Arts Funding and Diversity in Oregon

The Oregonian reported this weekend that the city of Portland would start to tie arts funding to the diversity of the art organization’s board, staff and ultimately audiences.

Specifically, arts groups will be asked to increase the ethnic makeup of their staff, boards and contractors. Their audiences, too, may become more diverse through marketing and outreach. Organizations will also be expected to spend more of their budget — 30 percent being the ideal — on communities of color.

It appears the hope is that by shifting the composition of the board and employees, the type of programming will shift to be more inclusive. Though I think there is some potential for problems, I appreciate the intention behind the plan. Change the culture of your city through its arts and cultural institutions. The arts and culture community is probably a good place to start with such efforts because they are likely to regard the goal as a worthy one.

There are some practical problems as mentioned in the article. First, federal law prohibits making hiring decisions based on race.

Another problem noted is the lack of resources arts organizations have to perform the assessments and programs to which the money is tied. That said, the article notes there are plans for a new levy to fund arts organizations and arts education in the schools. This is encouraging because it acknowledges that the arts require a more supportive environment in which to operate and pursue these programs.

One thing I am most concerned about is that the programs offered to communities of color be appropriate to those communities and not simply extensions of activities which appeal primarily to Caucasian audiences. While some programs may be equally well received by all audiences and it is just a matter of making them more widely accessible, we already know that the demographics who have traditionally comprised arts audiences don’t view traditional arts programs has having relevance to them. There is a good chance that people outside of those demographics will perceive the programs as even less relevant to them.

Designing a program that is meaningful to different communities is possible. It just takes additional time and resources, two things arts organizations have in short supply. It is much easier to use a similar approach in all instances. Is there enough funding being offered by the city of Portland to make it worthwhile to customize programming?

However, since many arts organizations currently have no choice but to change their approach to their audiences and communities if they wish to continue operating, perhaps this is the most suitable time to implement this policy. If you are struggling to discover how best to engage your community, you might be open to considering expanding the definition of your community.

Do you think Portland’s plan can succeed? Not all the guidelines have been set, but do you think this is the correct approach.

One last thing to ponder. In the article Mayor Sam Adams is quote talking about the criteria they will use.

“Adams says organizations shouldn’t be intimidated by the measures. Increasing racial diversity on staff and boards and spending more money on communities of color will be just two of several factors that determine public funding. And when they are used, they’ll be interpreted flexibly. Different groups face different challenges, he says. “

I felt a little relief knowing there wouldn’t be a hard benchmark for funding. I think there has to be flexibility. On the other hand, I am a little concerned about how flexibly the criteria will be interpreted. It is one thing for private foundations to favor the same organizations with large amounts of funding. But there needs to be a higher degree of equity and transparency in the process of disbursing public funding.

Better to have clear guidelines from the outset about the type of outcomes are valued by the funding program than to sanction loose interpretations which allow the rationalization why an organization should be funded.

My perception is that this is the toughest part of funding. How do you allow for both a small organization that works with the same 20 people once a week for 9 months and a large organization that reaches 20,000 people once in the same time frame? Which is valued?

Now throw issues of race/ethnicity in as a factor and it becomes more complicated. (Yes, I am aware that diversity encompasses more than just race, but race is generally the most volatile aspect and is one of the stated criteria.) The stakes become a lot higher when you say racial composition matters and people can see where the money is going. If a medium size organization increases diversity by three on their board of ten and a large organization only increases their diversity by one on a board of 25 and the latter gets more funding in proportion to their budget, what will people think?

Does it matter that the one person on the larger board is more influential than the three on the smaller board and will potentially increase the reach and effectiveness of the organization? Well, I guess it depends on the way the funding criteria is written.

And as I said, with race as a measure, the criteria needs to be very clearly written as do the awards panel’s justifications. Leave too much ambiguity in the rules or the funding justifications and you open the whole process to accusations of racism, raising tensions rather than alleviating them. Funding for the arts is enough of a political issue as it is.

You Don’t Tell Me What To Give, Don’t Tell Me What To Say

An interesting question was posed to Kelly Kleiman, the Nonprofiteer, about the practice of suggesting donors increase their giving from the previous year. The writer was offended at being told what to give the next year. Kleiman attributes the origins of the practice to universities who, anticipating the increased fortunes of their graduates as the moved along in their careers, asked for slightly greater amounts as the years progressed.

This seems like a great thing and, in fact, is the reason individual giving is such an important source of funds to organizations: while foundations often won’t continue their support unless you do something new and different for every grant, most individuals will just keep on giving unless you affirmatively offend them.

But what you’re saying is that the request for elevated support is just such an affirmative offense.

The problem is that the cost of everything continues to go up, and unless the monetary inflow goes up at the same time the agencies you support will find themselves seriously behind the 8-ball. Perhaps the agencies requesting your increased support would do better if they reminded you of that—”We haven’t been able to give our actors a raise for five years while their rents and grocery bills just keep on rising”—rather than beginning with a flat-out demand that you do more.

I thought the question and answer gave some interesting insight into the whole practice of “upselling” donors from year to year as well providing some guidance about how make the request a little more graciously.

What made me cringe was the second part of the writer’s question/complaint.

