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Shrinking Outreach Activities

January 16, 2007

by:

Joe Patti

So my question is what is better for an outreach activity? An hour long lecture/demonstration for 300 kids with limited exposure to the arts in an auditorium where 20 students get a chance to participate for 5-10 minutes or a master class with 20 students with some exposure to the arts get a solid hour at least to actively learn something new.

It is the old quality or quantity debate.

Most people will probably say that both have their place in a well-designed outreach program. The problem for me is that with No Child Left Behind the opportunities for outreach are tilting toward the latter option and that worries me.

Maybe the granting agencies’ preference for big numbers served has become attached to my guilt sense and I have unrealistic expectations. Heck, the blame hardly can be directed at them. Their preference is only a reflection of the larger societal idea that the greater the number of people who like something, the more worthy it is. Reading about how students are bereft of any arts exposure at all also contributes to the sense that one provide the opportunity to as many as one can.

I know for certain that the smaller groups have a higher sense of satisfaction from the experience they receive. (I have decided, from our surveying, that right around 5th grade everything a student sees is dumb and one learns nothing from any experience.) Many of them are artist-teachers who will pass along the insights and knowledge they acquired.

I certainly walk away from both outreach activities feeling that I have made a wonderful contribution to people’s life experience. As time passes though I look back at the smaller events with less satisfaction than the larger ones. To be honest, it will probably be like this forever, or at least until I get old and crotchety and don’t give a hoot any more.

Or maybe funding philosophy will shift on a large scale and focus more on the quality experience for smaller groups thereby reinforcing an ideal with money.

Of course, then they will be criticized for not serving all those poor souls bereft of the experience….

State of the Arts

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Start That Grant Early

January 15, 2007

by:

Joe Patti

If you are considering applying for a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, or the Humanities, or any program run by the government, you will have to go through Grants.gov. My last grant application went in just before they implemented this new program through which all US government related grant applications must pass so I haven’t had to negotiate the system myself.

I did try to get the registration portion of the process out of the way when I got the email telling me that my next grant would have to go through that process. The complexity made my eyes cross and I decided to forgo my usual “get it done well in advance” ethic.

A couple days ago I saw an account of the hair-tearing frustration a woman at Hood College went through trying to assist a colleague submit a grant. I figured maybe I should warn others about what is involved as well.

If you go to the applicant FAQ page on the Grants.gov website you can start to see where the problems arise. First, you can only use Internet Explorer and Windows operating system as that is only thing the grant application software runs on. (Didn’t the government sue Microsoft for monopoly practices?) Firefox is out. If you have a Macintosh, you need to log on to an emulation program that only accommodates so many people at once. (They suggest logging on between 10 pm and 10 am.)

Then you need a DUNS number, register with the Central Contractor Registry from which you will get a Marketing Partner Id Number and will be able to designate an e-Business Point of Contact. Then you need to register with the Credential Provider who will give you a username and password so you can register with Grants.gov as an authorized organization representative.

You may feel lucky if you discover your organization has already acquired all this information. Of course, now you have to discover who it is that has all this information and who Grants.gov recognizes as the person authorized to authorize you as a user. And pray that they have saved all the usernames and passwords for the hoops mentioned above.

All this before you actually get to fill out the grant application. The government really doesn’t want to give you any money. Now I understand better why the United States Artists group I mentioned previously is focusing on funding individual artists. It is said that the best artists are troubled and tormented to some degree. This application process will push those artists over the edge and make mediocre artists better.

Arts in an Age of Technology

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Something In the Water in Minneapolis

January 10, 2007

by:

Joe Patti

In the course of writing my entry two days ago, I noted that the Theatre Communications Group had hired Teresa Eyring as the new executive director just before Christmas. Teresa was most recently the managing director at the Children’s Theatre Company in Minneapolis and will take up her new role in March.

Given that TCG’s previous executive director, Ben Cameron, had worked as a director of Target Stores arts philanthropy efforts, also in Minneapolis, you have to wonder if there is something about that city that makes it a finishing school for executive directors of national arts organizations.

Well, you don’t have to wonder, but it is fun to do so. In light of the new gorgeous facility the Guthrie Theatre just completed, there definitely is something intriguing going on with the arts in the Twin Cities areas.

I kept poking around the TCG website looking for interesting tidbits as I am wont to do. I found one survey about the benefits (health, dental, life, retirement, vacation) theatres give to their employees. Not surprisingly the people working for organizations with budgets of $10 million were better off than those with less than $500,000.

The report provides a reference if you want to cross reference what you might get from your job with the trends in the same budget group. It also mentions some of the non-traditional benefits some places give that might be adoptable to make life more pleasant at your place (Subsidized Yoga, etc).

The other thing on the TCG site that caught my eye was a link to the United States Artists, a joint venture of Ford, Rockefeller, Prudential, and Rasmuson Foundations. The organization was formed from the realization that while support for arts organizations waxes and wanes with the times, the individual artist is never funded very well. Every year they plan to give $50,000 to 50 artists based on the idea that “$50,000 is a common entry-level salary for art college faculty in America today. Hopefully, this funding will enable some artists to pursue their art full time.”

If you are thinking “Oooo, how can I get one of those,” the only way is to work hard at being good at what you do. USA solicits nominations from a group of people whose identities remain secret. Not even the nominators know who else is nominating. The $20 million from the aforementioned foundations is just seed money to start the program. With additional fundraising, they hope to increase the number of awards per year.

Check out the 2006 Fellows awarded last month.

Featured

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It’s Called Contextomy…

January 9, 2007

by:

Joe Patti

..and it is one of the many reasons I have a rule against quoting review blurbs provided in press packets. Contextomy is the practice of quoting people out of context. (The term caught my eye while I was brushing up on logical fallacies.) It has found applications in many arenas, but is widely practiced with movie and theatre reviews as noted in this Wikipedia article.

If you don’t like Wikipedia as a source (though most of that article is footnoted and cited pretty well) here is an article from Gelf Magazine on the subject with many amusing examples of the lengths publicists go to in order to make a dud sound great.
(Added: This article is actually the inaugural entry for a continuing series where the magazine tracks misleading quotes. Didn’t realize that when I first posted.)

I have a suspicion that this practice which is already being recognized by an increasingly skeptical audience may be approaching its final days. The difference is that in the past audiences were suspicious. Now they can access information on the web via their cell phones. As people walk out of movies and performances thinking “Geez, that was godawful, how could she say it was a cinematic tour de force?” they are going go online with their cell phones and search (reviewer) (show name) and discover that the reviewer said the show made Teletubbies look like a cinematic tour de force.

Without the drive home with a stop at Starbucks to buffer the disgust that will inspire them to go online and check things out, the distrust level could skyrocket. That is assuming people weren’t skeptical enough to check things out in advance.

And hey, if I am wrong and the practice flourishes for years to come, at least you have a fancy vocabulary word with which to impress your friends as you mutter “‘Superb and invigorating?’ Bah, it is probably just another case of contextomy..”

General Musings

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