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Oh What A Tangled Web…

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Today at lunch a musician friend was picking our brains about a fund raiser he wants to do for a cause he really believes in. He outlined his vision and then asked for ideas of places he could hold it. There were a couple assumptions he made about his budget that were unrealistic which we helped him to re-evaluate.

The discussion made me think of an article someone I follow on Twitter recently linked to by Nell Edgington, “5 Lies to Stop Telling Donors.”

Edgington lists the lies as:

1. X percent of your donation goes to the program
The distinction between “program expenses” and “overhead” is, at best, meaningless and, at worst, destructive… It is magical thinking to say that you can separate money spent on programs from money spent on the support of programs…“overhead” is not a dirty word…

2. We can do the same program with less money
No you can’t. You know you can’t. You are already scraping by…Politely, but firmly, explain to the donor that an inferior investment will yield an inferior result…

3. We can start a new program that doesn’t fit with our mission or strategy
Yes, that big, fat check a donor is holding in front of you looks very appealing. But if it takes your organization in a different direction than your strategy or your core competencies require, accepting it is a huge mistake…Don’t let a donor take you down that road.

4. We can grow without additional staff or other resources
Nonprofit staffers truly excel at working endless hours with very few resources…But someday that road must end…

5. 100 percent of our board is committed to our organization
If that’s true, then you are a true minority in the nonprofit sector. Every nonprofit board I know has some dead wood…It’s a fact that funders want to see every board member contributing. But instead of perpetuating the myth that 100 percent is an achievable reality, be honest with funders…It is far better to demonstrate that you are tirelessly working toward 90 percent.

I have frequently linked back to a post Andrew Taylor made about 6 years ago where he suggests non-profit organizations aren’t doing themselves any favors by keeping funders expectations high when they report everything went as good, if not better, than planned every single time.

In recent years “overhead” has come to the fore as a problematic measure of effectiveness. I think the whole idea about low overhead being a measure of effectiveness is the root of the other evils Edgington mentions in her article, in the pursuit of portraying themselves as having low overhead non-profits will say they can do more with less money, do more with same/fewer staff and the organization has a super efficient board.

An April article in the LA Times talks about why overhead is such a poor measure of a charity. In that column, Jack Shakely, president emeritus of the California Community Foundation, cites the example of a group that was buying its medicine in Canada but was using the cost of the medicine in the U.S. as a basis to report the difference in price as an in-kind donation in order to make their administrative costs appear to be a smaller portion of their budget.

Writes Shakely (with my emphasis added),

Don’t get me wrong. Low administrative costs could indicate prudence and sound judgment at a charity, but they could just as easily indicate inadequate staffing, insufficient salaries or, shall we say, fudging. Moreover, administrative costs aren’t the primary measurement of for-profit excellence. Are McDonald’s admin costs lower than Wendy’s? Apple’s lower than Microsoft’s?

[…}

But our intuitive thinking system wants an answer now, and because we are intuitively inclined to believe that the nonprofit sector is filled with soft, amateurish executives, we latch on to the pseudo-science of administrative costs as a measure of excellence. It’s hogwash; there is absolutely no way of telling that an organization with 5% administrative costs is superior to one with 20% costs based on that criterion alone. In fact, the exact opposite may be true.

As Shakely notes, it will be hard to get donors and funders to shift to better criteria when the overhead ratio appears to be so clean and rational a measure. But as both he and Edgington comment, no funder is going to use any other measure of evaluation if they aren’t told the criteria is unfair and unrealistic.

Think about what you can do to change assumptions as you make your next pitch or write your next grant proposal.

Still Cool As Hell After All These Years

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Today I am going to point you back to an interview Michael Rice of Cool As Hell Theatre Podcast did with playwright Paula Vogel.

Michael stopped doing his podcast a few years back but keeps the site working because, you know, he is cool as hell.

It is worth listening just to hear his customary lead in, but as I observed when I first wrote about the interview, Vogel has some interesting things to say:

“She does say some interesting things about the messages artists are getting these days. Among them are her feelings that “Darwin and captialism are very bad models for art” (3:15) and art begets art.

I was also intrigued by her idea that even though she was a klutz, she had to learn to play sports and as a result, all athletes today, artists of the flesh she calls them, speak for her inner athlete. She hopes for the day that every creative artist speaks for the inner artist housed in everyone.

[…]

She does present some quotable moments like “art is a dog that you feed that bites you” (7:05) when arguing that art should challenge society but the agenda of arts funders is to make art palatable and devoid of challenge.

Art Ain’t Easy

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Some members of the Student Media Art Collective (SMAC) we assembled had gotten an idea to create a mural on the construction wall by the college library. At one of the SMAC meetings, they had mentioned they were having a difficult time getting past all the administrative and bureaucratic hurdles. There was a plan to paint the mural at the end of March during the school Spring Break. When it didn’t emerge, I figured the hurdles got the best of the students.

However, I liked the idea and given that construction next to my building would cause a larger construction wall to encroach upon the courtyard in front of the theatre eliminating 1/3 of it for 18 months, I saw a pressing need to make the wall attractive. I broached the subject with the appropriate powers that be last week to lay the groundwork and smooth the road. I also spoke with a couple of the professors who were advocating for the library mural project to get their buy in. Everyone was pretty positive about the idea and the professors figured my involvement would help eliminate some of the barriers the students had faced this go round.

Happily, the students got the green light to do the library mural after all and worked throughout the past weekend to create it. The mural is fairly simple as you can see in the images below. However, it provides proof that the students can pull the project off within the parameters set by the various concerned parties. As much influence as I may or may not have, had they not done a good job it would have been that much more difficult to get a mural on the construction wall in front of my theatre.

 

I stood with to two of the visual arts professors who had been supportive of the work this morning and they were extremely pleased by so many aspects of the project. Just as I might be able to pick out various nuances in a performance, they were making observations about the execution of the piece that were not significant to me at all. (Like the way the black and white merged into each other at the bottom of the “H”.)

Amid all the gushing observations, they expressed pride in the students for pushing the project and their vision to competion despite all the obstacles. One of the group leaders wanted to give up a number of times. One professor pointed out that Christo had faced similar problems getting permission for his public art projects. Much of the professors’ pleasure probably derived from the fact that the impetus to execute the mural was generated entirely by the students rather than a class assignment. They were very happy to see students taking the initiative.

For me the mural represented an argument against those who claim there is little value for art in education. That mural required research, mathematical knowledge to execute in larger scale, politicking and advocacy, understanding the materials and media, artistic choices and team work. There was a lot of problem solving involved, which of course we all know is highly valued by employers these days.

In the middle of the project, one of the students commented that they didn’t realize how much work would be involved. The professor working with them chuckled and replied that he purposely never asked them if they realized how much work would be involved because he didn’t want to dissuade them.

This blog entry comes partially out of an email I sent out to the campus directing their attention to the decision making and problem solving required to bring the mural to fruition.  This was partially to  underscore the role of arts in the education process. I was also addressing the assumption that it was executed almost on the spur of the moment without much planning and preparation. It became apparent after speaking with a few of the people involved that concerns about a reckless execution was the basis for some of the impediments to authorization the students experienced.

Graduation is in a couple weeks and it is usually held in the library courtyard with the stage directly in front of where this wall is. This means the audience is facing the mural the whole time. I hope no one makes the decision to hide or cover it up. I think the sentiment expressed is perfect for a commencement.

 

Charm Offensive (Minus The Offensive)

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I was reading the Western Arts Alliance (WAA) Spring Newsletter today and there was a letter from Alliance President John Haynes (page 2) giving his view of what audience engagement is really about.

He tells a story of his time as a programming executive at CBS TV when he pretty much had an unlimited expense account and could do just about anything that struck his fancy. He would regularly order pizza delivered to his apartment and he could hear its approach long before it got to the door thanks to the singing of the Neapolitan deliveryman. At one point the delivery man confessed he was having a hard time saving his money because he was attending the opera a few times a week. Haynes confessed in turn that he had never attended the opera, a fact that flabbergasted the delivery man.

“He was shocked. Here I was, living the good life in a doorman high‐rise on West End Avenue, three blocks from Lincoln Center, but bereft of the most glorious creations of mankind. He sang longer and with more feeling that night than ever before. Neighbors I’d never met came out of their apartments. He sang his way to the elevator and was still singing when the door closed.”

The next time Haynes ordered pizza, the delivery guy showed up at the door with two tickets to the opera. Haynes attended his first opera, Carmen, with the pizza deliveryman. He says that he has seen his role as an arts administrator to do for others what the pizza deliveryman did for him; expanding the scope of his experience. “And that’s how I came to conceive of my role as an “arts leader. I’m just the pizza delivery man. ‘Wanna see something cool?'”

The pizza deliveryman was an apt model for the arts community. He was clearly passionate about a segment of the arts. Even though he couldn’t believe Haynes did not go to the opera, much less love it, he managed to express it in a humble rather than condescending way. (And like the arts, he was poor and funded his passion through donations/Haynes’ large tips.)

Of course the challenge we face today is that unlike Haynes, audiences aren’t necessarily won over after one exposure. And many of us are expending great effort in the direction of audiences who are not CBS executives with unlimited expense accounts. Regardless, we do have the same opportunity the pizza man had. We can unabashedly share our passion where ever we go and maybe after repeated exposure, people will start to open up to the possibility of sharing whatever it is that makes us (metaphorically) sing. (Keeping in mind that constantly singing songs from Wicked, either literally or figuratively, is going to make people want to throttle you.)

I realize that since this is filtered through Haynes’ recollection, the pizza deliveryman sounds very charming. Someone else might have perceived him as pushy and elitist. Though I have to think he was indeed as earnest as Haynes portrays him.

