The Office–by flickr user Rum Bucolic Ape

Income inequality, slow economic growth and wage stagnation have been hot button issues in recent years. Last month, the Obama administration did something significant about the latter, announcing an updated overtime rule that would make millions more eligible for overtime pay. Effective December 1, 2016, the new rule doubles the salary threshold—from $23,660 to $47,476 per year—under which most salaried workers are guaranteed overtime. The rule is expected to affect some 4.2 million workers, though whether it will benefit these workers (through increased wages) or possibly harm some of them (through lower base salaries and reduced benefits) remains to be seen. The implications for industry, however, are likely to be dramatic no matter what, especially for firms like publishing, fashion, media, consulting and yes, nonprofit arts organizations that have long relied on the willingness of young, ambitious employees to work long hours for little pay in exchange for a shot at the big time down the line. The shift might not be such a bad thing for the arts more generally, however. If nonprofits and businesses have less incentive to overwork low-paid employees, those employees will likely have more time for leisure activities, which could lead to a (further) boom in amateur arts participation and entrepreneurial arts ventures once this rule goes into effect.

Brazil Dumps, Then Reinstates its Cultural Ministry. Brazil has become a familiar character in the twenty-four hour news cycle in recent months, what with the impeachment trial of President Dilma Rousseff and a faltering economy, along with concerns about the zika virus in light of the upcoming Olympics (which is plagued with its own corruption and other scandals). The cultural sector had its fair share of drama this month after interim president Michel Temer, who replaced Rousseff in what many are calling a coup, announced a plan to subsume the Brazilian cultural ministry into the education ministry on May 12 as part of a broader effort to streamline the government. The plan immediately met with fierce opposition from Brazil’s cultural community. Artists staged occupations of government buildings across 11 cities and even music legends Erasmo Carlos and Caetano Veloso lent their support, giving a concert at a Rio de Janeiro protest on May 20. The pressure clearly worked; many credit artists with Temer’s reversal.

LISC Tries a New Model to Fight Gentrification. Adaptive reuse of abandoned spaces has long been a tried-and-true move in creative placemaking playbook, but concern has been growing about the gentrification effects of such policies in an era of increasing income inequality. The Local Initiatives Support Corp., a national nonprofit organization that has been investing in neighborhoods since 1982, has decided to try something different, committing $50 million to help prevent the gentrification many fear will be a byproduct of the redevelopment of Washington, DC’s 11th Street Bridge. The new park development along the Anacostia River–which has been likened to New York City’s High Line–is expected to increase adjacent property values, pricing out poorer residents who have long called the area home. LISC funding will support groups providing affordable housing, early childhood education, medical care, food support, arts education and other services near park site, in an attempt to preemptively ensure that poorer residents are able to remain in their communities. The park is slated to open in mid-2019, but LISC says it is committed to the project and to the price tag no matter the timeline.

Big Shifts in British Public Broadcasting. Last August, we reported on the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC’s) financial struggles–compounded by a trend towards internet media consumption–and noted that the government had appointed a committee to review the BBC’s Royal Charter. That charter expires at the end of 2017, and all agree the 94-year old company finds itself at a critical juncture. Much has changed in the decade since its charter was last renewed, and the BBC–which receives an outsize £5 billion in licensing fees, commercial and other income–is under close scrutiny. This month, culture secretary John Whittingdal unveiled the government’s plans for the BBC in a white paper. The main takeaways? An emphasis on greater transparency and fiscal responsibility, and a new board with government appointees (which some critics worry compromises the BBC’s journalistic independence from the government). The white paper also notes that it “welcomes the BBC’s commitment to develop and test some form of additional subscription services,” giving the corporation the green light to launch a Netflix-like paid subscription service. The uncertainty facing the BBC comes as the UK’s state-owned, commercially funded broadcaster Channel 4 held off a threat to sell off the government’s stake to the highest bidder, which was called off after outcry from channel representatives and the wider public. In many ways the BBC and Channel 4 will serve as a harbinger of other government-sponsored news organizations’ fates in the digital economy.

