In her previous job, Chu oversaw the mid-recession capital campaign that built the Kauffman Center, a major performance venue that is now home to the Kansas City Ballet, Symphony Orchestra and the Lyric Opera of Kansas City. She has a background as a grantmaker, with a PhD in philanthropic studies and a previous post as the vice president of community investment for the Greater Kansas City Community Foundation. A former member of the Greater Kansas City Chamber of Commerce, she may also be well equipped to reach across the aisle – or at least to continue making the case for the economic impact of the arts.

Adams, a Vietnam veteran and intellectual historian, has led arts and humanities initiatives at several colleges, including the Great Works in Western Culture Program at Stanford and a major expansion of the Colby College Museum of Art. His long and varied resume of experience in academic administration marks a shift from Leach, who had been a Congressman for thirty years at the time of his appointment. We hope he will continue his tradition of open forums entitled, “Yo, Bro.”

Glimmers of hope in state and local arts budgets: For the first time in many years, public arts funding is increasing in notable areas of the country. The Florida state budget now officially includes $56.4 million for the state’s Division of Cultural Affairs, vaulting the Sunshine State past New York to take the prize of most generous state arts council overall – even if you exclude the $12.4 million in line-item funding from that total. Not to be outdone, New York City’s 2014-15 budget includes a $23 million boost for arts education, to be directed toward arts specialist positions, facilities, and partnerships with cultural institutions. On the opposite coast, the California Arts Council received a $5 million boost from the state, bringing its total appropriation to about $9 million. Paltry as it may seem compared to Florida’s investment and California’s size, that $5 million is the first significant increase the CAC has received since it was gutted by more than 90% more than a decade ago. Michigan allocated an additional $2 million for the Michigan Council for Arts and Cultural Affairs, and South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley gave arts advocates reason to cheer by refraining from vetoing funding for the South Carolina Arts Commission for the first time since 2011.

Debate over equity in arts funding adds to Bay Area arts turmoil: In what may be a harbinger of feuds in other parts of the country, arts advocates in the City by the Bay clashed with one another over funding for arts organizations serving communities of color. A recent report from the Budget Analyst’s Office claims the bulk of funding distributed by San Francisco’s Grants for the Arts/Hotel Tax Fund goes to organizations serving primarily white audiences. Amid calls to address the disparity by boosting funds to the Arts Commission’s Cultural Equity Grants, which target underserved and culturally specific communities, sharp words flew between sub-groups of arts advocates, some of whom felt the Arts Commission and Grants for the Arts were being pitted against each other. The budget for Cultural Equity Grants is now poised to receive $119,000 previously allocated to Grants for the Arts, with further action by San Francisco’s Board of Supervisors expected in July. This is all on top of the recent shutdown of the San Jose Repertory Theater after 34 years and the dramatic shrinking of San Francisco’s Intersection for the Arts announced last month.

The Detroit Institute of Arts continues on its escape path from the city’s bankruptcy proceedings: The Detroit City Council unanimously approved the museum’s plan to privatize as a charitable trust. The so-called “grand bargain” would ransom the DIA from the bargaining table in exchange for more than $800m in public and private funds to be paid to the city’s pensioners over 20 years. Foundation money currently accounts for more than $350m of that, including major gifts from Ford ($125m) and Kresge ($100m). The museum itself is required to raise $100m of the money; they’re about 70% of the way there, thanks to recent donations from the Big Three automakers ($26m total) and from Mellon and Getty ($10m and $3m). Even if the funds are raised, the deal must still win the approval of pensioners and the presiding judge – which is not guaranteed, as some creditors are calling for part or all of the museum’s collection to be in play to settle the city’s debts.

Creative hubs compete to offer tax credits for film and TV production: A large majority of states offer tax incentives for film and TV production, but the last several weeks have seen several governments advance the arms race. New Jersey’s state Senate passed a bill that would raise the annual cap for film tax credits from $10m to $50m; Austin’s City Council approved reimbursement of up to 0.75% of production companies’ wages; and, not to be outdone, the California state assembly passed a “Film and Television Jobs Retention and Promotion” Act that would add an undefined amount to the current $100 annual kitty. In Pennsylvania, lawmakers may clarify their tax credit rules to better attract feature films and TV series specifically; the shopping network QVC has received more than $26m under the program since 2008. Meanwhile, Boston is kickin’ it old-school: the state legislature is considering incentives to lure live theater headed to Broadway or Off-Broadway to Beantown and the rest of Massachusetts. As we noted in January, the ultimate benefit of incentives like these to citizens is not always clear.

MUSICAL CHAIRS/COOL JOBS

• After seven months, Los Angeles has a new arts czar: Danielle Brazell is Mayor Eric Garcetti’s nominee to head the Department of Cultural Affairs. Brazell, who has spent the last eight years corralling the region’s arts advocates as executive director of Arts for LA, will take up the reins in August.
• Los Angeles also added a high-profile art education leader to its ranks: Rory Pullens, head of Washington, DC’s Duke Ellington School for the Arts, will take over Los Angeles Unified School Districts’ arts education branch in July.
• After fourteen years as Deputy Director and Director of Programs, Grantmakers in the Arts’ Tommer Petersen will retire at the end of 2014. GIA has announced a national search for his replacement.
• Simon Greer has left the Nathan Cummings Foundation following a two-and-a-half year stint as president and CEO. Greer noted he and the Board were “increasingly unaligned around the hard choices that are inevitably part of implementation.”‘
• Sad news: Rebecca Blunk, former Executive Director of the New England Foundation for the Arts, passed away on June 22 at the age of 60.
• The San Francisco Arts Commission is hiring a Senior Program Officer for Community Investments. Deadline: 6/16. Salary: $73-89k.
• Artist Trust (based in Seattle) is looking for a new Executive Director. Deadline: 7/3. Salary: $85-95k.

NEW RESEARCH OF NOTE

• Three new studies examine the link between arts participation and individuals’ sense of life-satisfaction.
• A University of Messina psychologist has linked creative capacity to hormones. Examining a small sample of visual artists, she found evidence of high prenatal testosterone rates among both males and females. A 1999 study of musicians suggested a similar correlation.
• Music education has been linked to increases in mathematical ability – might it help students with reading as well? Unfortunately, it may not do as much for your kid’s skill with the oboe as Malcolm Gladwell believes: a new study finds a strong genetic component to musical talent.
• Last year we outlined best- and worst-case scenarios for the impact of MOOCs on public education. Now, research on the use of educational technology in affluent vs. non-affluent communities suggests the worst-case scenario may be winning, as children from mid- and high-income families benefit more from fancy gadgets and internet access than their low-income peers.
• The National Assembly of State Arts Agencies offers a snapshot of how its members handle fellowships for individual artists.
• Arts Midwest has released a report on its leadership and strategy development program, ArtsLab, including case studies of eight grantees.
• Researchers affiliated with the Cultural Policy Center are preparing a book on the impact of major cultural facilities projects and the mistakes that can drive unwise investment by cities. The book expands on the authors’ previously-released study.

photo by Martha Soukup

In his most recent budget proposal, President Obama is seeking to impose a cap on itemized deductions in the personal income tax return – which includes the deduction for charitable contributions. This provision, part of the administration’s strategy to raise revenue to pay for government spending, has been a part of every White House budget proposal since 2009, and every year arts advocacy organizations join the rest of the nonprofit sector in opposing the changes. So far, the cap has been successfully warded off, but there’s growing concern that if Republicans and Democrats ever agree on sweeping tax reforms, the charitable deduction will be on the chopping block. The fear that limiting the tax deduction will lead to reduced donations to charitable organizations is particularly great this year due to the tax increases that were passed at the end of 2012, prompting the Charitable Giving Coalition to step up its resistance with a new website: protectgiving.org.

While it’s become a popular strategy on Capitol Hill to complain about the lack of progress while refusing to budge from one’s own policy positions, a case can be made that the nonprofit sector’s lobbying on behalf of the charitable deduction has neither improved the financial stability of the sector nor created greater legislative security. At best, it has limited the declines in individual giving in recent years. So rather than simply digging our heels as we head into the next round of budget debates, let’s take a moment to explore a broader range of policy options and see which might make the most sense for the arts.

Before we get to that, though, here’s a refresher on the mechanics of the charitable tax deduction for anyone who needs it.

What is the charitable deduction and how does it work?

The tax deduction for charitable donations was established in 1917, just four years after the federal income tax was introduced. While there have been some changes over the years, in its basic form this provision allows taxpayers to deduct donations to nonprofits and charities from their taxable income. So if a taxpayer earns $50,000 and gives $2,000 to charity, she only has to pay taxes on $48,000. The rationale behind this provision was initially that the taxpayer who gives away $2,000 doesn’t have that money available to spend on herself, so it shouldn’t be counted as part of her income. Nowadays, the deduction is more commonly thought of as an incentive dangled before taxpayers to coax them into donating more money to charity. By allowing taxpayers to deduct charitable donations from their taxable income, the government essentially agrees to pay for a portion of the donation.

Think about it this way: If you earn $1,000 and you’re taxed at a rate of 30%, you have to pay $300 to the IRS and you end up with $700 in your pocket. But if you donate $100 to charity, your taxable income is reduced to $900. Your tax bill then comes to $270 ($900 x 30%). In return for giving $100 dollars to charity the government reduces your taxes by $30, so in the grand scheme of things that $100 check that you write to your favorite opera company really only sets you back $70.

Who benefits from the charitable deduction?

While this all sounds great in principle, there’s a big catch: not all taxpayers benefit from the charitable deduction. Initially the income tax only applied to a rather small number of wealthy Americans, but during World War II it was expanded to affect roughly 75% of the population. Instead of having all of these tax filers list their deductions individually—$42 for prescription medicine here, a $100 donation to a museum there—the IRS introduced the “standard deduction” in 1944. The standard deduction lets all filers lower their taxable income by a fixed amount. For the 2012 tax year that amount is $5,950 for single taxpayers and $11,900 for couples. That means that you only have to keep track of your deductions and itemize them on your income tax return if they exceed $5,950 (or $11,900 if you’re married). That saves a lot of taxpayers (not to mention the IRS) a huge headache, but it also means that the 70% of filers who take the standard deduction don’t get to write off their charitable donations. (One might argue that the non-itemizers benefit from the charitable deduction in a roundabout way, since a typical deduction for charitable donations was factored in when the standard deduction was calculated back in 1944, but the fact remains that the current deduction for charitable contributions and any changes to it are only relevant to about 1/3 of American tax filers.)

For those who do itemize deductions, the amount of the government’s subsidy towards charitable donations depends on the filer’s marginal income tax rate. If you’re in the 35% bracket and you donate $100 to a good cause, the government gives you $35, but if you’re in the 10% bracket you only get $10 back from Uncle Sam. Economists say that the “price of giving” is lower for the individual in the 35% bracket than for the one in the 10% bracket (e.g. note 1 here). Giving $100 to charity “costs” the former (presumably richer) person $65 and the latter $90. While this seems sort of unfair, it’s the result of having a progressive income tax system in which those who earn a lot pay a larger percentage of their incomes into the public purse.

This means wealthy taxpayers not only have more money in their bank accounts to give away, but when they donate to charity the government covers a larger portion of their donations. It is therefore no surprise that the rich are responsible for a large share of charitable giving. Although only 3% of tax filers have annual incomes over $200,000, those households contribute 36% of the money that individuals give to charity every year—a total of $73 billion in 2008. However, the federal government foots the bill for about a third of those donations through the deduction for charitable contributions (assuming that most of the individuals with incomes over $200,000 are in tax brackets with marginal rates over 30%).

One might say, “well it’s all for a good cause, so it doesn’t really matter if the government is paying for a portion of the donations,” but it turns out that taxpayers with high incomes choose to give their money to different causes than those who are less well-off, and the charitable deduction allows them to divert large amounts of government funds to their favorite organizations. The wealthy support educational institutions and the arts to a much greater extent than poor people, who tend to focus their giving on basic needs and religious organizations. The extent to which the arts depend on donors with high incomes for their contributions is quite striking. In 2005, 94% of the funds that arts organizations received through individual contributions came from households with annual incomes over $200,000.

Of course, the donors are not the only ones who benefit from the tax deduction. All of the people who receive services from nonprofits and charities may be considered indirect beneficiaries of this provision in the tax code. However, to determine whether the charitable deduction is the best way for the government to support the work of nonprofits we must take a closer look at the incentives that are created and how people respond to them.