The pizza man has had his victory. For the rest of us, another challenge is to be charming as we talk about our passions and avoid making people’s eyes glaze over as we yammer on–or worse, harden as they feel alienated by the tone and direction of the conversation.

Most everyone in the arts seems to be invested in this shared goal, but there are few clear tips circulating about how to accomplish it. Perhaps it is as easy as the “be yourself” advice dispensed about dating. But if that were effective, there wouldn’t be 1,000 new dating articles on newsstands and the internet every week.

I’d suggest more practical and specific advice about diminishing the appearance of elitism might be what the arts needs. But like I said, advice on any sort of relationship doesn’t seem to provide much clarity or instill confidence.

Dear Thespis-

There is a woman at the supermarket I would really like to get to know better as an audience member. However, she seems to think I am elitist snob even though the resale value on her five year old SUV is still more than I made last year. How do I get her to even consider looking my way?

Intrinsic Value As A General Value

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Recently there has been a sentiment that the arts community shouldn’t use economic benefits as an argument for supporting the arts. I agree with this because there are a lot of problems with the argument which can weaken your position. The difficulty is that in trying to reframe the argument in other terms, you are fighting a sort of cultural inertia.

Arts Alliance Illinois Executive Director, Ra Joy retweeted lobbyist Dan Johnson who wrote “Instead of using the phrase “I’m a taxpayer” to legitimize a comment about government, we should use the universal phrase “I’m a citizen'”

We have a consumerist mentality which leads us to feel we get a say in how all our money is used and should expect a certain level of satisfaction. Businesses we make purchases from extend money back guarantees to assure our satisfaction so there is a tendency to apply a similar outlook to other areas of our lives. In addition to those addressing concerns to the government, students often use the my taxes/tuition pays your salary argument with their teachers.

The problem is, people often over estimate how much of the cost their share actually covers. Hamilton College recently launched a campaign at their students showing that after February 23, someone else was paying for their education. As most of us in the arts world know, a taxpayer’s share of the National Endowment for the Arts funding is below fifty cents.

And, of course, in many cases the price of a ticket to a performance at a non-profit organization only covers about 1/3 of the cost of the production.

Johnson’s suggestion to use “I’m a citizen” is essentially the argument for the intrinsic value of the arts. It harkens back to the social compact theories of Hobbes, Locke and Rousseau that influenced the Founding Fathers of the United States. (My first major was Political Science.) It is an argument that the government owes us based on the intrinsic nature of our relationship rather than our dutiful payment of taxes.

The influence of money which drives the concerns over the Citizens United decision and those of the Occupy Movement illustrate the problem of equating economic influence with general worth and merit. It is probably time to emphasize intrinsic value in general and not solely in the arts.

With 10,000 Friends Like These, You Don’t Need Enemies

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One of the things that makes me cringe uneasily is seeing non-profits running social media “follow me” campaigns where they make the push for the next multiple of 5000 milestone looming a few hundred followers away. Maybe they simply want the appearance of being as cool as all the other kids on the block and show off how popular they are. But to my mind, and perhaps I am erroneously attributing motivations, it appears to be the social media version of “if only they get exposed to our work once, they will fall in love with us forever.”

I should be clear that while I often talk about the “get them in the door and they will won over” reasoning in relation to the arts, I am seeing this practice across the non-profit sector. If the motivation is reaching more people via raw numbers, I think it suffers the same flaw as buying huge mailing lists or extending special offers/programs to get more people through the door. Unless you are making an effort to provide an experience/materials that is relevant to the new people, the effort isn’t productive.

Non-profit organizations are advised to move away from the shotgun approach in their physical advertising and most agree because of cost and recipient resentment over being spammed by snail and email. But social media is both inexpensive and people are choosing to follow you rather than you pushing your material on them. In my view, regardless of how inexpensive a channel of communication is, the goal should always be to have a your information be of interest to a high percentage of those being reached rather than reaching the highest number of people.

Yes it is cheap to greatly augment those numbers of virtual followers, but why are you even making the effort if you have no follow up plans? That’s worse than creating a social media presence just because everyone else is. At least you aren’t actively trying to convince people to buy in to an experience you have no intention of enhancing.

Many of the organizations I follow provide information that is interesting to me as an arts professional, but unless they have 10,000 arts professionals/admirers following them, I doubt most of their followers are as engaged as I. The quality and quantity of one organization’s feed actually dropped significantly after their big push. (Though I suspect the feed was initially created by an intern who left or a staff person who got pulled off the detail because the tone also became decidedly less strident and partisan.)

The other problem is that these “follow us” campaigns encourage existing sincere followers to leverage their relationships with others to bolster your followers. This is akin to asking board members to open their address books to solicit donations from their friends, albeit less intrusive and garnering even less personal investment.

Ask people to evangelize for your organization, by all means. But if you are flogging them everyday to help you reach a specific goal, the number 10,000 has as much relevance to the well-being of your organization as January 1, 2000 had to the end of the world.

If you know most of your followers aren’t going to pay attention and decide not to write to their interests, why the heck did you make so much ado updating the countdown every couple hours for two weeks? If your social media site wasn’t envisioned as a tool to provide information to interested parties and strengthen your relationship with them why does it exist?

I will be the first to admit that I am not using my organization social media sites as often and effectively as I would like. But when I do issue updates, it is to celebrate the success of partner organizations/artists, make followers aware of grant opportunities, national issues with the arts and artists with whom they may be unfamiliar. Yes, when we have a show coming up, I am linking to videos and online stories about the artist, but we aren’t having a show every week of the year.

I know that a large segment of those following are positively inclined toward the arts as both consumers and practitioners. Many are not make the decision to attend a show, but their knowledge and general attitude toward the arts can be positively influenced by all the information we post.

Foundation Data Wants To Be Set Free!

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Last week Lucy Bernholz posted a collection of links on Philanthropy 2173. One of these was a video of a talk she gave last June on how the information foundations collect is as important to non-profits as the money they give.

She notes that foundations end up being huge repositories of information about successful activities in our communities and across the nation. In the best scenario, these projects get funded once and then filed away in the archives. In the worst scenario, they just get filed away.

As a result of their granting activities, Bernholz notes, the foundations know a whole lot about whatever their areas of interest are. But because the data hasn’t been aggregated into a usable form, even the foundation may not be aware of just how much they know. She advocates for making that data readily available so that groups can collate the information and make everyone aware of just what exactly is going on, what is needed and what the costs of delivering services are.

Bernholz uses the example of looking at all the requests made to Donors Choose, combined with what foundations are funding and the Race To The Top programs to learn exactly what is happening and needed in classrooms.

According to Bernholz’s post last week, there has been some progress since she gave her talk in using non profit data to help organizations.

To my mind, such transparency would probably also promote much more accurate reporting by non profits. It has been noted that grant reports have a tendency to be idealized. All the goals are met or exceeded and there are no challenges or unforeseen problems causing a deviation from the proposal. A system which files such information away and forgets it perpetuates this practice.

However, if the information is out there and circulating and people are repeatedly contacting you to find out how you designed your programs to achieve such wonderful success, there is greater pressure to have your results more closely reflect reality.

Stuff To Ponder: What About Engaging Arts Organizations?

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Taking up where I left off yesterday, one of the last things I mentioned was that arts people might have an easier time shifting their perceptions to be more inclusive of what constitutes artistic practice and works of art than the general public might.

The thing is, while arts people may be more able to make the shift in thinking, they may not think it is necessary unless the necessity of doing so is pointed out to them. There is a lot of effort being made on a national, regional and local level to communicate the benefits of the arts to the general public but there isn’t a complementary effort to let the arts community know what their role is.

You can help in that effort by passing on or retweeting this post! 😉

But really, I recently realized the effort to get the general public to invest in the arts is a little one sided. Americans for the Arts will run ads telling people there are things they can do give their kids more arts experiences but most of the burden is on the parents to go online to the Americans for the Arts site and seek out arts organizations in their community. There may be an assumption that whatever arts organizations are doing to generate public awareness of themselves will be enough.

While Americans for the Arts had some requirements if you wanted to partner in their last kids and the arts campaign, what perhaps they should have also done is gone to the arts organizations and said, listen, we are going to run a slew of ads in your area encouraging people to take their kids to performances and museums and sign them up for classes. We are going to tell them to look for this little smiley guy logo. You can benefit by putting this logo on your website, in your ads and on the side of your building like the Safe Place logo they have on fire stations so people can easily identify organizations that offer these services.

The NEA starting a long term campaign communicating a “its all art and you should be reaching out” message to arts organizations through various channels would help to get arts organizations on the same page with them. That way the arts groups can start providing a public message complementary to the NEA’s and begin to shift themselves and the community to a more inclusive mindset.

Heck, what might actually be effective is a national campaign like the one Dominos recently ran that acknowledges people’s complaints about arts experiences. It could simultaneously address public sentiment and let arts organizations know they have a responsibility in the relationship as well.

Of course, lacking the unified will of a corporation, the campaign can’t make concrete promises of improvement across the arts sector. And honestly, unless it was incredibly well-designed and coordinated, it could alienate the general public, arts organizations or both.

But it would also be the first time that these issues were acknowledged and addressed nationally. Those of us who regularly read blogs and attend conferences are likely well aware of the need for change. But many arts people, including board members, aren’t participating in these conversations and may not be as aware of the shifting realities. This would put the topic front and center.

There isn’t just a need to do a better job of communicating our message to our local community, we need to apply the same techniques to communicating among ourselves. Which may in turn increase the number of organizations effectively communicating with their local communities.