Kresge Pairs Health and Art & Culture Programs for Neighborhood Revitalization. Food and culture have always been closely aligned; this month, the Kresge Foundation took that relationship a few daring steps further by pairing up its Arts & Culture and Health Programs to launch Fresh, Local & Equitable: Food as a Creative Platform for Neighborhood Revitalization, or, FreshLo. This unprecedented program, which aims to strengthen economic vitality, cultural expression and health in low-income communities, will distribute nearly $2 million in grant funding in support of neighborhood-scale projects demonstrating creative, cross-sector visions of food-oriented development. The foundation seems to be onto something with the food+art thing: more than 500 organizations applied for FreshLo funding, and Kresge ultimately decided to fund six more grants than initially planned. Though the Kresge Foundation has a long history of tackling food deserts, this is the first time a national funder has intentionally integrated food, art and community to drive neighborhood revitalization at this scale.

MUSICAL CHAIRS / COOL JOBS

• Melanca Clark has been named president and CEO of the Hudson-Webber Foundation.
• Loren Harris has been appointed Vice President of Programs at the Nathan Cummings Foundation.
• Susan Delvalle has been named president and executive director of Creative Capital.
• Shannon Daut is the new Cultural Affairs Manager of the City of Santa Monica Community and Cultural Services Department.
• The Field Foundation of Illinois has appointed former Joyce Foundation culture director Angelique Power its new President.
• After a decade working with the Future of Music Coalition, CEO Casey Rae leaving to become SiriusXM’s director of music licensing.
• After seventeen years with The Association of Independent Music, Alison Denham is taking on a new, global role at Worldwide Independent Network.
• Artstor President James Schulman has joined the Mellon Foundation as a Senior Fellow in Residence at the Mellon Foundation.
• Acclaimed music and culture writer Sasha Frere-Jones has abruptly exited the L.A. Times after less than a year at the paper due to “ethical issues.”
• Local Initiatives Support Corporation seeks a Program Officer. Posted May 6; no closing date.
• Slover Linett Audience Research seeks a Vice President. Posted May 12; no closing date.
• Arts Consulting Group, Inc. seeks an Associate Vice President. Posted May 26; no closing date.
• Nina Simon’s Santa Cruz Museum of Art and History is hiring a Director of Development and Community Relations. No closing date.

NEW RESEARCH OF NOTE

• Out west, a survey commissioned by the Oregon Community Foundation and the Oregon Arts Commission provides a snapshot of the state of arts education in Oregon. In Boston, the Boston Public Schools Arts Expansion released a case study on the successes of its work. And across the pond, a UK study reveals deep concerns about the future of arts education among those in the theater industry.
• A report from Lifetime Arts looks at arts education for the aging in America’s libraries.
• Diversity continues to dominate conversation the field. The Americans for Arts and National Endowment for the Arts (following up on the former’s cultural equity statement) released the results of their 2015 Local Arts Agency Census, revealing that taken a whole, the field could do a much better job of diversifying board and staffs. The website CNTRST calculated the total percentage of ‘whiteness’ in mainstream films, and found that white men take up twice as much space on the silver screen than they do in real life. A study commissioned by the professional association Directors UK shows that women make up just 13.6% of film directors in the UK; a percentage that has barely changed in the past decade. In more encouraging news, a study released by Asian American Performers Action Coalition show gains for minority actors in New York City: in the 2014-15 season, 30% of theater roles in NYC went to black, Latino and Asian-Americans. Related, Richard Florida shared the results of his research on the racial divide within the already-advantaged creative class.
• A new evaluation assesses the successes and impact of the New York Community Trust’s Edward and Sally Van Lier Fellowship over 25 years.
• Two interesting papers from Bridgespan this month. The first finds that funders’ reluctance to fully fund overhead costs prevents many nonprofits from maximizing their impact. The second argues that billion-dollar philanthropic investments in key areas could improve social mobility and revive “the American dream” for low-income families.
• A report on the first three years of the Taking Part survey’s longitudinal study (which has been conducting annual interviews about arts engagement with a group of 4,600 adults in England) reveals statistics on who attends the arts most often and why people stop engaging.
• A study commissioned by Intermedia Arts assesses the demand and availability of arts-based community development training and investigate how the benefits of Intermedia Arts’ Creative Community Leadership Institute could be made accessible for a broader range of communities.
• A report from the February 2016 Salzburg Global Seminar looks the role of the arts in advancing environmental sustainability.
• A study published in the journal Personality and Individual Differences suggests that creative individuals share more personality traits with psychopaths than their less creative peers do.
• A report from the UK calls for stricter rules for primary ticket selling sites, rather than harsher punishments for secondary sites. And it turns out, according to a survey of 18,000 people in 15 countries, that Shakespeare is far more popular in Brazil, India, China, Mexico and Turkey than he is in the UK.

