Learning about programs like this, I had a hunch that partnerships between arts organizations and health organizations will be the next big thing for both groups. I thought with some research I would learn that the number of partnerships between an individual health organization and an individual arts organization has grown in the last five to ten years, and to an extent, that’s true. But some of the best, and even the fastest-growing, programs for the arts in healthcare have been around for decades. The commonality between most of these very robust programs, old and new, is they are not one partnership – they are many partnerships. Programs for the arts in healthcare appear to thrive when they are created and supported by a network of groups, each contributing their own specialty.

Background

I present as informed speculation the idea that programs for the arts in healthcare work best as networks, and suggest it as an area for further exploration. My analysis is based on a subjective impression of which programs are thriving, as demonstrated by the number of patients an organization has served or visitors to an organization’s public galleries, and by an organization’s reputation within the arts or the healthcare communities. Several of these programs have received accolades or positive appraisal from external organizations. For example, CosaCosa’s Healing Art Project has been featured in Designing the World’s Best Children’s Hospitals, a publication of the National Association of Children’s Hospitals, and both NYU and Audience Focus, Inc. have conducted evaluations of New York MoMA’s Meet Me at MoMA that demonstrate the program’s effectiveness.

As the number of arts and healthcare partnerships increases, so does the number of ways the arts and healthcare interact, including therapeutic initiatives, increasing accessibility to the arts (for people whose disabilities may be a barrier), and decreasing the stigma of a disease. The Global Alliance for Arts & Health (formerly the Society for Arts in Healthcare) defines five focus areas for arts and health: patient care, healing environments, caring for caregivers, community well-being, and education. While all of these are valuable, the programs discussed here primarily relate to the first two categories (patient care and healing environments), although many of them may have other benefits.

Art therapy as a field of study originated in the late nineteenth century, as psychologists began to study the connections between art and mental and emotional wellbeing. As early as the 1930’s, psychologists used art in “milieu therapy,” encouraging patients to enjoy and create art as a part of healthy self-expression. More recently, the practice expanded from mental health to physical health. Music therapy as a discipline has followed a similar trajectory, emerging between the First and Second World Wars and first used for war veterans. These fields provide a substantial foundation for programs that combine arts and healthcare, and many healthcare organizations hire art and music therapists directly or through partnerships.

Musicians Care by Sherman Hospital on Flickr

Some of the earliest programs uniting art and healthcare were simple introductions of visual art into healthcare spaces. The British organization Paintings in Hospitals was founded in 1959 by a hospital employee who saw the positive effect that bringing the visual arts into a healthcare environment had on patients’ health and wellbeing. This type of program is still popular today, and now, many art-in-hospitals programs have blossomed into extensive networks of artists, art organizations, and hospitals. National networks such as Paintings in Hospitals and Scotland’s Art in Healthcare are thriving, and many other programs exist on a smaller scale, such as Oakwood Arts for the Spirit in Michigan. These early programs focused on improving the healthcare environment rather than giving patients opportunities to create art themselves. In the next few decades, more participatory arts and healthcare programs were created in a variety of disciplines, such as Dance Exchange’s Metlife Foundation Healthy Living Initiative program, founded in 1978.

Beginning in the 1990s, arts and healthcare partnerships have become increasingly common. Notable organizations include Dance for PD, a partnership between the Mark Morris Dance Group and the Brooklyn Parkinsons Group which has spread to over 100 communities, and Concerts in Care, which brings live music to residential care facilities across Canada. Over several decades, the concept of using the arts in healthcare has gained broad currency, as evidenced by numerous articles in mainstream medical journals and popular science periodicals (for example, this study showing that music can ease chronic pain and depression). It has also captured the attention of national policymakers.

The principle of network effects applies here; the more people who participate in a network, the more benefit users get from it. In the case of arts and healthcare partnerships it isn’t the number of people participating that makes the difference, but the number of organizations, and the people are still the ones benefiting. However, there is still a parallel. The more points of access there are for the users, with multiple healthcare organizations and multiple arts organizations participating, the more likely users are to find the program in the first place and find a part of the program that addresses their needs. Presumably, the network also creates opportunities for networking in the sense of making professional contacts, and new collaborations arising out of existing partnerships. The main drawback of having a network is that more people contributing ideas also means a more complex and often less efficient system of implementing them. For networks of organizational partnerships, having clarity and consensus around the group goals for working together as a whole can help to mitigate this drawback.

The Power of Networks

In our highly networked world, partnerships between three or more players have a lot going for them. A number of arts in healthcare programs consider their network of partnerships fundamental to what they do. For example, Shands Arts in Medicine, the hospital described in the introduction, says on its website, “An essential component of [our] mission is to create collaborations with other hospital departments, community arts organizations and hospitals around the world. These collaborations spark projects that move the message of art and wellness to a broader audience.”

A Network of Skills and Specialties

While many thriving arts in healthcare programs are organized as partnerships and networks, there is no set template that works best. In many cases, either a dedicated organization facilitates programming by reaching out to both health and arts organizations, or a healthcare organization brings in art by partnering with several different arts groups in their community. It is less common for one arts organization to partner with several health groups, but this approach seems just as effective.

Networks of program offerings, built on combining the strengths of multiple partners, allow arts organizations to leverage a set of related skills and expertise in multiple ways to target a variety of healthcare needs. For example, through a variety of partnerships the Smith Center for Healing and the Arts in Washington, DC offers different programs for cancer patients and survivors, military members and veterans, the general public, and health centers. This array of offerings and of recipients would likely be much smaller if the Smith Center limited itself to partnering with one hospital. Since the healthcare landscape is so multifaceted, the corresponding partnerships with the arts must also extend to many specialties.

Moreover, a network of partnerships can help an arts organization reach one particular audience more fully. For example, the New York Museum of Modern Art’s Meet Me at MoMA offers programs at the museum and on-site for organizations that work with individuals with Alzheimer’s. It also has a monthly interactive gallery program for individuals with Alzheimer’s and their caregivers to come independently. This combination of services, made possible by the museum’s connections to a variety of health care organizations, enables MoMA’s programming to reach people with Alzheimer’s in a variety of stages, at a variety of levels of independence, and in a variety of family and professional care situations.

Healing in the Community

The diversity networks provide helps organizations capture the best opportunities their community has to offer. For example, Snow City Arts in Chicago offers art classes to hospitalized children. While their teaching artist-in-residence program is the core of their offerings, the organization proclaims, “By working side-by-side with local arts organizations, performance groups, music ensembles, and prominent universities, we help ensure our children are learning from Chicago’s brightest artistic minds.” The program works with hospitals to bring this instruction to children who regularly miss school because of their health needs.

Artist Hein at Work by Virginia Lockett on Flickr

The advantage of networks goes in the other direction, too, helping arts and healing organizations play a more connected, more visible role in the community. In the case of COSACOSA’s Healing Art Project, this connection is intentional: “The Healing Art Project reaffirms the time-honored role of artists in sustaining the health of a community.” The project brings together children and youth of a variety of health experiences – healthy kids, kids with disabilities, and kids living in pediatric healthcare centers – to create collaborative artwork. The artwork is displayed in pediatric healthcare centers, and in some cases is an integral part of the design of these centers. Thus, the program is community-oriented both in the creation and the use of the art.

The visibility advantages of being in a network can also help a program expand and connect to the community of people it serves. For example, Dance for PD, which now has branches from Pasadena to Philadelphia to Pune, India, has been given the opportunity to participate in a number of high-profile events, such as the Parkinson’s Unity Walk in New York, which draws around 10,000 attendees.

Looking Ahead

The funding climate for this type of partnership appears to be growing friendlier as art therapy becomes more mainstream. There are several foundations and grant programs with a specific interest in bringing the arts into healthcare, such as the grants made by the Global Alliance for Arts & Health and the Metlife Foundation’s Healthy Aging grant program. Networks of partnerships have the opportunity to maximize their ability to seek support, since different funding avenues may be available to organizations on different sides of the partnership. However, networks also increase the number of variables involved, and any innovative program, especially one that is tangential to an organization’s mission or primary activities, may turn out to be a hard sell to grantmakers and donors if it appears on the surface to be riskier than traditional offerings. Organizations looking to enter partnerships should bear this in mind.

Arts organizations looking to get involved in an arts and healthcare partnership would do well to research the health and arts landscape in their area, to see whether there is an existing network they can join, and to learn what needs are not yet being met. There are a number of great resources put together by established organizations (see below); another benefit of networks is that they encourage a culture of freely sharing information. However, most of the literature out there on partnerships between the arts and healthcare is focused on providing practical guidance on what seems to work; little has been written on why it works. I am hoping to start the latter conversation with this piece, but the topic deserves more thorough attention than I am able to give it here. I envision studies that involve interviewing the leadership and staff of dozens of organizations across the country, including stand-alone projects, one-on-one partnerships, and networks. Such an effort would hopefully demonstrate whether networks are one successful model that has a lot of advantages and happens to be very popular right now, or whether they are truly the best model. The resulting lessons would equip many more organizations to unite healthcare and the arts.

Resources

• The University of Florida and UF&Shands Arts In Medicine have an online toolkit called AIM Together for organizations interested in the intersection of arts in medicine.
• The Global Alliance for Arts & Health has a basic toolkit for organizations which was created for a presentation at an event but has useful and in-depth information, and provides more resources in the members-only section of their website.
• The University of Florida also has an online toolkit specific to Arts in Healthcare for Rural Communities.
• New York’s Museum of Modern Art’s Meet Me At MoMA program provides museum programs to Alzheimer’s patients and their caregivers. MoMA provides guides for museums, care organizations, and families on how to start or engage with this type of program.
• The National Endowment for the Arts has a page on the arts in healthcare on their website.

