• AFTA’s Narric Rome shares the latest on how arts education has fared in the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (aka No Child Left Behind) reauthorization, which Jennifer Kessler reported on earlier this year. Mostly good news, from what it sounds like.
• Looks like net neutrality advocates dodged a bullet when the Senate rejected an effort by Republicans to turn back regulations that were put in place last year.
• It’s official: the zero-budget Kansas Arts Commission will be receiving zero dollars in matching funds from the NEA. Kansas is now contemplating selling arts license plates a la the California Arts Council.
• Jonathan Arbabanel gives the insider scoop on what’s happening with the newly-merged Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs and Special Events.
• Did you know that, by law, artists in California earn royalties from future sales of their work? It sounds like a great idea, but Kal Raustiala and Chris Sprigman make a compelling argument at the Freakonomics blog that it’s actually not good policy for most artists.

ART AND THE GOVERNMENT: INTERNATIONAL

• Christopher Madden finds a strong relationship between cultural expenditures and cultural employment in Australia and New Zealand.
• Did you know that UNESCO has a Creative Cities Network? Or that the network has a conference coming up in Seoul, South Korea? I didn’t.

PRIVATE DOLLARS

• You’ve no doubt heard of the ArtPlace grant opportunity (letter of inquiry due today!), but the initiative offers just as much money in loan financing via the Nonprofit Finance Fund. There is a separate process to get in on that action, and the deadline is December 1.
• Mitch Nauffts reports on Bloomberg Philanthropies’s emergence as one of the nation’s top foundations.
• The Richard and Rhonda Goldman Foundation, a significant supporter of the arts in the San Francisco Bay Area, is spending down and has distributed its last set of grants.
• More on the Irvine Foundation’s new arts strategy, from arts program director Josephine Ramirez and foundation president Jim Canales.
• Whoa, I’d heard of composer Ann Southam via Kalvos & Damian’s New Music Bazaar, but I had no idea she was loaded.

IN THE FIELD

• Two Austin art museums, the Austin Museum of Art and Arthouse, have merged.
• Yet another orchestra is facing significant financial troubles: this time, the Dallas Symphony. The Los Angeles Philharmonic, by contrast, is doing great under the strong leadership of Deborah Borda, with Walt Disney Concert Hall averaging 95% of capacity.
• Well, this is a novel negotiating tactic: the NYC Opera’s unions have offered to perform for free this season in exchange for health care and power over future venues. City Opera rejected the offer.
• Americans for the Arts’s Amanda Alef scored an interview with the collective voice that is the Occupy Wall Street Arts and Culture Committee.

RESEARCH CORNER

• Mandee Roberts takes issue with the fact that architects are included in the NEA’s recent report on artist professions and income.
• The NEA’s Sunil Iyengar takes on Holly Sidford’s report for the National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy, “Fusing Arts, Culture, and Social Change.” So does the League of American Orchestras’s Jesse Rosen, and Andrew Taylor.

THIS ECONOMY WE LIVE IN

• Applications for art and design college degrees in the UK are down 27% from last year, and officials worry that the rising cost of higher education is squeezing out lower-income students.
• As the cost of postsecondary education ratchets up ever higher, Cooper Union is considering charging tuition to undergraduates for the first time since 1902. (h/t Xenia via the Createquity Tipster)
• The value of the worldwide underground economy (broadly speaking, enterprises that are not registered or licensed and don’t pay taxes to the government) is approximately $10 trillion, according to an economist at Johannes Kepler University in Austria. If it were a country, it would be the second-largest economy in the world after the United States.

IN THE BLOGOSPHERE

• Farewell for now to Sean Stannard-Stockton, who is taking a sabbatical from his excellent blog Tactical Philanthropy. Hope we’ll see him back again soon.
• Chicago Artists Resource has a great behind-the-scenes interview with Thomas Cott of the celebrated email newsletter You’ve Cott Mail.