The lobby of the Willard Hotel is rumored to be the birthplace of the term “lobbying.”
Photo by Ellen Meiselman

In March of 2012, Grantmakers in the Arts (GIA) launched the Arts Education Funders Coalition. The goal of the Coalition is “to research and identify federal policy opportunities that promote equitable access to arts education in all public schools.” It consists of about 135 individuals from 115 organizations within GIA’s membership and is led by a small advisory committee of prominent voices in arts advocacy, education, and philanthropy.

This is new territory for GIA. The organization’s president and CEO, Janet Brown, acknowledged in a recent conversation that public policy can be uncomfortable, risky, and “very difficult to get funders to invest in.” Successes are few, far between, and at the mercy of our volatile political process. But when a critical mass of arts education funders felt funding nonprofit programs was no longer a sufficient strategy to achieve their aspirations to further arts education in public schools, they decided to attempt to affect policy directly, and GIA took on the challenge.

Setting the stage

When attempting to influence public policy, an organization must first decide where and how to target its efforts. Will the focus be on the federal, state, or local level? Should a law be enacted, tweaked, or repealed? With the Arts Education Funders Coalition, GIA decided to focus on the federal level and work toward adding pro-arts language to existing education legislation.

In announcing the formation of the Coalition, Janet Brown explained:

Why is GIA involving itself in federal policy, you might ask. It’s because that’s where decisions are made in education in America. Although we’d love to believe that education policies are determined locally, the reality is federal policy drives the actions made by state departments of education and local superintendents and school boards. Our obsession with testing to determine learning is evidence of this. Equity issues are best dealt with at the federal level where the governmental “carrot” is meant to level the playing field.

Despite its national aspirations, the Funders Coalition hasn’t garnered much attention to date from the arts sector. According to Janet Brown, “[The Arts Education Funders Coalition is] not a very visible project because it’s a different kind of advocacy than American for the Arts (AFTA).” AFTA, the lead advocacy organization for our sector, mobilizes email campaigns and organizes Arts Advocacy Day, which brings hundreds of people to Washington each year in an overt attempt to draw the attention of policymakers to issues concerning the arts community, among other advocacy efforts. (The organizations are talking to each other: AFTA’s Vice President of Government Affairs and Arts Education, Narric Rome, is on the advisory committee of the GIA Arts Education Funders Coalition.) GIA is taking a quieter approach, banking in part on the assumption that a pro-arts education agenda would have more clout coming from a group of people who have skin in the public education game:

As a group of funders who have contributed millions of dollars to the public education system or to the nonprofit arts sector to compensate for lack of arts education in public schools, Coalition members and other funders have a stake in developing effective policy that will secure the place of arts education in twenty-first century education.

To lead the effort, GIA hired a Washington, DC firm specializing in education policy, the Penn Hill Group, to help develop an agenda and do the on-the-ground lobbying. Executive vice president Alex Nock has been presenting the Funders Coalition’s progress as part of GIA’s web conference series.

The Funders Coalition’s agenda takes on many aspects of federal education policy, including juvenile justice, research, Head Start, teacher evaluation, and the cornerstone of federal education legislation, the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA, formerly known as No Child Left Behind). It describes the arts-positive change the Funders Coalition would like to see in each area, including:

• “that any school improvement structure adopted in ESEA reauthorization… include arts education as a strategy in the overall plan to turn around a low-performing school,”
• “that arts education be integrated into the Head Start standards and partnerships be encouraged between Head Start providers and community arts organizations,” and
• “that the [Investing in Innovation] program adopt an absolute priority for arts education that requires the Department of Education to fund quality applications with an arts education focus.”

The agenda is multifaceted, but GIA’s focus is on language. According to Janet Brown, the Coalition faced a choice at its outset. It could propose new, stand-alone legislation to advance arts education, or lobby to change existing laws. After considering the contentious political climate, relatively low priority of education policy on the congressional to-do list, and extreme amount of time and effort brand new legislation would require, GIA and the Penn Hill Group deemed the latter option more realistic.

The story so far

We’re just weeks away from the Coalition’s second birthday. What progress has it made?