Roy Hargrove, a popular jazz jammer, at work on his horn. Photo courtesy of Eddy Westveer via Flickr.

This is the second post in a series on the tragedy of the commons and what it means for the arts sector.

Four talented young musicians step on stage at a West Village jazz jam. Each faces competing pressures: helping make the band sound tight and showing off her own skills. With this information, and a little bit of formal logic, we could conclude that this situation is hopeless (as we did in the previous piece of this series). Each member of the band faces a pair of incentives that together push her to overplay–meaning simply, as in Pitfalls, playing for a longer period of time than would normally be appropriate for the given tune–and make the music worse. Jazz jams from New York to LA are plagued by this fate, but many avoid it. Some, like the one at Fat Cat in New York City, host some of the best music around.

In order to achieve their goals, arts funders often need the organizations they support to work together. Many of these on-the-ground organizations face a set of incentives similar to the jazz musicians. Yet in the real world, successful collaboration is not unusual for arts organizations or jazz artists.

Why are some shared goals realized when incentives appear to be aligned against them? Doctoral degrees, book deals, and Nobel prizes have been awarded for attempts at answering this question. People and the institutions we make up are difficult to understand. Though there does not yet appear to be a consensus on a single set of factors that generate solutions, simplified versions of the theories posited by diverse academics like Elinor Ostrom, Robert Axelrod, Robert Sugden, Antonio Demasio, George Lakoff, and Daniel Kahnemen from economics, political science, psychology, cognitive science, linguistics, anthropology, and mathematics can help funders move toward a fuller toolkit of productive impact strategies.

Jazz Jams That Listeners Can Enjoy

Looking at how a jazz jam works and how the members avoid failure helps us better understand which strategies foundations should be choosing. A jazz quartet that plays well together could draw on one or a combination of the following scenarios:

Cooperative Strategies: Jazz jams can be quite draining. A series of bad experiences can scar a player for life. Only the musicians who get a lot out of playing stick around to teach jazz to the next round of youngsters. Teachers have learned through experience that they are happiest when they get to play extra time and when no one else overplays. They also learn that pretty much everyone feels the same way. Since it is unlikely that they will run into a lot of players that feel differently, they need to develop a strategy that can work for them throughout the years and keep them energized to go onto the next jam.  Over time, musicians start to develop a simple plan: 1) the first time you play with a new group, don’t overplay. 2) If your bandmates overplay, you can overplay next time as payback. 3) If they don’t overplay, reward them by going along the next time and not overplaying. Cooperation is the best possible option for the group as a whole, so this simple strategy is able to gain momentum over time and become the dominant approach. The four musicians who show up at the West Village jazz jam have all been trained well and know this strategy. If they follow it, the players and the audience will leave happy enough to return another night.

Psychological: It is not often that jazz musicians are accused of being abnormally rational. Each player’s approach to the music is organic, complex, and deeply emotional. Even in everyday life, aside from the creative and culturally cooperative setting of the jazz jam, recent research suggests that no one always acts completely rationally. Our West Village jazz musicians are no different. Each of the players has interests and goals. These incentives can be understood by analyzing the individual musicians’ situations as if they were happiness-maximizing robots. The problem is that players in this group also have brains and bodies, and those don’t always work like a computer.

As the trumpet player reaches the stage, a lot is going through her mind. 98% of it is subconscious. Her fellow musicians start to play. Before she has even picked up her instrument, she hears the chord changes and watches the guitarist strike his instrument. Her brain mirrors this; her mind’s fingers are playing all of those chords. Though she is only observing, her neurons are quietly firing, providing her a subconscious empathic connection to her bandmate. She begins to play and comes to a decision point: should she overplay or play along with everyone else? Her decision draws on a number of simple rules for mental processing. One, called framing, tells her to use the information she has, as it is presented, to make the decision. She was just telling her friend how one of the players earlier in the night was a “ball hog.” The metaphor she used equates “overplaying” and “being a ball hog” and sets the frame for her: jazz is a team sport in which each member should sacrifice for the goals of the team. Using this framing, she decides to pass the ball to her teammate.

Social Context: Jazz musicians are members of social networks outside of just the jazz jam community. The social norms jazz musicians learn outside of jazz—whether in their homes, schools, or places of work or worship—matter inside jazz. When the bass player takes the stage, he is behaving in a way he finds appropriate given his upbringing and social context. Though he feels the urge to take off his shirt—it is hot after all—he probably won’t. He has learned that in this society, when you’re at an upscale music venue, you don’t take off your clothes even if you’re overheated. The same logic applies to his decision not to overplay. His society has conditioned him to appreciate teamwork and cooperation as important virtues. He decides to limit his playing to one turn over the chord changes, because he knows doing otherwise would be seen as inappropriate in his society.

Rules: There’s a sign on the wall of our imaginary West Village jazz haunt: UNLESS YOU’RE CHARLIE PARKER, KEEP IT UNDER 2 CHORUSES! As new players arrive, the doorman makes sure to point out the sign and let them know that they’ll have to pay a fine if they break the rule. When these fresh-faced jazz jammers reach the stage, overplaying doesn’t cross their mind. They know they have to play by the rules and do their best within their time limit.

Unspoken Rules: A young alto sax player walks into a bar on Frenchmen Street hosting a jazz jam. He sits down to watch a few songs and sees that certain players are getting kicked off stage, while others are allowed to stay on stage tune after tune. He notices the difference between the two types of players: the ones who get pushed off are overplaying, and the ones who get to stay are team players. A few songs later, he gets called to the stage. When he gets the chance to overplay, he decides against it because, even though the rule is unspoken, he knows that there will be costs to overplaying.

The Rules that Set the Rules: At the beginning of every jazz jam it hosts, a club in Harlem asks every non-playing person in attendance to vote on the rules for the night. Those in attendance raise their hands and voices in support of a reasonable limit on how long solos can be. They decide that musicians who break the rules can’t play the rest of the night; they’re the customers after all. The rules as determined by the audience constrain the freedom of the musicians to play what they want, but they do so in the interest of everyone there.

A Well-Intentioned Intervention at Our Dreamed-Up Jazz Jam

As one further complication, we could add to our hypothetical jazz jam the existence of an organizer. The person responsible for bringing the whole event about could use her power to influence where the jam is held, what the rules are, and who is allowed in. She could also draw on cognitive scientific, psychological, and game theoretic evidence that using the right language and setting the right context for the jam could change the outcomes. By facilitating the jam with this awareness, she could ensure the jammers work together to the benefit of all involved.

Funding Successful Cooperation

Foundations often use grant-making as a way to structure the incentives available for achieving their goals. Often times, the goals require collaboration among organizations they are funding and other organizations with a similar purpose. Foundations can be more successful if they learn how collaboration works and integrate this knowledge into their grant-making strategies. The simplified jazz jam situations I previously laid out provide a window into how organizations and people come to cooperate.

Foundations that select organizations for funding by assessing marginal costs against marginal social benefits may incentivize organizations to work against shared goals (see The Pitfalls of Shared Goals). Providing grants on this basis carries an implicit theory: the value organizations create together is worth no more than the value they create on their own. The alternative belief, that the value organizations create through collaboration is greater than that which they provide alone, suggests a broader range of strategies.

The Collective Impact approach, as described by John Kania and Mark Kramer in an article for the Stanford Social Innovation Review, is an important first step toward solutions. Kania and Kramer suggest that foundations should set a shared agenda, develop a common measurement system, work with organizations to help them fit into their highest-impact role, encourage cross-organization communication, and fund an institution to manage this process. These suggestions draw on the idea that, by changing the rules that make the rules and increasing the visibility of an organization’s failure to contribute to the shared goals, foundations can get closer to achieving their desired outcomes. Each of these suggestions is valid, but other strategies exist as well.

Foundations and other funders of the arts could turn to the varied explanations (above) of why people work together to define strategies that fit their unique needs. Take, for example, a funder seeking to increase the diversity of art making in their community. The funder may choose to fund an organization working to provide performance spaces for women and a separate organization working on offering music classes to underserved communities. Each of these organizations are important, but by emphasizing the individual impact they have on their focus, e.g., how many people became instrumentally proficient per dollar, the funder misses the opportunity to promote shared goals. Instead, the funder could attempt to reframe the work each organization does by offering combined team trainings with all of its grantees in attendance. It could set a standard that any organization which appears to not be working in concert with other organizations is barred from funding for a certain number of years. It could offer trainings on cooperative strategies, like the tit-for-tat strategy explained above, such that the organizations they fund would self-enforce cooperation. And it could even change the language it uses in the grant-making process to ensure that it helps organization leaders think of their organizations as one piece of a bigger puzzle.

In reality, many foundations do this sort of thing every day without knowing it. They consider long-term objectives and make decisions based on audacious goals rather than just near-term impact. They bring diverse coalitions together to discuss shared goals. While a short-run cost-benefit analysis may not see the value in time spent at a bar with other organizations in the community, the cooperative model we’ve been discussing makes sense of its importance.

The strategies foundations and other funders develop are particular to their mission. By understanding how collaboration works in a simple setting, funders can tweak their social impact strategies on the big stage to be more aligned with the evidence on how we reach shared goals.