Do donors respond to tax incentives?

The deduction for charitable contributions affects taxpayers in two different ways. On the one hand, we have the “price effect.” As noted above, higher marginal tax rates reduce the price of giving, creating a bigger incentive to contribute to charities. However, high marginal tax rates also mean that people have less money left in their pockets after paying their taxes. In general, if people’s incomes are reduced, one would expect them to become less generous donors. After paying for rent, food, and utilities, they have less money left over for nonessentials like vacations and charitable donations. This is called the “income effect.” Note that the income and price effects work in opposite directions. Higher marginal tax rates incentivize donations through the price effect, but they simultaneously create a disincentive through the income effect.

Several economists have examined donors’ responsiveness to tax incentives over the past few decades, but the results remain inconclusive. Most studies find that donors respond to tax incentives, but the historical record shows that the level of charitable contributions remains relatively constant over time when measured as a proportion of GDP regardless of the available tax incentives. Some studies suggest that higher-earning taxpayers are more responsive to the incentive than those who are less well-off and that there are differences between types of charities (religious, social, educational, etc.) that receive donations. Many policy analyses (CRS, CBO, TPC) therefore calculate the upper and lower limits of a range into which the effects of proposed policy changes are expected to fall rather than a specific estimate.

Considering policy options: goodbye deduction?

To establish the worst-case scenario as a baseline, one might ask what would happen if the charitable deduction were eliminated completely. Independent Sector, an advocacy organization for nonprofits and charities, recently put out a list of FAQs according to which “with no deduction for charitable gifts, itemized charitable giving would drop by between 25 percent and 36 percent total.” This assertion is rather misleading. The study from which Independent Sector gets these numbers states that a taxpayer in the 30% income tax bracket might reduce his contributions by 25-36% if the deduction were eliminated. Since the incentive to donate depends on the filer’s marginal tax rate and 98% of households face rates under 30%, the reduction in the total amount of individual contributions is likely to be much smaller than Independent Sector suggests.

The truth is, we have no idea what would happen if the tax deduction were eliminated. Not only have studies of the price and income effects been inconclusive, but they are all based on observations of how donors have reacted to incremental changes in tax rates and deductibility in the past. These estimates may be useful in predicting the effect of small changes within the range of what’s been observed in the past, but there’s no reason to be believe that the response would be the same once the government’s incentive approaches zero. In fact, economic theory would predict that it’s not the same.

For example, if the deduction were eliminated completely, one might expect some donors to dig deeper into their pockets to keep their favorite charities afloat. However, some wealthy Republicans might cease all charitable donations to protest the fact that they’re having to pay more taxes, secretly hoping to blame the financial hardships of the charitable sector on the Democrats in the next elections. These types of reactions are difficult to predict. One thing is certain: if the indirect subsidy that the government provides through the charitable deduction were eliminated in order to reduce the deficit, individual donors would have to dig deeper into their pockets to sustain nonprofits at their current level of activity. And if the entire nonprofit sector were in severe financial distress, one can easily imagine that some donors would reallocate their gifts towards hospitals and basic social services, compounding the impact on the arts.

Capping the deduction

The good news is that no one has proposed eliminating the deduction altogether. Obama’s 28% cap on deductions, on the other hand, remains a very real possibility.

Obama suggests that the government could increase its revenue by capping deductions at 28% of the donor’s AGI. As mentioned above, the size of the tax incentive is generally determined by the marginal tax rate that taxpayers incur, but Obama’s proposal sets 28% as the maximum anyone can claim. For the vast majority of households, this would be of no consequence. If you’re in the 10%, 15%, or 28% tax brackets, you still get your deduction as normal. But the 2% of filers who itemize their deductions and face marginal tax rates over 28% would no longer be able to reduce the tax on their donations to zero. People in the 30% bracket, for example, would still have to pay a 2% tax on their charitable gifts. They owe 30% according to their tax bracket and they only get 28% back on the donated amount (due to the cap), so the IRS gets to keep the 2% difference.

How might this cap affect contributions to charitable causes? The short answer is that it will most likely result in a minor, but noticeable reduction in contributions. Here’s what people are saying:

• The Center on Philanthropy at Indiana University estimates that the cap will lead to an $820 million (0.4%) reduction in charitable giving in the first year of implementation, increasing to $1.31 billion (0.7%) in the second year.
• In 2010 the Congressional Research Service put the decline in charitable giving in the 0.16 – 1.28% range.
• In a back-of-an-envelope calculation for the Washington Post, Harvard economist Martin Feldstein estimates that the 28% cap could reduce charitable giving from individuals by $7 billion, which amounts to a 3% decline (relative to the $230 billion in charitable contributions from individuals reported in Giving USA 2009).
• Len Burman of the Tax Policy Center and the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities came up with similar figures in 2009.

Taking all of this together, it seems we’re talking about a 0.5% to 3% decline in gifts from individuals.

The impact on arts nonprofits is likely to be a little bit higher than that, since the cap will primarily affect the wealthy taxpayers who contribute most to the arts. The 2010 study by the Congressional Research Service includes an analysis of how the 28% cap would affect different segments of the nonprofit sector. It estimates the reduction in individual giving to the arts to be around 2.4% (compared to 0.16-1.28% overall).

The figures above were calculated based on the tax rates that applied between 2003 and 2012, but as we know, the tax rate for the highest income bracket was increased from 35% to 39.6% at the beginning of this year. How does that change things? If charitable contributions remain fully deductable, we would expect the higher marginal tax rates to increase donations due to the price effect. However, if Obama’s proposal to cap total deductions goes through, the reverse is to be expected—the higher tax rates actually exacerbate the decline in charitable giving caused by the cap. That’s because the higher tax rates reduce the taxpayers’ disposable income, bringing the income effect into play, while the cap on deductions holds the price of giving constant.

The Congressional Research Service estimates that the combined effect of the 28% cap on deductions and the higher marginal rates that Obama sought to impose on taxpayers earning more than $200,000 would reduce giving by 0.28% to 2.27%. That’s almost double the decline that they estimated for the cap on deductions alone (see above). The Center on Philanthropy arrives at similar figures when including Obama’s proposed tax hikes. Those projections still fall within the 0.5% to 3% range mentioned above. If we take the worst-case scenarios for the 28% cap and the largest estimates for the impact of the of the higher tax rates, we might be looking at a 5 or 6% decline in charitable giving.

So it looks like we don’t need to fear that individual contributions will drop by a quarter if the 28% cap were introduced, with or without increases in the top marginal tax rates. Nonetheless, a 5-6% decline is nothing to take lightly, and for organizations that are already reeling from the recent recession even a modest reduction in individual contributions could be the final straw. Moreover, the estimates apply to total charitable donations nationwide, but individual organizations could be unlucky and find that several of their major benefactors scale back their contributions more drastically than the national average, leaving gaping holes in their budgets.

Other options: expanding to non-itemizers and adding “floors”

Faced with this uncertainty, the response from arts advocacy organizations has been to dig in their heels and demand that the deduction for charitable contributions remain intact. However, as Michael Rushton notes, there’s little reason to believe that there’s anything magical about our current tax code; in fact, the charitable deduction has been criticized in the past for several reasons (notably for being inefficient, regressive, and having an unclear theoretical justification). So instead of clinging to the status quo as our only hope for survival, we might ask: what changes to the current system would lead to the best outcomes for arts organizations? How might we incentivize charitable donations while supporting the government’s goal of reducing the federal deficit?

In 2011 the Congressional Budget Office came up with 11 different policy scenarios and estimated their likely impact on tax revenue and charitable giving. These included:

• allowing all taxpayers to write off charitable gifts on their tax returns, rather than just those who itemize deductions
• creating a minimum donation (either a fixed dollar amount or a percentage of the donor’s AGI) which would have to be exceeded to qualify for the deduction
• converting the deduction into a tax credit (which would give all taxpayers the same 15 or 25% tax break on charitable contributions instead of linking it to the donor’s marginal tax rate)

This study found that by extending the deduction to all filers and simultaneously establishing $500 ($1,000 for couples) as the minimum donation required to qualify for the deduction the government would be able to increase revenues by $2.5 billion annually, while boosting contributions to charitable causes by $800 million. Or even better, by replacing the deduction with a 25% tax credit for all taxpayers, the government would save almost the same amount, while driving up donations by 1.5%.

Since the government’s objective right now is to reduce the deficit, presumably without harming the nonprofit sector unnecessarily, Eugene Steuerle of the Tax Policy Center has advocated for expanding the tax deduction to all filers, with a minimum contribution of 1.7% of the donor’s AGI required to qualify. This would net the government between $10.4 billion and $11 billion per year without reducing charitable donations by a dime. The argument for establishing a minimum contribution to qualify (often referred to as a “floor”) is that people are likely to give a small amount of money to charity regardless of whether they receive a tax break or not. It’s therefore not necessary for the government to forgo any revenue for that portion of their contributions. Further, at a certain point the administrative costs of tracking small donations—acknowledging their receipt, submitting documentation to the IRS, checking for fraud—is not worthwhile. For those who object that a $1,000 donation is a far bigger sacrifice for a couple that only earns $20,000 a year than for a millionaire, a floor that is linked to the taxpayer’s AGI might pose an attractive alternative. With a 2% floor, someone earning $20,000 could claim the deduction by making a $400 donation, while someone earning $500,000 would have to donate $10,000 to qualify.

Beyond the bottom line

Reforming the charitable tax deduction might offer other benefits as well. For example, it could provide an opportunity to change the composition of our donor lists. By giving those in lower income categories greater incentives to support our work and allowing them to leverage some of the indirect subsidy that the government provides through its tax breaks, arts organizations might be able to diversify the ranks of their donors, so as to be less dependent on a small wealthy elite. Based on the CBO’s estimates, by replacing the tax deduction with a 25% credit that is subject to a low floor (say 1% of AGI), it should be possible to maintain charitable donations at their current levels or even increase them slightly while saving the government several billions of dollars annually and allowing donors from lower income categories to acquire a bigger stake in nonprofit arts organizations. A more diverse pool of donors, both in terms of their economic status and their tastes, would reduce the financial risk of artistic experimentation and could allow companies to diversify their programming in ways that their current (predominantly wealthy) donors might not support.

All in all, reforming the deduction on charitable contributions isn’t necessarily a bad thing for the arts. There are ways of changing the tax code that could actually increase revenues and diversify the sources of income for arts organizations, even while helping to reduce the federal deficit. Since any change creates uncertainty and will likely produce losers as well as winners, I can understand arts administrators and advocates who would rather stick with an imperfect status quo than commit their careers and their organizations to an uncertain future. However, I believe that participating in the discussion and shaping the outcomes to fit our sector’s interests will ultimately prove more productive than trying to block change from the start.

Art Cars Attack, photo by M Glasgow

(Note: a follow-up to this post, “In Defense of Logic Models,” is now available here)

“I feel like whenever I talk to artists these days, I should be apologizing,” says Kevin Stolarick, Research Director for the Martin Prosperity Institute at the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management. To most in the arts community, Stolarick is better known as Richard Florida’s longtime right-hand man and research collaborator on his bestselling book, The Rise of the Creative Class. Stolarick, who first met Florida just after the academic had cashed the first check for the advance from Basic Books, proceeds to recount how the book’s success led to an explosion of interest from mayors all around the country wanting to redefine their cities as welcoming meccas for Florida’s new Starbucks-drinking, jeans-wearing idea people. Unfortunately, the mayors’ collective interpretation of the lessons from Florida’s book boiled down to, “all we need is to get us some gays and artists and a bike path or two, and our problems will be solved! The problem,” Stolarick tells us, a decade after The Rise of the Creative Class’s publication, “is that it’s a trap.”

This scene is unfolding in a basement auditorium in lower Manhattan, the site of a panel and presentation hosted by the Municipal Art Society of New York to give audiences the first public preview of the ArtPlace vibrancy indicators. ArtPlace, as many readers know, is a private-sector partnership among nearly a dozen leading foundations to support “creative placemaking,” a term invented by officials at the National Endowment for the Arts. Spearheaded by leadership from the NEA, the creation of ArtPlace is perhaps this Endowment’s, and by extension the Obama administration’s, signature achievement in the arts—despite the fact that it doesn’t distribute a cent of government money.