On November 18,2013, GIA sent an email to members of the Funders Coalition with good news: “Through work with Members of Congress and their staff, [we were] able to ensure that arts education would play a prominent role in the preschool programs funded under [a proposed] bill should it pass Congress over the next year.” Time will tell how “prominent” that role actually is, but the announcement suggests an encouraging victory for what is a relatively new effort.

Pre-K may have been low-hanging fruit for the Funders Coalition. Without standardized testing and other competitors for the class time that older students face, Pre-K curricula naturally have more room for the arts. But according to Brown, the inclusion of arts-friendly language in the bill was not inevitable. “If we had not been there the language would not have been included,” Brown said. “Bills are written based on the knowledge of the staff who are writing them.” If that’s the case, it’s a good thing the Penn Hill Group and GIA are there to educate them.

The Coalition has also succeeded in getting more specific language included in Senator Tom Harkin’s bill to reauthorize ESEA, which will hopefully be brought to the Senate floor for consideration in March or June. ESEA has been waiting for reauthorization since 2007, and Alyson Klein for EdWeek accurately called its chances back in June: “Everyone knows that the reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act is ultimately headed absolutely nowhere [in 2013], thanks to partisan divisions.” The language included in Senator Harkin’s bill is a win for the Funders Coalition, but the success of the bill is difficult to forecast given Congress’s recent track record of inaction when it comes to ESEA.

The next act

The Funders Coalition’s effort raises familiar but tricky questions about arts education advocacy:

• Is legislative language without designated funding enough to make real change? New York City’s arts education legislation is a great example of the folly of language that isn’t backed by specific, dedicated funding. In 2007, $67.5 million previously earmarked for arts education was released to the discretion of school principals. Accountability measures were put in place to theoretically ensure that students received the arts education prescribed by law, but many arts advocates would argue that the state of arts education in New York City schools has declined as a result of the change. The conventional wisdom is that if decision makers don’t have to spend money on a non-tested subject, they likely won’t, focusing resources instead on subjects in which the school is held accountable for its performance. To ensure the delivery of arts education in schools, policy needs to mandate what is to be provided to students, allocate dedicated funding, and establish a mechanism to ensure compliance. How much will be budgeted, for example, for the arts if they are to play a prominent role in preschool programs across the country? Will the appropriated funding be enough for full-time arts teachers in every school or simply materials with which general classroom teachers can incorporate arts projects? Language will help, but it’s not everything. Funding is a very important piece of the puzzle. Which begs the question…

• Does it make more sense to work at the federal or state/local level? Federal policies set priorities which states are encouraged to adopt via competitive funding programs and other means of reward and punishment. All states receiving Race to the Top grants, for example, must develop comprehensive teacher evaluation systems as a condition of funding. Nevertheless, education is constitutionally assigned as a state concern and the bulk of education funding – over 90% – comes from state and local sources. Therefore, state and local officials have the most control over how education funds are spent. If you grant the premise that money is a key, if not the key, ingredient in successful reform, the states could be the best place to advocate for arts education.

For now, it’s too early to tell what answers we might glean from GIA’s experience, and whether its quieter strategy will pay off. It could be that potential victories for the Funders Coalition really do influence state priorities and lead to expanded arts education opportunities in schools. At the very least, as the Funders Coalition continues its work we should know more about the potential for funders to be advocates. There are many valuable lessons to be learned as this effort continues.

ART AND THE GOVERNMENT

• The value of the creative sector to the U.S. economy? Half a trillion dollars. The value of the Bureau of Economic Analysis’s official inclusion of our sector in its GDP analysis? Priceless. Responses from the field have been mixed. Some are celebrating how full the glass is: the creative sector, led by Hollywood, advertising, and television, accounted for 3.2% of the economy – more than tourism (2.8%) – and employed 2 million workers. Others have focused on the top half of the glass: the recession hit our sector especially hard and to lasting effect, and the bulk of the economic value is from advertising, with relatively little from “independent artists and performing arts.” Still others question the value of glasses entirely: embracing economic measurements of the arts could undermine aesthetic arguments for their necessity – though Createquity’s Jena Lee recently suggested otherwise.
• In the latest installment of the Detroit Institute of Arts saga, museum leaders have joined closed-door negotiations with several of the nation’s largest private foundations, both local and national, to protect the beleaguered institution by raising a whopping $500 million for the city’s underwater municipal pensions. Sources say they could be close to a deal. Meanwhile, efforts to raise private funds to spin the museum off from the city got a boost from biotech millionaire Paul Schaap, who has pledged $5m.
• The Marion Ewing Kauffman Foundation has released a policy paper detailing several strategies for mayors and local government to support cultural entrepreneurship.
• A new report published by old friend Shannon Litzenberger intends to “ignite a conversation about addressing the existing logjam in arts funding in [Canada].”
• Arts Council England wants the the field to “transform itself into a low-carbon, sustainable and resilient sector” — so much so that it requires environmental reporting of its grantees, and is out with a summary of the first year of that effort.
• The Seattle Department of Cultural Affairs is offering $10,000 for an action plan on a Cultural Development Certification — intended to be the arts’ parallel to the LEED designation. Proposals are due January 22.