For more on these topics, check out:

• “Evolution of Cooperation” by Robert Axelrod
• “Spontaneous Order” by Robert Sugden
• Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman
• “Behind the Looking-Glass” by Antonio Damasio and Kaspar Meyer
• Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things by George Lakoff
• Rules, Games, and Common-Pool Resources by Ostrom, Walker, and Gardner

Ever since then, I’ve been something of a crusader for developing channels for information-sharing within and around the cultural research space. I simply couldn’t believe that such important work wasn’t more visible within the sector. As my interest grew in building bridges between researchers and practitioners through initiatives such as the Arts Policy Library series on Createquity, I also began to see the value of facilitating greater connections among arts researchers themselves. While researchers tend to be more plugged in to what their colleagues are doing than your typical practitioner, there are still significant information gaps that too often hold back collective progress. That’s why, after I started work at Fractured Atlas on implementing the Hewlett Foundation’s Bay Area Cultural Asset Map project, I created a Google Group called the “Cultural Mapping Community of Practice” and recruited many of my heroes from the summer of 2008–as well as some new ones I’d picked up along the way–to join.

There was just one problem: other than an initial burst of activity in which participants eagerly shared details of projects that they were working on or had recently completed, not many people made use of the Cultural Mapping Community of Practice. After the pilot phase of the Bay Area Cultural Asset Map was complete, the group essentially fell dormant. I gradually realized that this was probably because participants, despite the name, viewed the Cultural Mapping Community of Practice as the project of a single person–me. Every time I would post something, there would be some responses, but after that conversation would die out and no one would start a new thread. It’s almost like people were waiting for permission to participate.

That’s not what I wanted at all! My vision was for a commons, a shared resource that we all could benefit from and own. But that wasn’t going to be the reality so long as I was the only person behind the curtain. So I started recruiting some trusted colleagues to join me on a steering committee for the group, starting with Kiley Arroyo, and continuing with Jean Cook, Anne Gadwa Nicodemus, and Andrew Taylor. For the past several months, the five of us have been meeting and speaking regularly, developing background materials, inviting participants from our professional networks, and committing to regularly seed discussion with new and relevant content. Along the way, we changed the name to the less tongue-twisting Cultural Research Network and attracted some notice from the official NEA Art Works blog. And before long, we’ll be opening up membership on the steering committee to nominations from any participant in the group.

I’m proud to share that the Cultural Research Network officially launched this afternoon under its new name and configuration. Here’s an excerpt from the opening message:

How (and How Not!) to Participate in the Cultural Research Network

We hope that you will take advantage of the CRN in the ways that ensure its value and relevance to your work. For example, here are some ideas for how you can participate.

• Offer or solicit practical advice and perspectives on methodological challenges. Are you working on a thorny problem outside your area of expertise and aren’t sure how to solve it? Are you considering use of a particular data set and would like perspectives from others who have employed it in the past? Ask away.
• Share background information and technical documents developed as part of larger projects. Some of the most valuable elements of a research process—environmental scans, literature reviews, lists of possible data sources, etc.—don’t always make it into a final report. This forum is a great place to share those kinds of materials with your fellow researchers so that we can all learn from them.
• Discuss field-wide issues and/or work collaboratively to develop shared infrastructure. What does the field’s sudden interest in Big Data mean for arts research? What are the potentials and barriers to developing common taxonomies for arts-specific data? The CRN provides an ideal venue for conversations about common resources and challenges in the arts research space.

We believe that the CRN will reach its full potential if everyone keeps in mind the following values:

• Openness: Participants recognize that no one is an expert in everything, including (especially) themselves. Questions are welcome regardless of the identity of the asker.
• Transparency: Participants assume by default that there is more to be gained than lost by sharing information. Dialogue is straightforward, candid, and informed by full context.
• Generosity: Empowering people to help one another is a core purpose of the Network. Participants do not hesitate to give freely of their time and expertise to move the field forward.

If all of that sounds interesting, feel free to read the FAQ and sign up at the group homepage. We look forward to sharing and learning with you!

from the Library of Congress

This is the first piece in a three-part series on the tragedy of the commons and what it means for the arts sector.

Remember that group project you had in middle school where one of the members slacked off and got the same grade as you? What about that green stuff growing in the back (and maybe event the front) of your fridge in college? Sometimes, when a group of people is collectively responsible for a thing or an action, members of the group don’t do their part–leaving the project unfinished, or the refrigerator unclean.

Arts funders and policymakers are often shooting for goals that require on-the-ground organizations to work together. The Surdna Foundation, for example, “supports efforts that provide artists with business training and financial resources that enable them to be, and create, valuable economic assets for their communities.” One of the grants Surdna has made under this program is to the Rebuild Foundation, an organization that helps finance cultural spaces. This is an important effort, and it is a major part of “providing artists with…financial resources,” but it alone does not make financial resources and business training available to all artists. Instead, the Rebuild Foundation works within an informal network of organizations in St. Louis, Omaha, Chicago, and Detroit to help make the arts a more viable livelihood and to stimulate local economies by strengthening the arts. The strategies that Surdna and all other grant-making institutions put in place have implicit, if not explicit, theories of how the organizations they fund will work with others to reach the goal the foundation intends, e.g., viability of an artist livelihood.

Goals that require a shared purpose, as the goals of many foundations do, are not all that different from those you and your roommates had in college of keeping the fridge clean. Under certain circumstances, they can be left unmet. An understanding of some of the perspectives on why that happens and how to prevent it can help improve the outcomes of a foundation’s strategies.

Tragedy of the Commons

The most common answer to why shared goals are left unmet draws on an out-of-date example about which most people today know very little: common grazing land. Using the metaphor of common grazing land for all shared goals and resources goes back to ecologist Garrett Hardin’s 1968 article in Science, “The Tragedy of the Commons.” In it, Hardin asks us to picture an open pasture. He argues each herdsman in town has the same incentive: to bring all their cows to this free grazing land. As more and more cows come onto the land, a threshold is passed beyond which the shared land is degraded and becomes unfit for grazing. He explains that typically we expect the invisible hand of the market to help us move toward a better society—competition weeds out the socially costly and leaves us with the socially valuable firms and products. In this case, the invisible hand of competition has led to the degradation of what was a perfectly good pasture. Hardin goes on to extrapolate this to other problems like pollution. Each potential polluter faces higher benefit than cost from polluting, so each chooses to pour their leftover grease into the sewer. Hardin calls all of these shared resources or goals “the commons” and names the overconsumption of them “the tragedy of the commons.”

Tragedy of the Jam Session

This same problem can arise in the arts on a micro-level. Take, for example, a simple jazz jam session.

In a smoke-filled room in the West Village, four up-and-coming bebop players take the stage. They’ve never played together before, but they’re pretty talented, so the audience is expecting a show. Each player wants to live up to that expectation; she hopes that everyone in the room enjoys the music, and that she herself will enjoy it too. At the same time, each member wants to show off her chops with some improv. Improvisation is limited to one player at a time in most bebop settings, and if it runs on too long in a context like this, it can ruin the tune.

Each player, then, has two main incentives: to play the song well together and to take more improv time than the other members. Playing the song well is a goal that all members share responsibility for meeting. Every member looks bad if the song flops. If the song sounds great, everyone has succeeded. Assuming the tune as a whole sounds good, each member can make herself look better by playing a solo that is a little bit longer.

The first soloist begins as the melody ends, and she faces each of these incentives. At this point, the band is playing well together, and it doesn’t seem like playing a little bit longer than normal will mess up the song too much, so she chooses to play one extra time through the chord changes. The player who follows faces the same incentives, and also chooses to improvise longer than necessary. Likewise for the third and the fourth soloist. Three-quarters of the way through the tune, the audience is texting and checking email–they came to hear jazz, not a bunch of overly-eager youngsters play worn out licks over the same tune for an hour. The shared goal that they set out to meet has gone unmet, and each member of the band looks worse because of it.

Making Tragic Grants

Individual arts organizations competing for grants are faced with a similar set of incentives as the herdsman or the soloist. A greatly over-simplified, but illustrative example may be helpful here:

Two organizations have a goal. This goal is something like providing a community and audience exposure for emerging artists and cultural innovators. Each organization uses this mission to define metrics and targets for success and measures performance by attendance and the number of performances held in a given year. Both organizations share a similar mission and constituency, so they look for funding from the same foundation.

Meanwhile, the foundation from which they are soliciting funding is attempting to meet its own mission of making the broader community a hub for cultural innovation. Let’s say it also believes that attendance and the frequency of performances are critical components of success, and it chooses to emphasize these metrics in the grant-making process by giving only to the best-preforming organization.

If both arts organizations know the metrics that the foundation is using for assessing potential grantees, they will compete to host the performances that will be most likely to draw the largest, most consistent audiences. A problem arises because an organization can win the funds by scheduling performances that directly compete with the other organization’s schedule, drawing away potential guests on an important night for their competitor. Similarly, one of the organizations can lose out on the funds if they attempt to develop new artists that will benefit the community-wide goal of innovation rather than attempting to bring in established, highly demanded performers. No organization is made better off by focusing on the broad shared vision; they are only made better off when they focus on the part of that vision that can be attributed immediately to their work. In this way, the shared vision of cultural innovation is lost to the competitive struggle for funding.

For the jazz quartet discussed above, multiple internal and external forces set incentives. The arts organizations’ incentives, on the other hand, are at least in part set by the foundation’s expectations for how the grant money will be used and what it will accomplish. Foundations thus have a responsibility to understand how the incentives they create promote or hinder cooperation between grantees.

Avoiding the Tragedy

If you’ve ever had a clean refrigerator, seen a good jazz jam, or observed organizations with competing incentives reach a common goal, you already know instinctively that the tragedy of the commons is not a necessary evil. People and organizations find ways to solve problems like these every day. Anthropologists, economists, sociologists, political scientists, and ecologists have attempted to draw general lessons from people world-over who maintain working commons. In the next installment of this series, I will explain how their theories might work in the situations described above.