There are already a few communication channels being used to rally arts organizations and their supporters to contact their legislators prior to crucial votes. Those are a good starting point to mobilize arts organizations but the message needs to come from different sources: blogs, television, radio, YouTube video, tweets, Facebook. In other words, the same channels we are urged to use to engage our communities can be used to engage arts organizations.

Whatever the message is needs to be light and encouraging rather than declarative and directive. Just like our audiences, arts organizations should be hearing more from their national, state and local leadership than OHMYGOD! THEYAREALLAGAINSTUS YOUMUSTMOBILIZENOW!

There should be Van Goghurt commercials made to encourage arts organizations to do better and point out resources organizational leaders can consult.

The nonprofit arts world in the U.S. is so decentralized it is hard to effectively communicate with most of the organizations. If the government provided higher levels of funding, more organizations might have closer relationships with central funders and it would be easier to provide training and information in best practices. For many it is not worth the effort required to apply, so they remain unidentified and out of touch with service organizations.

Instead of providing a few arts organizations with the funds to improve community participation, maybe foundations/funders should focus on establishing stronger channels of communication and relationships between service organizations/arts councils and arts groups, as well as between the arts groups themselves. Once that is achieved, instead of many individual organizations trying to re-invent the wheel alone, they may become better aware of the practices of those around them which will hopefully translate over time into a community engaged with the arts rather than with specific arts organizations.

As it is now, the best engagement practices developed by the exemplar organizations being funded will only be disseminated to a few hundred people attending a conference or reading a report. Better engagement and communication between arts groups and the arts councils/organizations that serve them could multiply the impact.

Don’t Forget Leadership and Teamwork

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I was helping out a local high school by conducting mock interviews with their students today. I enjoy doing this because the school does a great job preparing the students for the experience. I often don’t realize just how nervous the students are until the sweaty palm handshake as they depart. The last student I spoke to was applying for a position as a nurses aide and I was pleased to hear him talk about how his experience as the section leader in his band conferred leadership and conflict management skills. I made sure I complimented him on mentioning that and coached him about mentioning it in future interviews. (My interview partner who was not an arts person did so as well.)

It occurred to me that when I have read about the benefits of the arts recently, leadership and teamwork didn’t seem to figure largely in the lists. Given the recent push that education make someone employable, it is probably important that it be emphasized more.

I did a quick and, by no means exhaustive, survey of articles listing the benefits of arts education and found that my suspicion was generally true. Many talked about the cultivation of very desirable traits like intellectual and emotional development, flexibility of worldview, judgement, problem solving, expressiveness and ability to anticipate consequences.

In our desire to justify ourselves by identifying some distinctive advantages conferred only by the arts and creative expression, we seem to have forgotten some basic benefits a high school kid can cite. Speaking of which, while we are touting these benefits, it probably behooves us long term to make sure high school kids who are having these experiences can cite the benefits.

The intellectual and emotional development advantages frequently referenced are often individual achievements. Leadership and team work are assets in the social sphere and warrant inclusion. It may seem of little consequence now, but I suspect there is a fair chance that in the next 10 years technologically induced anti-social/introspective tendencies may be be deemed a crisis and these qualities will be highly prized.

This all being said, there are a lot of benefits to arts education and it is tough to list them all. If you are looking for a list to keep handy, here are some great ones. (A couple which list leadership and teamwork). Again, these are some I personally find helpful rather than an exhaustive list.

Americans for the Arts
National Assembly of State Arts Agencies
Miller-McCune
Artsblog post by Kristen Engebretsen

Feel free to add a few of your favs in the comments section.

Who Is More Important? The Event Or Organization?

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I had a small disagreement about marketing with one of the people partnering on a show with us that raised the question about what is more important, the artist or the organization.

The disagreement was pretty simple. We had designed an ad to promote a show. Between the sponsor and creator logos/credits and the general design of the ad, there wasn’t a lot of room left. To maintain a clean, attractive look for the show, I suggested that we omit the three names of the presenters. We would have the name of the theatre, but not “presented by X, Y, Z groups, each of which were fairly long.

My feeling was that the show was what would attract the audience. If we credited the three of us, it would look cluttered and the pertinent information would be lost. If we reduced the font size to the point the ad didn’t look cluttered, it would be too small to be of value and not worth including.

Since we had already advertised the show via brochures, posters, postcards and email blasts, most of those who associated our names with quality already knew we were involved with the show. Those whom we would be reaching with the ad would be making decisions based on the show, not who was presenting it. Therefore, our names were not as important in this particular communication channel.

My partners disagreed with my point of view (though they praised the ad image as much better than the brochure and poster images which was gratifying) and we included our names in pretty small type.

It got me to thinking, is there ever a time when the event is more important than the organization taking credit? Choosing to cede space in favor of a funder might be done out of a concrete sense of obligation (or lack thereof, I am aware of some organizations that choose to omit funder recognition.) Valuing the event/artist above the organization is a bit more theoretical and nebulous a decision.

I don’t know that it should be a default organizational policy where you decide the artist always comes first and people will have to work to find out whose efforts were responsible for their experience. There are some cases where people won’t be familiar with a work where the organizational reputation for quality will provide the confidence an audience needs.

In some cases, you may want to take credit for an experience but get very little recognition because the artist’s reputation will eclipse your own. We recently presented Ben Vereen and it was clear from the phone conversations we were having with patrons that our involvement played no part in the decision to attend.

Both Elton John and Neil Diamond are performing in town in January and February and I couldn’t tell you who the promoters are. I could make an educated guess of 3-4 different people. That is probably the best rationale for making sure your name is associated with your productions. Get a reputation for quality and people will attribute great experiences with which you had no involvement to you.

Surveys show that audiences don’t have much awareness of the tax status of the organization providing their nights’ entertainment. If people aren’t discerning between profit and non profit organizations, how aware are they of whether a show is being presented by me or someone who is renting our facility? There are times of the year that bring especially high numbers of calls from people expecting us to resolve problems with tickets they didn’t purchase from us, so I know some people aren’t aware of the distinction.

Knowing that people may not be making as great a distinction between you and everyone else as you might hope, are there situations where the event is more important than your organization? I am not talking about simply leaving your name off marketing material for the sake of aesthetics. I am asking if there is some program you have or dream of having where it doesn’t matter if anyone knows you did it?

Is it possible for a non-profit to get to that place? Do the producers of a Broadway show care if they have high personal/business name recognition if the show is profitable? Can a non-profit be that blasé as dependent as they are on attracting funders who want assurances their support is making a difference?

I don’t know the full answer to these questions because I have just started considering them and it is a complicated matter.

I don’t think the inability to subsume the organization name to that of an artist necessarily has a direct correlation to the situation Diane Ragsdale discussed in November about low pay for artists. As I note, there are many important reasons to keep name awareness high. However, the organization’s perception of artists certainly is going to factor into the question.

With all the instances recounted by Inside the Arts blogfather, Drew McManus, of orchestra boards answering the question pretty decisively in their own favor, it may be a question that needs to be asked more frequently.

Teachers Don’t Know From Creative

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We all know that arts classes and opportunities have been disappearing from schools at varying rates for decades. It may or may not surprise you to learn that creativity is not encouraged in schools either. While you may have suspected it all along, Alex Tabarrok links to a number of studies from the Marginal Revolution blog.

He cites in one study,

“What the paper shows is that the characteristics that teachers use to describe their favorite student correlate negatively with the characteristics associated with creativity. In addition, although teachers say that they like creative students, teachers also say creative students are “sincere, responsible, good-natured and reliable.” In other words, the teachers don’t know what creative students are actually like.”

As Tabarrok notes, the classroom process is not conducive to impulsive creative expression. Self control is valued in students in order to create an environment for a group to learn in. I would note though that this is not to equate self-control with smothering creativity. Even in self-directed learning environments where students are more in control of the pace and manner of their learning, a degree of self-control is still expected.

It occurs to me that part of the fight to restore arts education to schools needs to include advocating for a learning environment that encourages creativity. Arts people may hold certain assumptions about that arts in education involves cultivating creative expression, but it might not necessarily be so. Everyone probably has a story about a teacher who nearly killed their interest in an artistic discipline.

It may seem like incrementalism in the face of the size of the struggle to get arts education restored, but in the process, it will be important to try to preserve opportunities for creative expression still have left lest they slip away.

Think about it– outside the classroom the only place where a child is still permitted to indulge their screaming anarchist tendencies is on the playground and a lot of schools are doing away with recess. Without recess, there is another moment of a child’s life where they are expected to behave.

Now granted, for all I know kids today may stand around at recess playing on their Nintendo DSes and ignore their screaming anarchist tendencies without any help from their schools and such advocacy is for naught anyway.

My point is that while fighting for the restoration of arts, it is probably important to make teachers aware of what creative students are actually like and provide tools/guidance for dealing with them rather than requiring them to conform to expectations all the time.

Essentially the approach of “Arts offer X, Y, Z to your students. But since you may not provide opportunities in the coming academic year, we will happily help you to recognize the creativity of your students and engage it in your classroom to some degree since these kids are likely the ones you have pegged as disconnected.”

Comes The Curator

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While at the Arts Presenters conference, I learned that Wesleyan University has a certificate program in Curatorial Practice in Performance. My first thought was to wonder if there was really that much of a demand for such a program. Then I recalled that many arts organizations have long been consolidating their executive and artistic director positions into one person and that there were likely quite a few people who sought the training originating from this situation alone. People hired for their ability to run the arts organization like a business might find themselves a little anxious about making the correct artistic decisions.