“And this year, when, as a board member, I was given the fundraising “ask” letters that were going out under my name to my personal contacts, I felt especially irritated to see the request for a specific additional amount. I would certainly never have written my friends directly with this request.”

Kleiman responds that the writer is within their rights to feel upset that such a request was going out under their name. It put me in mind of a piece from the Non-Profit Quarterly I wrote on this summer. The author, Simone Joyaux, referred to the practice of having board members solicit donations from family and friends ,as trespassing. She claims it leverages personal relationships rather than an interest in a cause and ends up alienating both the board member and their friends.

Joyaux noted that giving based on trespassing is generally shallow and not likely to persist after the board member has transitioned away from the organization. Unless, of course, the person solicited is genuinely interested in the organization’s cause. In which case it is better to have conversations and identify that interest initially rather than blindly solicit everyone in a board member’s address book.

This post title inspired by Lesley Gore

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zaw1ibwVbPI&w=640&h=360]

Who Is More Important? The Event Or Organization?

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.

Stuff To Ponder: Active Interpretation of Culture

Participating in the Lead or Follow discussion over at Artsjournal.com, Lynne Conner writes the following about audience participation/engagement in performances (my emphasis).

Inviting audiences to interpret the art works we present (make, produce, critique) is not pandering. I wish we would stop this disingenuous habit of conflating an audience member’s inherent desire and cultural right to interpret the meaning or value of a work of art with choosing the agenda for artists or arts organizations. Sports fans engage in some of the most active interpretation in our culture (and as a result experience real satisfaction and pleasure), but that doesn’t mean they choose the plays or create the roster. I mean, come on.

This got me to thinking in a slightly different direction. There are numerous television stations, radio shows and newspaper columns featuring people with high levels of expertise talking about sports, yet thousands of people feel no reservation about expressing a contrary opinion loudly in public places and in blog posts. They can hold opposite opinions about games and players from those of their close friends and still remain close. They are not intimidated by those with greater expertise or by the prospect of hurting their personal relationships.

But have you ever been afraid to express your opinion about an artist or arts experience you have had for fear of either appearing elitist to the people around you, even close friends? Or on the other side of the coin, been afraid of appearing insufficiently knowledgeable? Why is that? Feeling unable to discuss these topics, of course, creates a vicious cycle where people continue to feel they can’t discuss these things.

But can the image problem the arts have be fixed by having more people talking a lot more? Maybe, but it will require a lot of people doing a lot of talking.

It is interesting to me that when a person goes shopping, a large number of choices can paralyze someone and result in no choice being made. However, in the face of hundreds of different opinions to select from, sports fans don’t seem to have a problem sifting through them and generating their own view of things. They don’t worry if they don’t agree with the guys at ESPN despite all the computers, statisticians and analysts the network has in their employ.

When it comes to the arts, people get concerned if they don’t agree with the single person writing the review/preview. Either something is wrong with the reviewer or with them. Sports fans can dismiss a single writer as a bum and find another source of information that more closely agrees with them. It doesn’t matter if it is a wholly unsubstantiated view. The fact it confirms their view can make them more comfortable and confident with their ability to evaluate their favorite sport.

That isn’t so easy to achieve in relation to the arts and is becoming less so as media outlets cut back their coverage.

Its funny because it is so much easier to dismiss the opinion of a single poorly funded person over a corporate television station with the resources to analyze something to death based on a thousand different criteria. Yet in the absence of any other easily accessible information about the performance, people don’t feel they know enough to say the reviewer is wrong, even though they may be absolutely right. On the other hand, ESPN’s analysis may be as close to 100% correct as can be, but it doesn’t bother the sports fan in the least that they are completely wrong in disagreeing with the analysis.

Heck, there are sports fans who have been rooting for teams that haven’t been contenders for a championship in decades. They find some pleasure in being wrong year after year rooting for the wrong team.

How many arts organizations get that much slack after rendering a poor performance?

A lot of the devotion a sports fan feels has to do with a feeling of ownership and investment they have in the team, a sense of kinship they feel with other fans and myriad other factors. Many arts patrons feel the exact same things.

Of course, some elements of the sports experience won’t translate over to the arts. Dancers aren’t going to reminisce about how they were berated by audiences at the beginning of the season but won them over with their technique and heart the way a rookie athlete might. Though audiences for those few performing arts companies who retain the same ensemble from year to year can speak about watching artists develop over time.

There isn’t anything insurmountable standing in the way of people engaging in active interpretation of their arts or cultural experience in the same manner as they do with sports–except that they aren’t doing it. There isn’t an arts and culture police running around enforcing standards on conversations. The only impediments are those largely tacit ones we enforce upon ourselves and each other.

I am going to stop short of suggesting what we must do because I don’t think it is as simple as more arts coverage in the media, more arts in schools, more arts bloggers, more outreaches, more free performances. These may all help, but there are a lot chicken and egg factors to the arts environment in the United States. These things are useless of themselves if no one is receptive to them. How do you create that receptive environment?

At the Arts Presenters conference earlier this month, Braddock, PA Mayor John Fetterman quoted a lesson from Sen. Alan Simpson that any significant change takes seven years. I wonder how long it might take to change the culture of a community to the point where people felt free to engage in active interpretation of arts and culture.