Venn diagrams. Photograph by Demetri Mouratis

When some brave soul writes an updated history of arts education in the United States (any takers?) I think he or she will describe the early-to-mid-2000s as an ambitious era. The arts education sector, mirroring the broader arts field and the constantly reforming field of education, is having larger and broader conversations about impact, outcomes and sustainability. In the process it’s moving toward large and broader models of best practice such as the idea of  “shared delivery”  (also known as “blended delivery” and the “three-legged stool model”). Shared delivery has been in vogue for the last few years. It was a central topic of conversation at the Grantmakers in the Arts Conference in 2008. Americans for the Arts identifies shared delivery as a key component to a broader approach called “coordinated delivery” – which, in turn, was identified as a major arts education trend in 2010. My own initiative, Arts for All, upholds shared delivery as integral to the vision of ensuring high quality arts education for all students in Los Angeles County.

In the K-12 public school setting, shared delivery envisions students receiving arts instruction from three distinct parties: 1) generalist elementary school teachers, 2) arts specialists, and 3) teaching artists and/or community arts organizations. Under this model, the three collaborate to provide visual and performing arts programs to children. The generalist teacher integrates the arts throughout daily lessons across subject areas, the specialist hones in on skills and content specific to his or her art form, and the teaching artist supports one or both while engaging directly with students and providing the perspective of a working arts professional. The model posits that each of these three roles is of equal importance. While there are different attempts to represent this idea graphically (try here, here and here (page 17)), all fall back on a basic visual of three concentric circles:

Shared delivery does not reflect what I or, based on anecdotal evidence, the majority of people within my age bracket received in terms of arts education. My fifth grade generalist teacher was a woman named Mrs. Gonzalez. I saw her every day, and she taught me math, reading, science, history and so forth. My school had a visual arts specialist, Ms. Peters, whom I saw once a week. Art never really came up during my math/reading/science/history lessons, and math/reading/science/history never really came up during my art lessons, so if Mrs. Gonzalez and Ms. Peters worked together behind the scenes, their collaboration wasn’t readily apparent to me. The only visiting teaching artists I recall encountering in elementary school were members of a theater company who performed an abridged version of Macbeth during a school-wide assembly in our cafeteria. Afterwards they sat on plastic chairs and answered questions. They stayed for about an hour, and we never saw them again.

Were I the beneficiary of a true shared delivery model of arts education, those actors would have come into my classroom and taught me theater for a number of weeks or months alongside Mrs. Gonzalez, who would in turn be learning theater techniques to use in other subject areas, all the while also working with Ms. Peters to draw connections to visual art. I may have had a teaching artist work with me and my teacher in third or fourth grade so that I understood the elements of visual art by the time I got to Ms. Peters in fifth grade. I would have had a lot more art in my life, period.

Shared delivery is ambitious and, on a broad scale, largely theoretical. As with much in arts education, the roots of the model stretch back to budget cuts in public schools beginning in the 1970s, when broad anti-tax sentiment gripped the country. In California, this sentiment manifested in a state-wide ballot measure capping property tax rates, at a time when California’s school districts received the bulk of their funding from local property taxes. When the measure passed, schools braced for a huge – according to this 1978 estimate, more than 33%– drop in revenue. Similar cuts impacted state and local education budgets across the country; according to the Center for Arts Education, New York City had a robust curriculum in all four art forms before the city’s 1970s fiscal crisis pushed it to the brink of bankruptcy. How many visual and performing arts teachers were laid off as a result across the country is difficult to determine, but it appears that schools took a pretty big hit from which they never fully recovered. In 2007, per SRI’s analysis of arts education across California, 61% of the state’s schools did not have even one full-time equivalent arts specialist on staff.

Concurrent with these cuts, the field of teaching artistry was formalizing. As described in NORC at the University of Chicago’s 2011 report, “Teaching Artists and the Future of Education,”

Artists slowly began entering schools in the 1950s. Their roles were initially limited to introducing students to the excitement of live performance… That began changing in the mid-1960s… Artists in the Schools became one of the first programs of the new National Endowment for the Arts. By the mid-1970s, Young Audiences, Urban Gateways, Lincoln Center Institute of Arts Education, and other organizations in major cities were sending artists to schools to teach workshops and residencies.

These teaching artists brought with them what NORC calls a “new kinds of arts pedagogy” that “modified the more hierarchical pedagogy of the conservatories, rooted in European classical tradition, to find an approach based on the principles that the arts are for everyone.” As “quasi-outsiders” in the public school system, teaching artists could experiment with new ways of teaching the visual and performing arts, many of which went on to become best practices. Given the loss of arts specialists, teaching artistry also allowed many students who otherwise may never had access to a certain art form to learn directly from a professional. Schools, in turn, clearly saw the benefit.  According to the National Center for Education Statistics, in 2009-10 42% of elementary schools across the country reported partnerships or collaborations with cultural or community organizations, 31% with individual artists, 29% with museums or galleries, and 26% with performing arts centers.

Throughout the 1990s and 2000s, the standards-and-accountability movement took full force across the United States, with states defining or redefining what students should know and be able to do in each grade level and in each content area, including the arts. National visual and performing arts standards were developed in 1994 (with a revision due out later this year), and every state except for Iowa and Nebraska has adopted its own standards for the arts at the elementary or secondary level, or both. The quality of the state standards varies, but for the most part, they represent newly codified aspirations regarding what public school students should know in all art forms.

Alongside those aspirations came a realization that meeting the standards required changing how teaching artists and classroom teachers (both generalists and specialists) interact. A simple “service provider” arrangement, in which schools select and arts organizations deliver from a list of pre-designed programs, left classroom teachers and teaching artists operating in silos, with the teacher essentially “handing off” responsibility for arts instruction to a short-term visitor. As noted in the National Guild for Community Arts Education’s Partners in Excellence handbook, this approach “does not take full advantage of the expertise of both the artists and the educators to create in-depth, pedagogically sound arts experiences for children and professional enrichment for teachers.” The field’s definition of best practice shifted accordingly to include much higher levels of collaboration between teaching artists and classroom teachers. The teaching artist or arts organization’s goal is not to deliver a certain number of lessons to students, but to make sure something is left behind when the artist walks out of the classroom – be it lasting effects on students, a long-term increase in teachers’ skills, a changed school culture, or all of the above. Teachers, therefore, learn alongside students so that they can, in theory, carry on the arts instruction when the teaching artist is not there.

Hence, the shared delivery model engages not only students but also teachers, and posits that a number of individuals, and a lot of planning time, are needed to ensure that students learn what we want them to learn in dance, music, visual art and theater during the school day. The need for collaboration and planning is not unique to the arts in schools – numerous education initiatives (and even President Obama’s education platform) recognize that classroom teachers don’t have enough opportunities to work and reflect with their peers across subject areas. Shared delivery of arts education does, however, envision a lot of different visual and performing arts cooks in the proverbial education kitchen. Those cooks need to be paid and that kitchen needs supplies. Done well, shared delivery may have a fantastic return on investment, but collaboration takes time, and time takes money. As noted by SRI,

While integrating arts instruction into other subject areas may be pedagogically powerful and may maximize students’ instructional day, the collaboration necessary to make it successful appears to require a substantial amount of teacher time… This time came either from teacher contract time dedicated for planning or professional development or through schools paying to have two adults in the classroom – or both.

Shared delivery isn’t cheap, which begs the question of whether it’s realistic. Many schools, not to mention arts organizations, are gearing up for their fourth consecutive year of budget cuts. We can’t argue that having three parties work together to provide arts education during the school day is more economically efficient than just having one or two – it’s not – and we are particularly vulnerable if we assume the need for multiple parties is unique to the arts. Granted, “shared delivery of math instruction” sounds pretty weird: imagine if Ms. Gonzales, while teaching my class about variables and basic algebra, had been collaborating with a math specialist whom we also saw once a week, and we’d had periodic visits from a friendly community partner from, say, a local investment or research firm, and that partner led us through hands-on projects that allowed us to see how using letters to stand in for numbers applies to real-life, day-to-day careers and decisions – hold up, that sounds amazing.

The real costs/benefits of this approach have yet to be known, but in my mind, the promise of the shared delivery model is not that it allows us to “restore” arts education in a cheaper or easier way. True shared delivery is such a far cry from what most of us received growing up that its relevance to a (possibly mythical) “golden age” for arts education within classrooms is dubious. Instead, it aspires for an entirely new vision of how all students receive arts instruction – and perhaps, by extension, how education works in general. The promise of the model is that it acknowledges deep and meaningful learning, whether in nuclear physics or dance, happens when different experiences, concepts and skills overlap. You can’t expect to learn everything from a single source any more than you can consider yourself an expert on a topic by hunkering down alone and reading a textbook. Colleagues in other subject areas are aware of this; several math and science grant programs run through the Department of Education and National Science Foundation feature an emphasis on partnerships similar to what I described above, with the latter going so far as to aim to “promote institutional and organizational change in education systems — from kindergarten through graduate school.”

We may not be entirely alone, then, in the scale of what we hope to achieve. We even may be ahead of the curve in recognizing how deeply those concentric circles need to overlap in order to be effective, and in developing best practices for how that overlap happens. In order to take the model further, we need to pay more attention to the all-too-neglected shared spaces between the arts specialist and community arts provider, and between the arts specialist and generalist. We also need to be meticulous in documenting and discussing how the circles come together and stay together over time, and assertive in sharing what we are learning with colleagues from other subject areas. As complex as it is, the very notion of shared delivery reflects how far we have come as a field: from trying to “catch up” to other subjects in schools, to pioneering collaborations between teachers, schools and communities that those other subjects may very well learn from.  With luck, future students will thank us for our ambition.

