Advocacy

You Too Can Help Build Public Will For Arts And Culture

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Long time readers will know that for the last year or so I have been a bit of an evangelist for the burgeoning effort to Build Public Will For Arts and Culture.

What impresses me about the effort is that it learns from the successes and mistakes of past efforts. For example, they study how the a long standing concern about smoking didn’t gain much traction until the argument was reframed around the idea that one had a right to protect one’s health from second hand smoke.

Nor is the effort afraid to cede short term satisfaction in order to meet the long term goals. First rule of building public will for art and culture is you don’t talk about art and culture. (Because the term currently has negative connotations for people.)

The effort has moved to the next step with the creation of the Creating Connections website. The site has a summary of the research to date. There are tools for getting involved, including messaging, how engage with groups so they feel like they have a stake in the outcome and questions to ask oneself about the experiences you are providing to the community.

What I was surprised to see was the inclusion of talking points about the Building Public Will effort that accompanied a Powerpoint presentation on the subject.

Basically, anyone can go out and start talking to groups about this effort tomorrow if they wanted to. I feel like that is putting a lot of trust in people not to screw it up. But that also fits into the underlying philosophy about this being a grassroots effort about active participation in the arts and culture.

So if anyone wants me to come talk to their group, let me know. I am ready! More importantly, now you have the tools to deliver the talk yourself. (Though obviously a famous blogger such as myself would have WAY more gravitas!)

Data Is Nice, Stories Are Better

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It is pretty much an accepted truth that if you want to secure funding for the arts from a government entity or foundation, you need to marshal a lot of data to prove you are having an impact, especially an economic impact.

However, in a recent interview Kresge Foundation President & CEO Rip Rapson seems to indicate that story rather than data may be more important in influencing decisions and policy.

Rapson speaks about a conversation he had with former NEA Chair Rocco Landesman about the ArtPlace initiative. (my emphasis)

And I said, well, I agree with that, but how about the data, and how about the quantitative elements of all of this? Isn’t that what will tip the scales?

And he just laughed. He wore these big cowboy boots, and he stood up, and he pounded the floor, and he said, you know what? I walk into every congressional office in the United States House of Representatives, and not one asks me about the data. They all want to know a story about what happened in one of their neighborhoods, one of their communities, one of their cities.

He doesn’t say that data isn’t important. My suspicion is that politicians especially like to have data to corroborate their decisions if anyone questions them. Rapson says one of the goals of ArtPlace is to help discover:

“Is there something between the highly rigorous, systematized generation of data about how many dollars per square inch an arts activity generates and all of these millions of points of light? When are the data important? When are the stories important? How do you aggregate the stories?”

A little later he gives an anecdote that illustrates how people overlook the arts in their lives and just how invested they are in their practice. He speaks of a very conservative wardperson in Minneapolis who thought the arts were a waste of time. (my emphasis)

“He actually hauled me in front of the city council committee to explain why in heaven’s name we would accept a grant like this.

So, I said, well, Walter, could we have the very first conversation in your ward, and he kind of grumbled and said all right, all right. So, we had it. It was at his Ukrainian church where he went every Sunday. We were able to identify the woman who sewed the vestments, the man who had done the mural painting on the altar, the three women, who every year created the Ukrainian Easter eggs. We got the choir director. You get the drift.

And Dziedzic walked in and saw these13 people in his congregation, and I said something to the effect of “I want to introduce you to your arts and cultural community, Walter.” And they all talked about how art became central to the way this Ukrainian church practiced, and of course he was toast; he became the biggest single advocate of how arts and culture sort of shaped community life. Now, I could have brought him all sorts of data, I suppose, but, having him sit with 13 or 14 of his congregation members talking about Ukrainian eggs and choral concerts, was really quite wonderful.

So in trying to convince people of the value of the arts in their lives, it may take focusing on impacts on a very granular level. Not just things that happen in the district or town that they identify with, but how it manifests directly in places they are deeply invested and care about.

A program that served 1000 school kids may not be as important as the joy it brought a single kid.

While the implications of that single sentence could lead to a whole debate about influence, wealth disparities, urban vs rural funding, etc., remember that not all the hearts and minds you need to influence are politicians, funding organizations and individual donors. Just shifting the general perception for a greater number of people in a community can be a victory.

Overhead Funding May Not Be Expanding, But The Conversation Is

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Something I had meant to mention in my post yesterday was that Priceonomics’ admiration of Yerba Buena’s Dream House Raffle sounded very similar to fund raising philosophy espoused by Dan Pallotta.

Said Priceonomics,

There is something admirable about Yerba Buena’s Dream House Raffle.

Every nonprofit spends a lot of time conducting and worrying about fundraising, and that is time that could be spent on the nonprofit’s mission. The Yerba Buena Center for the Arts identified a new revenue stream and has done well at it. It now raises more money from its raffle than it receives from individual donations or from the city of San Francisco.

Dan Pallotta says something similar in his 2013 TED Talk:

Now, if you were a philanthropist really interested in breast cancer, what would make more sense: go out and find the most innovative researcher in the world and give her 350,000 dollars for research, or give her fundraising department the 350,000 dollars to multiply it into 194 million dollars for breast cancer research?

If you have been following my blog for any period of time, you know that there has been a lot of discussion and examination about overhead ratio as a valid measure of institutional effectiveness.