THOUGHT BUBBLES

• Congratulations to the folks at Animating Democracy for a fabulous blog salon at ARTSBlog, which took place over the past week. Doug Borwick makes a good point in noting the creeping influence of creative placemaking on the discussion there.
• Arlene Goldbard was also at the Beyond Dynamic Adaptability conference, and she had some things to say about the WolfBrown white paper on participatory arts that was presented there.
• Speaking of conferences, the Independent Sector Conference (about which I’ll have a report here shortly) wasn’t the only social sector gathering that met recently. Bunmi Akinnusotu offers a brief but informative dispatch about the 2011 Net Impact Conference in Portland, OR.
• Imagine my surprise to find this article on the Fast Company website (h/t Mission Paradox) by a former classmate of mine from undergrad, Adrian Slywotzky. Adrian recounts a fascinating pro-bono study by consulting firm Oliver Wyman (in which he is a partner) called the Audience Growth Initiative that looked at audience churn at nine major symphony orchestras.
• Fantastic advice from Seth Godin on how to get hired at a small company (a term that describes virtually all arts organizations).
• Bad Culture has posted Part II of its interview with longtime Bay Area cultural policy wonk John Kreidler. (Part I is available here.)
• Is Wikipedia, arguably the most successful crowdsourcing experiment in history, running out of steam? I sure hope not, but the encyclopedia has a huge backlog of editorial work (adding sources to articles, etc.) that is apparently stretching the capacity of the site’s volunteer contributors.
• Thank you, Beth Kanter, for highlighting the fact that curation (of content or otherwise) is an art form all its own.
• Coolness: Life in a Day, the YouTube project showcasing user-uploaded video all recorded on July 24, 2010, is now available in its 90-minute entirety – on YouTube, of course.

I’ve made it my mission to get the arts a fair representation at this conference, which is entitled “Advancing Sustainable Global Enterprise: Problem Solvers, Innovators, and Changemakers,” and inspired by last year’s crowdsourced WNYC show segment on arts policy, I thought I’d open up the process to all of you. I am pitching the two topics of 1) Art and Community Revitalization and 2) The Creative Economy as particularly relevant to Net Impact’s mission and audience. Here’s an excerpt from the email I sent a Net Impact board member making the case:

Rationale for Integrating the Arts into Net Impact
Net Impact seeks to make a positive impact on society by developing leaders who use the tools of business to improve people’s lives. Much of Net Impact’s current focus revolves around the role of the environment and clean energy in a sustainable future for business and society. It’s worth nothing that a century ago, the public conversation around the environment revolved around parks and conservation—issues seen as important, yet largely separate from everyday life. Even when concerns about pollution brought the interaction between business and environment to the fore in the 1960s and 1970s, calls to stop acid rain and save the whales were still treated for the most part as distinct causes, isolated from their broader connections to other areas of human endeavor. It has taken until today for a healthy and productive conversation to develop around the nexus between environment, energy, and the economy, which now provides such rich material for the conversations at Net Impact events such as last year’s conference.

I believe that a similar conversation is beginning to develop around the role of a different natural resource in the world economy: human creativity. Urbanist Richard Florida argues in his bestselling book The Rise of the Creative Class that a new model of economic development is in its nascent stages around the world, one in which the jobs gravitate to where the talent is, rather than talent gravitating to where the jobs are. Florida posits that the so-called “Creative Class,” which includes white-collar management professionals such as strategy consultants and financial advisors in addition to a “super-creative core” of artists, scientists, and teachers, chooses where to live (and thus, where to spend much of its money) based on a wide range of factors beyond simply the availability of jobs in their industry, such as the level of diversity, openness, and tolerance for new ideas in a community. Those metropolitan areas with high concentrations of creative class workers, continues Florida, then benefit from a competitive economic advantage over other regions.

So where do the arts fit into this paradigm? Cultural policy advocates and researchers argue, and in some cases have conclusively shown, that the arts carry with them a number of “instrumental” benefits for communities, which can be described as positive spillover effects that are associated with engagement in the arts or the presence of arts producers in a defined geographic area. These spillover effects can include decreased poverty rates and increased population in otherwise depressed areas; substantial economic impacts resulting from spending on behalf of nonprofit arts organizations and their audiences (Americans for the Arts estimates the total impact at $166.2 billion across the country, and for a number of reasons this number may represent an undercount); and rising property values that accrue to all landowners in the community. I suggest that two of these instrumental benefits are especially worthy of deeper exploration in a future Net Impact National Conference.

Art and Community Revitalization
A growing body of research literature now suggests that the physical presence of nonprofit arts institutions in a community or neighborhood produces collateral benefits to those communities in the form of higher levels of civic engagement, increased land values, and lower poverty rates; and that these benefits accrue to community members whether or not they participate directly in arts organizations’ activities. It makes sense: people like to live in and visit interesting places, and the arts make places more interesting; therefore, the arts help neighborhoods attract mobile individuals and strengthen ties to existing residents. This panel would explore whether the arts should play an integral role in community development strategies alongside more traditional methods such as workforce training and transportation infrastructure, and investigate the success of practices currently in use.