According to the program website, the purpose is:

“…designed so that students can learn to modify and adapt curatorial practices from one discipline to another. ICPP welcomes emerging curators as well as other arts professionals who are interested in time-based art practices in visual art, traditional arts and the performing arts. The emphasis of the program is on the how of curating and focused on developing tools to contextualize performance.”

I was in a session where either Program Director Kristy Edmunds or Managing Director Pamela Tatge, (whomever was sitting behind me) noted that the visual arts have long had curatorial training, but it was lacking in performance disciplines.

In a separate session moderated by Alan Brown on what drives and inhibits our success, Brown noted that presenting arts organizations are becoming increasingly interested in having a curatorial relationship with artists rather than just taking what is offered. Given that most contracts coming across my desk stipulate that the artist has sole control over the artistic content of the show, I wondered if there is going to be a lot of pressure to on that very common contract clause in the future.

Conceivably, if arts organizations take their responsibility to more effectively serve and engage their community to heart, they will have a better sense of what their community will respond to than the artist. I am not talking about pressing artists to tone down edgy elements in the performance to conform to local tastes. Rather I envision a presenter may ask that a particular piece be performed knowing how it will resonate with the history of the location or address an on going concern of the region.

Brown noted that a few performing arts organizations are soliciting requests for proposals (RFQ) from performing artists so that projects more closely conform with what they want to achieve. RFQs from visual artists aren’t uncommon, and Brown says there aren’t a lot of performing arts organizations soliciting, but the fact there are may represent a shift in the approach to residencies. Pam Tatge who was on the panel for this session commented that artist residencies were becoming an intersection of the artist’s goals and presenter’s goals.

It seemed to me that this is something of a compromise between commissioning a piece and hosting an artist for a performance. There is a desire to provide the community a deeper experience than might be derived from attending a performance but not enough resources to direct the creation of a new work. So presenters are seeking artists who can provide additional experiences with specific relevance to the local community. These additional experiences seem to tend toward interaction and working with members of the community and de-emphasize the lecture/demonstration model.

It just occurred to me that another one of the underlying themes of the conference seemed to be the blurring of distinct roles. In addition to a session specifically about cross-discipline performance curation, there were two different sessions on the dissolving boundaries between agent, manager and producer with people taking on the functions of all three in various situations.

Those were just the sessions specifically dedicated to this idea. Just as the topic of cross-discipline curation came up in a separate session I attended, I am sure the topic permeated other conversations.

Arts Presenters 2012 Edition

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I have been attending the Association of Performing Arts Presenters (APAP) conference this past weekend. I am sure I will have more to say on the subject in future entries, but I wanted to post a few reflections and impressions while they were fresh.

First, I wanted to give some congratulations and props to Mario Garcia Durham, the new President and CEO of APAP on this, his first conference with the organization. I had met Mario a handful of times before in his capacity as the Director of Artistic Communities and Presenting at the National Endowment for the Arts. I was always set at ease by his open and welcoming manner when I had consultation sessions with him.

I took it as a good sign that he invited the Emerging Leadership Institute participants and alumni (of which I am one) up to his suite to discuss what we felt was the future for the field. We didn’t have a lot of time with him, but it was a promising sign. I also thought it was a promising sign that he got a standing ovation at the start of the conference from the membership. (And even more promising that he decides to discard a long speech he had prepared at another gathering!)

For this conference, I decided to break out my laptop and do a little live tweeting from different sessions. I had a great time doing it and could really see the utility of the activity for the conference, and somewhat by extension, for Tweet Seat programs that have been emerging at various arts events. I will say though that I really felt that I ended up missing many aspects of the sessions I was attending. Not only in terms of not entirely absorbing points people were making, but also some of the nuances of what they were saying. Even though my brain and multi-tasking abilities may not be on par with those of the younger generation, I can’t help but think they would indeed suffer from the same situation.

I was also surprised given the size of the attendance that more people weren’t tweeting from the various discussions going on, at least not on the official hashtag, #APAPNYC. Didnt see much on the counter-conference hashtag #APAPSMEAR, either. Many people used the hashtags to promote their showcases, but didn’t really seem to overdo it.

I was a little disappointed that there weren’t more people tweeting from the sessions because there were often a number I wanted to attend running concurrently and with a few exceptions, no one was reporting what was transpiring in those rooms.

On the other hand, there were a fair number of people following along. I appreciate all those who signed up to follow my twitter feed. Between those who started following me and those who were tweeting themselves, I found a number of new interesting people to follow in turn.

One interesting thing I noticed was a change in the underlying theme of the discussions at the conference. In the past it has often been about declining attendance and funding. This year it seems to be more focused on social and cultural trends, perhaps thanks to the Occupy Wall Street movements. People were talking about loss of identity, disenfranchisement, fragmentation and polarization of society.

Questions were raised about what role arts organizations would have in addressing this and place in the community rather than how to get more people through the doors. One of the major speakers at a few of the sessions was John Fetterman, the mayor of Braddock, PA who has attracted a lot of national attention for his efforts to revitalize his town and reverse the decline by the use of art and community efforts. As part of one effort, they took the bricks from a demolished garage to make a communal bread oven.

I will try to post more on the conference in the weeks ahead as I am able to digest the experience.

Diversity vs. the Brand

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Apropos to the recent aggregation of articles on You’ve Cott Mail about diversity in the arts, I wanted to point back to a post I did a few years ago about the pressures of protecting the brand image which may make it difficult to achieve diversity.

In the post I point to how everyone from Ivy League universities to car companies will willingly eschew the opportunity for immediate gain in order to protect their brand image. Arts organizations may have the best intentions for diversifying audiences, but the fact that funders/donors/sponsors may desire to have their name before the eyes of certain demographics will drive many choices that are made.

Side Effects of Cultural Policy

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I hope everyone had a wonderful and restful Christmas yesterday. As I understand it, today is the seventh day of Hanukkah. And of course, we are just in the beginning of the 12 days of Christmas (which gives those who have procrastinated in their gift shopping to save face by the Feast of Epiphany.)

It is frequently mentioned that Hanukkah was never really a significant Jewish holiday but that its proximity to Christmas celebrations helped to make it so. That idea of how cultures influence each other is related to today’s blog post retrospective.

Back in 2005 I made a post about indirect outcomes of cultural policy. The fact that the U.S. doesn’t have a cultural policy is a policy of itself, but unfortunately limits the conversation we can have about the value of the arts. Yet the U.S. government actively used it arts and cultural assets as soft power influence around the world.

I also talk about how artist lead gentrification can improve neighborhoods and how the same high rents which displace the artists which made it happen can also result in the destruction of ethnic enclaves.

Dickens, Illustrated

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By the time you read this, I should hopefully be at my sister’s house teasing my nephews. Fear not loyal readers, for I have scheduled a series of posts according to my usual publishing schedule. I will also be attending the Association of Performing Arts Presenters conference at the beginning of January and should have some insights to report from there.

As I was looking back at some old entries to see if there was anything I might want to link back to in my absence, I came across a post about groups trying to use graphic novels to get kids interested in great literature. In that entry, I noted that something similar had been tried with Classics Illustrated back in my parents day but had failed because there was too much content to squeeze into too few pages.

It got me to thinking, it might be possible to do a credible job by turning great works into web comics. I will confess one of my guilty pleasures is to follow a number of web comics. One I will cop to reading is posits that the world mythologies are actually based on the conflicts between humanoid aliens from another dimension, one group holding to a philosophy of authoritarian rule (Titans) vs. a more free will philosophy (Greek gods).

Because it is expected the story will unfold over the course of months or years, some of the restrictions inherent to print don’t apply. Also because people can read the comic on computers and mobile devices, distribution issues are less problematic.

There are plenty of classics like A Tale of Two Cities that will make for exciting reading without any need for embellishment. A lot of plays, operas and ballets could benefit from a comic book adaptation as well. Linking to the completed comic could serve as a study guide for a lot of organizations.

Yes, students would use the comics as a substitute for reading the book for class. But they are already watching the movie, reading synopses and buying papers as a substitute for work already. Doing a thorough job with the web comic would provide an opportunity to make people aware of the full content of the literature that they would normally avoid reading.

Even Great Artists Need Recess

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I may be beating a long dead horse here but last week the National Endowment for the Arts linked to a NY Times article from their Twitter account asking what people thought. The article in question was about how public schools in NYC were having arts classes during recess. I tweeted in response that I thought it was great, but that when I was a kid, I had art, music AND recess. The title of the article touts the school as being highly rated.

While I am happy these kids are getting some arts exposure, I wonder how it can really be seen as an improvement and a credit to their high rating that they had to do it during recess. It’s a shame that that the only time students can have the experience. It is with some chagrin that I tell the story of my first day in high school where I was trying to figure out when we would be allowed outside for recess. The memory of realizing I wouldn’t be having recess any more still causes a little ache.

I have to wonder, is there really so much more to learn these days that they have to squeeze arts classes and recess out? I know arts get cut for financial reasons, but if a school has the resources to offer it during recess, then they could offer classes as well, right? It has been 30 years since I was in elementary school, but I don’t think there have been that many developments in history, reading, mathematics and science in that time that can’t be covered in the course of all the elementary years of school.

If they have to spend so much additional time teaching and testing material for kids, that must mean those of us in the previous generations fell short of learning all that was required of us, correct? I quake in fear for what it will mean for me when these kids grow up and bring their superior knowledge capacity to bear, pushing me out of my job.

Okay, while it may indeed happen one day that my knowledge will be obsolete compared to younger people, I am fairly certain it won’t all hinge on the differences between what we learned in elementary school. In fact, I may retain my superiority over them simply because of the freedom of recess I enjoyed in elementary school.

