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Maintaining STEAM Pressure To Manufacture Better Art

September 3, 2018

by:

Joe Patti

I am going to be attending the Arts Midwest conference this week so I started scouring my archives for content for Wednesday’s entry. Instead, I came across an old post that is a bit more appropriate for Labor Day.

Back in 2009 I wrote about a New Republic piece that suggested one of the reasons manufacturing has diminished in the US is that business schools started focusing more on finance and consulting back in 1965. So while countries like Germany and Japan have constantly made advances in manufacturing, the US hadn’t been able to keep up.

“Harvard business professor Rakesh Khurana, with whom I discussed these questions at length, observes that most of GM’s top executives in recent decades hailed from a finance rather than an operations background….But these executives were frequently numb to the sorts of innovations that enable high-quality production at low cost. As Khurana quips, “That’s how you end up with GM rather than Toyota.”

I made the following observation about how this situation was finding its way into the arts.

…realized that this describes exactly what people are afraid will happen if arts organizations are “run more like a business.” The fear is that decisions will rest entirely on return on investment and will be divorced from the manufacturing process as it were.

There was a time I would not have imagined that any arts organization would have a disconnect between the administration and the artists…

Nearly five years ago, I cited observations that orchestra administrations were disassociated from the performances and performers. Given all the conflicts and closures since then, I don’t think the overall environment has gotten any better since.

With the increased focus on STEM subjects, I wonder what this portends for the future. Will an emphasis on research and experimentation lead to more innovation in general and have an influence on the arts in the form of data based decision making and technology driven innovation?

Or will the value of the arts continue to be evaluated in terms of quantitative measures?

The fact that the arts community was pretty quick to start insisting that STEM become STEAM to include the arts makes me optimistic for the former scenario, but we need to pay attention to what areas our schools focus on.

Art(ist) Education, Arts in an Age of Technology, Building Public Will For Arts And Culture, State of the Arts, Working In The Arts

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Even Faced With Challenges, People Choose To Fund The Arts

August 29, 2018

by:

Joe Patti

On Americans for the Arts blog, Megan Van Voorhis writes about how voters in Genesee County Michigan approved a millage to support arts and cultural institutions in their county.

What’s particularly noteworthy about voters approving this property tax is that Genesee County’s seat is Flint, MI.

When the topic if government support of the arts is discussed, the question often arises how you can justify support for arts and culture when there are so many other problems to be addressed. Flint, MI has been known for the social and economic challenges it faces in addition to some significant problems with the municipal drinking water supply.

Yet, voters saw some value in supporting a millage proposal that would enhance the arts and cultural environment in their county. Why is that?

Of the three millage proposals that were approved in early August, the arts and culture one passed with the smallest margin of about 3380 more Yeses than Nos. A pretty respectable margin.

Van Voorhis, who grew up in Flint, expresses confidence that the residents of Genesee County will find their quality of life improves as the financial support of the arts and cultural organizations continues over the next decade. She cites a study showing a similar effect in Cleveland when they passed taxes in support for arts an culture.

One of the insights and suggestions she pulls out of the Cleveland study will be familiar to those of you who have been reading my posts on Arts Midwest’s Creating Connection initiative to Build Public Will For Arts and Culture.

Insight #1: Long lasting change involves shifting the way people think
[…]

Try this
Work backwards. Go talk to the people you’re trying to influence and ask them what they care about. What are their biggest challenges? What changes are they trying to effect? Ask them if there are particular ways arts and culture could be helpful to them (or if they’ve even considered arts and culture as part of the equation). All of this information better positions you to illustrate how arts and culture can be woven into and make a difference in those things they care about. Ultimately, you’ll be better positioned to articulate exactly how investment in arts and culture will yield concrete benefits from an angle they already understand.

Creating Connection emphasizes that lasting change requires changing the way people think and that the effort to shift the thinking requires effort over the long term.

Note that Van Voorhis’ suggested approach starts with focusing on the community first rather than the organization. Consider and address their challenges first.

Earlier when I asked why it was that people voted for the millage proposal, what I suspect is the answer is that arts and culture connects with a deep need people have. That need transcends specific arts organizations so it is incumbent upon arts organizations to pay attention to serving that need.

There are more things from the study that she cites and what she cites is only a small segment of the whole study so if you are interested in making a similar case in your community, it may be worth taking a look.

Building Public Will For Arts And Culture

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We Believe There Is A Secret Phrase Even If You Say There Is No Secret Phrase

August 28, 2018

by:

Joe Patti

I wanted to make another visit to the piece on shared power and transparency in grant making F. Javier Torres and Leila Tamari wrote for Inside Philanthropy which I referenced in yesterday’s post. I wanted to address this issue separately in its own post.