Stolarick’s presence at the event was appropriate, for in many ways it was The Rise of the Creative Class that made the current creative placemaking movement possible. For a time it was the kind of book that smart people buy for all of the other smart people they know – a genuine ideavirus. Florida, more than anyone else, was responsible for conflating creativity, innovation, and artistry in the popular imagination, and among the measures that he and Stolarick developed for the book was a “Bohemian index” associating the concentration of artists in a given metropolitan area with population and employment growth. Though the empirical claims in the book turned out to be built on shaky foundations, they were intuitive (and well-argued) enough that municipal leaders started taking notice. In fact, Carol Coletta, the current director of ArtPlace, was one of the first people to invite Florida to help put his ideas into practice in a real city context as co-organizer of 2003’s Memphis Manifesto Summit. Florida, Stolarick, and their associates became the first widely acknowledged spokespeople for the idea that a vibrant set of opportunities and amenities for creative expression could lead to regional economic prosperity.

But Florida wasn’t the only one drawing public attention to the economic power of the arts over the previous decade. Separately, the Social Impact of the Arts Project at the University of Pennsylvania has been studying the relationship between concentrations of cultural resources and various social and economic outcomes since 1994. As then-Associate Director of the Rockefeller Foundation, Joan Shigekawa commissioned a groundbreaking collaboration between SIAP and The Reinvestment Fund to study the dynamics of culture and urban revitalization, work whose influence can be seen clearly in much of the policy that Shigekawa has since helped develop as Senior Deputy Chairman of the NEA.

SIAP, which is led by Mark Stern and Susan Seifert, cites The Rise of the Creative Class frequently in its publications dating from that period, usually to position its approach in opposition to Florida’s. In fact, in 2008 SIAP published one of the most hilariously brutal program evaluations I’ve ever read, following the attempts of Florida’s Creative Class Group (CCG) to turn around three Knight Foundation communities by inspiring volunteer “catalysts” to drive toward the “4 T’s” of economic development (technology, talent, tolerance, and territorial assets). In that evaluation, Stern and Seifert offer a single overarching criticism: CCG forgot about its outcomes. Much like South Park’s Underpants Gnomes, the project team had a clear idea of what it was putting in to the process and what it hoped to get out of it, but a much vaguer sense of how it was going to get from Phase 1 to Phase 3.

South Park’s Underpants Gnomes, image courtesy Wikipedia

Which brings me to my central point: despite all of the attention paid to this issue in the past year and a half, despite all of the new money that has been committed to the cause, creative placemaking still has an outcomes problem. As a field, we have not yet learned the lessons of the Underpants Gnomes. And until we do, I’m worried that we risk repeating Stolarick’s apology to practitioners a decade hence.

Leaving the dots unconnected

“When times were good,” Kevin Stolarick explains at the ArtPlace vibrancy indicators convening, it was easy for city councils, funders, and others to buy into the ideas in Florida’s book on the strength of his celebrity and qualitative arguments. But now that cities are facing more economic pressure, Stolarick continues, “they’re saying, ‘we need proof – and that’s going to take more than Richard Florida’s next book.’”

“Proof” is a word that seems to give creative placemakers hives these days. Less than two weeks prior to the ArtPlace event, I had participated in a webinar given by the NEA to introduce its Our Town Community Indicators Study. Our Town is the Endowment’s public-sector counterpart to ArtPlace – likewise the brainchild of Rocco Landesman, it granted some $6.6 million to communities for creative placemaking projects across the country in its inaugural round last year. The Community Indicators Study is a multiyear data collection effort whose chief purpose is to “advance public understanding of how creative placemaking strategies can strengthen communities.” Yet when, prompted by researchers who were listening in on the call, the NEA’s Chief of Staff, Jamie Bennett, asked the Deputy Director of NEA’s Office of Research and Analysis about causation vs. correlation, this is the exchange that resulted:

Bennett: …Are you going to in some way be able through this project to prove [for example] that arts had a direct impact in causing the crime rate to go down?

Shewfelt: A lot of the language I’ve used today has been very carefully chosen to avoid suggesting that we are trying to design a way to specifically address the causal relationship between creative placemaking and the outcomes we’re interested in.

As a matter of fact, the NEA has chosen to forgo a traditional evaluation of the Our Town grant program in favor of developing the aforementioned indicator system. The project will no doubt result in a lot of great data, but essentially no mechanism for connecting the Endowment’s investments in Our Town projects to the indicators one sees. A project could be entirely successful on its own terms but fail to move the needle in a meaningful way in its city or neighborhood. Or it could be caught up in a wave of transformation sweeping the entire community, and wrongly attribute that wave to its own efforts. There’s simply no way for us to tell. I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but we can’t accomplish the goal of “advancing understanding of how creative placemaking strategies can strengthen communities” without digging more deeply into the causal relationships that the NEA would prefer to avoid.

The vibrancy indicators that were the subject of the ArtPlace convening face a similar quandary. The purpose of the indicators is to help ArtPlace “understand the impact of [its] investments.” And what is that desired impact? During a webinar delivered to prospective applicants last fall, Coletta declared that “with ArtPlace, we aim to do nothing less than transform economic development in America…to awaken leaders who care about the future of their communities to the fact that they’re sitting on a pile of assets that can help them achieve their ambitions…and that asset is art.”

ArtPlace Theory of Change

ArtPlace’s investments all have a singular focus on “vibrancy,” a concept defined in its guidelines as “attracting people, activities and value to a place and increasing the desire and the economic opportunity to thrive in a place.” While that was as specific as things got during ArtPlace’s first two rounds of grantmaking, the indicators project, which examines factors as diverse as cell phone use, population density, and home values, will go a long way toward concretizing ArtPlace’s primary lever of community transformation. Even so, ArtPlace doesn’t seem any more eager than the NEA to connect the activities of its grant recipients to the broader vibrancy indicators directly. Though the projects themselves are supposed to have a “transformative” impact on vibrancy, ArtPlace isn’t requiring its grantees to collect any data on how that impact is achieved. Furthermore, ArtPlace’s guidelines state clearly that the consortium has no plans to invest in research on creative placemaking beyond the vibrancy indicators themselves, despite its advocacy goals and a desire to “share the lessons [grantees] are learning to other communities across the U.S.”

To be clear, I don’t mean to question the value of research of the type ArtPlace and Our Town are leading. Efforts such as these, Fractured Atlas’s Archipelago data aggregation and visualization platform, Americans for the Arts’s National and Local Arts Index, Western States Arts Federation’s Creative Vitality Index, and others help to draw a clear picture of a community’s overall cultural and creative health and can serve as an essential tool within a broader research portfolio. But in order for those tools to really come alive in a grantmaking context, they have to be grounded in a clear and rigorous conceptual frame for the how the specific funded activities are going to make a difference, and then integrated into the actual process for selecting grant recipients. And that’s the part still missing from the vast majority of these efforts. In an upcoming article for the Grantmakers in the Arts Reader, Anne Gadwa Nicodemus (who co-authored the original Creative Placemaking white paper for the NEA with her mentor, Ann Markusen) writes, “it’s probably unreasonable to expect that a modest, one-year Our Town grant will move the needle, at least quickly….Because the geographic scale, time horizons, and desired outcomes vary across creative placemaking efforts, one-size-fits-all indicator systems may prove inappropriate.”

Without a clear and detailed theory of how and why creative placemaking is effective, policy and philanthropy to support creative placemaking is hobbled. Attempting to predict and judge impact based on indicator systems alone carries with it at least four problems:

• It doesn’t give a clear road map for project selection that will identify investments most likely to make a difference. Without previous research demonstrating causal interactions between grants given and differences made, it’s hard to know what effect a new grant will have – much less how to compare the potential effects of hundreds or (in ArtPlace’s case) thousands of competing investment opportunities.
• It doesn’t give us the tools to go back and analyze why certain projects did and didn’t work. Maybe a public artwork succeeds in drawing people to a neighborhood, but real estate values stay stagnant. Maybe development along a transit corridor was executed on schedule, but ridership is lower than expected. Broad, sector-level indicators will only tell us that the project didn’t work – not why.
• It doesn’t acknowledge the complex nature of economic ecosystems and the indirect role that arts projects play in them. Many economists agree that talented, highly educated individuals are key to community prosperity. But numerous considerations likely play into their decision to (re)locate in a particular place. When are the arts truly catalytic for a community, and when are they merely icing on the cake? Indicator systems would have no way of telling us on their own.
• It provides little insight on how to pursue arts-led economic development while avoiding the thorny problems of gentrification. Any thinking around policy interventions must acknowledge the possibility of negative impacts as well as positive ones. In the case of creative placemaking, an attendant worry is that longtime residents of transformed neighborhoods won’t have asked for the change, and may be adversely affected by it. To date, there is little shared understanding of how creative placemaking projects that benefit all community residents are distinguished from those that simply replace poorer residents with wealthier ones.

In her Reader article, Nicodemus writes that

The answer to the question “What is creative placemaking, really?” is that funders and practitioners are making it up in real time. We’ve entered an exciting period of experimentation, which makes sharing information absolutely critical.

In the interest of sharing information, then, I will report out below on some lessons I’ve learned from my own research on the topic over the past five years, as well as from a collaboration with ArtsWave, a funder supporting vibrancy through the arts in the Greater Cincinnati/Northern Kentucky region.

Toward a unified theory of creative placemaking: Filling in the blanks

The major deficiency of the Underpants Gnomes’ business plan was that they attempted to connect their activity (stealing underpants) with their intended impact (profit), without really considering the steps in between. To take an extreme example, if I start an organization called “Artists for World Peace” (there is such an organization, by the way), get some artists together to stand in solidarity, and put on a show, it would be unrealistic of me to expect world peace as the next logical result.

Yet most studies of the connection between the arts and economic development have attempted to measure the direct relationship between arts activities (whether single or in the aggregate) and economic outcomes. For example, the Social Impact of the Arts Project examined the correlation between cultural assets and poverty decline in Philadelphia, and a groundbreaking study by Steve Sheppard compared employment levels and real estate values in North Adams, MA before and after the opening of the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art. These research efforts have done much to shape our collective understanding of urban revitalization through the arts. But they share in common an unfortunate tendency to gloss over the details of exactly how creative activities are responsible for making neighborhoods and communities more attractive, and therefore, more valuable. This gap is especially problematic when one tries to apply the lessons of these studies to a policy or grantmaking context, where the details of how projects are implemented can make all the difference in whether a particular intervention is successful or not.

When I was in graduate school, before I came into contact with any of the research above, I created a simple model of arts-led gentrification to illustrate the specific case of a neighborhood lent a young, “hip” reputation by newly relocated artists. This model is different from others I’ve seen in a few ways. First, it casts neighborhood development as an iterative process, starting with tourism on the local level among artists. In other words, the people who are going to be checking out the happenings in a struggling outpost of the city are not, by and large, yuppies – they are other artists who are colleagues of the ones living in that neighborhood. Second, it emphasizes the role of bars and restaurants as attractors for other neighborhood visitors (including yuppies), whose viability is only made possible by the modest foot traffic generated by arts activities. And finally, it places at the beginning of the process not just arts activities, but specific kinds of arts activities: visible, storefront spaces like galleries and performance venues that signal the presence of art and draw visitors to a particular location.

Three years later, some of the thinking reflected above found its way into my grantmaking strategy work with ArtsWave, an local arts agency based in Cincinnati, OH. First, some background: in late 2008, ArtsWave had commissioned a research initiative designed to develop an inclusive public conversation about the arts in the region. Based on hundreds of conversations, interviews, and focus groups with area residents, two key “ripple effect” benefits emerged as especially valued by citizens:

1. that the arts create a vibrant, thriving economy: neighborhoods are more lively, communities are revitalized, tourists are attracted to the area, etc…and
2. that the arts create a more connected community: diverse groups share common experiences, hear new perspectives, understand each other better.

To its immense credit, ArtsWave didn’t just sit on these results and continue in the status quo. Instead, the 83-year-old united arts fund underwent a total transformation, taking on a new name and organizational identity, and most importantly, adopting these two themes as the new goals for its grantmaking.