BATUTA:  THE COLOMBIAN “SISTEMA”

by Eric Booth and Tricia Tunstall

The accomplishments of Venezuela’s El Sistema are greater and more far-ranging than anything we in the United States can imagine. It is not an overstatement to assert that El Sistema represents the most significant innovation in the arts and arts learning in our lifetimes. Fortunately, we in the United States and around the world are beginning to learn about it and to learn from it.

The Sistema-inspired work in Colombia called Batuta, the second largest such national program in the world, is also doing work beyond our U.S. imagining. And we have yet to begin learning from it. We hope that this essay will serve as a useful introduction to the proud history and the current accelerated growth phase of Sistema Batuta Colombia.

BATUTA: THE BACKGROUND

Twenty years ago, Maestro José Antonio Abreu, the founder of El Sistema in Venezuela, helped the Colombian government to spark the launch of Batuta (Spanish for “baton”) amidst the turmoil of Colombia, a country riven by crime, drug cartels, and political division. Colombia’s problems were similar in some ways to those of Venezuela – both countries faced, and are still facing, crushing poverty and intense pressures on young people toward gang, crime, and drug involvement. In addition, Colombia has faced the challenge of internal migration, with thousands of children living in refugee-type camps and in migrant limbo.

Batuta’s goal has been to address these glaring needs. As in Venezuela, the focus has consistently been upon the twin missions of socialization and musical development – with social learning equal to, and sometimes even prioritized over, musical skills.

Batuta has many strengths to build upon: a significant presence throughout the country; a highly developed early childhood music education curriculum; a national faculty of dedicated and motivated teachers; a wide network of affiliations with an existing ecosystem of music programs; an already exceptional national youth orchestra; and several emerging regional youth orchestras – one of which has just triumphantly completed its first international tour, to Germany and Italy.

As in Venezuela, many thousands of children in Colombia, in all of the country’s thirty-two states and in cities and towns large and small, have experienced life-empowering change as a result of Batuta’s work. In the words of its director, Juan Antonio Cuellar, “Social action is the mission; music is the tool.” Cuellar describes taking a plane across a remote area of the Andes, driving to the end of the only road, taking a boat to a small town…and finding the children singing songs and working in recorder ensembles exactly as they do in downtown Bogotá.

Several differences between the cultures and circumstances of Colombia and Venezuela have meant that Batuta’s growth has been somewhat different from the development of Venezuela’s El Sistema. Batuta’s program focuses predominantly on younger children in non-orchestral settings; of the 47,000 students currently engaged in Batuta’s programs, only 9,000 play orchestral instruments. The rest follow a program of choral singing, playing Orff instruments and recorders, and learning basic musicianship skills. This vital and beautiful work is guided by a national curriculum and a remarkably consistent pedagogy for early childhood learning. But a scarcity of trained orchestral teachers, and perhaps more crucially a scarcity of orchestral instruments, have held back the growth of an orchestral focus. The dense network of youth orchestras that characterizes Venezuela’s Sistema is still, in Colombia, very much in the process of development.

Another difference between the two countries has been Colombia’s wider and more developed infrastructure of already-existing classical music programs. Especially in Colombia’s four major cities of Bogotá, Medellin, Cali, and Cartagena, such programs have provided a range of opportunities for musical training, both for impoverished and for more-advantaged youth. Functioning within this existing music-learning ecosystem, Batuta leadership has emphasized the roles of coalition builder and service provider. For example, Batuta has frequently served as coordinator for regional gatherings of many music programs. And one of its current goals is to become the nation’s go-to source for affordable, high-end musical instruments. In its role of trustworthy national agent for coordinating, supporting, and elevating the entire field of music education, Colombia’s Batuta is without parallel in Latin America.

Unlike Venezuela’s Sistema, which is primarily government-supported, Batuta is supported by a mixture of public and private funds. Public support comes through the Presidential Agency for Social Action and International Cooperation, and from the Ministry of Culture, and constitutes about 70% of the budget. The program’s main partner in the private sector is the Fundación Bolívar-Davivienda, the largest private foundation in Colombia and part of the Bolívar Group, one of the nation’s largest consortia.  (It’s interesting to note that in Colombia, much of the funding, like many of the regional orchestral programs, is consortium-based.)  The head of the Fundación Bolívar, Fernando Cortes, is an ardent believer in the cause of youth development through music; his advocacy has helped garner major support for Colombia’s first national youth orchestra, the Filarmónica Joven de Colombia, and also for Batuta’s teacher training initiatives.

We had the great privilege of visiting Bogotá in July 2011, learning about Colombia’s “Sistema” through working with Batuta teachers, conversing with its leadership, observing performances and rehearsals, and teaching within its professional development program. What follows is an attempt to encapsulate our experience and learning in Bogotá, to share with all those who are interested and engaged in the El Sistema movement. Since our stay was short, our observations are necessarily quite preliminary and incomplete. Our hope is that they will serve as food for thought, inspiration, and further exploration.

NEW LEADERSHIP FOR BATUTA

In 2008, Juan Antonio Cuellar, a U.S.-trained Colombian composer and the dean of a Bogotá university music school, took over as Executive President of Batuta with a mission of change. Driven to address the sad reality that without a strong orchestral program, Batuta was losing many of its students at around age twelve – the very time when young people are most vulnerable and most attracted to the self-destructive choices that surround them – Cuellar has set about improving both Batuta’s orchestral commitment and its professional development opportunities for teachers. His aim is for Batuta and its partners to achieve results similar to the miracle in neighboring Venezuela, but in their own Colombian way.

To achieve the mission of significantly increased orchestral focus, Cuellar has set two goals as his first major priorities: the launch of vigorous and sustained teacher development initiatives, and the creation of “iconic” youth orchestras. To meet the first goal, he has tapped a wide range of resources, especially including Venezuelan teachers and overseas visitors like ourselves; professional development teachers go on tours to every Batuta site and frequently conduct regional training “intensives.” The second goal is being addressed through the formation of youth orchestras on regional levels, and also through the creation and development of a national youth orchestra under the artistic direction of U.S. conductor Matthew Sydney Hazelwood. These two goals are intertwined in many ways: students need examples to look up to, teachers need excellence to aspire to, and high aspiration raises the reach of everyone’s achievement. Integral to both priorities is the expectation that teachers perform in orchestras, so that teachers can learn by doing, and students and community can know and be inspired by their teachers as artists.

TEACHER TRAINING: THE KEYSTONE OF DEVELOPMENT

“Teachers are the motors of everything we do,” says Cuellar. “The teachers we train now will create the future of Batuta.”  In order to build the capacity of Batuta teachers to create orchestral programs and curricula, ongoing training programs are in place in all four major regions of the country. Teachers come together on a regular basis to be taught by leading educators from Colombia, Venezuela, the U.S., and elsewhere.

Rather than espousing a particular pedagogy, or even using a specific set of guidelines for hiring or retention, Cuellar proposes that there are three main elements to all good teaching – especially all good youth orchestral training. “One is improvement: are your students improving artistically, all the time? Two is engagement: Are your students engaged? Are their families engaged, and are their communities engaged? Three is ethics: are you adhering fully to the highest code of ethics, following the UNESCO Rights of Children code? And are you modeling for these students everything you want them to become? This includes artist, teacher, learner, experimenter, and socially responsible adult.”

This code of ethics, says Cuellar, is transmitted to students naturally, in the course of ensemble learning. “Children learn everything in orchestras,” he says. “Values. Habits. In this regard, the rehearsal itself is always really the point.”

As Cuellar describes these three imperatives, we can see why he emphasizes teachers and professional development as the cornerstone of his strategy for the future. Teachers with such deeply held values will necessarily have a forceful, intrinsically motivated, positive-but-relentless drive for constant improvement in their students’ capacities. They will have an equally positive-but-relentless drive for expanding their investment in families and communities. And they will have no trouble with the idea that their own lives, and the examples they set, are their most powerful teaching tools.

Teacher training, as conceived for Batuta, is an ambitious and far-ranging enterprise. In the three-day workshop we observed and participated in, Batuta teachers from across the Bogota region were invited during a morning session to reflect on the “Studio Habits of Mind,” a framework for understanding the mental habits that determine whether learning will be successful, engaged, and creative.  The model was developed by researchers at Harvard Project Zero in 2004 by studying the teaching and learning of the best visual arts teachers in the U.S. Adapted to music, the “studio habits of mind” serve as a guide to holistic learning for Batuta teachers, students, and even conductors; Maestro Matthew Hazelwood eloquently describes how the Studio Habits inform his work on the podium.

In the U.S. we often state axiomatically that intensive orchestral study develops the “whole child.” But we do not generally create structures for music learning that are pedagogically wide and artistically deep, to commit to such holism. We found it remarkable, therefore, that Batuta – uniquely among El Sistema programs, as far as we know – is developing such a holistic framework for broadening and deepening the learning experience. [1]

In the afternoon workshop we observed, the professional development focus switched to active, hands-on, master class-type learning, as Venezuelan master teacher Francisco Diaz coached the teachers in ensemble conducting. Diaz, who is from Barquisimeto and was one of Gustavo Dudamel’s teachers, has been an important figure in the work of Venezuela’s Sistema for many years. We watched him work both with the teachers and with young violinists, and his teaching style was consistent: hard-driving, exacting, insistently positive. He demanded courageous experimentation on the part of individuals, and was at the same time constantly attentive to the progress of the group as a whole.

