From now on, New Blogs will be an occasional feature whenever I have enough new ones to share with you.

Applied Imagination
Createquity reader Steve Dahlberg recently got in touch with me and pointed me to his blog about “creativity, creative thinking, creative problem solving, innovation, applied imagination, education, creative studies and more.” Steve brings a welcome science-oriented focus to his writing that is missing from most of the other content I keep up with; a number of posts, for example, highlight current trends and conversations in neuroscience. Steve also runs a consulting service called the International Centre for Creativity and Imagination.

Arts Council Blog
My good friends at the Arts Council of Greater New Haven have been maintaining this cool little blog for quite a while, actually. Currently, it appears to be toiling in some obscurity, judging by the paucity of comments, but it would be an ideal place to talk about how things that are going on nationally (like the recession, the new administration, etc.) impact on the local arts scene. I encourage anyone who’s reading this in New Haven to check it out. And even if you’re not in New Haven, there’s lots of eye candy in the form of photos from recent exhibitions and events around town to keep you entertained.

NYC Performing Arts Spaces Blog
As if the Fractured Atlas blog weren’t enough, NYC Performing Arts Spaces (which is now a Fractured Atlas project) just introduced one of its own. There’s some content overlap, but the NYC PAS blog tends to focus more narrowly on space-related and NYC-specific issues.

The IdeaFeed
Totally fascinating site from the head and keyboard of Jay Corless, a Miami-born cultural policy maven who has done time in Paris and London and and is now once again based in the States. You must check out this extremely intricate interactive report on the development of the UK creative industries policy in the 1990s. Jay is also gearing up for an awesome-looking cross-country tour of creative community-building efforts in 35 cities across the United States that will result in an online travelog and hardcover book. If you want to help him out, it looks like the donation page could use a little love.

This story is interesting to me not because of my own history with the organizations involved (I was one of NYC Music Spaces’s early-ish adopters and am listed on their testimonials page, and it was a conversation with Fractured Atlas founder Adam Forest Huttler that sparked me on my way to applying to business school), but also because of all the talk that I’m hearing these days about mergers and acquisitions in the nonprofit sector. It’s the sort of subject that is very interesting to my classmates and professors at business school, but tends to be far less exciting for executives and board members of actual organizations in the field. For better or worse (mostly worse, in my opinion), clashing missions and egos have a way, or at least a reputation, of stymieing even the best-laid merger plans.

I first learned about the impending Fractured Atlas/NYC Performing Arts Spaces merger through a conversation with a staff member at Americans for the Arts, which itself merged in 2005 with the Arts & Business Council. That was a marriage that in some ways made less sense on paper, but from all appearances the transition seems to have been accomplished rather smoothly. Assuming all continues to go well, perhaps these two relatively high profile megers will encourage other arts organizations to consider similar steps, which for service organizations in particular would be, I think, a healthy proposition.

For straight-up presenting organizations? Maybe not so much. I had a case in Nonprofit Management class last year that looked at theatre organizations in Seattle in the 1990s and considered whether some of them should merge. Frankly, I do think there is some value in letting individual arts presenting organizations and ensembles retain their own identities and leadership structures. It allows for a more nimble landscape, a more entrepreneurial spirit, an ebb and flow of organizations successful and not. That’s not to say that some economies of scale can’t be leveraged, however. (Oh, look at me, I’m using MBA-speak.) Not every organization needs its own performing and rehearsal space (or even its own office space), for example. Not every organization needs to have its own accounting department, or IT team, or fundraising operation. A couple of colleagues of mine from Yale who graduated last year have started their own bookkeeping and financial consulting firm aimed at small nonprofits, called Easy Office. Another friend from high school has a startup IT consulting firm that provides custom solutions to nonprofits at below-market rates. These sorts of ventures and other forms of collaborative infrastructure can go a long way toward containing overall nonprofit-sector expenditures on support systems and talent, without necessarily sacrificing what makes each individual organization special.

• Not too long after I wrote about playing at one of Tonic’s last shows, NYC Performing Arts Spaces came out with its long-awaited report on rehearsal/performance space issues in New York, Where Can We Work? (pdf). My memory may be suspect since I filled out the survey quite a while ago, but I do think I am quoted on page 5 (I’ll let you guess which one). Anyway, it’s a very nice report, although I wish the authors had chosen to explore in more depth the strange and dysfunctional relationship between musicians/music organizations and the real estate market in New York City. For all the revenue that the arts supposedly generate in New York, the portion of that value that is captured by artists relative to the portion that is captured by landowners is absolutely miniscule. Think about this: not only do landowners benefit from rising real estate values caused by the infusion of creatively-minded audiences into an area, the rehearsal space crunch means that a huge portion of what little income musicians do make goes right back out the door into the pockets of landowners again! That is why Trinity Wall Street‘s chorus and orchestra are among the most prestigious around–it’s because the church happens to own a lot of the surrounding area, including the land on which some huge skyscrapers sit. What this does is create enormous barriers to entry for any small organization or individual artist trying to survive. It’s horribly anti-competitive and a huge infrastructure problem for the city. The suggestions contained in the report are good ones (I’m particularly intrigued by the proposal to grant a tax benefit for performance venues that agree to pay performers respectable wages), but I think that real estate stakeholders need to be brought into the discussion as well, as happened with Galapagos’s innovative partnership with Two Trees Management that enabled its move to DUMBO for “twice as much space for half the rent.”
• I’m giving a presentation at SOM’s Organizational Effectiveness Seminar (known affectionately as ORGEFF around these parts) on April 2 on the topic of the arts and economic development. ORGEFF is one of SOM’s best-kept secrets: an entirely self-directed weekly nonprofit wonk session, with (delicious) free lunch provided and guaranteed interesting discussion. Each week consists of a 20- to 40-minute presentation, usually given by a current SOM or Forestry student, followed by Q&A. ORGEFF’s proprietor, Professor Garry Brewer, occasionally gives talks of his own that usually focus on ecologies of organizations and funders in the environmental field. Anyway, I’m looking forward to the presentation and I’ll post a summary after I’m done.
• Next year’s entering students look out: I’ve been selected as the co-Chair of the 4th Annual SOM Philanthropy Conference as well as co-leader of the Arts & Culture Club. I’ll also be serving on the Net Impact Executive Committee. Guess those grand visions of suddenly jacking up my music output 500% next year are not looking too realistic.
• I had the distinct pleasure of seeing Ted Hearne’s incredible Katrina Ballads in New Haven last week. It was one of the best new music concerts I’ve been to in years, and seeing Isaiah Robinson belt out high C#s in “George Bush Doesn’t Care About Black People” backed by several of my friends from the NYC choral scene was nothing short of jaw-dropping. They’ve been touring it around for a while, so if you get a chance to see an upcoming performance, please do.
• I’ve also been listening to a lot of Dub Trio lately. Heavy metal + Jamaican dub = awesome.