The Creative Economy
As more and more traditional avenues of work become replaced by new technologies and new paradigms, it is becoming increasingly clear that the only truly sustainable competitive advantage is the ability to absorb and generate new ideas quickly. This panel will examine the multifaceted role of creativity in our economy, both as the engine of entire sectors in and of itself, and as an essential tool in moving the pace and productivity of business as a whole forward. To what extent do the arts and creative industries have the potential to serve an R&D function for the rest of society? What do the arts have to learn from business, and what can business learn from the arts?

Just as Net Impact has much to gain by including the arts, the arts community would also benefit greatly from fuller participation in Net Impact. By their very nature, artists and arts organizations pursue a hybrid business model that often combines a significant earned income revenue stream with less tangible goals. Unlike standard for-profit enterprises, fundamental aspects of arts organizations’ products are not negotiable. For this reason, their audience development initiatives share much in common with the so-called “social marketing” necessary for many social ventures. Yet despite these and other commonalities, there currently exist few opportunities for those in the arts community to communicate with peers across the social sector. Incorporating the arts more fully into Net Impact events would do much to fill this unfortunate void.

As part of the proposal, I’m required to identify four speakers and three alternates for each panel, and provide their bios and a rationale for inviting them. So I put it to you: who would you want to see speak on these topics? I’m especially looking for people who not only know what they’re talking about, but are articulate and charismatic in front of an audience (a lesson learned from both organizing and attending previous conferences). Respond here in comments or feel free to email me directly at ian.moss@yale.edu with suggestions. Feel free to nominate moderators as well as panelists. I look forward to your ideas!

• I didn’t realize that Jeff Skoll, in addition to being the first chairman of eBay and one of the more important supporters of social entrepreneurs in the world, also owns a media company that has produced movies including An Inconvenient Truth, Good Night and Good Luck, Syriana, and others. And he’s younger than Barack Obama. Talk about net impact.
• I attended an interesting lunch session on “The Scandinavian Cooperative Advantage” in which Robert Strand spoke about the cross-sector partnerships undertaken by various Scandinavian companies. One of the more interesting of these is the Global e-Sustainability Initiative, spearheaded by Nokia as an alliance among telecommunications companies to increase leveraging power against suppliers in the sustainability arena. I noted in a question that Scandinavia also happens to have some of the highest arts participation rates in the world and wondered whether there was a connection. I mean, you’ve got all those company choirs promoting listening skills….
• An afternoon talk about “Opportunity Finance” revealed the following insight: community development loans of the kind made under the Community Reinvestment Act are perceived as “high risk,” but it’s only a perception. As one panelist put it, he bets Goldman would trade its balance sheet for his at the moment. Even during healthy times, the claim was, security (if not actual performance) is comparable to that of large financial institutions. The same panelist, Donald Hinkle-Brown of The Reinvestment Fund, talked about how CDFIs are a “tiny little speck of tendon” connecting the financial industry to low-income communities, and thus, are an important infrastructure point in the fabric of society. Hinkle-Brown also provided the best quote of the day when a questioner asked what the compensation in opportunity finance was like compared to traditional banking jobs. His answer: “Well, we still have jobs.”
• At a session on Measuring Impact, Debra Natenshon from the Center for What Works shared a story about an avant-garde theater company that came up with a way to measure audience reaction to its performances with a minimum of financial and labor investment. After each show, the director would come out on stage and tell the audience, “Thank you for coming tonight. There are three exits, one with a green sign, one with a yellow sign, and one with a red sign. If you enjoyed the show and will definitely buy a ticket again, exit through the green door. If you think you enjoyed it but are not sure if you would come back, exit through the yellow door. And if this was just way too weird for you and you hated it, exit through the red door.” Then, three volunteers would stand by each door and use clicker devices to record exactly how many people chose each door. Now, I’m sure my Program Evaluation professor would like me to say something here about statistical conclusion validity related to the reliability of measurement (who knows how the public declaration of choice or the group dynamics between friends who may have arrived together might affect the results), but hey, something is better than nothing, right?