Torres and Tamari talk about the lengths they went to provide grant applicants with as much information about how they were applying their criteria as they could.

When we embarked on refining the application process for the NCPF in 2015, we asked ourselves: “How do we benefit by holding our cards close to the vest?” There was no benefit! As a result, we sought to provide thoughtful explanations for why we needed information in a certain format. We also pushed ourselves to remove as much jargon as possible.

[…]

At the next stage of our process (where approximately 7 percent of applicants were invited to submit a full proposal), we made the process more open by providing all applicants with what we’d actually be looking for in the full proposal and site visits. This is the same material we provided to panelists who reviewed all the projects and provided funding recommendations.

However, they said, in their effort to be as clear as possible about the criteria they would be employing in evaluating proposals, they also provided people additional information with which to game the system.

This showed up for us in 2016 when we chose to publish that we were particularly interested in projects focused on community development sectors underrepresented in our portfolio to date. We received hundreds of submissions in which applicants attempted to alter the goals and strategies of their projects into one of the sectors we listed as being “of special interest,” believing this would make them more competitive in the funding process.

More often than not, these projects would have been strong had they been framed in a community development sector more authentic to the work, instead of the ones we stated as priorities for the year. As a result, these proposals were received by our peer review panel as round pegs attempting to fit into square holes, and ultimately decreased their competitiveness.

There are frequent conversations in articles and blogs like mine about how organizations will undermine their operational effectiveness by pursuing grants that ill fit their organization and then by going through the contortions trying to execute grant activities alongside the core programs for which they really wanted the grant money.

Less frequently do funders tell the non-profit community that it was clear to them applicants were proposing something for which they were ill-suited and they would have been more effective taking an approach that reflected their core strengths.

As one who has served as a grant panelist, I can tell you it is often clear that organizations are trying to change color to suit the grant program criteria. It is just that few organizations will come out and generally encourage applicants to avoid taking that approach.

By the same token, the unequal relationship dynamics and opacity Torres and Tamari say the National Creative Placemaking Fund (NCPF) was working so hard dismantle does encourage people to try to game the system.

If you aren’t clear what a granting entity wants, there can be a perceived benefit in correctly guessing the secret combination of words that the granting entity has determined will unlock the funding. There may not really be a narrow set of phrases the granter is looking for, but the opacity of the process means that getting funded reinforces your confidence in your superior ability to read between the lines of proposal guidelines.

Basically, I think in some respects applicants have been conditioned to try to game the system as much as possible. Faced with funders who say they are being completely earnest about what they are looking for, some applicants will be convinced there are some unspoken criteria with which they will align and enable them to gain funding.

Fundraising, State of the Arts

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Writing Contracts With An MOU Attitude

August 27, 2018

by:

Joe Patti

Earlier this month, F. Javier Torres and Leila Tamari wrote a piece on shared power and transparency in grant making for Inside Philanthropy. They were reflecting on some of their practices over the last decade at ArtPlace America’s National Creative Placemaking Fund.

One of the things that caught my eye was their discussion of memorandum of understanding (MOU) with grantees. I had written about MOUs vs Contracts for ArtsHacker about three years ago where I mentioned that MOUs generally aren’t legally binding where contracts are.

Despite the fact they were granting significant sums of money to people, Torres and Tamari say it is that non-binding characteristic that lead them to use an MOU versus a grant agreement.

…we developed customized memorandums of understanding (MOUs) instead of using grant agreements. We chose MOUs because they are intended to be jointly negotiated. They allowed us to share power and build consensus about our relationship and expectations of each other (beyond the financial investment). Through this back-and-forth process, funded projects could request non-financial resources in support of their goals.

While using MOUs was a step in building a more equitable power dynamic, funded projects rarely took advantage of this opportunity, and we recognized we still had the ability to “reject” a request as the holder of resources.

Even though the use of MOU didn’t solve issue of an unequal power dynamic as they had hoped, it struck me that this was a benefit of MOUs I hadn’t spoken about in my original ArtsHacker article. Though as I had written in another ArtsHacker article, even though contracts are supposed to formalize an agreement at the end of a discussion rather than be used as a sort of bludgeon at the start of the conversation, contracts are often employed in this latter role.

So if you want to avoid having either party feel like their options are being limited from the outset, perhaps starting the conversation with the intention of creating an MOU is the best approach. As the conversation evolves, you may feel that the relationship is better formalized with a contract instead.

Granted this is probably overly complicating things because both parties are likely to realize their arrangement really requires a contract from the outset, but starting with an MOU mindset may be more conducive to a constructive relationship.

Management Philosophy, Working In The Arts

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