MUSICAL CHAIRS

• Deborah Rutter, President of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, will succeed Michael Kaiser as President of the Kennedy Center in DC, with potential implications for classical music programming.  This leaves a number of important vacancies at the capital’s cultural institutions, including the Smithsonian, the Hirshhorn, the Corcoran, the board of the Kennedy Center itself – oh, right, and both the NEH and NEA.
• Detroit’s Michigan Opera Theatre has found its first President and CEO: Wayne S. Brown, current director of music and opera at the National Endowment for the Arts. David DiChiera, the Theatre’s founder and general manager, will transition to serving as artistic director beginning January 1. Brown’s departure continues a recent exodus of top NEA officials, including the directors of Theatre & Musical Theatre, Literature, and Public Affairs/Chief of Staff.
• John Maeda, president of the Rhode Island School of Design and prominent advocate of “STEAM” education, is leaving his post at the end of the semester to join a venture capitol firm and consult for eBay – right as eBay announces plans to follow Amazon’s footsteps and launch an online art marketplace.

ALL ABOUT THE BENJAMINS

• Debate over effective altruism is raging on, and not just in the arts. Charity Navigator President and CEO Ken Berger slams it as “defective altruism” in a blog post for Stanford Social Innovation Review, and 80,000 Hours co-founder William MacAskill counters. Lest the bickering ruin your holiday spirit, GiveWell released its top charities of 2013 (no, the arts are not included) along with a thoughtful set of notes from staff members on where (and why) they each plan on giving this year.
• The Hewlett Foundation has announced a new grantmaking priority to promote an American governing process that is more productive, more civil, and less polarized.
• A new Center for Effective Philanthropy survey suggests that most foundation CEOs are skeptical that real progress has been made against the major problems they are tackling, but that their own organizations have made substantial contributions. Lucy Bernholz points out that they also lack confidence in their own measures of success and wonders whether boards can effectively hold them accountable.
• Speaking of Bernholz, her annual list of philanthropy’s top buzzwords is out for 2013 and might just be the perfect gift for the “makers” and “solutionists” on your list this holiday season.

IN THE FIELD

• Louisiana ArtWorks, a lavish $25 million art studio construction-project-turned-fiasco that has stood nearly empty since its completion, is up for auction. On top of the $600,000 yearly mortgage left to New Orleans taxpayers, more than $15 million state and federal funds had been sunk into the project.
• A new 300-student charter school for the arts is set to open on the site of a former department store in Fayetteville, North Carolina.
• In the rare positive story from Motown, the Detroit Symphony Orchestra is back in the black after a lengthy and debilitating musicians’ strike three years ago. Meanwhile, musicians from the Minnesota Orchestra, having spent the last year locked out in a labor dispute, are going rogue by applying for a 501(c)(3) and organizing their own concert series.
• Philadelphia has been adjusting to the shifting priorities of three major local arts funders, and Peter Dobrin details the ramifications and changes in a three-part series.
• The History Colorado Center takes “visitor tracking” to a new level with a “business intelligence” system that integrates and mines data from all areas of the museum, including “who is visiting, whether they’re members or donors, whether they’re coming as families or in adult pairs or alone, and from where… Whether those visitors eat in the café or shop in the store, what they ate and what they bought.” Not creepy at all…