Cuellar takes a long-term view of teacher development: the students of today are the teachers of tomorrow. The future of Batuta, he is convinced, depends upon the numbers and passion of students who choose to become teachers in the system. During our time in Colombia, we were struck by the frequency with which students are given this message. It is a great honor to be a teacher, they are told.  It is the fruition of their artistry to become teaching artists. And it is their responsibility to become teachers and to share the beauty and transformative power of their musical lives. [2]

Francisco Díaz echoed this theme in his closing remarks to the Batuta teachers in Bogotá. “Your students are the future,” he told them. “We must instill in them the passion to teach, and they will take care of everything. We are accidents in this process – we merely begin it. We must trust the future to them.”

“Trust the young” – it is one of José Antonio Abreu’s most memorable and enduring sayings. As teachers in North America, we have much to learn from this El Sistema faith in the infinite capacity of our students, and from leaders’ willingness to empower young people with jobs and decision-making authority.

A NEW NATIONAL YOUTH ORCHESTRA

Through cooperation between Batuta and other music programs, and with the support of the Fundación Bolívar-Davivienda, the Filarmónica Joven de Colombia was established two years ago, in 2009. This ensemble brings together over a hundred young people aged 16-24 from across the country, under the artistic direction of Matthew Sydney Hazelwood, a busy and widely respected  U.S. conductor with deep musical ties to Colombia.  In July 2011, Maestro Hazelwood conducted a two-week training “intensive” for the young orchestra, bringing a team of his favorite teaching artists from the U.S. as well as seasoned Venezuelan educators, to fast-track the learning process. An ambitious five-city national tour followed.

Many of these young musicians had never played together before, yet because of their musical hunger and their zeal for preparation, they learned and grew in ways that were beyond the imagining of their faculty. Already they have attained the kind of improbable excellence and outsized exuberance that one sees in Venezuelan youth orchestras – albeit with a distinctly different feel, and a focus on repertoire that develops finesse and nuance in tandem with muscular intensity.

We heard the culminating performances of the tour in Bogotá, in a new performing arts center whose grand contours suggest equal parts ancient pyramid and modernist concert hall. The acoustics were splendid, and the sold-out audience was the kind U.S. orchestras dream of, a rich representation of the city that surrounds it: many young people, families, the social elite, cool twenty-somethings on dates. With Angela Kim as superb guest soloist, the orchestra gave a skillful and passionate rendition of Saint-Saens’ Piano Concerto No.2; they also played Rimsky-Korsakov’s “Capriccio Espagnol,” Johann Strauss’s “Fledermaus” Overture, and Mahler’s Symphony No. 1. The concerts had the visceral excitement of performances by Venezuela’s national youth orchestras — both musically illuminating and electrifyingly fun. Like their Venezuelan compatriots, the Filarmónica Joven de Colombia radiates joy.

For this culminating performance of their intense month together, in the national capital and in the best concert hall in the country, the energy level sizzled backstage. Onstage, like seasoned professionals beyond their years, they channeled that effervescence into their best and most focused performance, according to several who heard them during the tour.

Cuellar is interested in enhancing the sense of “event” in relation to the orchestra’s concerts, in order to more fully engage audiences – and the “FJC,” as they are known, are experimenting with several distinctive performance practices. Their concerts begin with a dramatic entrance, with the conductor among them: rather than sitting down to play, they stand and face the audience; they begin their first piece standing in place, and sit when the music seems to invite it. In addition, for this tour there were special lighting effects designed by Cuellar to accompany and support the Mahler symphony. The stage was sometimes nearly dark, sometimes awash with hues that varied with the progress of the music. While such experiments can run the risk of being distracting or irrelevant, we found that these simple, elegant effects were musically sound, and created light environments that enhanced the listening.

The final encore was a Colombian folk song familiar to everyone in the audience. Like the Venezuelans, but in their own distinct style, the young musicians exploded into a playground of moving, singing, clapping and improvising. Cumbia (a characteristic Caribbean-Colombian folk music) dancing broke out across the stage and moved into the audience.  The musicians who weren’t dancing began to improvise, sometimes even swapping instruments for solos. It was as ecstatic a closing as could be imagined – an unchoreographed, spontaneous, ebullient sharing of their personalities and their joy.

Since it was their final concert, there was much hugging and weeping after the encore by these tired and wired teenagers, and they did it onstage instead of hidden backstage.  A number of families joined them on the stage.  As audience members, we were moved by the quality of the music and the generosity of the artists: it felt authentic, joyous, and emphatically “iconic.”

One additional note for U.S. music educators: at the end of the tour, the musicians in Filarmónica Joven de Colombia were asked to reflect on their learning experience.  They spoke of their love and gratitude toward all their teachers, from Venezuela and the United States. And they noted that the U.S. teachers had very valuable ideas, tools, and suggestions, but that all came “from a soloist’s perspective.” They found that the U.S. teachers struggled with teaching in groups, were somewhat inconsistent in their teaching between one student and the next, and were a bit too gentle.

Since these orchestra members were raised in the El Sistema lineage, the orientation of the Venezuelan teachers naturally felt more familiar to them. They praised the Venezuelans’ skills in moving whole groups (or sections) steadily forward, and their ability to demand more and achieve more. They also praised these teachers’ consistency of approach, within a session and in general; it was clear that any Venezuelan teacher could pick up right from where a previous one had left off months before.

We in the U.S. who are involved in El Sistema-inspired work would do well to take note of these comments. We have much to learn about changing our mental and pedagogical framework away from the soloist/conservatory view to a perspective in which musicians develop in a group. We have much to discover, too, about how driving a rehearsal hard can increase the fun of it, and how repetitive practice can lead to refinement without boredom.

BUILDING ORCHESTRAL COMMUNITY:  THE ENCUENTRO TRADITION

In 2009, a music-loving Air Force colonel in the western city of Cali decided that the 90^th anniversary of the Colombian Air Force should be celebrated with a huge musical event involving every single musical child in the city. So Batuta helped to mobilize all the music programs in the area that were working with children, and brought them together in a massive encuentro – a huge gathering of orchestras and choirs.

Batuta, with the support of the Air Force and the enthusiasm of the colonel, hired some of the greatest musicians in the region to come and help Batuta with training and rehearsing the young musicians.  The encuentro brought together young people from Cali and from a Batuta music center in Buenaventura, a port on the Pacific two hours away from Cali.  Buenaventura  is a dangerous region of the country; as the country’s key Pacific port it is used as a transit hub for weapons and drug trafficking.  But the teachers traveled wherever the children were, and rehearsed them intensively for weeks. The concert itself, with seven hundred young people performing in an airplane hangar for an audience of thousands, was unforgettable. “They played Shostakovich and Borodin, they sang the Alleluia chorus from Handel’s Messiah,” says Cuellar. “And while we originally thought that beginners and advanced players would perform separately, it quickly became clear that everyone should play everything — mostly because every young musician yearned and asked to play in everything. So even the smallest children performed in all the pieces. For every single music program in the city, this concert raised the bar of excellence.”

“We don’t look for things…we find them,” he adds.  He has said this several times, and here the meaning seems clear: such an amazing event occurs not through chance, but because of a laser-like determination, a refusal to look without finding.  This adage seems to be the “Juan Antonio” equivalent of the “José Antonio” dictum about teachers’ responsibility to serve students: “No is simply not an option.”

The larger message seems to be a near-miraculous truth of El Sistema work in Colombia, Venezuela, the U.S., Scotland – wherever its seeds take root: the passionate and concentrated focus on changing the trajectory of students’ lives through music seems to prompt the appearance of unexpected, unreasonable, even impossible opportunities.  Cuellar launched an “encuentro strategy”… and then an Air Force colonel offered an airplane hangar for a concert of 700 kids.  What were the chances of that?  Cuellar hadn’t looked for it – but Batuta found the opportunity.

The encuentro was so successful that the Air Force repeated it again the following year.  After the second concert, leaders of the various music programs had developed sufficient enthusiasm for the benefits of coordinated endeavor, and sufficient trust in Batuta as a fair agent of everyone’s interests, that they agreed to launch a regional orchestra of the best students from all programs, with Batuta as manager.

The use of the “encuentro” – a gathering of musical ensembles to perform  together in a particular, high-aspiration public event – is an important tool in Batuta’s strategy of orchestral development.  When many programs join together toward a specific musical goal, teachers and students alike overcome their natural parochialism and collaborate to accomplish something extraordinary that no one program could ever accomplish alone.  As they did in Cali, program leaders usually recognize that coordination serves their students and does not diminish their programs.  Feeling the success of what they can do together, they want to make it a regular practice.

Another distinctive growth strategy in Batuta is to nurture, lead, and interconnect the many small and medium El Sistema-inspired initiatives that have emerged over the past years.  Juan Antonio Cuellar systematically helps to build up the capacity of these organizations and actively seeks opportunities for collaborative work between all of them. Such collaborations also incorporate a number of universities and conservatories.

Out of this recognition, collaboration, and shared success, “iconic” regional youth orchestras can be born.

ICONIC REGIONAL ORCHESTRAS

When a permanent regional youth orchestra emerges, drawing the most motivated and best students from all programs, it is “iconic” in that it creates an example of what can be done when programs strive together for something greater than individual institutional identities. It is also iconic in that the music students of the region can see and believe in what is possible if they strive: they are potentially those musicians onstage, if they apply themselves. The national youth orchestra provides a particularly dramatic model for this ideal, but regional orchestras increase the visibility and accessibility of the model throughout the country.

