Info You Can Use: Resources For Developing Community Engagement

I have been reading a fair bit lately accusing arts organizations of paying lip service to the concepts of connecting and building relationships with the community. The suggestion is this is something of a euphemism for “what is the least I have to do to convince people to see my show?”

While there may be some truth to this, there are a number of arts organizations who sincerely wish to forge stronger bonds with their communities.

The Association of Performing Arts Presenters recently released a resource for those wishing to develop community engagement activities.

The 14 members of the Leadership Development Institute, comprised of presenters from across the country developed the content for “A Cooperative Inquiry: How Can Performing Arts Organizations Build and Sustain Meaningful Relationships with Their Communities?”

They organize the content into the following areas:

Making the Case – Why is it important to know and connect with community?

Building an Organizational Culture – Why is it important to integrate community engagement into a presenter’s mission/strategic plan?

Connecting with Your Community – How should geographic, socioeconomic and political realities of the community inform an organization’s approach?

Involving Artists – How should artists – who are key stakeholders in the arts ecology – be involved in connecting their work with communities?

Evaluating Impact – How can evaluation serve internal learning and enhanced community engagement?

The material gets the old Butts in the Seats seal of approval because it offers practical solutions. Being part of the Leadership Development Institute requires that you discuss the theories, go back and try to implement what you discussed within the context of your organization and then come back and report to the whole group.

As a result, most of the five areas listed above ends with a “How It Works In Practice” section discussing what did and didn’t work for some of the participants. Each area also has a worksheet associated with it to help guide discussions and planning.

The areas that I read with the greatest interest were the first two, making the case and building organizational culture. It seems to me that if you don’t have a clear understanding of your goals and investment by the staff, all your efforts are likely to come to naught.

I liked the five sample generic case statements they provided because they ran the gamut from invoking Aristotelian ideals to the short and practical,

“Unless our arts organizations continually evaluate our missions and evolve our programming to reflect the communities in which we serve, we run the risk of becoming irrelevant and impotent as a force for social and cultural change in our cities.”

I also appreciated that there was one specifically geared to university campus based art organizations.

When it came to making statements about who the community you served was and who you would like to connect to, I liked their suggestion that an arts organization work a little backwards and start by examining a performance or event that you deemed culturally successful and determine what made it important and relevant.

This appealed to me because so often statements about mission and who you serve are very aspirational. That is how it should be.

But often looking at these statements in the context of an event you feel was successful might contradict some of that self-image if the community you think you are serving well isn’t participating in your greatest successes.

On the other hand, you may discover that you have made greater strides in serving a community than you imagined when you recognize that what you identify as the culturally successful event, while not the best attended or financially rewarding, has had the deepest impact in the community. This may manifest in a hundred small ways that aren’t directly recorded on a balance sheet.

When it comes time to try to build organizational culture around the idea of community engagement, that culturally successful event can provide a great starting point.

Staff can be dubious when new initiatives are introduced so having an example of an event that everyone is proud of provides a set of shared values from which to start a conversation about other efforts in which everyone can feel some degree of investment.

Drama Is A Choice

You may have heard the phrase, “He who yells first, loses.” This is a rule that is often used in beginning acting classes because anger is an easy emotion to go to when faced by the obstacles presented by the other people in your scene or exercise. In order to force the student to explore and exercise all the options available in human interactions, anger is often removed as a choice.

In many instances in real life, this is also the case. Exploding with anger often indicates that a person feels they have lost control of the situation and are trying to reassert control by overwhelming everyone with an exhibition of rage.

Sometimes, people use crying to achieve the same effect. In either case, there is some degree of drama involved.

Seth Godin reminded me of all these things in a recent post where he essentially says people can only process so much drama before a sense of equilibrium is established that allows them to continue to function in the face of it all. (And unfortunately, as we know, if it is a slow news day, people will create a high sense of drama to fill the vacuum.)

The last line is what really drove it home to me.

“But understand that drama is a choice.”

Arts organizations often operate in a sense of crisis and impending doom. It is easy to forget that some of it is of our own making and a result of the way we choose to perceive and process the world around us.

In fact, there was a recent segment on This American Life that dealt with the personal narrative a Bosnia refugee told himself about all the lucky breaks he had received which lead to his current success.

The high school teacher he credits with giving him the one critical break that allowed him to become a renowned economist says his perception of the entire situation and the seminal incident are almost wholly incorrect. However, it isn’t long before he starts to reweave his narrative to support his belief he has benefited from a long series of lucky breaks.

You Wanna Come Upstairs And See My New Etchings?

There are days like today when I simultaneously feel invigorated to be working in the arts and grossly inadequate for having been remiss in forging relationships and participating in other arts disciplines.

I went to the local museum today to ask them to put up a poster for a show we are going to be presenting in a couple weeks.

I ended up in the executive director’s office briefly chatting about an email I had sent suggesting possibly collaborating on a grant, though I only had a vague idea for a project.

