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“Change Starts From Within” Means You

November 27, 2018

by:

Joe Patti

Cyndi Suarez wrote a piece for Non-Profit Quarterly that bears considering as non-profit organizations make an effort to have the demographics of their staff and boards better reflect that of the communities they serve.

In writing about the challenges faced by people of color entering organizations predominantly staffed by Caucasians, she notes, (my emphasis)

“…they’re expected to both bring a particular value as a person of color and fit into the dominant culture. This puts the person in what one described as being at odds with “the truth in my heart.” The organizations don’t expect to have to change, and it’s extremely difficult for these people of color to address the challenges from within the organization, in isolation from others like themselves or any other support.”

Seems a little silly doesn’t it given how often the phrase, “change starts from within,” is blithely thrown around?

While I have heard discussions about the disconnect between wanting to expand involvement and participation by groups without considering that it will mean changing things about the organization, I hadn’t considered that the following problem also exists:

“…even though that person of color is a symbol of the potential change that often ushers in the money, she usually has no decision-making authority over how that money is used, and it is rarely presented as a budget at her disposal. Or, even worse, as with Carlos, the person is expected to take the lead in identifying the money himself.”

An organization in the initial phases of trying to expand involvement and participation may not be in a place to put a new hire in direct budgetary control of funding, but there should be consideration of creating a strong relationship between the funding and the scope of the new hire’s responsibility/decision making in its use.

Suarez makes other worthwhile observations about the changing dynamics in the work place in her piece. These are the ones that primarily jumped out at me.

Advocacy, Leadership, Management Philosophy, State of the Arts, Working In The Arts

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You Keep Throwing These Terms Around. I Just Want To Know..Will I Get Paid?

November 26, 2018

by:

Joe Patti

Earlier this Fall I had a friend who was relatively new to the business of presenting performances. An agent had rattled off a series of numbers as part of the performance fee deal an touring group was looking to get and my friend had no idea how to interpret those numbers.

I realized these type of arrangements probably confuse a great number of people in the business, both presenters and touring artists, so I wrote an Arts Hacker post about some of the more common deal structures for performances.

If you are a presenter and you don’t know what $40,000/10% NBOR/60-40 split on overages refers to, it is difficult to decide if you can meet your budget for the show.

Likewise, if you are a musician going into a music venue and they are offering you a percentage of net deal, before you accept you’ll want a pretty good sense of what the potential gross is and just what expenses the venue will be subtracting out before you get paid.

Common Deal Structures For Touring Groups

Info You Can Use, Working In The Arts

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Bringing Porches Back Front And Center

November 20, 2018

by:

Joe Patti

While I was at the Arts Midwest conference in November, Joanna Taft, Executive Director of the Harrison Center for the Arts, spoke about the “porching” culture that had developed in Indianapolis and spread across Indiana.

A short time later, she wrote a piece on the subject for Shelterforce. I have written a fair bit about cities that utilize people’s front porches and yards as impromptu stages for music festivals so I am pretty down with the idea of porches and stoops as community gathering places.

Taft focuses on an active return to traditional uses of porches– just sitting outside and chatting with neighbors and passersby.

I will be honest when I first heard about this, I wondered if people were trying to turn hanging out on the porch into a thing by verbing a noun. According to Taft, the practice is outside the experience of so many people that she and her collaborators created step by step guides and videos to help people get organized.

What I did appreciate was that Taft and the Harrison Center recognized that porching on a weekly basis might end up excluding some neighbors for various reasons and made efforts to find solutions.

…it became evident as we monitored social media posts and attended neighborhood association meetings that many longtime residents were being left behind. The neighbors participating in #PorchPartyIndy were sorted by their financial ability and energy level to host a porch party. We wanted to make our porching initiative more inclusive.

…we realized the time had come to not only encourage residents to host their own parties, but for the Harrison Center to intervene and host porch parties for some of our neighbors.

[…]

Before the party, we organized a group of Harrison Center interns to visit the homes of residents we had met through neighborhood association meetings. At those meetings, we noticed that some of these neighbors expressed strong opinions and concern for their community and this convinced us that they had powerful stories to tell. We queried them about their favorite foods and colors to ensure we catered to their porching style.

For instance, we discovered that a neighbor named Miss Terri loves purple, so we arrived with a table for her front yard covered with a purple tablecloth, and served purple carrots, purple chips, and grapes. Miss Jimmie turned 101 and was tired of the same old cake, so we put candles in her favorite dessert, a pecan pie.

Audience Relations, Building Public Will For Arts And Culture

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Building Housing With A Museum At The Center

November 19, 2018

by:

Joe Patti

Almost by chance I came across a piece on Shelterforce from about two years ago relating how turning a community room in Harlem housing community into a gallery lead to the intentional inclusion of galleries and museums in future construction. As they learned about how people used and gathered around the spaces, subsequent construction increasingly focused on arts and educational spaces. The most recent project in 2015 essentially built the housing around a museum.

This was all very intriguing as I have never heard of a housing construction project being planned around a staffed arts & culture space.

Back in the late 90s, Ana-Ofelia Rodriguez, the director of community affairs for Broadway Housing Communities (BHC) decided to turn a community room into a gallery.

Artists would set up their displays at night, and before Rodriguez could enter the building the next morning, she says tenants had critiques for her of the work that had been installed. “We realized that it had to be a permanent fixture because it had a kind of healing property. It made people talk to one another—they didn’t have to like the art, but they were talking and looking forward to the next artist,” she said.

That first effort, The Rio Gallery, was one of the first galleries in North Harlem and is still thriving today. It is visited by both residents of the housing community and people those from greater neighborhood and beyond.

The success of that gallery lead BHC to include a gallery and pre-school in the construction of the next project completed in 2003.

Seeing how the inclusion of galleries and instruction spaces was encouraging greater interaction internally and externally between residents and the larger community, the 2015 completion of The Sugar Hill Project included both the Sugar Hill Museum Preschool and the Sugar Hill Children’s Museum of Art & Storytelling.

The museum features art exhibitions by Harlem and northern Manhattan artists, and its programs are designed “to nurture the curiosity, creativity, and cognition of children ages 3 to 8,” with a heavy emphasis on storytelling.

[…]

With the museum’s target audience of children ages 3 to 8, “the programming should engage both adults and children,” says Baxter. She notes that Charlene Melville, now BHC’s education director, works with museum staff to develop new methodology to engage adults. “Some parents are more familiar with engaging in play and art-making, and some are not. It’s about being flexible and creating lots of diverse opportunities—including through music and storytelling,” Baxter says.

There is probably a lot in this story that runs counter to beliefs about those most interested and willing to participate in creative activities.

There is also probably a lot in this story about how influential elements that are the intentional focus of a community can be in the lives of the residents.

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