Of late, the topic has been spilling out of publications focused on non-profit audiences and into the mainstream. This week, FastCompany’s FastCoExist took up the topic in a piece titled, “Demanding That Nonprofits Not Pay For Overhead Is Preventing Them From Doing Good.”

Upon reading the transcript of Dan Pallotta’s talk, I see the FastCoExist article basically says everything he did three years earlier. Except there continues to be more research conducted that is supporting the validity of the claim. FastCo cites a new Bridgespan Group study that shows how uniformly applying a flat rate limit on overhead is undermining non-profit effectiveness.

According to a recent report by Oliver Wyman and Seachange Capital Partners only 30% of New York nonprofits can be considered “financially strong”—and “many trustees do not understand the financial condition of their organization or how it compares to its peers.”

[…]

Part of the problem is that many funders have become obsessed with measuring their impact on a per-dollar basis, which means they’re more eager to give to specific projects than the institutional upkeep that supports them. But the 15% overhead limit doesn’t even parallel what commercial companies shell out. According to Bridgespan’s research, the average S&P 500 firm spends about 34% of their budget on essential behind-the-scenes support. For IT companies it’s more like 78%, the report notes. Some 21st-century nonprofits probably require the same kind of tech firepower.

Similarly Pallotta noted,

So we tell the for-profit sector, “Spend, spend, spend on advertising, until the last dollar no longer produces a penny of value.” But we don’t like to see our donations spent on advertising in charity. Our attitude is, “Well, look, if you can get the advertising donated, you know, to air at four o’clock in the morning, I’m okay with that. But I don’t want my donation spent on advertising, I want it go to the needy.” As if the money invested in advertising could not bring in dramatically greater sums of money to serve the needy.

What Bridgespan did in their research was segment non-profits into four general areas (U.S.-based direct service, policy and advocacy organizations, international networks, and research organizations) and then broke down expenses into five different categories. It probably isn’t any surprise that different segments of the non-profit sector vary widely in their needs.

There is a graphic in the FastCo article that illustrates this, but for example research organizations spent huge percentages on physical assets compared to policy and advocacy organizations. Policy and advocacy organizations didn’t spend any money on field and network operations, whereas the international and research segments did, but in greatly differing amounts.

They use this research to support their assertion that requiring flat-rate reimbursements for overhead costs across the entire non-profit sector is inappropriate. Not to mention that the percentages they set are restrictively low.

Regardless of whether this research brings about change in the immediate future, at least the scope of those involved in the conversation continues to expand.

Pursuing Better Artist Treatment Through Cultural Shift Rather Than Rules

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Given all the attention recently being paid to the release of Americans for the Arts’ Statement on Cultural Equity, I thought it would be a good time to call attention to the draft of a Code of Conduct for Non-Equity Theatre being developed by a pilot project group in Chicago.

The Code of Conduct seeks to set guidelines for the sexual content/nudity, physical safety, violence and use of cultural representation in non-union performances. Essentially, the creators want artists to be fully informed about any of these issues from the time the audition notices go up through to rehearsals and performances.

There are also some general “be decent to the artists” guidelines like:

[at auditions] Actors will be made aware of people present that are not the casting authority.

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You will not be asked to audition more than 3 times for this production;
You will not be kept at any audition more than 3 hours; or past 11pm;
You will not be asked to disrobe, or perform any intimate contact or violence as a part of your audition;

Even without sexual content and violence, the interminable, anxiety-inducing audition environment has long been a source of complaints by performers. One element of the code that appears frequently is that the performer has the right to refuse to audition or refuse a casting offer without fear of future reprisals.

The code doesn’t just stipulate that you need to tell people that the roles they are auditioning for will include sexual content, staged violence or place them in physically precarious situations, it also insists that a clear plan about how these things will be handled be communicated and provides guidelines about how to address them. (i.e. at what point in the rehearsal process is full nudity implemented and how the environment should be managed.)

Cultural appropriation and stereotypes in performance has been a frequent topic of discussion and the code includes that as well.

“…actors have the right to make inquiries about how the producer plans to use their cultural personhood…

…participants have the right to speak up if…

Costume pieces that can be reasonably understood as culturally demeaning are not disclosed at audition/casting.

Staging (culturally based violence or abuse not disclosed at the time of auditions/casting)

Accents to underscore a cultural presentation not disclosed…

Make up that can be reasonably described as “blackface” or “brown face” not disclosed…

Some elements of the code are attempts to create some parity with union situations. For example, appointing a Non-Equity Deputy as an extra set of eyes too make sure the physical, social and emotional elements of the production are being handled appropriately. Included in this is addressing an environment of harassment or intimidation, be it based on sexual, gender, racial or ethnic identity; age, ability, citizenship, etc.

Again, one of the frequently mentioned aspects of the code is a clearly defined complaint path for any issue that may arise.

Reading the Code of Conduct a number of thoughts struck me. First, there is fair bit in the document that has long been part of the rules Actors’ Equity union contracts. The code is essentially asking that all performers enjoy the same basic level of consideration that union actors have received.

At the same time, there are decades old unaddressed issues here that have long bedeviled the arts community regardless of union affiliation. These are problems that everyone has talked and complained about, but nothing has been done to rectify.

Of late, many of these complaints have been addressed by action thanks to the conversation being picked up by larger constituencies. In this I see some hope that even if this specific code of conduct is not adopted, practices may change to achieve the ends the authors seek.

As they note on the project homepage, they seek to engender a cultural shift, not construct a legal document.