The opening event was a keynote conversation between John Brock, Chairman and CEO of Coca-Cola Enterprises and Carter Roberts, director of the World Wildlife Fund. Coca-Cola Enterprises is not the same as Coca-Cola; it’s a separate company that handles the bottling and distribution of Coca-Cola products. Brock began by describing his company’s recent focus on developing specific targets for sustainability, things like introducing hybrid electric trucks. As he put it, “most of the things we do [in the sustainability space] not only make sense for the planet but also pay off economically.” Roberts gave a brief history of WWF, which started out solely as an organization protecting species. However, as time went on, they realized that to protect species, you need to protect their habitat; to protect their habitat, you need to protect the environment; and to protect the environment, you have to change how the world works. So they’ve now expanded into areas like policy, commodity markets, and an international network of people on the ground. For example, Amazonian forests are being cut down to grow soy, which are being sold to China to feed chickens and cattle, which are being sold to an increasingly affluent middle class there. So, Roberts argued, if you want to save the rainforest, you have to start with China. Roberts also spoke about consumption in the US, which is completely out of control. By itself, our country consumes 1.2x what the planet as a whole can sustain over the long term. If the rest of the world were to catch up with the US, we would need 11 planets to sustain our hunger! Carter says that the businesses that survive and succeed are going to be the ones that realize this and figure out ways to do more with less.

The focus of the partnership between WWF and Coca-Cola Enterprises is water conservation. Right now, CCE uses 1.77 liters of water for every liter of water it transmits to the consumer. That’s down from 1.9, but there’s a long way to go to get to parity. Coca-Cola proper would like to take this even further—doing reforestation and other initiatives to replace the liter that’s taken out. The sugar in Coke actually takes more water to produce than the beverage itself. As a major buyer of sugar, Coca-Cola has a lot of leverage to determine the sustainability practices of its suppliers.

Coca-Cola Enterprises has set a goal of reducing its carbon footprint by 5% over the next six years, despite 4% year-over-year growth. However, climate change in the Arctic Circle is now on track for the worst-case scenario. Companies acting alone, voluntarily, won’t be enough—we’ll need legislation and participation from everybody as well. John Brock then talked about setting intermediate goals regarding water conservation of reducing that 1.77/1 ratio by 10% next year. (As an aside, I can only imagine what it must be like to be on the sustainability case for a ginormous company like Coca-Cola or Wal-Mart. Thrilling, in a way, but talk about pressure—you could be holding the future of the world in your hands, in a very real way. Not meeting your targets on the business side might cost you your job, but at least it won’t cost a few coastal cities here and there.)

Next was a discussion about bottled water, which the moderator calls “the elephant in the room,” referring to the two bottles of Dasani on the table. (Dasani is owned by Coca-Cola.) Carter pointed out that Dasani is actually not as bad as some competitors, since it uses local sources (and not as wasteful as Coca-Cola either, since there’s no sugar content). That doesn’t speak to the packaging, however.

During the brief Q&A portion of the event, an audience member from Baruch College asked about environmental labeling for consumer products. Brock gives qualified support, and suggested that it’s on its way eventually. Another questioner asked what Coca-Cola is doing to promote health and wellness in light of its product mix. Brock responded by talking about the “panoply” of products available to consumers, including the healthy ones; they’re starting a “Get up and run” campaign in association with its products. (Interestingly, no one had any questions for Carter Roberts.)

Overall, I think this cross-sector work between two very high-profile organizations is very cool—and quite groundbreaking. However, I couldn’t help but feel a little disappointed in Brock’s answers, which betrayed some hesitancy and defensiveness around issues (such as nutrition, plastic bottles, etc.) beyond what his company had already committed to. The willingness of him and other company leaders to play ball on the environmental front undoubtedly represents progress. I just hope that it won’t turn out to be too little, too late.

I’ll be back with more from the Net Impact North America Conference later today.

That wasn’t the first time this fall that I have found myself fascinated by a business school case that was rooted in the nonprofit world. For the Deloitte-sponsored Net Impact Case Competition in November, a raucous all-night affair that bookended intensive work around the case with a party at the graduate center bar, we analyzed a (real) profit-generating initiative by a (real) charity for autistic adults and children in the local area. The case, which was published by SOM’s Program on Social Enterprise, was a big hit among the competition participants. I’m looking forward to Sharon Oster’s Strategic Management of Nonprofit Organizations course in the spring where we’ll be doing a lot more of this kind of stuff. The only downside is that it meets Mondays and Wednesdays at 8:15am—for the entire semester. Alas, five and a half years of post-college maturation has not made me any more of a morning person.

The second half of SOM’s Organizational Perspectives series completes my courseload in the first spring session. In addition to Oster’s course, I’ll be taking Employee, State & Society, Operations, and Innovator. That all seems far away right now, though. For the moment, I’m home with the family and looking forward to my trip to Israel and Turkey as part of my International Experience next month.

Thanks to all of you who have been reading the blog thus far, and I hope to keep entertaining you in the new year. If you ever have any feedback for me, please feel free to leave a comment or email! Take care and happy holidays, everyone.