My task, starting in January 2011, was to assist ArtsWave in creating a new framework for funding arts & culture activities based upon the ability of organizations to create vibrancy and connect people in the region. With the help of a volunteer task force consisting of ArtsWave board members, staff, community leaders, and grantee organizations, we worked backwards from the idea of “vibrancy” and ended up with an extraordinarily complex theory of change. Here’s the part that specifically deals with cultural clusters and neighborhood economic development:

Excerpt from ArtsWave theory of change: cultural clusters

Some elements of this model will certainly look familiar, though with some new wrinkles added: evening and weekend hours for storefronts, for example, as well as decreased crime and improved physical spaces (in general, not just arts spaces). ArtsWave, however, extended the concept to apply to regional economic development as well:

Excerpt from ArtsWave theory of change: regional development

Note here that the principal lever for the regional development model is that the Greater Cincinnati/Northern Kentucky region is “differentiated” through the arts. That is to say, it attracts people from outside of the region because it gains a (deserved) reputation for being a more interesting place to be than its peer cities. And what helps differentiate Cincinnati is something we call “extraordinary cultural experiences.” We attach a very specific definition to “extraordinary,” focusing on its literal meaning of “out of the ordinary.” For ArtsWave’s purposes, experiences are extraordinary if they are associated with one of the following:

• Events or productions with a national or international profile
• Events or productions that feature something uniquely special about the region
• Events or productions that feature innovative programming or presentation

Not only do experiences meeting the above criteria help to differentiate the Greater Cincinnati region in the eyes of tourists or prospective residents, they also contribute directly to ArtsWave’s notion of “vibrancy” (the green arrow in the diagram).

What this approach does is explicitly connect the activities of grantees to the broader community change that ArtsWave hopes to create. A key innovation that came out of this process was the distinction between “Sector Outcomes” (in blue) and “Grantee Outcomes” (in purple). We defined grantee outcomes as the farthest point out in the model to which individual organizations could reasonably be held accountable—and those outcomes feed back into the evaluation and selection process at the grant application stage. All other outcomes, the sector outcomes, are a reflection on ArtsWave’s overall strategy, rather than on any one particular investment. This allows us to “aggregate” impact from the level of the individual project to the level of the broader context.

The beauty of designing a model like this is that it allows each assumption embedded in each link on the causal chain to be tested, if necessary. Of course, it would be impractical to do so for every investment a grantmaker might make. But that isn’t necessary. In order to provide the kind of evidence that mayors and other officials are looking for, you only need a few examples to demonstrate replicability. But we have to be sure that those examples really do show the effects of intentional creative placemaking strategy, rather than just a lucky coincidence.

Where We Go From Here

Despite the challenges I discuss in the first part of this article, I’m heartened to see creative placemaking funders taking some positive steps toward a more rigorous theoretical foundation for their work. In particular, ArtPlace is beginning to move in this direction with a list of ten signals grantees can use to judge whether their projects are making a difference. The challenge will be to unpack those relationships with the same rigor as is currently applied to collecting data.

Meanwhile, we would love feedback on the models we have created to describe economic development through the arts. While we are hopeful they can help to move the conversation towards a deeper consideration of the complex mechanisms involved in creating place-based vibrancy, we readily acknowledge that they aren’t perfect. Do they accurately reflect creative placemaking goals and processes? Which aspects of the model are best backed up by existing research and which are shakiest? Which seem intuitively right but have not been studied in depth? What are we leaving out?

If you have comments, questions, or resources to offer, please leave a comment here or get in touch at ian.moss@fracturedatlas.org. And in the meantime, Fractured Atlas will be eagerly researching how emerging evaluation methods in other sectors, such as outcome mapping, most significant change technique, and complexity science, can potentially be applied to the arts.

(Enjoyed this post? We’re raising funds through July 10 to make the next generation of Createquity possible. We are 53% of the way there, but need your help to cross the finish line. Please consider a tax-deductible donation today!)

TOO LONG; DIDN’T READ?

• Createquity is relaunching in the fall with a whole new editorial agenda, an expanded team, and a new website! We’re building upon everything we’ve learned over the past seven years to tackle the hard questions that matter and make principled, evidence-backed recommendations for the field that we can confidently stand behind.
• In order to give us time to prepare for these big changes and do them right, we’re going dormant for the summer starting this week. But don’t worry: we’ve scheduled some re-runs of “Createquity’s greatest hits” to keep things interesting.
• If you’d like to get involved, please donate to our Indiegogo campaign that will run through early July. Help us bring this dream to life!

Photo by k rupp

A Case for Change

Back in March, I co-hosted a Createquity Office Hours gathering for our editors, writers, and readers located in the San Francisco Bay Area. Among the attendees was a woman who wanted us to review a research report her organization had recently published. Createquity’s only real channel for such reviews at the moment is the Arts Policy Library, a format involving an exhaustive deconstruction of seemingly every strength and weakness of a research text. Because they are so labor-intensive to generate, we made a decision years ago to focus Arts Policy Library articles only on high-profile publications – which means that up until now, the way to get Createquity to review a research report has been to get lots of other people talking about it first. As I rattled off a few names of other outlets to whom this woman could pitch her study, I found myself admitting rather apologetically: “the thing is, Createquity is not a tastemaker when it comes to arts research. We don’t drive the conversation, we react to it.”

As I heard those words coming out of my mouth, all I could think to myself was, “Jesus, how lame is that?” If Createquity was not going to be a tastemaker for arts research, of all things, then who was? But as I thought about it more, I realized this observation wasn’t just true for research reports. Our recurring features like Around the Horn and public arts funding updates are necessarily reactive to events in the news. When we do a feature in response to a topic proposal from a guest author or Fellow, we’re reacting to that individual’s interest and expertise. Sure, we have a strong editorial filter, but as I reflected, I came to realize that we hardly exercise any editorial direction at all.

But maybe we should be. Createquity and I have come a long way since the days when I was a fresh-faced grad student with a crazy idea to start a blog about the arts in a creative society, eager to soak up as much information as I could about the field. Back then, blogs were still something of a novelty, and few writers and outlets were trying to draw connections across disciplines and comment on the “behind the scenes” elements of arts management, funding, research, and policy in a broader way. But as this personal blog chronicling my journey through business school has evolved into a multi-author, fieldwide resource read by thousands, a lot has changed alongside it. Social media has become the premier way to engage in discussion online and is changing our reading habits in substantive ways. Arts institutions have created dozens of venues for discussion and debate in the interest of advancing open-ended conversations about the future of our field. More and more, I hear from our readers that that they are simply too busy to keep up with it all. Whereas the problem in 2007 was not enough information, the problem today is that there is too much.

All of this has resulted in a resource that, after seven years, is no longer optimally serving its readership. Don’t get me wrong: I’m incredibly proud of what Createquity has accomplished, and continue to believe that we offer a quality of commentary and depth of insight that is unparalleled in our field. But whereas the crucial opportunity of 2007 was to expand access to conversations about the future of the arts to people who hadn’t traditionally been able to partake in them, the crucial opportunity of 2014 is to start bringing those conversations in for a landing. We’ve collectively learned enough about the way that the arts sector works, what kinds of challenges it faces, and what kinds of interventions are possible that we can begin to make the kinds of principled, evidence-backed recommendations that we can confidently stand behind. So why aren’t we putting actionable next steps in front of people who could conceivably make a difference?

A Theory of Change

Last winter, Createquity’s editorial team gathered in Philadelphia to discuss our strategic goals and the evolution of the site. To frame the discussion, we generated what’s called a theory of change, which is a way of depicting a strategy visually. I’ve now been a part of many theory of change development processes, and the capacity of this tool to open up new ways of seeing one’s role in the world never ceases to impress me. Our own exploration was no exception.

At Createquity, we’ve always placed great importance on quality: of prose, presentation, and analysis. We take pride in our ability to come up with insights that are not obvious and convey them with style. We also try to take an open-minded, objective approach – which is not to say that we never have an opinion, but rather that we adjust our opinions in light of the facts instead of looking for facts to justify our opinions.

These values have built our reputation thus far, and we’ve had the privilege of publishing some truly fantastic articles over the years. But as we fleshed out our theory of change, we realized that publishing articles is not really the point for us. Looking back on what we’ve done to date, the articles I’m proudest of are the ones that actually made a difference in the way that people in power approach their work – most notably the series on creative placemaking and research that began with 2012’s “Creative Placemaking Has an Outcomes Problem.” We want Createquity to be not just interesting but useful – in other words, we want to have an impact.

(Click to enlarge.)

Ensuring a consistent and direct connection between our work and potential decisions on behalf of the sector requires us to engage in advocacy in a much more proactive fashion than we ever have before. And so, beginning this fall, that’s exactly what we’re going to do.

Being the Change

Take another look at the diagram above and you’ll see a key activity for Createquity that is brand new: “Identify and articulate strong cases for change.” What will these cases for change be, exactly? Well, the truth is that we’re going to need to invest a little time towards figuring that out – after all, we’d prefer not to come out with guns a-blazing on behalf of some cause that we later decide wasn’t such a great idea in retrospect. But we have a pretty clear sense of how we’re going to go about it, at least. Createquity’s ultimate goal is to help the arts ecosystem “work better for artists and audiences.” So, what does that look like in practice? What are the characteristics of a healthy arts ecosystem versus an unhealthy one? Put another way, if everything were perfect, how would that be different from how things are today? Our next step is to map out answers to these questions in enough detail that we can start to see the picture as a whole instead of in little bits and pieces. In identifying the gaps between our perfect world and present-day reality, we’ll start to get a sense of where the biggest priorities are, and which of them are not getting enough attention. Once we know which areas we want to focus on, we’ll devote ourselves to researching the state of the evidence in those areas, with particular attention to “what works”: what kinds of interventions and next steps might conceivably move the needle on the things that we think matter most?

This new approach will require a near-total restructuring of our editorial process. Right now, we spend a lot of time (somewhere between 15 and 20 hours a week) assembling links from widely-read sources for regular columns like Around the Horn and the Public Arts Funding Update. Our other major editorial focus, the Createquity Fellowship, has produced some great content (and people) over the past three and a half years, but invariably our team spends so much time editing and mentoring that we hardly have any left over for writing. Imagine if we spent all of that time instead reading all those research articles and publications that hardly anyone else is paying attention to, but arguably have more to teach us? And then synthesizing what we’ve learned so we can point out the areas that badly need more of our collective attention?

For all those reasons and more, we’ve decided to reinvent Createquity from the ground up to support our new vision. When you return to this address in the fall, things are going to look very different around here! As exciting as this is, as you can probably tell, it’s going to take a ton of work. So we’ve decided not to post any new content to Createquity this summer to enable us to focus our undivided attention on preparations for the relaunch. If you just can’t imagine not getting your Createquity fix, we’re taking this opportunity to stroll through our back catalogue and repost some of our favorites. For those of you who have been with us from the beginning, you might be surprised at how fresh some of those old chestnuts still are.

Finally, if you’re as psyched about this new direction as we are and would like to get involved, there are lots of ways to do so!

• Spread the word: In its new incarnation, Createquity’s success is highly dependent on reaching the right people. If all goes according to plan, we’re going to be putting out some pretty important, compelling stuff in the fall and beyond – better than anything you’ve seen here before. By sharing what you read, you’ll be doing your colleagues a solid.
• Get into the weeds with us: If you’re not sure you trust us to make the right decisions about which of the arts ecosystem’s problems are most important, or what the research tells us about what we could do to fix them, I don’t blame you. We’re just a few people, after all. That’s why, when Createquity relaunches, the considerations and logic behind all of our major editorial decisions will be accessible via the website – often before any actual cases for change are generated. And if you want to get in there and debate us on the details, I guarantee we’ll listen to you. This is your chance to help steer us in the right direction.
• Help us pay for this thing: Createquity has been from day one an all-volunteer effort – we don’t even have a bank account. But this new website isn’t going to drop out of the sky for free, and we need to get our geographically dispersed editorial team together in one place for some in-person planning sessions, among other priorities. We’ve set up a crowdfunding campaign on Indiegogo and would love to have your support – and we have some cool/valuable perks to offer in return. Please consider donating today – it will go a long way towards making our new vision a reality!
• Join the team: We love working with smart, awesome people! As part of the new plan, the Createquity Fellowship will be evolving into an explicit apprenticeship for joining the editorial team. We also expect to have ad hoc volunteer opportunities available. Stay tuned for further details as the coming months unfold.