Dr. Todd B. Kashdan recently had a piece on the Creativity Post about this very topic. (my emphasis)

If you want children to do well in school, give them dedicated time to play, sing, dance, build something out of wood, or whatever their fancy. There is a myth that time spent in these activities is time better spent cramming in more information for all important high stakes tests. Unfortunately, the brain doesn’t work that way. We each have a finite amount of willpower and when this willpower is exhausted, carrots and sticks are not going to change this fact. Our brains need time for restoration and replenishment. Discover what kids are passionate about and set them free to pursue it. Let me repeat that, set them free. Do not overly structure their recess. Do not overly structure their play time. This is a time for them to recharge their batteries. In return, you will get a greater frequency of creative, curious, critically thinking youngsters. You will get attentive, engaged students.

There is a great NY Times magazine article on the science behind the finite nature of willpower. There is a shorter version of the information on NPR if you don’t have the willpower to read the article. 😉 (Though as you will learn, you might be able to get some will power by eating a cookie!)

The more I read about the importance of allowing kids free time, the more I appreciate that my elementary school emphasized self-directed learning. (Albeit under the withering gaze of nuns which I am sure counteracted some of the benefits the freedom afforded.)

It occurs to me that arts people shouldn’t just be advocating for arts in the schools, but the free time to explore and express it. I am sure artistic and creative people are well aware of examples from their own disciplines in which a strict teaching environment has had a stultifying effect on the development and joy of young students. The advocacy can’t simply be about providing arts education if it is bereft of an opportunity to play. If students choose to spend their free time peering down at a cell phone texting their friends, it may be in part because they were never provided the opportunity and encouragement to spend it any way else.

Try Ask

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I try a fair number of the strategies/techniques that I cover here. Some work better than others. For example, for the last seven performances we have tried just asking two questions in our surveys, one fun question and one that we really want to know about from our audience. Even with the ability to answer on a hard copy or text your answer, we haven’t gotten a lot of participation.

Except the night this past weekend when we were participating in an Americans for the Arts survey. Strangely, participation in our 2 question survey went up a little when people were faced with filling out a multi-question survey.

We also didn’t get the response I expected for a recent tweet seats program even though it was circulated a fair bit via social media. Though since this was a trial program, the small number of participants suited me fine and the experience will allow us to refine our approach.

In any case, I am sometimes skeptical about how much input and participation we might get from our community with other endeavors. So I was a little surprised and very pleased by the response we received for space naming meeting were recently had. As part of a renovation we hope to undergo, we have been trying to find a new approach to facility and space naming campaigns so we hosted a brainstorming meeting.

Recalling Andrew McIntyre’s assertion that people who are emotionally invested in your organization might only be visiting you in 2-3 year intervals, we invited people who had either donated or purchased tickets to multiple shows over a 3-4 year period. That yielded about 450 names after purging duplicates. We followed up a letter with a reminder email.

While only about 15 people attended the informal lunch meeting, there were about five times as many people expressing pretty heartfelt regrets saying they were honored to be invited and wishing they could be there. We even received some donations though we didn’t ask for any money.

I was really rather surprised at how many people seemed interested in investing more time and effort to provide feedback than would be required for a paper survey. I am sure the fact the purpose of our communication was to give them something (lunch) in return for their participation rather than asking them to pay to participate (season brochure, email newsletter) probably had a positive impact. Perhaps knowing they could participate in a dialogue rather than in the unidirectional conversation of a survey was a factor in their willingness to come to the meeting.

In any case, it was a very constructive experience for us, especially since I had never spoken face to face with 90% of those who attended. We were hearing from a number of new voices. The meeting also ran about an hour longer than we had planned due to the length of the conversations.

I am significantly less skeptical about the prospect of people’s willingness to participate and become invested with us. None of these people may participate in our space naming campaign, but my encounter with them has left me energized and excited. My advice to others who may not believe there is a lot of interest and investment in their programs based on survey response rates is to give a brainstorming type meeting a try. Like us, your attendance to invitees ratio may be fairly low, but you may gain unsought benefits.

(The title of this entry is a Hawaiian pidgin/creole phrase)

Advocation For Arts Careers To High Schoolers

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I was speaking about arts careers at a high school career day today. The high school had been really good about sending out information packets with suggested topics to cover with the students (what skills do you need, what type of education is required, what classes should you be taking right now).

I have done a few of these in the last couple years but it was only after today’s session that I started to think about what arts people should be doing when they get the opportunity to speak to students about arts careers. There are guides written about presenting testimony to government entities and speaking to businesses about the benefits of the arts. There is a lot written on getting the arts back in schools, but not a lot has been created on the subject of advocating arts careers, or even just for taking arts classes after graduation, to middle and high school students.

This might present a significant challenge given that the students may not have had many arts experiences or at least recognize it as such. Unlike adults who might view the arts as having value in the context of the economic health of an area even if they do not often attend themselves, students may not have developed many impressions at all.

One of the reasons I started thinking about this is that I shifted my approach somewhat mid-stream today. While I think the result was better than what I had planned, I think there is still plenty of room for improvement. Maybe those of you focused more on arts education have worked all this out already and can provide some guidance.

I worked up a powerpoint presentation with images of what we do at the theatre now, including the ways our students are making their own opportunities. I also had job descriptions from various positions in performing and visual arts – production managers, art handlers, outreach assistants, etc to show students that there were opportunities beyond just performing.

The first session went pretty well from my point of view at the time and I got through the slides. The second session took a little longer to go through the slides. By the third session I had basically abandoned the slides and only showed 2 or 3 for the remaining two sessions of the day.

Essentially I went from talking to them to having a conversation with them about what they were doing now arts wise, what they wanted to do with their careers, why they didn’t want to pursue their artistic interests as a career and for those who did want to pursue it, what factors were standing in their way. I made this shift partially out of a realization that I wasn’t practicing what I am trying to preach about engaging audiences and partially because the questions they were asking pointed toward concerns in these areas.

In the process, I came to realize that a lot of the claims about the skills and abilities of the Millennial generation are a little inflated by the media. These kids are pretty much like I was in high school, a little unsure of themselves and appreciative of the wisdom of others (and just as practiced at exhibiting disinterest). Yes, they will probably grow up and outstrip the accomplishments of those who preceded them, but we old farts still have something of value to offer at present.

We had discussions about parents not being supportive of aspirations and wanting their kids to be lawyers. I talked about developing portfolios of your work and creating speculative pieces to showcase talent since they won’t necessarily have pieces they have created for a job. We talked about creating your brand both online and with face to face networking and housing your portfolio of work online for people to reference. (Which surprisingly didn’t seem to have occurred to many of them.)

I also gave them some tips about how to create opportunities for themselves to exhibit their talent. How to approach people with resources they may need, what those people may expect from them and how and work out mutually beneficial arrangements.

What was interesting to me was that in this age of television shows like American Idol which make it seem like success is achievable in terms of weeks rather than years, there were really very few students who were absolutely sure that they would make it. While there were a few people who said that they wouldn’t pursue their artistic interests as a career due to impracticality or low income potential, most simply lacked confidence in their own abilities.

My underlying message to everyone was to stay in school (naturally) and the benefits of different disciplines for their careers – liberal arts and social sciences so you can understand what motivates people; science to gain the skills to examine situations objectively as well as understand the properties of materials one might work with as an artist; business and law/contracts to understand how to protect your interests.

Ultimately, of course, I kept pressing the idea that you had to nurture your artistic passion and creativity in whatever you pursued. Fortunately, the teacher had a guitar in the classroom which helped to reinforce that concept.

So what else can you say to students preparing to go to college who may not have ever really experienced or thought about the value/place of arts and creativity in their lives to awaken their minds to the possibilities?

It’s Not A Genius Grant. It Might Actually Be Much Better

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I just got around to reading up on some of the new granting program initiatives the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation has recently announced.

In the interests of correction right from the start- Contrary to what I retweeted last week, the Doris Duke Leading Artists program is not their version of the MacArthur genius grants. Program director Ben Cameron explicitly makes that point. Sorry about that.

There were a number of things Cameron wrote that I was pleased to see a major foundation acknowledging (my emphasis):

Does project support force an artist to follow through with the production of a work that may be, after exploration, of less interest or less feasible than originally envisioned? Do regrant programs by their very nature favor projects that can garner consenus from a panel (a sort of comfortable middle) and disadvantage less conventional, more extreme or riskier work that an artist might wish to do? How can programs encourage more artistic risk while still acknowledging and supporting “failure” or “dead ends” that can be celebrated for their lessons, without necessitating further investment of production resources? With so many grants offered at nominal levels, how can an artist piece together a life of economic dignity? And now, with so many artists approaching their latter years, financially unprepared for retirement, have we been derelict in not supporting longer-term artist life needs and more aggressively helping artists prepare for this phase of life?

In an earlier paragraph, he acknowledges that foundations often establish long term relationships with organizations, but infrequently with artists, even those who are well established. In a later section, he refers to the amount of gratitude artists exhibited upon receiving an additional $10,000 no strings attached grant as “frankly, depressing in the knowledge that an unrestricted grant of $10,000 could be both so extraordinary and so life-changing for so many.”

One of the problems that I and other blogs have frequently discussed is that grantees often feel like they have to report everything turned out as good, if not better than anticipated in the grant proposal. If only grants did have the magical power to contravene the effects of real life, they wouldn’t be needed as frequently and in as large sums as they are. I was pleased to see a funder say they realized what the reality was. Overall, I was happy to see that they had decided to make a commitment to bolstering support to artists into their retirement.