BIG IDEAS

• With the National Endowment for the Arts gearing up to announce new collective impact funding for arts education next month, now’s a great time to brush up on what collective impact is – and while you’re at it, dig into this new series on measuring backbone organizations’ success.
• Beth Kanter unpacks the developmental evaluation strand of last month’s Next Generation Evaluation conference and offers some insight on its relationship to social change initiative and nonprofit practice.
• The Los Angeles County Museum of Art is partnering with Google, Accenture and other for-profit companies to launch an art and technology lab that will “will award grants and make museum facilities available to help artists explore new boundaries in art and science.” Elsewhere in LA, though, the public school system’s efforts to equip classrooms with iPads seem to be suffering from One-Laptop-Per-Child-like problems, which one pundit blames on “innovation fatigue.”
• Real-estate developers are increasingly cultivating artists and designers as tenants in low-rent neighborhoods who will help transform the area, raise the rents, and eventually move out. One developer calls the process “gentlefication.”
• Now this is a different kind of conference report: Arts & Ideas has created a gorgeous interactive document of The Art of Placemaking conference hosted last month in Providence, RI by the folks at WaterFire.

RESEARCH CORNER

• Dallas’s National Center for Arts Research has released its inaugural report on the health of America’s arts and cultural organizations. The report includes the average performance of organizations in eight indices and an examination of what drives organizations, and introduces the concept of high performance and intangible performance indicators (KIPIs). NCAR is working with IBM to create a online dashboard for organizations to access their own KIPIs.
• Roland Kushner, co-author of Americans for the Arts’ National Arts Index, looks at the relationship between private sector giving and arts index scores between 2000 and 2011. He finds a correlation beyond charitable contributions to the arts increasing the vitality of the sector, arguing that “charitable giving and engagement in the arts may emanate from the same instincts, values, and attitudes.”
• Americans love libraries! Nearly half of adults have visited a library in the past year, and fully 90% believe their community would be adversely affected if the local branch closed, according to a Pew study.
• A new study from Germany suggests that the relationship between studying music and improved academic performance may be causal: when researchers controlled for differences such as parental background, student musicians still out-performed their peers on cognitive tests – especially verbal ones.
• Some interesting findings have been reported by psychologists studying the effects of first-person shooter games. They surmise that players who enjoy these immersive and violent games are satisfying an innate desire for control and split-second decision making that is rarely achievable in today’s society. Video games also got some support from a new study out of Israel’s Center for Educational Technology.
• Korea-Finland Connection, a collaboration between Korean Arts Management and Dance Info Finland, has published an evaluation of its three-year program intended to create long-term  relationships between Finnish and Korean artists and organizations in the performing arts.
• Half of Equity members in Britain earned less than $8,200 in the last year, according to the union’s latest survey.  Additionally, “95.8% said they had never been pressurised to appear nude at a casting.”

September 27
Town Hall: State of NYC Dance Snapshot and Trends
organized by Dance/NYC
92nd Street Y
1395 Lexington Avenue, 2nd Floor
New York, NY
5:30 – 7pm
Info and registration (it’s free)
(I’ll be co-presenting with Dance/NYC Executive Director Lane Harwell the results of Dance/NYC’s new study, “State of NYC Dance (2013),” which I co-authored with Fractured Atlas Research Fellow Sarah Lenigan.)

October 5-9
Grantmakers in the Arts Conference
Loews Philadelphia Hotel
1200 Market Street
Philadelphia, PA
More info (not free, but it’s sold out anyway)
(In addition to blogging the conference, Daniel and I will be participating in a session called “Rethinking the Grant Panel” on Tuesday, October 8 from 11:10am-12:10pm.)

October 14-19
Evaluation 2013
Washington Hilton
1919 Connecticut Avenue NW
Washington, DC
Info and registration (not free)
(My first time at the American Evaluation Association’s annual conference, and I’m looking forward to it! I’m presenting an IGNITE talk about ArtsWave’s recent transformation on Thursday, October 17 from 8-9:30am.)

October 30
Third Annual Arts and Education Symposium
hosted by The Educational Policy and Leadership Center and the Pennsylvania Arts Education Network
The State Museum of Pennsylvania
300 North Street
Harrisburg, PA
Info and registration (not free)
(I’ll be delivering the keynote address at this conference, focusing on the role of metrics and assessment in arts education and beyond.)