Until soon!

It’s a crisp spring evening in Philadelphia’s East Passyunk neighborhood, and the avenue is coming alive. Market lights cast a warm glow over a restaurant patio where groups of people dine at picnic tables and a band does a quick sound check on stage. A little further down the block, shops and boutiques begin to close up for the evening, dimming their display window lights as a nearby gallery begins to fill with people out for an opening and a cafe prepares for open mic night. Pedestrians meander the sidewalks and through a small public square, chattering as they pass sandwich boards advertising restaurant week and lampposts plastered with flyers for upcoming film screenings and art shows.  A cyclist darts past a couple hailing a slow moving cab on the narrow street, and a group of twenty-somethings crack open the door of a crowded bar before stepping in.

Summer night on East Passyunk Ave. in Philadelphia. Photo credit: Christopher Woods (Flickr user: ChrisinPhilly5448)

If Passyunk Avenue sounds like a place you would like to be on a Friday evening, you are in good company. Known for their bustling pedestrian-oriented streets, repurposed historic buildings, inviting public spaces, diverse cuisine and retail offerings and the presence of the arts, informal or “Naturally-Occurring Cultural Districts” (NOCD) such as East Passyunk are highly desired by those vying for an apartment in the hippest area in town, budding entrepreneurs seeking space for new venues, not to mention urban planners and policy makers around the country. The term “cultural district” has been used to refer to a variety of different types of urban neighborhood, and there are even some cultural districts in rural areas (note: for the purposes of this post, arts, entertainment, and cultural districts are collectively referred to as cultural districts). NOCDs evolve without any government intervention, which is the ideal scenario from an urban planning and economic development perspective—due to a fortuitous combination of circumstances, a particular neighborhood turns into a hotbed of cultural vitality without any effort or public spending. Indeed, studies have shown that the benefits of successful cultural districts go beyond their nightlife; these areas are often home to ethnically, educationally and economically heterogeneous populations, and also offer residents a variety of services, making them convenient and distinctive places to live and work.

Designating Cultural Districts

Many cultural districts seek to replicate the success of NOCDs through careful planning and policy, with varying degrees of success. Since the 1980s, cities across the country have tried to foster the development of these planned cultural districts in areas that share many characteristics of NOCD, but where cultural life remains somewhat isolated from the rest of a community, or is just beginning to emerge as a significant factor. The idea is that with a little extra help these neighborhoods could turn into the next cultural hotspot. The development of these districts typically begins with identification of a neighborhood’s potential, often through the nomination and application by local stakeholders. If selected, an official designation is awarded, sometimes accompanied by a suite of government incentives targeted specifically at artists and other cultural producers. Usually positioned as economic development strategies, these programs are designed to encourage artists, entrepreneurs, institutions and potential developers to build on and organize around existing arts- and culture-based assets. If successful, the initial effort to designate a district will eventually result in increased tourism, tax revenue and outside investment in the designated areas.

A concert in a vacant lot in the state-designated Station North Arts & Entertainment District in Baltimore. Photo credit: Theresa Keil, courtesy of Station North Arts & Entertainment, Inc.

Mere designation of neighborhood as an officially recognized cultural district can by itself provide several benefits, including:

• Credibility: Though the designation process and standards vary from state to state, designating a cultural district recognizes the arts and cultural resources as defining characteristics of an area. A state-level review process and subsequent designation also lends credibility to this recognition.
• Catalyst and Organizing Principle: Cultural district designation at the state level can function as an organizing principle amongst artists, residents, business owners, and community development professionals to establish cooperation and consensus as a neighborhood undergoes redevelopment or creates a neighborhood vision plan.
• Marketing Potential: Given the cachet of cultural districts, designation can be a powerful marketing tool for a neighborhood undergoing active development. Designation offers the opportunity to change or influence the narrative about a given neighborhood in a positive way, as well as influence future investment.
• Leverage Funding: In addition to some states enabling designated cultural districts access to specific loan funds, state designated cultural districts are uniquely positioned to attract regional and even national funding that might not otherwise be possible in the absence of designation. As an added bonus, the inherently place-based nature of a cultural district draws funding toward defined geographies.
• Formalizing Relationships: Designated cultural districts offer the opportunity to strengthen state and local partnerships, strengthening relationships between agencies at these levels. Depending on the district’s management model, designated cultural districts can also link artists and informal arts collectives and bolster working relationships across the nonprofit, private and public sectors.

There are currently 13 state-designated cultural district programs, with designation criteria and process varying by state. Statewide programs are usually administered by the program’s respective state arts council, or in some cases by a state Main Street program, another economic development strategy that leverages local assets and emphasizes local heritage and historic character in its approach. Management strategies vary at the local level as well: some are volunteer-led organizations, others are fused with a Main Street program or community development corporation, and a few are autonomous nonprofit entities.

Of the 13 states that have designated cultural districts, only five (Iowa, Louisiana, Maryland, New Mexico, and Rhode Island) offer tax incentives for activity occurring within districts. These tax incentives can take the form of income tax exemptions, property tax incentives, sales tax credits or exemptions, preservation tax credits, or admissions & amusement tax exemptions. Other benefits for state designated districts include technical assistance programs or small grants offered directly to organizations, artists or other entities that are either located in designated districts or partner with the districts’ managing body.

A street view of Central Avenue in Albuquerque’s Arts & Cultural District. Photo credit: Kent Kanouse (Flickr user: KentKanouse)

Evaluating State-Designated Cultural District Programs

With the earliest state-designated cultural district programs now more than a decade old, it’s time to ask whether they are working effectively. To date, unfortunately, limited research evaluating state designated cultural districts exists. The National Assembly of State Arts Agencies (NASAA) produced a 2012 overview of state cultural district policy and programs. The topic of cultural districts, designated and not, has also been addressed by Americans for the Arts, and was the focus of a 2013 AFTA preconference.

Several states have attempted to shed some light on the broad impact of their cultural district programs. The Maryland State Arts Council provides a yearly report on the economic and fiscal impacts of its arts & entertainment districts. According to the analysis, which uses the IMPLAN software and input/output methodology, an estimated 5,144 jobs were supported by arts & entertainment districts along with $458.2 million in total state GDP and $38.3 million in total tax revenues.

The Texas Cultural Trust used interviews, case studies, census data and tax records from Texas cultural districts to measure economic impact based on five indicators: population, employment, property tax base, taxable sales, and annual operating budget of the cultural district. The document also attempts to forecast the three-year impact of Texas’s designated cultural districts based on increased marketing and promotion, and changes in property value/property tax base increase.

The Iowa Department of Revenue evaluated its three-tiered state historic preservation tax credit program, one part of which is specifically applicable for the renovation of historic properties in designated cultural and entertainment districts. Using tax credit recipient surveys and Iowa Department of Revenue tax data, the study compares the Iowa historic preservation tax credit to similar programs in other states and evaluates the economic impact. It claims that every dollar awarded in state tax credits leveraged an additional $3.77 in federal and private investment.

Overall, the reports present the presence of a designated cultural district as a benefit and driver of economic development. Data on the number of people taking advantage of the tax incentive programs and the economic impact of these programs is missing from these reports, however, and from other state-designated cultural district programs with yearly reporting mechanisms. While the Iowa report provides an analysis of its historic preservation tax credit, it does not provide an analysis of those used specifically in its cultural and entertainment districts. This may be because certain data is difficult to locate: cultural district income tax benefits for artists, for example, are filed with an individual’s yearly tax forms and are therefore not publicly accessible.

Challenges

If better data on cultural district tax incentives were available, there’s a good chance it would show that the incentives are of little consequence for the artists, organizations, and developers catalyzing revitalization in designated cultural districts. Several sources, including the NASAA policy overview, a Johns Hopkins University report, and anecdotal evidence from conversations with district managers, suggest that even where tax incentives are available, not many people or organizations take advantage of them.

This is likely a function of the limitations of state cultural district incentives. Specifically,

• Stringent definitions of “qualifying artist” and “artistic work” significantly reduce the number of individuals eligible for the incentives. This is particularly true of the income tax and sales tax incentives offered by several state programs. The definitions often require art to be made and sold within district boundaries, which does not reflect contemporary art-making, marketing, and sales practices. “Industry-specific work” such as graphic design or commercial photography does not qualify for most state incentive programs, which prevents many creative professionals from using the incentives.
• Unclear guidelines for administration of incentives make it difficult for comptrollers or other government officials to determine eligibility for the incentives and to administer the programs consistently. In turn, this lack of an established protocol makes it difficult or impossible to use the credits, causing artists to seek alternatives.
• Insignificant amounts of eligible income derived from the sale of art, tickets, or other work that does qualify for the incentives further limit the potential pool of applicants. In a time when many artists derive their primary income from other jobs, proceeds from the sale of work might not meet minimum thresholds for reporting, or might go unclaimed on an annual income tax form due to complicated documentation requirements.
• A lack of promotion highlighting the availability of tax incentives leaves them relatively unknown to the public. Simply put, the existence of cultural district incentives is not widely advertised.

Given the hurdles for using districts’ incentives and the fact that most state programs do not offer incentives at all, it appears the success of cultural districts primarily stems from designation itself and the opportunities to market, program and organize that the designation provides. However, even the components of the programs that do not provide direct financial assistance still require funding and a management structure through which to administer the program. This brings us to another challenge for cultural districts: sustainability.

Regardless of management structure, dedicated staff time is vital to realizing the goals and reaping the benefits of a designated cultural district. Beyond small technical assistance grants, only two states offer operational support for the management of districts at the local level. The minimal funding available for this purpose seems disproportionate to the economic impact that cultural districts are expected to yield.

Perhaps the greatest challenge of cultural districts lies in maintaining affordability for the artists, entrepreneurs, and other longtime residents and businesses of designated districts, ostensibly those catalyzing the economic impact of the neighborhoods. While many NOCDs are celebrated success stories, some, like New York City’s SoHo or Miami’s Wynwood District are criticized for becoming victims of their own success, having experienced rapid commercialization, rising rents and displacement of the artists and longtime residents of the neighborhoods.Policies for state-designated cultural districts do little to consider the long-term sustainability of cultural districts whose “assets” are in large part reliant on individuals who are vulnerable to economic shifts and rising cost of living. Existing cultural district policy does not address issues of affordability, putting the creative clusters that rely on affordable live and workspace options at risk of displacement.

Conclusion

State-designated cultural districts benefit communities across the country, serving as a organizing principle, lending credibility to creative communities at the local level and boosting marketing potential in the neighborhoods in which they are initiated. With some programs now more than a decade old, however, it seems the policy and incentives programs accompanying some of these programs lag behind. While steps are being taken to increase advocacy efforts and expand the applicability and usefulness of these credits, including an expansion of geographic limitations for eligible artists in both Maryland and Rhode Island, progress remains slow. As arts organizations, researchers, and policymakers continue to explore cultural districts and make decisions about the creation of new districts, several key pieces of data need to be added to the equation.

First, data on cultural district tax incentives should be collected and compared to the expectations of policymakers at the time of their creation. Specifically, how many individuals are using the incentives, and how much is being claimed as a benefit of these programs? In addition to providing a clearer picture of the costs and benefits of designated districts, this data would enable more strategic decision-making for promotion of incentives.

Secondly, policymakers and researchers should adjust programs to better support and sustain artists, administrators and organizations. Where incentives for artists and creative professionals are offered, policymakers need to consider how art is marketed and eventually purchased. For example, the relatively recent emergence of Etsy, Kickstarter and other online platforms has changed the way artists and creative professionals seek visibility for their work, network, and sustain their business. Furthermore, increased connectivity between major urban areas makes it common practice to live in one city as a practicing artist and participate in exhibitions in another metropolitan area. Existing policy incentives do not align with these practices.

Finally, cultural district programs need to consider and promote affordability when it comes to residential and work space within districts. Whether at the policy level or local district level, administrators need to consider how to incentivize property owners to continue developing and maintaining safe and affordable studios, galleries, venues and living spaces. Another aspect to consider is adjusting policies and programs to incentivize renters to remain in cultural districts.

At their best, designated cultural districts provide a policy framework that leverages existing creative energy to foster the type of asset-based economic revitalization observed in NOCDs. However, as designated cultural district programs age and additional states create similar programs, it is vital that administrators delve more deeply into the research and evaluation of these programs to monitor the success of these districts, as well as some of their unintended consequences and areas for improvement.