The only thing that gave me pause was that the foundation decided to select recipients of support in their Doris Duke Leading Artists program from the pool of past grantees. Given that they had started to wonder whether their past selection process might reward mediocrity over risk taking, it seemed a slightly flawed approach. But honestly, there isn’t much alternative to deciding to how to make the awards. Besides, Cameron never suggests that the artists being awarded grants might be lacking in talent, only that the granting process encouraged highly talented people to moderate their ambitions.

The Leading Artist program is the one that most excites me, even though I won’t be remotely eligible. Even though the grant is for less money and there are more requirements for how it is used than the MacArthur genius grant, my claim that it might be much better stems from the potential change it represents in the approach to supporting artists. If successful, this program might become a model for other funders much as the programs of other foundations have provided the inspiration for the three that Cameron introduces.

It may also engender the idea that a healthy artistic practice involves some investment in one’s work, some effort in audience development and some investment toward retirement. (my emphasis)

“Recipients will receive an unrestricted grant of $225,000 over a three to five year period—a schedule to be determined by the artist recipient. An additional $25,000 will be available to the artist specifically to support work around audience connections or development. And a final $25,000 (which must, however, be matched by the artist) will be available for retirement purposes, bringing DDCF’s potential investment to $275,000 per artist.

We’d like to make clear that there are things these grants are not: They are not life-time achievement awards. They are also not “genius” grants, nor are they project grants. They are investment grants, designed to offer support with minimal administrative burden to exemplary professional artists who are dedicated to work in the nonprofit sector and with maximum flexibility and empowerment for the grantees.”

The second program is Doris Duke Performing Arts Fellows “these awards acknowledge that there are artists who have yet to achieve the same level of recognition as their colleagues in the Leading Artist category, but who nonetheless might have significant impact on their fields.” These people will be chosen by anonymous nomination with 20 grants awarded annually for each of the next five years. The awards are scaled down in both time and amount, but are meant to be used for the same purposes – creation, audience connections and retirement.

The third program is somewhat intriguing to me as well. Doris Duke Artist Residencies is meant to address a perceived adversarial relationship between artists and arts organizations by providing funding to essentially find a better way to do things.

“…All of these organizations can create residencies for artists, not only from within their fields but for artists from outside their disciplines. While a theater can clearly request support for a playwright or actor, a dance company can request a dancer or choreographer, and a jazz organization can request a musician, a theatre could instead request a dancer, a dance company could request a playwright, or a jazz organization could request a videographer. This flexibility allows for the possibility of important, cross-disciplinary learning.

…Ours is instead about supporting a partnership between an artist who wishes to explore and reimagine institutional life and behavior, and an organization willing to open itself to that exploration. It is also about reimagining how an organization and an artist connect to their community and supporting a pilot effort to behave in new ways. And, they are about the creative engagement of audiences in ways which give the organization and artist an equal stake.

As such, we recognize that these residencies will not be of interest to everyone. Those looking for a traditional artist in residency program will inevitably be disappointed that this initiative does not support those efforts, even while we support them through other initiatives in our grant portfolio.”

What I appreciate about this program is that it appears to be trying to give artists and organizations some breathing room and security to experiment as partners some new ways to engage audiences. This program will be open to applications some time in Spring 2012.

Possible To Cultivate New Funders Motivated By New Mandates?

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You may have read about the report the National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy released at the Grantmakers in the Arts conference noting the disparity in foundation support for arts organizations.

According to the report,

“the largest arts organizations with budgets exceeding $5 million represent only 2 percent of the nonprofit arts and culture sector. Yet those groups received 55 percent of foundation funding for the arts in 2009. Only 10 percent of arts funding was explicitly meant to benefit underserved populations.”

Most of this money is going to large organizations patronized by a shrinking wealthy white audience during a time when people are orienting toward community based arts groups.

As I read this, I recalled Scott Walters’ discussion of the difficulty his small arts organization had meeting the deadlines for the Our Town grant process and the questions he raised about the appropriateness of the criteria being employed. I suspect there is something of a feedback loop inherent to foundation grant programs in that they are structured to the needs of the organizations they serve and those they serve tend to be organizations with the resources to meet the criteria of the grant programs.

Foundations may have to expand the number and types of organizations they serve, as the report suggests. But I strongly suspect they will have to also institute changes in their process to better accommodate those with fewer resources than those with whom they currently deal. Otherwise, they probably won’t have very strong participation from a larger, more diverse group.

Of course, most foundations, whether they have an arts focus or not, were set up to serve the interests of their founders. It appears that this has been rather successful. The greatest success in securing support for under served populations may end up being best realized by cultivating/encouraging individuals and groups from those communities to develop their own funding structures whether it is foundations or cultural hui.

The article mentions that current funding practices originated in an 19th century need to prove America was on par with Europe culturally. That need has passed and a new set of practices based on different motivations are required. Existing foundations may end up doing a lot of good after shifting their priorities, but in attempting to overlay new priorities on their founding purpose they may never be as effective as organizations that structure their approach around a mandate to support the arts and culture of under serve communities from day one.

Cultivating a sustained culture of support in areas where it is not currently practiced won’t happen overnight, but aided by technology it may not require 100 years to take root either.

Are Gov’t Caps of Non-Profit Salaries On Horizon?

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The Stanford Social Innovation Review (SSIR) notes that the governor of New Jersey has placed salary caps on non profit executives who do business with the state and the governor of New York has started a non profit salary review.

While governments have a right to be concerned over non profit scandals and society might properly have an expectation that a good portion of the funding going to a non-profit organization will be directed toward serving the appropriate segments of the community, there is a inequality in the expectations. In an article linked in the SSIR blog, Doug Sauer, CEO of the New York Council of Nonprofits notes,

““The State government contracts to buy services from nonprofits just as it contracts with the for-profit sector; except that the nonprofit is often expected to unfairly perform at below the actual cost of doing business. Perhaps it is also time to order an extensive review of the executive compensation of ‘taxpayer supported for-profit businesses’.”

Additionally, John Brothers notes in the SSIR blog post that most non-profit executives don’t even approach the $141,000 cap that NJ is imposing.

“According to the 2010 Guidestar Compensation Study, human service executives earned a median annual pay of just over $122K. What is more interesting is that of the over 3,000 nonprofits surveyed, just 0.004% earned more than a million dollars and only 4 percent earned more than $500K, with sizes of organizations peaking in the multi-billions. I would say that this is hardly a national epidemic of nonprofit jet-setting executives.”

You may look at these stories and think that they only apply to social/human service organizations. However, Gov. Cuomo of NY doesn’t make as clear a distinction regarding those organizations that NJ does. While the initial round of inquiry letters went to social service organizations, the fact the NY governor said all non-profits receiving state funding will be reviewed raised the question,

“Does this mean that the task force will examine compensation at hospitals and other health care providers – where CEO salaries of $1 million or more are not uncommon? What about major arts organizations and institutions of higher learning where that is also true?”

This move to evaluate non-profit salaries provides a potential avenue for those who oppose the funding of arts and culture. Lacking the ability to accuse artistic content of being obscene, they can seek to limit funding to organizations whose compensation is perceived to be excessive.

Fortunately, there are a number of objective measures and loads of data one can employ to prove compensation is fair. This situation underscores the need for non-profits to become better organized to advocate for themselves before it comes to that though.

Info You Can Use: Does Friending A Candidate Endanger Your Non-Profit Status

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The Non Profit Law blog linked to a really great publication put out by the Alliance for Justice that explains whether your online activity might run afoul prohibitions in your 501 (c) 3 status. This is the clearest explanation of these issues I have read.

“This guide aims to answer the questions nonprofit managers most frequently face regarding the Internet and social media.”

The document covers situations that don’t involve online activity, but really it is the social media element that comprises the uncharted territory that people aren’t clear about. The document makes a distinction between lobbying, which a 501 c 3 non-profit can do and supporting a candidate, which they can’t.

Though sometimes the distinction is very subtle. For example, you can make a post on Representative X’s Facebook account, “Rep X, support the arts by voting Yes on Bill 123.”and that is direct lobbying. If you post a slightly different message, “People of My State, tell Rep X, to support the arts by voting Yes on Bill 123, ” and that is considered grassroots lobbying because it is a general call to others to take some action. If you post, “We love Rep X because she supports the arts and voted Yes on Bill 123,” that is promoting a specific candidate.

Except in some very specific circumstances, you can’t link to a candidate’s website. In fact, you can’t link to any website that promotes a candidate and you are responsible for making sure the content of the site doesn’t change since you first linked to it.

For example, you are doing a renovation and link to the website of the company that is providing you with sustainable wood as a way of proving to your constituency that you are acting responsibly. If the supplier changes their website to criticize a candidate’s stance on logging, your organization might be in trouble.

There are also restrictions on allowing employees to use company equipment, even on their time off, to express support for a candidate.

In answer the question posed by the title of this entry, no, you can’t friend a candidate on Facebook or follow them on Twitter. They are free to friend and follow your organization. Even though etiquette suggests you follow them in return, the IRS suggests you don’t.

About the only time you are safe to have a promotion of a candidate on your website is if you allow Google to place ads on your website and have no control over what they are placing.

There are a lot of other questions answered in the document as well. Since a lot of 501 (c) 3 organizations are associated with 501 (c) 4s which have looser restrictions, they provide some detailed guidance about how closely connected their activities can be. The guide also deals with setting policies for renting your mailing lists, guest bloggers, moderating blog commenters, using photos, hosting videos.

It is clear that there are going to be a lot of nuances specific to the activities of different organizations. However, if you have had questions about what is permissible as lobbying and prohibited as campaign support, and don’t have a tax lawyer immediately available, this is a good place to start to find your answers.