San Francisco, CA / The Mission District

ArtPlace has released a report on the “top 12 ArtPlaces” in the country – the neighborhoods or clusters that scored highest on a subset of the funder’s much-discussed vibrancy indicators: number of “indicator” businesses (“eating and drinking places, shops, personal service establishments and other businesses that cater to consumers”), percentage of independently owned businesses, walkability, percentage of workers in creative occupations (“artists, writers, entertainers, architects, engineers and designers”), number of arts-related nonprofit organizations, and number of arts-related businesses. The results are organized by ZIP Code and then ranked, with a half-mile radius being drawn around the epicenter of activity in each ZIP.

Carol Coletta of ArtPlace and Mayor Tom Barrett recognize the Third Ward as one of America’s Top ArtPlaces 2013.

The list is clearly media bait – there have already been five events scheduled to provide mayors and city officials an opportunity to crow in public about making the inner circle, and ArtPlace is openly soliciting more. And, no surprise, the list does not provide any insight on how ArtPlace’s own investments fit in to the mix. That said, I do like the fact that it is quantitative rather than editorially-driven, and if what we’re really measuring is “rapidly gentrifying hipster paradises,” it passes the smell test at least for two of the places I’ve spent significant time: Washington, DC (the intersection of U Street/Adams Morgan/Dupont) and San Francisco (Mission District).

Washington, DC / Adams Morgan and the U Street Corridor

Having just recently moved to (and therefore looked for an apartment in) DC, it’s uncanny how well the methodology captured my preferences in that city. Although we ended up in the somewhat less exciting neighborhood of Cleveland Park for commuting-related reasons, I recall being instantly attracted by the obvious bustle and life around the corner of Columbia Road, Adams Mill Road, and 18th Street during early and subsequent visits. New York’s entries are a little more surprising – Manhattan is represented not by the West Village or the Lower East Side, but by Manhattan Valley, a term I have never heard before despite living in NYC for six years but that apparently refers to the area spanning upper Upper West Side and lower Morningside Heights. (A slightly odd choice to normalize the results by income, pushing up lower-income areas that have higher-than-expected concentrations of cultural resources, might be affecting what we’re seeing here.) Brooklyn also makes the list with what is now known as the BAM Cultural District (home to the new Barclays Center), rather than ultra-hot Williamsburg, I’m guessing because there aren’t enough nonprofit organizations in the latter neighborhood. I was surprised not to see the Boston area represented in the top 12, although both Back Bay and North Cambridge made a longer list of 44, representing the nation’s largest metropolitan areas. The press release notes that a “Top Small Town ArtPlaces” list is being prepared for later this year.

Brooklyn, NY / The intersection of Downtown, Fort Greene, Gowanus, Park Slope and Prospect Heights

At the very least, it all makes for some pretty maps.

Related: the NEA’s Our Town gets a glowing review as an “example of powerful placemaking” in The Atlantic Cities.

Update: here’s some more local perspective from Dallas.

Program Specialist, Archipelago, Fractured Atlas

Fractured Atlas is seeking a full-time Program Specialist for a newly-created position.  The Specialist will manage components of Archipelago, Fractured Atlas’s cultural asset mapping tool, along with the organization’s participation in the Initiative for Sustainable Arts in America.  This position reports to the Research Director.

This is an exciting opportunity to join a cutting-edge nonprofit organization working at the intersection of culture, technology, design, and data. The successful candidate will be a creative “doer” who takes pride in delivering to the highest standards of performance time and time again.

Deadline: January 2, 2013.

More travel for me coming up this month – I’m on a panel at the Future of Music Coalition Policy Summit on the 13th, giving a workshop on the untapped potential of evaluation in Chicago on the 14th, then speaking at the ArtSmarts Knowledge Exchange in Calgary on the 16th (my first work trip outside of the United States). Here are the deets:

November 12-13
Future of Music Coalition Policy Summit
New America Foundation
1899 L Street NW, Suite 400
Washington, DC
Info; event is at capacity
(I’ll be participating in a panel called “The Intersection of Data, Policy and the Arts Sector” at 3:55pm on the 13th.)

Wednesday, November 14
“Solving the Underpants Gnomes Problem: Towards an Evidence-Based Arts Policy”
part of the University of Chicago Cultural Policy Center Fall Workshop Series
DCA Storefront Theatre
68 East Randolph Street
Chicago, IL
5 – 6:30pm
Info here (scroll down)
(This is a going to be a 90-minute solo workshop with a fair amount of new content, all about the untapped potential of measurement in the arts – what we’re doing wrong, and how we can fix it. I’m excited!)