Photo by E. Briel

In early 2014, President Barack Obama addressed workers at a General Electric gas engine plant. “A lot of young people don’t see the trades and skilled manufacturing as a viable career,” he said,  “but I promise you, folks can make a lot more… with skilled manufacturing or the trades than they might with an art history degree.”

That simple remark sent arts advocates into a letter-writing and tweeting tizzy. When the president apologized a few weeks later, via a hand-written note to an art history professor, the gesture was hailed by arts ed advocates as a victory that acknowledged “the untapped potential of [arts] industries in helping to improve the economic growth, jobs creation, and trade surplus of the United States.”

But the apology, while well-intentioned, didn’t reflect a change of heart. In the letter, Obama admitted that the arts were a source of joy in his life, but explained he was trying to “mak[e] a point about the jobs market, not the value of art history.” According to him, it’s not that art history doesn’t have value; it’s just that its value has more to do with joy than dollars – or practical skills.

Obama, like most high-profile leaders in education, frequently trumpets the need to cultivate an “innovative” workforce. While the definition of “innovation” has long been squishy, the president’s earlier statements suggest he sees an innovative workforce as one with “makers of things, not just consumers of things.” One would think the link between arts education and workforce development would be easier for him to grasp, particularly with reports on the impact of “creative economies” popping up left and right. Yet the link may seem more tenuous than arts educators would like to believe. Take, for example, the 2013 Otis Report on the Creative Economy. Released annually since 2007, and focused on the Southern California region, the report attempts to quantify the economic impact of “creative professions and enterprises that take powerful, original ideas and transform them into practical and often beautiful goods or inspire us with their artistry.” Not surprisingly, the report shows that those professions and enterprises are a big, and lucrative, deal in the region.

Arts education advocates hail these findings as evidence of a huge market for the skills taught in arts classes. Yet it seems that the very for-profit leaders who hire for such creative economy jobs are skeptical of the relevance of arts education. According to “LA Creates: Supporting the Creative Economy in Los Angeles,” which was released as an addendum to the 2013 Otis Report and features a synthesis of interviews with leaders from the creative industries,

While public and nonprofit sector participants were in near unanimous agreement on its importance, private sector participants expressed a fuller range of skepticism about the benefits of seeking solutions through support of arts education, and often didn’t see arts education as a priority among a hypothetical set of specific strategies that would improve the ability of creative businesses to expand and thrive.

What’s going on here? For-profit CEOs rank creativity at the top of their lists of important leadership qualities; arts education advocates have been arguing that their work provides a direct pipeline to the “creative economy” for years. Why, then, does the link between arts education and workforce development seem so difficult for people – even those working in the “creative industries” – to grasp?

One explanation may lie in the disconnect between arts educators’ rhetorical embrace of creativity and the constraints they, and all educators, face in traditional K-12 classrooms. Arts educators have fought hard for inclusion and respect within the public school system, and have dutifully adopted many trappings of that system along the way. The most obvious example is content standards, such as the Common Core, which outline what students should know and be able to do at each grade level. The standards movement started in the 1980s and continues to the present day, when forty-five forty-nine states and the District of Columbia have established them in the visual and performing arts. While arts educators variously embrace or chafe against those standards, they’re widely accepted as best practice, in large part because they allow the arts to demonstrate parity with other disciplines.

But does “demonstrating parity with other disciplines” at the K-12 level foster the best environment to nurture 21st-century skills like creativity? After all, “creative studies” programs in higher education– both bricks-and-mortar and virtual offerings of which are growing in number – are designed around the idea that creativity is not content-specific:

Traditional academic disciplines still matter, but as content knowledge evolves at lightning speed, educators are talking more and more about “process skills,” strategies to reframe challenges and extrapolate and transform information, and to accept and deal with ambiguity… “The new people who will be creative will sit at the juxtaposition of two or more fields,” [the director of a creativity center] says. When ideas from different fields collide… fresh ones are generated.

Meanwhile, most K-12 classrooms are still structured with each discipline, be it math, reading, or dance, in its own bubble. Despite efforts by the writers of the Common Core and the soon-to-be-released national arts standards to provide more flexibility across disciplines, advocates in all content areas are pushing for students to receive a minimum amount of guaranteed instruction in whichever discipline they support.

This raises some questions for arts educators. If the economy of the future will require that students demonstrate more applied problem-solving than content-specific knowledge, our hope that schools address discrete, and traditional, arts disciplines during the school day may not the most obvious choice for our future “innovative workforce” – if cultivating that workforce is indeed what we hope to do. Is teaching the arts a more effective means of teaching 21st-century skills than a framework like the Buck Institute’s Project Based Learning, which puts a heavy emphasis on hands-on, interdisciplinary problem-solving but doesn’t yet have a strong arts focus? If our top priority is “cultivating a 21st-century workforce,” should we be arguing that every student should have, for example, forty-five minutes of violin instruction per week? Are we missing a broader opportunity to get ahead of what may be a long-term shift toward a more interdisciplinary approach in education?

Some arts educators are embracing the interdisciplinary approach via the “STEM to STEAM movement,” a promising offshoot of our renewed focus on workforce development. While broad STEAM rhetoric is as muddled as it is popular, certain STEAM school models, particularly those at the high school level, are pretty friggin’ fantastic. Current interest in STEAM from government and certain business leaders provides an opportunity to investigate research on creativity and problem-solving in a deeper way, expanding our understanding of how creative people work and enabling openness to how “creativity” is taught in non-arts contexts.

Whether we like to admit it or not, the arts do not have a monopoly on 21st-century skills. Nor should those skills have a monopoly on our arguments for why arts education is important.  Perhaps the more willing we are to examine the link between the two, the more likely we are to uncover what the full impact of arts education can be.

Summary

Published in 2011, The Participatory Museum presents Nina Simon’s social web-inspired approach to museum exhibits and partnerships and serves as a handbook for museum professionals for engaging in participatory projects. The Participatory Museum looks at how audiences participate in online platforms such as YouTube and Flickr and extends those principles to visitor participation in a museum. The first section of the book presents the theoretical framework for participatory design, and the second lays out practical tips for designing participatory exhibits and programs including types of projects, evaluation tips, and advice on how to build institutional capacity for participatory projects.

Four main ideas make up the theoretical part of the book:

Scaffolding places clear parameters through design into an exhibit that help frame the visitor experience and the range and nature of responses generated. Scaffolding guides visitors and keeps requests for participation from being too open-ended.

Me to We Design, a recasting of Simon’s earlier hierarchy of social participation, guides visitors through personal entry points to make connections with content, and ultimately to other individuals. Those connections take many forms.

Social technographics are a concept borrowed from Forrester Research’s 2008 “social technographics” tool, which categorizes audience profiles in social media engagement, audience profiles are based on types of activity and include creators, spectators, critics, joiners, collectors, and inactives. Good design considers how the actions of each audience type can enhance the experience of others.

Social objects function as a conduit for participation allowing visitors to “focus their attention on a third thing rather than on each other, making interpersonal engagement more comfortable.” Giving objects a social dimension can involve making design tweaks, physically altering objects, or reworking interpretive tools to make objects more personal, relational, active, and provocative.

In the second section, one chapter each is devoted to four types of participatory projects—contributory, collaborative, co-creative, hosted—three of which come from the Public Participation in Scientific Research (PPSR) project of the Center for Advancement of Informal Science Education (CAISE). Simon added a fourth type, “hosted,” to accommodate projects that are done by outside groups within the museum. The participatory models range from less to more control on the part of the participants but needn’t be attempted in any particular order. She even demystifies choosing among models through a handy chart.

Analysis

At first, I was skeptical of the book’s wide applicability. Would it work well in the field regardless of museum type, location, or resources? As I read, however, Simon seemed to anticipate my objections, and The Participatory Museum succeeded in allaying most of my questions.

• The Participatory Museum is dense in practical information. Tips are peppered throughout the book. Simon reinforces her points with numerous case studies that illustrate both successful and unsuccessful attempts at encouraging participation.
• The examples are diverse, featuring organizations from several countries, of many kinds and sizes, and at different points on the participation spectrum
• Between the examples in the text, and anecdotal evidence from colleagues, it was clear that participation, as a tool, is useful in building engagement across a wide spectrum of audiences.

The theories underlying The Participatory Museum appear to be sound even if not originating in or having been formally tested in a museum environment at the time of publication. Simon translates what assessment does exist into practical advice, and even lays out a blueprint for what good evaluation could look like. The Participatory Museum gives every indication of being directionally correct, and an excellent guide to incorporating participatory design into an institution.

Implications

Simon’s book has had an undeniable impact on the museum field, reigniting debate over how to breathe life into decaying institutions. In the four years since its publication there has been a shift—or at least public perception of a shift— toward more participation. And even within the field, participation and the principles laid out in the book have become the focus of conferences, institution-wide training sessions, and professional development workshops. Though participation does seem to be where the field is headed, the principles have met with some resistance from proponents of the more traditional museum experience and design and the absolute control and authority of the institution.

At the end of the day, are audiences more engaged and are institutions meeting their missions more effectively through participatory design techniques? The Particpatory Museum’s usefulness ultimately rests on the answers to those questions. We will need closer study of participatory work to fully understand the implications of the broader trends the book catalogues and appears to be ushering forward. What do we gain from participatory exhibits or institutional cultures of participation? What do we lose? The good news is that the success of The Participatory Museum and the speed at which its recommendations have been adopted should provide a wealth of material for researchers to begin answering these questions with more specificity in the years ahead.

(For a briefer edition of this analysis, check out the abridged version.)

“This may sound messy,” Nina Simon, engineer turned experience designer, writes of participatory projects. “It may [also] sound tremendously exciting.”

Summary

Written in 2010 as a handbook for museum professionals who want to engage audiences in deeper forms of participation, The Participatory Museum presents Nina Simon’s social, web-inspired approach to exhibits and partnerships. At the time of writing, Simon was a highly sought-after experience designer whose philosophy was made popular through her blog, Museum 2.0. Part argument for participation and part toolbox, The Participatory Museum aims to inspire readers’ enthusiasm about participatory design and prepare them to launch their own successful projects.

The book itself is the product of a participatory project. Simon used an online wiki format to allow readers to submit relevant case studies and assist with writing and eventually editing. The online version of the book features linked footnotes for the examples used throughout the text.

Taking cues from social websites like YouTube, Netflix, LibraryThing, and Flickr, The Participatory Museum explores how brick-and-mortar institutions can learn from virtual participatory experiences. Simon defines a participatory cultural institution as one in which “visitors can create, share, and connect with each other around content.” Participation encourages multidirectional content experiences: a museum, rather than limiting itself to sending information in the direction of visitors, can encourage those visitors to contribute information to the institution and even share among themselves. Participation also encourages more equitable relationships among all stakeholders, making objects and entire institutions more accessible.

All of this requires an adjustment in thinking about authority, the role of the visitor, and the flow of information between individual and institution. In participatory projects, museum staff members used to holding absolute authority in the interpretation of objects must cede some of that power to visitors. Simon asserts that the very process that makes participatory projects rewarding for museum audiences is often a source of apprehension for museum staff. Done right, according to Simon, “participatory projects create new value for the institution, participants, and non-participating audience members.”

Drawing by Jennifer Rae Atkins

Using the example of how interactivity has transformed entire organizations such as the Boston Children’s Museum, Simon imagines a future where some institutions are “wholly participatory.” The Participatory Museum advocates for the power of participatory design to fulfill idealistic mission statements about engagement, connection, and inspiring action. Nevertheless, Simon is careful to include the caveat that this new method of design isn’t meant to supplant traditional techniques but to augment them, and argues that the two can peacefully coexist.

Structure and scope

The book is organized into two sections. The first, more theoretical part lays out several participatory design principles, and the second details how four different models of participation can work in practice.

Participation in theory

For Simon, the first and perhaps most important point that undergirds all successful design is a clear connection between the institution’s mission and the benefits to be gained from a participatory project by the institution, participants, or audience. No one will be engaged – or fooled – if a museum halfheartedly invites participation because it has become trendy. To reap the rewards of participation, staff and leadership must understand how the project will advance the museum’s core purposes. This grounding in mission and clarity of benefits makes everything else possible.