Will Buffet Family Foundation Influence Other Funders?

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Non-Profit Quarterly linked to an interview in Fast Company in which Warren Buffet’s grandson talks about his approach to philanthropy as he takes up the reins of the family foundation.

As I read the interview, I vacillated between mild dread where I hoped no one else decided to adopt the approach and feeling that his approach was sensible and might provide leadership that would strengthen the general non-profit infrastructure in the United States.

What made me most uneasy was his focus on quantity over quality.

“The first question, for instance, is “Assuming we are successful, how many people would we reach directly with the funding of this gift?” Proposals gets 3 points for affecting +1 million people, 2 for greater than 100,000, and 1 for less than 100,000. Those proposals with a less ambitious scope can secure a coveted spot on the portfolio team by being particularly unique or cost-efficient.”

While he does allow for funding of smaller efficient and effective organizations, I just wonder if that will get lost in the desire to report numbers served and therefore reinforce the idea that you have fudge numbers and always report success or lose funding.

Where this is coming from for him is wanting to get away from non-profits making emotional appeals and move toward discussing the complex factors which contribute to the problems the non-profit is trying to address.

“In the philanthropic world, the problem is the product, in the business world, the product is the solution.” says Buffett, who argues that NGOs are forced to “sell suffering.” The needless focus on sappy narratives often overlooks sophisticated solutions that can’t be easily marketed with a T-shirt-clad celebrity holding a small child.”

This is where I feel he is most sensible because he is determined to fund every step in the chain to addressing a problem, including the unsexy areas. But to do that, he wants the redundant organizations to either get out of the business, partner with other groups or refocus themselves.

“…rather than dolling out cash to independent, uncoordinated actors with the most heart-string-tugging story, they could take on an entire social problems (like food security or breast cancer) by systematically lining up nonprofits to tackle each part of the causal chain, from federal policy to victim resources.

“If you are an NGO, doing the exact same thing as another NGO, and that other NGO is doing better than you’re doing it, then you are in business for the wrong reason,” Buffett says in an exasperated rant against the individualist nature of charities. Overlapping operations, he says, not only waste money through redundant overhead, but keep brilliant minds occupied with logistical distractions that sap their potential impact.

“We will give you money to execute your mission,” Buffett says, “if you work together and identify the most cost-effective and successful ways to achieve that.”

Meanwhile, looking at the entire causal chain of a crisis is key to revealing missing links in the solution, such as political or logistical hurdles that are essential to success, but not appealing enough to raise dollars.”

Granted, the focus of the foundation he is leading is on agriculture, water and feeding school children rather than arts and culture. However, the practices of a Buffet family foundation is bound to have widespread influence with funders in other areas. It is possible that other foundations may use the same criteria.

Given that the question about whether there are too many arts organizations in existence has been a hot topic of late, it is conceivable that funders are already thinking along these lines.

So let me ask-

-how many arts organizations would seriously discuss merging or refocusing if a major funder told them they were redunant and less effective than another organization?

-how many might consider abandoning major activities that were redundant if the funder offered major support to expand in their areas of strength?

-would the arts in your community be more vibrant if there were groups that focused specifically on different niches within the chain? Such as:

-organization that handed advocacy for the arts with local government
-organization that focused on advocacy for the arts in education in conjunction with other advocacy groups
-organizations that purely perform
-organization that coordinates outreaches to schools by designing programs that emphasize the strengths of the performance and presenting groups

There are more functions that different groups might handle, of course, but this serves as a good example. You might look at this and think about how difficult it would be with all these tasks so decentralized, but think about how more schools would benefit if there was an organization that was making an effort to provide uniform coverage of your entire city/county. How much easier would it be for artists to make a living in the community if there was an organization that was hiring them to do outreaches in schools or connecting artists with students seeking instruction.

All this in an environment made conducive for these activities by groups who solely focused on influencing law and policy in government and school boards. Their advocacy is made credible by the existence of organizations who attract and employ strong performers and other organizations who develop exemplary education/outreach programs and train the artists to execute them effectively.

This approach may decentralize efforts and require a lot of cooperation between different groups, but does improve on the current situation where everyone does a little of everything with different degrees of success provided they have the funding and personnel.  As Howard Buffet acknowledges, there is a lot of unsexy infrastructure that no one really wants to fund that is crucial to the success of non-profit efforts. What a boon it would be if someone would fund all those places at a level smart people would be willing to engage in the work.

Yeah, Sometimes It IS Boring

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I wasn’t quite sure what I was going to post about today, but Adam Thurman at Mission Paradox decided me with his post today about reducing the opportunities for audiences to be anxious about their attendance experience.

He starts his post:

When I picture someone entering a live performance venue I imagine a thought bubble above their head. Here’s the thought inside that bubble:

“Man, I hope this doesn’t suck.”

Interestingly enough, that is what I was thinking when I was driving to see a dance show this Saturday. I didn’t have too much basis for real concern since I knew the curators who put the show together and had worked with close to half the groups who would be performing. On the other hand, the event was billed as cross cultural and you never really know how successfully performers will execute their vision of what that means.

I think most of you with any experience in the arts know what I mean. Like me, I am sure you have seen some pretty awful stuff performed right after some pretty good stuff and are uncertain how the night will turn out.

Question is, do most people in our audience members know we have the same concerns abut enjoying the as they do? Do they know we can be worried about not liking the performance or being bored?

I suspect they don’t. I suspect they feel our disappointment with a performance will be expressed in terms of the failure of its attempt to illuminate the futility of the post-modern vision against the fin-de-siecle fatalism of the last decade.

Andrew Taylor once wrote he felt it was counter productive for arts organizations to never admit any program supported by a grant did not perform as planned or better.

“It’s an insight as old as theater — conflict, flaw, and tension are what make narratives compelling. And yet, read through most arts marketing materials or grant applications and what will you find? Perfection, triumph, success, and positive spin. Their performances are always exceptional. Their audiences are always ecstatic. Their reviews are always resounding (or mysteriously missing from the packet). Their communities are always connected and enthralled. In short, they are superhuman, disconnected, and insincere.”

I would say the same is true with audiences. We advertise everything we do as the most exciting and seminal work they will ever see but never concede audiences may not be in ecstasy every moment they are in the theatre. As a result, audiences expect to be in ecstasy and may either decide there is something wrong with them for not feeling amazed or decide they have been had by a bunch of B.S.

One of my favorite episodes in Drew McManus’ “Take A Friend To The Orchestra” program came about 6 years ago when Drew took the brother of WNYC Sound Check host, John Schaefer, to a concert by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. Jerry Schaefer had never been to an orchestral concert before. One of the parts that impressed me the most was that Drew admitted that he often gets bored at times during a concert and that it was okay to be bored at times.

I am not suggesting a full confessional after every performance outlining everything that went wrong. One common theme on this blog has been the idea that we need to speak about the arts experience in everyday life –when we are waiting online in the supermarket, at parties and picnics, in elevators and on buses. I am not talking about announcing your boosterism aloud in public places, but rather getting people to talk about their experiences, fears, anxieties, passions, etc., in relation to the arts. Part of that conversation needs to be acknowledging that, yeah sometimes it is boring; sometimes is it bad; sometimes it is confusing, even for those of us with a lot of experience.

The benefit people in the performing arts have as audience members when it comes to artists who are not household names is that we may often know more about the artist’s reputation than most. We can enter a performance space or gallery with a higher degree of confidence about the experience than others might.

This isn’t a peculiar characteristic of the arts, it just comes with exposure and experience. Sports fans will know what match ups are likely to be most exciting than will a new attendee to a game. Sports fans will recognize when a high stakes situation is developing while a novice allows their attention to wander.

While there are entire cable channels and sections of newspapers dedicated to educating people about why certain sports match ups will be exciting, the Arts and Entertainment channel shifted its focus in other directions and newspapers are dropping their culture reporting. The arts have to mostly rely on word of mouth and those with the most knowledge aren’t really speaking often or in a compelling manner that acknowledges the beauty and the flaws that make the beauty all the more remarkable.

And believe me, I include myself among those not communicating in a basic, honest manner devoid of marketing spin.

Funding The In Between Places

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Scott Walters over at Theatre Ideas has been looking at how the National Endowment for the Arts distributed funds for its “Our Town” grant program. In the last three posts on the topic, he has been critical of the way the granting process is structured and executed, perceiving a surprising bias against rural communities given that it takes its name from Thornton Wilder’s play set in a rural location.

Scott’s initial criticism sort of deflated my sails when, by his criteria, the award to the Wallkill River School, Inc. in Orange County, NY where I grew up was not being made to a rural arts organization given the population of the county. I was excited to see that their project whose purpose is “To support the development of economic strategies for long-term, sustainable partnerships between the arts and agriculture in Orange County,” was funded.

I have to concede that the population has increased quite a bit since I was growing up and its psychological distance from New York City has diminished since then. (Though it still qualifies as “way upstate” in minds of NYC residents.)

I was also happy to see that the Trey McIntyre Project (TMP), headquartered in Boise, ID had gotten a grant. (Full disclosure, we will be presenting the dance company in Spring 2012.) Though it isn’t rural per se, Boise qualifies as fly over country in many people’s minds. I have found Trey McIntyre’s decision to locate there rather than NY, Chicago or L.A. to be commendable—and so has the population of Boise who treat them like celebrities. The group has made great efforts to expand the concept of a dance company’s place in the community by appearing anywhere and everywhere from flash mob like performances to dancing at the local NBA farm team games to creating their own art installation in a hotel room (forward to 3:30 to hear McIntyre talk about the installation)

I was also very happy to see a local burgeoning effort in support of Hawaiian culture was funded as well. I can probably devote an entry explaining how valuable this award is going to be in planting seeds for greater things.