November 15-16
ArtsSmarts 2012 Knowledge Exchange
University of Calgary Downtown Campus
906 8 Avenue SW
Calgary, Alberta, CANADA
Info and registration
(I’ll be participating in a dialogue on “Cross-Border Conversations on Creative Community Development” with Shawn van Sluys of the Musagetes Foundation, moderated by Stephen Huddart of the J. W. McConnell Family Foundation. The conversation takes place on November 16 from 11am-12:30pm.)

The IRS and Treasury Department are finally starting to bring some clarity to program related investments, releasing a rule that represents the first update in 40 years to the language describing how these financial instruments can be used. Unfortunately, the one arts example in the mix describes a 501(c)(4) “social welfare” organization, rather than the more standard 501(c)(3) nonprofit. This is a little worrisome given that the arts aren’t actually mentioned as one of the categories in the tax code that qualify for tax-exempt status, and 501(c)(4)s are not able to provide a tax deduction to donors.

Elizabeth Quaglieri describes the Obama administration’s Turnaround Arts Initiative, a pilot program spearheaded by the President’s Committee on the Arts and Humanities, the Turnaround Arts Initiative provides arts curriculum resources and the attention of celebrity artists to eight struggling “turnaround schools” across the country. The arts materials are designed to be thoroughly integrated into the schools’ turnaround effort, and the whole shebang will be evaluated by Booz Allen Hamilton after a two-year trial.

STATE

Obviously, the big news of the month was Kansas getting its arts council back, reported here on Friday. Elsewhere, the news is mostly decent. New Hampshire arts advocates were successful in turning back a threat to the state’s Department of Cultural Resources and public art fund by mobilizing more than 100 business leaders, artists, teachers, economic development officials, and others to attend a public hearing, impressive for a small state. A somewhat controversial plan in Connecticut to replace line item funding for arts organizations with a competitive pool also ended up going nowhere. I have mixed feelings about this one – I get that you don’t want to expose institutions to major financial risk on short notice, but as a general practice I think line items for specific arts organizations are pretty undemocratic (because the organizations with the resources to procure them tend to be on the richer side anyway) and bad policy (because the line items are not subject to any kind of centralized performance review by industry professionals who know what they’re doing).

This is slightly old news, but the New York State Council on the Arts reversed the trend of the past four years and came out of the latest budget process with a $4 million increase, to $35.6 million. NYSCA remains the best-funded state arts council in the nation.

LOCAL

The Washington, DC city council has given preliminary approval to an increase in the budget of the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities from $3.9 million to $11.9 million. That sounds a lot better than it actually is; the increase just partially makes up for a combined loss of over $16 million from the DCCAH and the National Capital Arts and Cultural Affairs program over the past couple of years.

INTERNATIONAL

England cut funding to arts groups two years ago, and the Brits apparently aren’t missing it too much. A survey reports that support for public funding for the arts has dropped from 52% to 44% since 2009. Meanwhile, Scotland’s arts council is moving many of its arts groups to short-term, project funding in an effort to get more mileage out of its shrinking budget.

The Australia Council for the Arts has just completed a five-month review process, its first in two decades, and the results are making some waves. The review advocates that the Council reform its “rigid” structure that silos arts grantmaking by discipline, and also put up much more of its funds for competition as opposed to guaranteeing money to specific institutions. Interestingly, it puts this move under the rubric of emphasizing “excellence,” whereas in the United States that word is typically code for the larger, established organizations.

Turkey has become the latest battleground for the arts and government censorship, with conservative Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan taking a hostile stance to Turkey’s theatrical community after performances of a Chilean play sparked controversy in Istanbul. The events led to Istanbul’s Islamist mayor taking over decision-making for the city-funded theater troupe that staged the play. Supporting that move, Erdogan also threatened to cut off state funding to Turkey’s theater companies in response to protests and resignations by artists pushing for freedom of speech. The bad vibes apparently date back at least to a performance of a different play when Erdogan’s daughter found herself the involuntary recipient of an onstage actor’s attention during an improvised scene and subsequently walked out of the show. That incident led to the actor, who claimed he didn’t know that the young woman in the front row wearing a headscarf was Erdogan’s daughter, being suspended and brought before the country’s minister of culture to explain himself.