We believe this is a crucial feature in Venezuela’s El Sistema success. Children can watch performances by students just a little older than themselves … and then by another orchestra better than that … then a city-wide youth orchestra … then one of the national youth orchestras (in Venezuela, there are currently three national orchestras that book international tours).  They can envision their path to greatness, because they see and feel its power and rewards so regularly.

In each of the four main regions of Colombia, Batuta is sponsoring and building a peak regional orchestra, with membership by audition.  These orchestras nurture wider musical aspiration, and build interest in and demand for all the music programs in the region.  The work in these orchestras feels very much like the orchestral work in Venezuela’s El Sistema – with good reason: many teachers and conductors travel from Venezuela to help build the orchestras, a process often simultaneous with providing professional development for Colombian teachers.

Batuta has now established such peak orchestras in three of the four regions. In addition to the permanent ensemble that grew out of the encuentro in Cali, there is also an iconic orchestra forming in the city of Medellin. Cuellar says that because an active “web” of music schools in Medellin involves as many as six thousand children, “there is the potential for a really strong pre-professional orchestra.”  He adds that the professional orchestra in the city is eager to be involved and supportive, recognizing that a vibrant youth ensemble can help them connect with the musical life of the region – and that without making this connection, they may lose audience to the new dynamo down the street.

And then there is the Youth Orchestra of Bogotá, a large and growing ensemble with members aged 13 to 18, led by the exuberant conductor Juan Felipe Molano. We heard this ensemble in rehearsal, and found its collective zeal and musical ambition every bit as astonishing as what we had heard from the national youth orchestra. The Youth Orchestra of Bogotá was about to launch its first international tour, to Berlin and 12 Italian cities, and the young members were clearly spurred to intensify training and rehearsal.  We watched them work long, hard days. We watched them enjoying every step of the way, growing before our eyes into the kind of generous, positive, mutually supportive musical community that is so characteristic of El Sistema in Venezuela.

And we observed that teaching and learning in Colombia, as in Venezuela, often uses playful, positive competition as a way to speed learning.  In a sectional exercise, for example, one half of the violin section may try to outdo the performance of the other half.  The competition never becomes ugly; it is based in the ancient definition of the word: “to strive with” rather than “to strive against.”  It occurred to us that Batuta is using the same playful competitive strategy between regional orchestras, encouraging them to try to outdo one another in order to raise the level of everyone’s accomplishment.

A KEY PRIORITY: MAKING INSTRUMENTS AVAILABLE

“Here in Colombia, we just don’t have enough musical instruments for young people in Batuta,” says Juan Antonio Cuellar.  “It’s very difficult to find them for sale, or even to get them donated.”

Solving this problem is critical, of course, for the large-scale orchestral development that is top priority for Cuellar and Batuta. “This is completely key to our vision of reaching and rescuing children through orchestral involvement,” says Cuellar. “There are many, many kids who want desperately to play instruments, but can’t.” Buying inexpensive instruments from China is not the solution, he says, because quality is unreliable; it is not unusual to place a large order for violins based on appealing samples, and then receive a delivery of violins of far lower quality.

Batuta is therefore entering the instrument-providing business in a major way.  Since it’s prohibitively costly to buy high-end instruments from abroad, Cuellar believes that the way forward is for Batuta students and teachers to develop skills in instrument assembly, maintenance, and repair.  There is support for this initiative from the Ministry of Culture, which has agreed to make Batuta the official instrument provider for all local culture centers funded by the government.

Eventually, Cuellar envisions a potential joint venture with Venezuela that would involve importing pre-made instrument parts and assembling them in South American factories.  (The natural resources and climate in Colombia make local manufacture from scratch impractical.)  In one way or another, he says, he would like young Columbian musicians to begin to see instrument maintenance and provision as a growth industry, with the door wide open for motivated entrepreneurs.

OVERARCHING STRATEGY: BUILDING PARTNERSHIPS

The presence in Colombia of a wide variety of music programs for children has meant that Batuta has developed in a collaborative and inclusive way, often serving as the catalyst for connection and cooperation between organizations.  As many arts and arts education professionals in the U.S. can affirm, getting established organizations to partner deeply and sustainably is a rare accomplishment.  Batuta has proven to be a reliable, eye-on-the-right-prize partner.  As a result, there are 38  organizations formally affiliated with Batuta, and many more such affiliations are expected. “In Colombia,” says Juan Antonio Cuellar, “the ‘Sistema’ is Batuta plus all the programs affiliated with it. We are all building something together.”

“And,” he adds, returning to his theme of teacher development, “we want all Batuta teachers to think this way.” An important goal of teacher training throughout the country is the capacity to build coalitions and partnerships. The ideal is “to build an entire community around the protection of children through music.” Batuta has much to teach consortium builders and stakeholder networks in the U.S. about how to break down institutional “silo” thinking and practice, for the benefit of students.

One very concrete way that the overarching Batuta network plans to serve its constituency is by developing a music library that will be available for use by all members.  The library will include teaching materials, curricula, and repertoire, and extra sets of orchestral parts for the repertoire being played by national and regional youth orchestras.  In this way, the growing network of youth orchestras will feel linked by materials and curricula as well as by pedagogy and mission.

Cuellar tells us the story of a huge donation of dozens of boxes of scores and music books from Boosey and Hawkes – a gift they didn’t seek, but found. Batuta couldn’t afford the shipping expenses. So they found an NGO in the U.S. that specialized in shipping aid to troubled areas of the world, and had the materials sent as “humanitarian aid.” “And that’s exactly what it was,” says Cuellar.

FINAL REFLECTIONS

At the end of the intensive teacher training workshop we attended, there was an opportunity for the Bogotá Batuta teachers and the visiting teachers to pause and share perspectives. There were many touching speeches of appreciation and praise. There were eloquent articulations of an ultimate vision of a teaching community, who can work together regularly to share visions and create standards. “We need to be a grand collective of teachers across the country, who can permanently reflect together,” said Cuellar. We noted how rare it is in music education to witness this emphasis on reflection as a primary teaching and learning tool.

And there was repeated recognition of the excellent progress made by the teenaged Youth Orchestra of Bogotá.  One participant boldly declared that within two years this orchestra could be as good as the iconic national youth orchestra, the Filarmónica Joven de Colombia, whose thrilling performance we had all seen the night before.  There was general nodding in support of this ambitious goal.  And then Francisco Díaz rose to say that this orchestra didn’t need two years to achieve it – they could do it in six months!  He said this with the same breath-stopping fervor we had heard from him before. The energy in the room surged. Instantly, they all saw this was possible. And they wanted it.

This kind of unreasonable, infectious hunger for achievement has driven the success of El Sistema in Venezuela. It now grows within the Colombian Sistema. Colombia may have grown in some distinctive ways, and may be funded and organized in unique patterns, but it is definitely a younger sibling from the same gene pool. The boldness with which the impossible is imagined and then realized – the idea of ensemble performance as a crucial medium for developing high musical standards – the joy in musical aspiration and accomplishment, realized in the ideal setting of the orchestra – all these are characteristic of the spirit and vision of Batuta.  They are clearly and closely related to the spirit and vision of Venezuela’s Sistema.

At the heart of Batuta is the same core assumption that guides El Sistema in Venezuela: that musical and social goals are inseparable, and that the lives of impoverished children, families and communities can be changed through the power of ensemble music learning, the joy in musical aspiration and accomplishment, and the presence of great beauty radiating constantly in the daily lives of young people.

For further information about Batuta, please contact:

batuta@fundacionbatuta.org   or adrianamendieta@fundacionbatuta.org

NOTES

1. Eric’s professional development teaching during this trip focused on the “habits of mind” as they relate to a group learning setting and to music.  He introduced them in the interactive, inquiry-based workshop style of U.S. teaching artistry, a style new to Batuta teachers.]

2. Asked to address the members of the national youth orchestra on the last day of their month together, Eric offered remarks that might serve as a kind of summation of the view we found so widespread: “You have become an extraordinary orchestra.  You have the skill, the passion, the communication, and the joy that makes this true.  I see many orchestras with such skill, some with strong passion and communication, and a few with such joy; it is the combination of all these things that gives you the rare opportunity to grow into greatness.  With this opportunity comes the responsibility of greatness, which is to become teachers…teaching artists who can bring others into this learning system, who can raise the level of skill and joy everywhere you go, who dedicate their lives to playing and teaching music – both of them, all the time.  This is the extraordinariness that is within your reach.”

• Sudhir Venkatesh (who may just be my favorite blogger on the planet) sat down with some kingpins of the “other” street to get their take on things. Perhaps surprisingly, they have AIG’s back 100%.
• Speaking of the crisis on Wall Street, business schools end up with a whole lot of egg on their faces in this article from the New Republic. Some choice quotes:
  

  Back in October, not long after Lehman Brothers collapsed and triggered a meltdown on Wall Street, one of the hottest e-mail forwards making the rounds among finance types was a letter by Andrew Lahde, a hedge-fund manager who had posted eye-popping 866 percent returns in 2008 by betting on increases in U.S. subprime mortgage defaults. Lahde was getting out on top, and his “So long, suckers!” missive made headlines–partly for his broadsides against predatory lenders, partly for his earnest digression in support of hemp products, and partly for his boasts about getting rich at the expense of Wall Street’s “low hanging fruit, i.e., idiots whose parents paid for prep school, Yale, and then the Harvard MBA.” These MBA grads, Lahde sneered, “who were (often) truly not worthy of the education they received (or supposedly received) rose to the top of companies such as AIG, Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers and all levels of our government.”