All this being said, I felt Walters did a credible job in his entry today arguing that many elements of the application and review process placed rural arts organizations at a disadvantage.

As Walters acknowledge in his analysis on Monday, the NEA did make an attempt to enlist the participation of arts centers in rural areas and didn’t receive a very strong response. However, in reviewing the comments on his failed grant application, Walter notes that the criteria being used to evaluate his application wasn’t appropriate for the project he was proposing.

“When I consulted the NEA as to why my own “Our Town” grant was not funded, the notes from the review committee focused on excellence: WHO is going to be providing the art, and what are their credentials? Notice that my proposal was for a participatory arts program, and so the artists would be members of the community, not imported “professionals” from outside the community. Participatory arts, as the NEA knows from having recently published it own studies on the subject, is about enhancing the creativity of the citizenry. Credentials and press coverage are irrelevant.”

He also notes that since rural arts organizations don’t have large staffs, the three weeks notice they were given between being invited to apply and the deadline was barely enough time to compose a proposal. When they made it past the first stage, they were given only a month to assemble a complete proposal, an immense task given the length of the application and the limited staff with which to do it. These small staffs may also lack the experience and advisers to guide them in infusing the grants with the polish that granters like the NEA have come to expect.

I actually faced a similar situation here. A grant program sponsored by the National Endowment for the Humanities specifically focused on community colleges was announced in June with a deadline in August. One of the things they are looking for is involving up to 12 other colleges in a partnership. So not only do you need to try to assemble a work group of professors and administrators on your own campus during the summer after everyone has scattered to the winds, you have to get buy in from the same nearly non-existent groups on other campuses as well!

Via the citation of a comment by Ian David Moss, Walters wonders if the NEA is suited and equipt to directly pursue its mandate of geographically diverse funding. He discards Moss’ idea of directing more funding to trusted partners in rural states and letting them make decisions in favor of asking the NEA to become more accountable by cultivating stronger relationships with organization that work closely with rural arts groups and making a better effort to recruit people with an understanding of rural arts operations to serve on grant review panels.

While I disagree with Walters’ criteria about what constitutes rural, I am generally with him about the need to make the grant process more accessible to arts organizations in small communities. A decade ago, heck, even 5 years ago, I would have said the NEA faced an immense task trying to identify and reach out to rural organizations. But with email and social media, it is fairly easy to create focused email lists and Twitter feeds with which to deliver information to these groups.

It is just a matter of enlisting the rural arts service organizations that provide support to these groups to assist them in making them aware of the channels the NEA will be using to communicate with them. As Walters suggests, a time table and structure that recognizes both the limitations and different array of opportunities specific to rural arts organizations. Given how few organizations applied, even an increase of participation by a handful of groups will allow the NEA to claim a many fold percent growth in rural program support.

Trespassing Won’t Make You Many Friends

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The Non Profit Quarterly had a piece by Simone Joyaux which I suspect reflects what will be the necessary practice in fund raising for the future.

She asks fund raisers to stop asking their board members to trespass on their family and friends.

Trespassing is when you ask your friends or colleagues to give gifts and buy tickets . . . just because they are your friends and colleagues. This is the personal and professional favor exchange. This is obligation to a person rather than a cause. It’s a lousy way to raise money. It’s offensive. It alienates the asker and the askee. And it’s not sustainable.

[…]

How often have you, as a fundraiser, asked your board members to name names? How often have you asked them to bring in a list? Did you ask your board members to write notes on the letters that you planned to send to their list?

I say again, trespassing is a bad idea. It alienates board members. It alienates the friends and colleagues of board members. It doesn’t produce loyal donors or sustainable gifts.

Joyaux advises asking board members to suggest those they believe might be interested in supporting one’s organization and then inviting them to learn more about the organization. In the process of interacting with these people, one can gauge whether they are interested in what the organization does and perhaps what specific manifestation of the mission they may be disposed to supporting. From there you can work on cultivating a relationship with them that may see them more involved with the organization.

This suggestion isn’t terribly earth shattering or new. I have heard Kennedy Center President Michael Kaiser say this is essentially what he does to garner support for the organizations he leads. When I first heard him speak about how he evaluates what people may be interested in and only really approaches them in relation to their interests, it seemed a less daunting and more considerate approach than soliciting everyone for every cause, even though it is much more time consuming.

As Joyaux notes, existing supporters like board members are probably going to be more comfortable implementing an organizational relationship building approach. After all, they invested the time to develop their personal relationships with friends and colleagues. While they may be willing to donate the fruits of that investment to their favorite non-profit, those relationships were built on entirely different circumstances which may not be entirely compatible with a request for support of a non-profit.

Now that social media allows people to be approached for their support every time they turn on a computer or pick up the phone, it is likely that only those organizations that take the time to cultivate a relationship with people will earn sustained support.

Not that social media won’t be a good tool for keeping people engaged with the organization’s work. It may just not be the strongest method for the organization and individual to gain a good mutual understanding and appreciation of each other’s priorities.

N.B. My apologies. Some how I ended up omitting the link to Joyaux’s piece when I first posted this entry.

Info You Can Use: Arts in Medicine

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A commentary by Dr. Gary Christenson on the Minnesota Medicine website offers the most complete listing of the benefits of arts in medicine I have yet seen. Whether the piece inspires you to partner with medical services or not, it provides evidence of the benefits of the arts to use alongside illustrations of the intrinsic, economic and educational values.

The commentary starts out relating an anecdote about an actual emergency “stat” call for musicians in a hospital. While acknowledging that such an incident is a rare occurrence in medicine, Dr. Christenson shows that the arts are already playing an important role in the practice of medicine:

(my apologies for the length of the citation. While I did pare it down to a large degree, there were just so many exciting and compelling examples, it was difficult to decide what to excise.)

“Although some might be inclined to dismiss the arts as a triviality, luxury, or unjustified expense in a time of concern over rising health care costs, research is showing that use of the arts in health care can be cost-effective. For example, a recent study done at Tallahassee Memorial HealthCare demonstrated that using music therapy when preparing children for CT scans significantly reduced use of sedative medications, associated overnight stays, and nurse time, and resulted in a cost savings of $567 per procedure. It also decreased the need for repeat CTs because of poor-quality scans. When extrapolating those numbers to all pediatric CT scans done in the United States, researchers estimated a potential savings of $2.25 billion per year.”

1. Studying the arts makes medical students into better doctors.

“In our state, storytelling and theater have been used to teach students how to effectively take a medical history. Last year, for example, Mayo Medical School and the Mayo Clinic Center for Humanities and Medicine partnered with the Guthrie Theater to offer the one-week selective “Telling the Patient’s Story,” which drew upon improvisation and storytelling to teach students to take and report patients’ medical history.”

“Harvard Medical School has found that training medical students in the visual arts can help them develop their clinical observational skills. Students who participated in formal training consisting of art observation exercises, didactics that integrate fine arts concepts with physical diagnosis topics, and a life-drawing session demonstrated better visual diagnostic skills when viewing photographs of dermatological lesions than students who only received conventional training.”

“The arts also can convey lessons in ways traditional lectures cannot. It isn’t surprising that the top-rated lecture by first-year medical students on the University of Minnesota’s Twin Cities campus for seven consecutive years was a reading of physician and playwright David Feldshuh’s Miss Evers Boys by Guthrie Theater actors. The play, about the Tuskegee syphilis experiments, illustrates ethical issues related to informed consent and human experimentation.”

2. The arts have therapeutic benefits.

“Museums such as the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Minneapolis Institute of Arts have programs for patients with Alzheimer’s disease and memory loss that use visual and cognitive stimuli to evoke memories. Dance has been shown to improve the mobility of patients with conditions such as fibromyalgia and Parkinson disease.”

“Storytelling has been noted to improve the quality of life for cancer patients,10 increase lung function associated with asthma, and reduce symptoms and doctor visits. One report noted that regularly playing the Australia didgeridoo decreased apneic episodes for patients with obstructive sleep apnea.”

3. The arts can help prevent disease.

“..a campaign to decrease heart disease in England found that people were much more responsive to the message, “Dance makes the heart grow stronger” than to “Exercise makes the heart grow stronger.” Dance is one of the best ways to improve health on a number of levels. In addition to its physical benefits, dance enhances social engagement, which is important to overall health and well-being, and it’s one of the best activities for delaying the cognitive decline associated with Alzheimer’s disease.”

4. The arts can improve the patient experience.

“…a body of research has shown that patients tend to be less stressed, less anxious, require less pain medication, and ready for discharge earlier when their environment includes views of the natural world.”

“Bedside visits by musicians and artists also distract children from pain and help them explore their feelings about their illness.”

5. The arts can promote physician well-being.

“…Although many physicians were involved in the arts before entering medical school, they put those activities on hold during their training. University of Minnesota medical students have an opportunity to keep those interests alive… The program…provides students with a small financial award to pursue and develop their interests and skills in such diverse areas as painting, drawing, singing, clowning, photography, and playing an instrument as a way to find relief from the rigors of medical study.”

Using the arts to reduce costs, provide relief and focus to patients and produce more effective doctors, what isn’t to love? As with all things, arts are only one part of bolstering well-being and providing better medical care. There is certainly a potential for it to become a much more important element in providing better medical care if employed and studied to a greater degree.

Dr. Christenson provides 20 footnoted references for his commentary which seems a good place to start for those looking to develop programs and partnerships to integrate the arts in medicine. The research is also obviously a good basis for advocacy about the value of the arts.

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