the tasks that I gave the team was to say: With the refresh, I don’t wanna see what we’ve touched and what we’ve not touched. It has to be seamless. It’s like you go into someone’s house and they’ve done the new part and the old parts right next to it, and you think, “If only you’d used an architect”—or people who do their own marketing work by themselves, you know, AI doesn’t do it for you. I tell you, they’ve done a masterful job. So we did a major refresh of our main gallery—about $22 million, spectacular new projects. Now, one of our AV teams did a presentation of the staff recently where they said, let us tell you what we have to do every morning to start the main gallery, and they told us that there are 1000 AV pieces that they have to make sure are turned on and functioning together. I was blown away, but you don’t actually see it. It falls into the background because it facilitates the experience of the visitor rather than being the primary experience. And then we created new galleries, and we brought 1600 objects out of closed storage and put ’em out without interpretation. Just put ’em behind windows. So it’s just a bunch of stuff for people to go and look at. It’s fabulous. And then more recently, we’re completing a restoration of Memory Hall and then Exhibit Hall has been made now into a fantastically flexible new gallery as well. So the entire property has been cleaned on the outside. New concrete, new pathways. Every area on the inside has been touched in some way. All because of the generosity of the community and some national donors as well.

When I came to the Museum and Memorial, one of my little mantras was we ought claim our rightful place. How audacious of me—arrogant! Our rightful place amongst our civic peers. So I was delighted about three months ago to see an article in The Kansas City Star that said, “We’re a city of museums,” and it started the sentence saying, “We have the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art and the National World War I Museum and Memorial.” Well, I felt like I’d arrived in that sentence. That’s what I meant. That we ought be considered that our vision of our forebears would be lived out, that we would be considered worthy of being in the same sentence as institutions like the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art and the Kaufman Center for the Performing Arts. It of course concluded that, well, actually the very best museum is the National World War I Museum amd Memorial. The idea that we would be aspirational and that we would seek to do the very best that we can do for the work of memory and for Kansas City is also what drives this very significant renovation.

Ethan Whitehill: You’re referencing a lot of community support, philanthropic support. There’s a lot of members of the business community with us today. What would you ask of them? How can they help?

Matt Naylor: The work of the civic society is a collective experience. We do it for the greater good. Great cities need great cultural amenities. Great cities need people working together for the common good. And this is part of the American experience, the American experiment. It is different than other countries even though other countries still do have nonprofits and good works and they’re to be commended for that—in fact, part of my future is to return to Australia and to contribute to that—so we need great cultural institutions. We need pillars in communities in order for businesses to thrive, to express their values beyond the engagement that they have as a core business. See, I’m of the view that philanthropy is really important in order for businesses to deepen a sense of purpose and meaning in their own lives. Philanthropy enables us to participate in things beyond ourselves, and that is a blessing for businesses, for foundations, for individuals. So, I would hope for the business community to frame it like that—that they see that them partnering is just good for business and good for their employees. And it’s really good for the community—that our communities are stronger when we have collective concern rather than just our own selves to be concerned about. Life is better when we do that, and our businesses are better.

Ethan Whitehill: So if it’s not obvious, Matt’s a little enthusiastic about what he does. How do you find your energy? Where does that come from?

Matt Naylor: I’m so fortunate to have had a career where a sense of vocation intersects with my occupation. I think there’s few who have had that experience, and I treat that as a real privilege that I’ve been able to do that. Prior to being in the museum sector, I was in the humanitarian sector, and that was deeply meaningful for me also, so I’m very fortunate that I genuinely believe in the importance of what we do. I had a guy yesterday say to me—he was comparing a museum that he was working with in Europe—he says, “They’re just run by academics, but you are more of a business guy.” It was a compliment, but I also really believe in what we do, that it really has a meaning beyond. My grandfather served in World War I. I didn’t really know him. He was British. He came to Australia twice when I was seven and when I was eight. My father really didn’t like him. My father left the UK after World War II in large measure to move away from his father. So there’s also a personal element to this season. On my desk, behind me, is my grandfather’s shaver. It’s a private nailer. It it’s his shaver, his blade. Some other things that were his that I got from my aunt’s place when I went when she died, and I have them proudly in office. But more than that, this blade was issued by the British, and it was made by the Germans because the Germans and the Brits were very strong economic partners, leading into World War I and it all fell apart. So in this blade, there’s a deeply personal story, but there’s also a bigger story about the fragility of the world in which we live and the responsibility that I have to do what I can to help create a just and lasting peace for all nations, which has expressed in the Memorial on the grape free. So there’s meaning beyond what I do it’s really personal for me in a very intimate way, but also in a bigger way as well.

Ethan Whitehill: Well, Matt, thank you for sharing the personal and the profound and really making an enduring impact on Kansas City.

Matt Naylor: Thank you. Thank you, Crux, also for this really important work, helping us articulate a core value and an invitation to us all to Remember Forward, no matter where we find ourselves. Thank you.