The Participatory Museum identifies “two counter-intuitive design principles at the heart of successful participatory projects” that reappear throughout the book. The first is scaffolding, the guidance and constraints given to visitors to help frame the range and nature of responses generated. Scaffolding is necessary to set up a safe environment where audience members feel comfortable sharing and interacting with each other. Simon juxtaposes the completely open-ended request for participation with the thoughtfully narrow one.

Compare, for example, the open-ended dialogue program of British artist Jeremy Deller, It Is What It Is: Conversations About Iraq,with the Human Library, an event first held for youth at the Denmark Roskilde Festival in 2000. It Is What It Is attempted to encourage visitors to ask questions of people who had served in Iraq by creating a large gallery with provocative images from the country and installing living-room-style seating. At points throughout the exhibition, soldiers, translators, and others were on hand to answer questions from visitors. Simon argues that It Is What It Is lacked “sufficient scaffolding to robustly and consistently support dialogue”: the two times she saw it at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, there were just two guests sitting on couches next to a powerful object.

The Human Library explores similar terrain: it is intended for “anybody who is ready to talk with his or her own prejudice and stereotype and wants to spend an hour of time on this experience.” Participants select a “book” from a catalogue of stereotypes, such as a black Muslim, a cop, a Goth, or a quadriplegic; once at the “checkout counter,” they encounter a person embodying their chosen stereotype for a discussion lasting anywhere from 45 minutes to two hours. The experience was more carefully crafted, and it was a success at generating the kinds of provocative discussions the designers hoped for. The framing of the event as a library eased some of the expected reluctance in confronting visitors’ own prejudices, allowing participants to choose their own book provided a personal entry point into the activity, and even restricting the time helped set people’s expectations. Simon reasons that limitations make people more likely to participate and that better-defined parameters lead to higher-quality and more relevant participation.

Good scaffolding alone doesn’t automatically result in amazing social participation. Truly social interaction, Simon says, has to start with the individual, who begins to climb a participatory ladder from a personal entry point, her second design principle. “Me-to-We” design, a recasting of her own earlier hierarchy of social participation, guides visitors through those entry points to connections with content, and ultimately to other individuals.

Not everyone will always want to engage with others socially, even if an exhibit is designed to allow it. To categorize the different styles of participation, Simon looks to statistics on American adults from Forrester Research’s 2008 “social technographics” tool, which categorizes audience profiles in social media engagement.

Forrester Research’s social technographics participation ladder.

In this framework, audience profiles are based on types of activity. Creators make up a small part of the participation pie, whereas critics, collectors, joiners, spectators, and inactives represent the majority in social platforms – and all but the last two (not just creators) count as truly participatory. Good design acknowledges the mixed composition of audiences and provides an outlet for each role to be involved, enabling the actions of each audience type to enhance the experience of others.

Simon devotes considerable attention to two other elements of design: technologies for social experiences and social objects. Each of these concepts is meant to aid in moving toward the “we” end of design. Simon asserts that mediating technologies can make people “more comfortable socializing with strangers” within the physical space of the museum. For example, Internet Arm Wrestling, an exhibit set up concurrently in several science centers around the U.S., enabled long-distance personal interactions. Visitors at one institution sat behind a metal arm and a computer screen and arm wrestled someone elsewhere at the same center or hundreds of miles away at another. The exhibit succeeded in engaging audiences in types of behavior they would not normally try within a museum or, probably, anywhere.

Simon doesn’t neglect the role of objects themselves in prompting social interaction. Simon argues that “social objects,” a concept taken from engineer and sociologist Jyri Engestrom, perform a similar role as mediating technologies, allowing visitors to “focus their attention on a third thing rather than on each other, making interpersonal engagement more comfortable.” Social objects differ from regular ones in that they tend to spark interactions among audience members who see them. Simon uses the non-museum example of her dog, who serves as a focal point for social exchanges with passersby when she is out for a walk. Harnessing social potential is as much about good design choices as good object choices, and giving objects a social dimension is an art. It can involve making design tweaks, physically altering objects, or reworking interpretive tools such as panels and labels to make objects more personal, relational, active, and provocative..

Participation in practice

Shifting to the practical considerations for participation in the second part of the book, Simon borrows three categories of participation from the Public Participation in Scientific Research (PPSR) project of the Center for Advancement of Informal Science Education (CAISE) and supplies a fourth of her own. One chapter is dedicated to each of the participatory models:

• Contributory
• Collaborative
• Co-creative
• Hosted

Simon describes contributory projects as “casual flings between participants and institutions,” with the most common form being the comment box or feedback wall. As the name suggests, these projects solicit contributions from visitors, which can take the form of opinions, stories, or personal objects such as photographs. Of the four participatory models, contributory projects are the simplest to execute and can involve the most people. Even though these projects are relatively casual, scaffolding still helps institutions ask for and receive meaningful contributions through thoughtful questioning and modeling desired behavior. The London Science Museum incorporated visitor-donated toys into the exhibit Playing with Science, and visitors reported feeling a sense of ownership and pride in seeing their toys on display.

In collaborative projects, institutions still take the leading role in project development, but they work side by side with community members to create new exhibits, programs, and services. These projects usually require a higher level of commitment from participants than those in the contributory category. The National Building Museum in DC runs an annual program that collaborates with local youth to create an exhibit based on the photography and creative writing of community members. Participants take part in twelve classes and have the opportunity to “partially self-direct” an exhibit at the museum. To Simon, though, the exhibit is just the beginning. She asserts that the real measure of success for these projects is what happens after they end – specifically, whether participants remain involved with the institution beyond the project. Simon suggests establishing four non-overlapping roles for the management of collaborative projects: project director, community manager, instructors, and client representatives. Each of these roles balances different levels of authority and intimacy with participants, so keeping them distinct, Simon argues, is important to project success and staff sanity.

Co-creative projects may be undertaken at the initiative of outside participants. On the surface, these projects may look very similar to collaborative projects, but the key difference lies in the share of power between the institution and participants. Co-creative projects are demand-driven and “require institutional goals to take a backseat to community goals.” The special sauce that makes these projects successful is a mixture of non-specialists equipped to accomplish both community and institutional goals, and institutions genuinely desiring community input and leadership. Seattle’s Wing Luke Asian Museum uses the co-creative model exclusively in developing their exhibits. Wing Luke staff members facilitate the development of the themes, content, and form of the exhibits by a team of advisors from the community.

In hosted projects, outside participants have almost complete power. One of the most common of these is a late night social event or reception sponsored by an external organization, although some museums may turn over a set of rooms for exhibitions controlled entirely by someone else. In all of these projects, the outside partner carries out their own project within the museum’s space. Despite the near-total abdication of power in these projects, creative constraints are still useful in ensuring a degree of consistency between community-led projects and those led by professional staff.

While the participatory models range from less to more control on the part of the participants, Simon believes that they needn’t be attempted in any particular order and shouldn’t be seen as a progression. She has even demystified choosing among models through a chart that walks through assessing your commitment to community engagement, desired control over the project, preferred level of leadership, availability of staff, skills gained by participants and benefits to nonparticipants.

Toward the end of the book, Simon devotes chapters to evaluating and sustaining participation. Evaluating participatory projects can be especially tricky because it must focus not just on results for the multiple beneficiaries but also on the process itself. And even the best design can crumble with inadequate institutional support and management structures. Simon suggests a few methods to get staff comfortable with taking on more challenging participatory projects, such as encouraging them to “spend time on the front lines with visitors” or conduct audience research. She also offers several strategies for keeping momentum going with newly started participatory projects, including hiring a community manager and cultivating a participatory culture from the very top.

Analysis

After reading The Participatory Museum, museums and their staff, regardless of their size or resources or content, should be able to begin their journey to reinvigorating themselves, right? What’s good for the web must be good for the galleries? I have to admit that at first I had my doubts.

Specifically, I was skeptical that the book’s techniques would work in a museum like mine, the Traditional Arts and Ethnology Centre in Laos: tiny, few staff, little money, no technology, almost no repeat visitors, and in a developing country. Forrester Research’s social technographics data draws on audiences in North America, Europe, Australia, Metro China, Japan and Korea – all relatively developed places. If any setting could test the limits of this model, it would be here. As I read, however, Simon seemed to anticipate my objections, and The Participatory Museum succeeded in allaying most of my questions about its applicability.

Many books meant as guides meander through abstractions and skimp on specifics, but The Participatory Museum is as dense in practical information as in theory. Tips (“Generally, a platform that has one-fourth to one-half of the space open provides a feeling of welcome and encourages visitors to share”) are peppered throughout the book. Simon reinforces her points with numerous case studies that illustrate both successful and unsuccessful attempts at encouraging participation. For example, in the section on collaboration, she shares her involvement with The Tech Virtual Test Zone, a 2007 project of the San Jose Tech Museum that did not turn out as expected. Simon’s own personal example of participatory failure was a poignant reminder that even seasoned designers don’t get things right all the time.

The examples are also diverse, featuring organizations from several countries, of many kinds and sizes, and at different points on the participation spectrum—some, even, from organizations similar to mine. To cite just a few cases, Simon presents an advice booth set up in the University of Washington-Seattle Student Center, a community photo-documentation project at the Vietnam Museum of Ethnology (VME), and a participatory book-tagging experiment in the Netherlands.

I also saw the applicability of Simon’s approach to the developing world firsthand recently, when my museum undertook a community-based participatory project similar to the VME’s. This work brought a flood of enthusiasm among community members previously untapped through traditional design methods. And a colleague in Indonesia recently quoted the book in justifying decisions she made within her museum. Between the examples in the text, and anecdotal evidence from colleagues, it’s clear that participation, as a tool, is useful in building engagement across a wide spectrum of audiences.

But can we trust the theories underlying The Participatory Museum’s recommendations for practice? While an exhaustive review of primary sources upon which the book draws is outside of the scope of this article, Simon certainly seems to have done her homework: her central typology of participatory projects (contributory, collaborative, co-creative, and hosted) is taken from the literature on public participation in scientific research. She deftly adapts it to the somewhat different context of museums, and added the final category (hosted) herself to account for the use of a museum’s space by an outside organization, where she argues persuasively that the principles of successful participation still apply.

That said, readers should be aware that most of the theory underlying The Participatory Museum had not been formally tested in a museum environment at the time the book was published. Simon speaks forcefully about the need for more and better evaluation of participatory projects; she calls the lack of it “probably the greatest contributing factor to their slow acceptance and use in the museum field.” The Participatory Museum seemingly does a good job of enlisting what assessment does exist and translating it into practical advice, and even lays out a blueprint for what good evaluation could look like, but the evidence presented in most cases is anecdotal. (There are exceptions, such as a 2002 impact study of Glasgow’s Open Museum, which lent objects to visitors in the community.) Purely on the basis of what was known in 2010, it is hard to be sure what tradeoffs would be involved in manifesting Simon’s ultimate vision of a new, wholly participatory kind of museum, or exactly how best to do it. Even so, The Participatory Museum gives every indication of being directionally correct, and an excellent guide to starting that process at an institution.

Implications

Whether you love or hate it, the impact of Simon’s book on the museum field is undeniable. With over 250 citations in books and journal articles, and required reading status in graduate museum studies programs, The Participatory Museum is widely touted as a must-read for museum professionals. The book has inspired conferences, institution-wide discussion sessions, and professional workshops around the country, and reignited debate over how to breathe life into decaying institutions. Simon continues to experiment with these principles at the Santa Cruz Museum of Art and History, where she has been executive director since 2011.

It’s hard to know how much credit The Participatory Museum can claim for this, but there has been a shift—or at least public perception of a shift— toward more participation in the four years since its publication. The Economist recently noted that museums were almost completely unrecognizable, having changed from being places “where people look on in awe” to being places “where they learn and argue.”

But is participation for everyone? There is a tension in The Participatory Museum between Simon’s utopian vision of wholly participatory institutions and her call for balance between traditional and participatory design. Writing about her divergent experiences during a visit to Yellowstone and Grand Teton National Parks in Wyoming in 2008, she admitted:

I am an elitist when it comes to national parks. I like my parks hard to access, sparsely populated, and minimal in services…I believe in lowering barriers to access and creating opportunities for visitors to use museums in diverse ways. On this trip, for the first time, I truly understood the position of people who disagree with me, those who feel that eating and boisterous talking in museums is not only undesirable but violating and painful.