The artistic director  burst out asking if I had wanted to see some pieces they had brought back from New Orleans for a show they were going to put together. Suddenly I found myself in an area of the museum I didn’t know existed looking at African ritual masks and other works.

Apparently a university in New Orleans (I believe it was Southern University of New Orleans) has long been the beneficiary of doctors at various hospitals around New Orleans who have brought back works from research trips to Africa.

The university campus was damaged by Hurricane Katrina and now the building which housed these works was about to be renovated. Rather than store the works in a warehouse for the next few years, the university is placing the pieces in the custody of our local museum. The museum in turn is going to organize the works into shows that will be lent out to other museums.

Most of the pieces are still boxed up, but I was fascinated by the stories of the pieces conveniently at hand they were showing me. In my excitement at having the opportunity, I also felt some regret that I had neglected to really explore the visual arts until the last five years or so.

Granted, I recognize that the experience I was having was as much a confluence of personalities and opportunity as my having taken the initiative to make that first visit to the museum. Not every performing arts facility manager is going to be able to walk into a museum and establish a relationship with the directors that results in an exclaimed invitation to explore the contents of shipping boxes.

(Though I had the romantic Indiana Jones-esque notation of wooden crates with artifacts nestled in excelsior versus the rather mundane Uhaul shipping boxes and bubble wrap.)

The dynamics may not exist where a performing arts director can walk into the Museum of Modern Art in NYC and get a backstage tour of the conservators’ workshops.

Still, the overtures for these relationships probably don’t happen enough. I bet Nina Simon would be all over the right opportunity to collaborate with a performing arts organization around Santa Cruz. Maybe this sort of thing hasn’t happened as a result of a sense of rivalry, perhaps out of disinterest, or maybe like everyone else, a sense of intimidation of an unfamiliar art form.

I think we are all getting the sense that the time when we can comfortably work isolated from each other is coming to a close. At the very least, an improved understanding of the flora and fauna of the greater arts ecology is going to be necessary.

Even if they never find a project to work on with each other, arts people from different disciplines can provide useful feedback to one another.

For example, after hearing the interesting story about each of the pieces, I told the directors I hoped they would include that in the display rather than a small plaque saying “Female Rite of Passage Mask, Ibo Society.”

They already intended to have a much more descriptive display, but I think it is valuable to have someone else reinforce the idea that the story is interesting and important to the enjoyment of a piece. Seeing someone enthusiastic about their work can be infectious and energize you about your own.

And if your colleague is excitedly babbling about something that seems entirely obscure and arcane to you, a close relationship can allow you to point that out and guide them to a more accessible discussion of what is interesting about the piece. You are enough of an outsider to be confused by challenging terminology a colleague in their discipline might not catch, but enough of an insider to know where to start providing guidance.

And of course, you can get a new perspective on your own practices. I implied not liking the sparse plaques in museums, but there is a debate in visual arts circles about how much and what type of information to provide and how much to leave up to the viewer.

Have you ever thought about whether your performances are helped or harmed by the amount of information you provide audiences?  As an audience member/viewer does it affect your enjoyment to learn that your interpretation of a work is diametrically opposed to that of the creator? Would you be happier not knowing?

What Will You Do If You Win?

Economist Alex Tabarrok has written about the fact that the primary activity of firefighters is no longer fighting fires. Fires are less frequent than in the past thanks to building codes and other preventative measures so municipalities are finding additional tasks for fire fighters to perform.

What caught my eye was his comments:

“…explains it in terms of what’s called the “March of Dimes problem.” When polio was defeated, the March of Dimes, started under Franklin Delano Roosevelt to combat the disease, suddenly had no reason to exist. “They were actually successful, and it was something they never planned for,” said Tabarrok. “But instead of disbanding the organization, they set it onto a whole bunch of other tasks…and so it’s kind of lost its focus. It’s no longer easy to evaluate whether it’s doing a good job or not.”

This immediately brought two things to mind. First, that this was a good illustration of the value of embracing the idea of building an expiration date into your organization at the time of formation.

The other thing it evoked was the oft expressed warning against chasing funding for projects outside the scope of your core purpose just because the funding exists. Not only does it cause an organization to lose focus, but as Tabarrok notes, it is difficult to evaluate if your work is really effective any more.

It occurred to me that one of the benefits of building a planned expiration into your organization is the ability to declare a win. That is something that non-profits don’t often get the opportunity to do given the way they are often structured.

If you read about the vision behind arts organizations with expiration dates, achieving the expiration condition doesn’t necessarily need to result in an absolute dissolution.

In many cases, it can just be an opportunity to reorganize a similar group of people to address a new project without feeling an obligation to perpetuate anything from the previous entity. In many respects, it contributes to organization evolution by discarding what didn’t work or is no longer relevant and allowing experimentation with some new ideas.