  “In a way, finance professors caused this problem–I’m not bragging about this,” says Charles Trzcinka, who chairs the finance department at Indiana University-Bloomington’s Kelley School of Business. He points out that many of the financial tools that played a starring role in the current crisis, from the countless ways to divvy up and sell mortgage-backed securities to the explosion of credit default swaps, were taught and developed in business schools without, often, a full appreciation for how they could go sour–if, say, housing prices cratered or large counterparties went bust.

  Trouble was, many students weren’t exactly taking Ph.D. courses. “There were so many people who just wanted to learn enough to get a job in this field,” says Trzcinka. “This market was full of people who were really just salesmen. You’d get them in class and ask them questions [about the latest financial innovations], and, for the first ten minutes, they sound sophisticated. Then you probe a little deeper, and, for the next ten, they’re an idiot.”

  Economic theories that would have been heretical 20 years ago–the idea, say, that people and markets don’t always behave rationally–are being greeted with fresh interest. At Harvard, informal debates are said to be breaking out in faculty lounges about whether professors should focus more on teaching students how to run businesses that are sustainable in the long-term, rather than just pawning off the latest hedging techniques.

  Ya think?

  Still, the changes amount to something less than an outright revolution. When I asked current MBA students what sorts of things they weren’t hearing discussed in class, the list of still-too-delicate topics included: whether executive pay schemes might have led people to take excessive risks; whether investment banks are really “value creating”; and, of course, what role MBAs might have played in the current crisis. Khurana told me that business schools still need to have a perhaps-uncomfortable discussion about their broader purpose in the world–a question that involves pondering “the fundamental relationship between the economy and society.” Not the sort of thing, alas, that’s easy to stick in a textbook.

  I’ve avoided for the most part the hardcore corporate finance classes here at SOM, so I can’t comment on the specifics of them, but in my own school’s defense it is worth noting that we have on faculty here one of the few Cassandras who called out the housing bubble way before it was fashionable, Robert Shiller. In general, the economics and finance faculty here seem to have a more behavioral orientation than average (that is, they believe that markets can be affected by human foibles, unlike Chicago-school economists who hold that markets are so perfect that any inefficiencies will automatically be arbitraged away immediately). That said, I’ll admit to experiencing more than a few “huh?” moments as someone with an outsider’s perspective looking into this crazy world.

• And maybe there is something to the value of that outsider’s perspective. Last week, I linked to a column that facetiously argued that artists and Wall Street execs should switch places for a day. Well, now we have an article that makes a much more serious—and fairly compelling, if you ask me—version of that same argument, pointing to the workshops that Pilobulus Dance holds for corporate employees. These types of training sessions are not unique—Benjamin Zander of the Boston Philharmonic is also known to do them, as are members of the conductorless Orpheus Chamber Orchestra. As someone who built a chorus with a similar model to that of Orpheus, I think that businesses could learn a lot from the arts. We are taught over and over again that competition is the panacea to everything and should be fostered in every context possible. But competition run amok leads to major agency problems, as we see in the current financial crisis, with employees looking out for themselves rather than the long-term future of their company (not to mention society). A functioning civilization relies on a delicate balance of competition and collaboration, market forces focused and directed by regulation and communal norms. Businesspeople have the competition part taken care of; artists can help with the collaboration.
• Along the same lines, there was an article in the Wall Street Journal last month suggesting that business professionals look to Hollywood for career cues.
• Andrew Dubber invents the Unconsultancy, a great idea for freelancers short on business or working with clients who can’t afford to pay very much.
• Fun article from a professional musician who spent a day lobbying in DC.
• So, all of the sudden everybody’s freaking out about the future of the arts. USA Today ran an article pointing to difficulties in fundraising, which was followed by similar themes in the Wall Street Journal and now philanthropy bloggers Allison Fine and Beth Kanter are getting into the act. Listen, I know things are bad out there, but the arts are going to be fine. The only field in human existence that specifically celebrates creativity for its own sake will be able to find creative solutions to its problems. That is not what I’m concerned about. What I am concerned about is the potential missed opportunity for the rest of society if the arts’ critical role to play in healing the massive damage from the last six months is not adequately understood or acknowledged. It kind of makes me think of the way the conversation about the environment has progressed in the past century. Public policy talk about the environment was once limited to talk about parks and conservation of natural preserves outside of urban areas. Then there was the backlash against pollution in the ’60s and ’70s, with the attendant laws and regulations that came with it. But it’s taken until today for the environment and energy to become inexorably linked in peoples’ minds, for “green” concerns to be incorporated into any urban or regional development plan worth its salt, for for-profit companies to be thinking about sustainability at every turn. That’s where the conversation about the arts needs to end up if we really want things to move forward. It’s already starting to happen thanks to the work of Richard Florida and many others in making that case. But you know, it’s a two-way street. At some point people on the “outside” are going to have to realize what they’re missing by not taking fuller advantage of one of the greatest natural resources in their midst, the surging creativity and imagination of their own fellow citizens.

In the meantime, here’s some other arts policy buzz around the web, and a look back at the week that was:

• Via Fractured Atlas, another group called ArtsPolicyNow has a competing arts policy platform on Obama’s Citizen Briefing Book, which you can vote up or down as you please. The full document is available here (pdf). (As an aside, the Citizen’s Briefing Book is looking a little sad right now; I’m embarrassed to say that as of this writing the top recommendation is for marijuana legalization, and that #5 is “Revoke the Tax Exempt Status of the Church of Scientology.” Really, people? This is the best you can do?)
• Yet another action item: this petition to create a Secretary of Arts cabinet position, inspired by Quincy Jones, already has an impressive 146,000 signatures.
• Barry Hessenius notes all of the recent activity and takes the opportunity to issue a righteous rant on artists coming together in 2009.
• Not directly arts policy related, but a new mini-study (pdf) by the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation finds that business start-ups are important to job creation, much more so (in the aggregate) than established firms. From the report:
  

  The fraction of employment accounted for by U.S. private-sector business startups over the 1980-2005 period is about 3 percent per year. This measure is interpretable as the employment-weighted business startup rate for the United States. While this is a small fraction of overall employment, all of this employment from startups reflects new jobs. As such, 3 percent is large compared to the average annual net employment growth of the U.S. private sector for the same period (about 1.8 percent). This pattern implies that, excluding the jobs from new firms, the U.S. net employment growth rate is negative on average. This simple comparison highlights the importance of business startups to job creation in the United States.

  The report doesn’t consider nonprofit startups, but I wouldn’t be surprised if the same principle holds true. (h/t PND)

• The current edition of Newsweek has a long article from Jeremy McCarter on Obama and the arts, looking back to FDR and the New Deal and tackling some of the issues discussed above.
  

  When President Roosevelt signed the Works Progress Administration into law in 1935, it included provisions for four arts programs: theater, writing, music and art. The $418 million (in 2008 dollars) allocated in the first year was a tiny slice of the agency’s total, but, as Nick Taylor relates in “American-Made,” a new history of the WPA, it was extremely effective. Arts organizations such as theaters and symphonies tend to be highly labor-intensive, making them a quick and efficient way to help put many people back to work. (Take note, you writers and artists threatened by new media and the Death of Print: part of the rationale for the program was to find jobs for talented people left unemployed by industrial shifts that predated the Depression, such as vaudevillians being put out of work by the movies.)

  From the vantage point of our current crisis, new employment may be the least interesting result of the arts programs. Without trying to be a latter-day Medici, FDR sponsored some impressive creations, including Orson Welles’s trailblazing, voodoo-inflected, all-black staging of “Macbeth,” as well as countless dazzling murals and posters. These achievements weren’t merely esthetic. The WPA’s investment in the arts also helped bring about a change in values—one that’s especially evident in the work of the Federal Writers’ Project. The agency published state guidebooks that were far more ambitious than itineraries for tourists on car trips. Contributors—including the young Ralph Ellison and Richard Wright—collected stories about the history, people and day-to-day life of cities and towns, making the books part essay collection, part encyclopedia and part vehicle for exploring a certain ideal of Americanness.

• Tom Borrup has an extensive report from the 2008 Creative Clusters conference (a.k.a. The International Creative Economy Network and Conference) in Glasgow over at the Community Arts Network.
• Closer to home, former Miller Theater executive director and darling of the new music world George Steel is returning triumphantly to New York as the new director of City Opera. After watching him leave unexpectedly last year for the Dallas Opera in what seemed at the time a rather strange marriage, the Big Apple media are excited to welcome him back. And Dallas seems content to let him go — the opera’s board chair has a remarkably gracious quote in the Times piece, and Scott Cantrell of the Dallas Morning News writes a bizarre hit piece on Steel, calling him “remote and aloof” and tittering that he didn’t show up at enough dress rehearsals and patron gatherings. Take it for what it’s worth; Cantrell doesn’t seem to much care for newfangled creations by people not named Mozart or Puccini. For example, the same piece (Leonard Bernstein’s A Quiet Place) that is “much maligned” according to Steve Smith is “generally dismissed” in Cantrell’s estimation.
• Umm, so yeah, it turns out that like a quarter to a half of all nonprofit organizations could lose their tax-exempt status next year. Oops! (In fairness, many of those are probably dead organizations that are still on the books for one reason or another. But if you know someone with a small nonprofit, make sure they read this article!)
• Hilarious.
  

  I understand that you’re used to working long hours at Lehman Brothers. Not-for-profit people work crazy hours too — without the promise of overtime pay or the possibility of a car service to take us home at 10 p.m. when we finally turn the lights off. (FYI: We turn those lights off by ourselves.)

• Finally, the Lodestar Foundation has an intriguing $250,000 prize for the best merger or collaboration between nonprofit organizations. Two of the eight finalists are arts and culture applicants, and another is a fascinating merger of a YMCA with a JCC in Toledo.