The Route 1 journey has been completed, and I’m now on my way back up after a celebratory couple of days in Key West (where I wrote part of this post). Strangely, it seems that goings-on in the world have not halted in my absence, so here’s a round-up of what’s been popping up in my RSS reader:
- More beating the drum for a high-level arts policy director position in the federal government. The arts policy document I mentioned a couple of weeks ago is now up at change.gov. Isaac offers a cogent vision for cross-departmental government arts support, and Adam responds.
- A new resource center for program-related investments debuts at the Boston College Center for Corporate Citizenship. Hitting a number of themes discussed during the recently concluded Yale SOM Philanthropy Conference, the center “will work to expand the field of mission investing through the sharing of tools, best practices, lessons learned, and ideas for products and services that could move the field forward,” according to its press release.
- I missed this one the first time around, but the Chronicle of Philanthropy posted a list of its most widely-read articles from the past year. One of these was a screed by Mark J. Drozdowski about bad fundraisers who keep getting hired again and again and again. A few observations:
- This is definitely a real problem, not just with development directors but with executive directors as well. It’s all too easy for people to “fail upwards” in the arts (as in other industries as well).
- I can’t help but feel that this is what happens when the availability of development positions outpaces the kind of proven, reliable talent that organizations usually seek. The explosion of nonprofit organizations and the expansion of development departments at the nonprofits that already exist worry me for this and other reasons.
- Fixing this problem is probably going to take some drastic changes in the field. Probably the easiest, and the one that already has the most momentum behind it, is for organizations to place more trust in emerging leaders (i.e., millennials and young Gen-Xers who are still in their first decade of experience in the field). They come cheap and often full of idealism, and as the Obama campaign proved, can be extremely effective despite their inexperience if organized properly.
- I don’t think that’s going to be enough though. Grantmaking organizations are going to have to work aggressively together to simplify the application process and make it less resource-intensive for organizations to run fundraising operations. Funders could help to stem the tide by taking more responsibility for the financial success of the programs that they sponsor; that is, by either (a) being open to fully funding program costs if it is within their budget to do so, or (b) playing an active role in facilitating funding coalitions with peer organizations on the program’s behalf. Either approach would take some pressure off of grantee organizations’ own fundraising operations, which in certain cases could be beneficial.
- Finally, infrastructure to allow organizations to share fundraising staff and back-office operations, an extension of what some theater and dance companies are doing with office space, could open up some economies of scale and make fundraising more affordable and efficient.
- Community Arts Network has two recent postings of interest: a history of arts-related public works projects from the Great Depression forwards, and a syllabus for a course at Goucher College in Baltimore called Cultural Ecosystem: The Arts in Community.
- Finally, via PhilanTopic, an online directory of fiscal sponsors from the San Francisco Study Center has debuted. Learn more about fiscal sponsorship here.