If participatory design is not the only worthwhile kind of design, where is the proper balance? How do institutions and staff know when they’ve hit the participatory sweet spot and when they’ve gone too far?

Indeed, the principles Simon advocates in her book have met with resistance from some quarters. While many institutions have begun transforming themselves into the new kind of museum that Simon envisions, others hold to their support of quiet contemplation and traditional design and seem to believe that they can meet their missions effectively and satisfy their audiences without these design techniques. Bruce Bratton, a Santa Cruz resident, and Judith Dobrzynski, a New York Times writer, are the most recent standard-bearers of the camp that is critical not so much of The Participatory Museum as of the concept of participatory design itself. Dobrzynski believes that the participatory trend, or as she calls it, “the quest for experience,” has led to a field-wide identity crisis in which entertainment has taken over the previously quiet and contemplative environment for which museums were known. Bratton’s more personal attack took aim at Simon’s own museum, calling it a “hobby circus” and claiming that the Santa Cruz Museum of Art and History had devolved into a community center under her leadership.

The Participatory Museum does acknowledge these concerns about audience members who don’t want to take part themselves or feel that others’ participatory experiences are intrusive. Early on in the book, Simon argues that the segment of the audience seeking a more traditional experience should not be left out of the process of “mapping out audiences of interest and brainstorming the experiences, information, and strategies that will resonate most with them” that is foundational to audience-centric design. The research profiling participant types notes that “passive” participants outnumber creators anyway, and through strategic design they can still benefit from others’ contributions. But at the end of the day, are audiences more engaged and are institutions meeting their missions more effectively through participatory design techniques?

For all the accolades and buzz it’s received, The Participatory Museum’s usefulness ultimately rests on the answers to those questions. We will need closer study of participatory work to fully understand the implications of the broader trends the book catalogues and appears to be ushering forward. What do we gain from participatory exhibits or institutional cultures of participation? What do we lose? Are there gaps between perception and reality on this front? (For example, the book presents little evidence that participatory design can make museum audiences less white.) Finally, how can we most effectively take Simon’s advice to put the audience first in any design, given the varied desires and priorities of individual members of that audience? The good news is that the success of The Participatory Museum and the speed at which its recommendations have been adopted should provide a wealth of material for researchers to begin answering these questions with more specificity in the years ahead.

Further reading:

• Nina Simon’s blog, Museum 2.0
• Jessica Shoemaker, A review of The Participatory Museum
• Sarah Jesse, What Would the Internet Do?
• University of Chicago Cultural Policy Center, Participatory Museum workshop
• Collections Link, Participation Portal
• Archaeology, Museums, & Outreach; Moving from Me to We
• Mike Murawski, Developing Questions for Visitor Participation
• Interviews with Nina Simon about the book:
  • Huffington Post, Nina Simon and the Participatory Museum Model
  • National Alliance for Media Arts and Culture, Five Question Q&A
  • Smithsonian Magazine, Nina Simon, Museum Visionary
  • Information and Design, The Participatory Museum

ART AND THE GOVERNMENT

• This is pretty much the most creative cultural tourism gambit ever.
• The Michigan House approved a plan to contribute $195 million in state money to the “grand bargain” to save the Detroit Institute of Arts from the city’s creditors; this money would join the $366 million pledged by foundations, $100 million pledged by the museum itself, and possible funding from union groups. Some creditors still reject the deal, although the judge overseeing the proceedings has refused their request to remove and appraise every painting in the collection.
• “National and local governments don’t take decisions about arts funding based on evidence, however convincing it is.” The Guardian argues that our only hope for better public funding is to create “the kind of solid public support that makes cuts politically dangerous or, even better, unthinkable” through closer ties to local communities.
• Score one victory for the arts lobby: after a vigorous campaign by organizations such as the League of American Orchestras, the Obama administration has carved out an exception for musical instruments in its new ivory regulations.
• Meanwhile, the FCC is accepting public comments on its latest proposed net neutrality rules, which would seem to allow internet providers to strike deals with content sites for faster service – deals akin to those that already exist with tech companies like Netflix, Google, Amazon, and Facebook. Given the Commission’s recent flip-flopping, there’s no telling where this will lead, and we may not know until after the next election. One thing we do know: the idea of America itself is at stake.

MUSICAL CHAIRS

• Peter Handler will be the new executive director of the Reva and David Logan Foundation, sponsor of the Logan Center for the Arts at the University of Chicago. Handler is currently the program director at the Richard H. Driehaus Foundation.
• Moy Eng, former director of both the Hewlett Foundation Performing Arts Program and Palo Alto’s Community School of Music and Arts, has been announced as the first executive director of the Community Arts Stabilization Trust (CAST), a real estate services provider for artists and arts organizations.
• John Horn, of the Los Angeles Times, will be the new host for an arts an entertainment program on KPCC, Southern California Public Radio.

IN THE FIELD

• Just a year after losing its highly respected director Deborah Cullinan to Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco’s Intersection for the Arts has just announced a major restructuring that will result in the closure of several programs and the layoffs of key staff. And NPR is cancelling “Tell Me More,” a little-heard daily talk show aimed at minority audiences, and eliminating 28 jobs. The National Association of Black Journalists blames lackluster promotion efforts.
• The San Diego Opera lives! But along with a full 2015 season, the company has announced layoffs including 13 full-time staff. And now the auditor is calling.
• New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art is planning to gut-renovate its modern and contemporary wing to make room for a major gift of Cubist paintings and potentially create a new entrance from Central Park. Is this another case of museum hubris?
• The plan to dissolve the Corcoran Gallery of Art has been finalized, with the collection going to the National Gallery of Art and other museums it chooses and the building and design school going to George Washington University.
• When you think of St. Louis, do you think of jazz? A $10 million expansion to Jazz St. Louis—to be called the Harold and Dorothy Steward Center for Jazz—hopes to make the two synonymous, establishing St. Louis as one of the top hubs for jazz in the world.
• Lower Manhattan is home to a new performing arts school. Thanks to three years of significant growth, Pace University’s performing arts program will become a school within Pace’s liberal arts college.
• Thanks to the lobbying efforts of Jonathan Safran Foer on behalf of all of those without enough to read, Chipotle cups will now be adorned with short texts by literary luminaries. Not everyone is enthusiastic.
• Those Colorado Symphony mile-high marijuana concerts are now invitation-only, due to an overlooked regulation banning toking up in public. The Denver Post’s music critic went and got blasted – I mean, had a blast.

ALL ABOUT THE BENJAMINS

• AT&T announced that it intends to buy DirecTV. The “media chessboard is moving more than it has in the past decade,” with Comcast’s February purchase of Time Warner cable and Sprint’s overtures to T-Mobile…
• … and reports that Apple is planning a major new foray into streaming music with an acquisition of Beats Audio and of co-founders Dr. Dre and Jimmy Iovine, though something is holding up the deal.
• Nearly four years after announcing a name change, a new mission, and a new grantmaking strategy focused on impact, Cincinnati’s ArtsWave (formerly the Fine Arts Fund) seems to be seeing results. The united arts fund raised a record $12 million for its annual campaign this year, helped catalyze last year’s creation of a new multidisciplinary arts festival drawing national attention, and is starting to form strategic partnerships with non-arts funders. Retiring CEO Mary McCullough-Hudson deserves a lot of credit for seeing this transformation through.
• The Hewlett Foundation’s Fay Twersky defends the decision to end the Nonprofit Marketplace Initiative as data-driven in the face of William Schambra’s accusation that a leadership change was the primary driver. Let’s hope this public debate doesn’t dissuade grantmakers from following Hewlett’s lead on transparency.
• The Metropolitan Atlanta Arts Fund has announced a new capitalization program, including its largest-ever grant of $200,000 to the Atlanta Contemporary Arts Center. The Fund created the program in response to research showing that even many of the city’s strongest arts groups were constrained by having only three months of financial cushion.

BIG IDEAS

• Is it time for foundations to embrace partisan politics instead of trying to remain above the fray? Writers for the Stanford Social Innovation Review think so. “Partisan conflict is not an external factor that advocates can work around,” they write. “It is the defining axis of American politics today, and funders must be unafraid to reckon with it.”
• The expansion of the Gates-Buffett Giving Pledge – a promise to give away at least half of one’s fortune – to include billionaires from around the world raises questions about different cultural attitudes toward philanthropy (in China, public or transparent giving is eschewed) and about the relative merits of the Big Philanthropy model vs the more distributed community foundation model of giving.
• Arts entrepreneurship aficionados, look out: Barry’s Blog has a stellar lineup, uh, lined up for a weeklong blogathon on the topic starting…today!

RESEARCH CORNER

• The National Academy of Sciences has hard numbers that show students learn better through hands-on activities than through lectures – at least when it comes to the sciences.
• Philanthropy Northwest reports on a year-long peer-learning project on diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts involving 10 foundation CEOs in the region.
• Corporate giving is up again, according to the Committee Encouraging Corporate Philanthropy’s annual tally.
• South Arts has released two research reports on arts education in the South. The first, a survey of nearly a third of all principals in the region, found among other things that Southern students have less access to visual arts and music than other American students but greater access to dance – with significant variation among Southern states. The second, case studies of nine strong arts education programs, found that the successful schools cultivated a shared vision of the arts, incorporated the arts into the core curriculum driven by state and national standards, and exposed students to working artists.
• Bringing the ability to make snazzy charts and tables to the masses, evaluators Stephanie Evergreen and Ann K. Emery have developed a data visualization checklist for the graphically challenged among us.
• In case you ever wondered about the correlation between per capita consumption of cheese and the number of people who die by becoming tangled in their bedsheets, Tyler Vigen has you covered.

UMKC Innovation Center Artist Inc. Programming, is seeking an Associate Director Program/Project Operations. This position is the chief administrator of the suite of Artist INC.programs and is responsible for the program’s consistent achievement of its mission and financial objectives. Artist INC programs are delivered through a collaborative partnership of the Charlotte Street Foundation, ArtsKC-Regional Arts Council, and the UMKC Innovation Center. The Director position and program offices are housed in the UMKC Innovation Center. Artist INC programs include the original Artist INC Live eight-week seminar that focuses on professional development and business training for emerging and mid-career artists; two speakers’ series that connect artists with national and local experts in arts entrepreneurship; the Artist INC website where artists can find the resources they need to shape their careers and grow their businesses; Artist INC Online, a web version of the live training seminar that significantly broadens geographic access to the groundbreaking program; Artist INC’s official blog PushingTheFlywheel, a digital resource destination for the local artist community; Artist INC II, an advanced project-based seminar available to all Artist INC Live alumni; One-On-One Strategic Planning sessions with Artist Peer Facilitators; and Artist INC Community Trainings that provide hands on training and support to communities in the Mid-America Arts Alliance six-state region so they may offer their own community’s sessions of Artist INC Live.

Deadline: May 27. This job is based in Kansas City, MO and compensation starts at $52,700.

Senior Consultant and Associate Consultant (two positions), TRG Arts

TRG Arts is a results-driven consulting firm that helps arts and entertainment organizations achieve increased, sustained revenue and loyal patronage. Our firm counsels some 1,200 client organizations – orchestras, arts centers, museums, festivals, Broadway presenters, opera, dance, and theatre companies – across North America, and now extending abroad to Australia and the UK. Informed by data, TRG consultants and analysts guide growth to achieve results. TRG’s ongoing study of patron transactions and behavior informs understanding of arts and entertainment consumers—who they are and how they invest their time and money. TRG applies that knowledge to each client situation, using data to craft strategy and find the most actionable means for each client to optimize revenue, and increase and sustain loyal participation.

No deadline, but the Senior Consultant position was posted a while ago.

Manager, Program Support (Education, Creativity and Free Expression), Ford Foundation

The Manager, Program Support is a composed and effective project manager, decision-maker, and implementer who functions as a key partner in the Office of the Vice President (OVP). The primary responsibility of this position is to initiate, develop, and manage strategic and tactical activities that optimize and support the work flow of the Vice President. The ideal candidate will possess the ability and confidence to initiate and move forward projects and related work independently on behalf of the Vice President, partnering with program and non-program directors, peer groups and colleagues across the foundation to identify and implement action items that maintain effective operations.

No deadline. Basically you would be working for the person at Ford who oversees all of its arts funding, among other things.