In recent years participatory culture has subverted consumerist habits, mass media production, and even our social interactions. People who wouldn’t previously have considered themselves creative are getting opportunities to become true collaborators in producing what they consume in fields where once they could only serve as audience members. Nowhere is this more true, arguably, than in the San Francisco Bay Area, the birthplace of parklets, Twitter, and Yelp. It’s clear that the lines between producer and consumer are being blurred in arts administration and education as well. Organizations of vastly differing sizes are adjusting to our changing culture in their own ways, altering how they interact with the public and how the public interacts with them.

Viewed from the outside, the two organizations I work for could not be more dissimilar, and yet both find themselves enveloped in this trend. Adobe Books and Arts Cooperative, where I head the gallery and serve on the board of directors, is a small, community-run bookstore and art gallery open since 1989; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA), meanwhile, where I work in the education department, is a large, international collecting institution of modern and contemporary art. Both are at crucial points in their history, and progressing in divergent directions in their vision for public participation and assessment of their educational goals. SFMOMA is reaching to be more experimental, more integrated into daily life, and more collaborative, while Adobe Books is realizing that it must become more like a museum in many ways (more organized, more curated, with a developed mission statement) in order to stay afloat. These organizations are evolving slowly towards each other, providing us with a unique window into how cultural institutions are balancing educational priorities with dueling needs for top-down curation and creative collaboration.

Both Adobe Books and SFMOMA are known as culture makers, information disseminators, and artistic/cultural venues in San Francisco. And both, in the past year, have left their longtime homes. SFMOMA has decided to infiltrate the city and beyond with creative programming and artist projects, “on the go” until 2016 while the museum is closed for an expansion, and Adobe Books was pushed out of its longtime home on 16^th Street due to rising rents and gentrification, recently relocating to a cozier space on 24^th Street. The similarities end there. SFMOMA has over 200 employees, and has the resources to maintain a strong presence in the city, with or without an actual building. Adobe Books, by contrast, could not survive without a store; it is known locally as “the living room of the Mission,” and providing a space for people to meet and for the public to gather is a crucial part of who we are. Though Adobe Books’s art gallery is now fiscally sponsored through Intersection for the Arts, the bookstore portion is still just that, a store, with goods to sell.

Adobe Books at its new location on 24th St. Photo by Tiffany Seinz.

The Story of the Community Bookstore

Clay Shirky argues in his book Here Comes Everybody that organizing without organizations is the modus operandi of the 21st century, writing that “unlike sharing, where the group is mainly an aggregate of participants, cooperating creates group identity.” Adobe Books, though a sole proprietorship for nearly 25 years, has seemingly always operated on a community-run, collaborative model. By stepping back from curation and allowing community members to give life to the space, former owner Andrew McKinley was able to establish Adobe Books as a safe harbor for ideas, a place for meeting and doing, and a spot of artistic intervention for many.

Adobe Books is a natural spot for self-directed learning. Despite a more tightly curated selection of books in our new, smaller spot on 24^th Street, as a mostly-used bookstore with an ever-fluctuating inventory, most customers come in with the expectation of finding something they didn’t yet know they wanted. Because the programming is mostly developed by the visiting public, free programs happen easily and often. Only just recently has the Board of Directors created an online events calendar, or a website at all for that matter. Yet, as Shirky might have predicted, this lack of organization did not deter people from coming into the space; if anything, it fueled widespread neighborhood involvement. People came to the Adobe space on 16^th Street for the books, the people, and the likely chance that something was going on: an art opening, music performance, poetry reading, etc. This scarcity of management also gave the makers and doers of the community a sense of comfortable ownership over a space where they could speak their peace, make their mark, host a party, or even take a nap.

In 2013, however, with a rapidly gentrifying Mission District and steeply rising rents throughout San Francisco, time was running out for a bookstore that operated more like a community center than a for-profit business. Transitioning into a cooperative business with a fiscally sponsored gallery seemed to be the only option for survival. With significant seed funding from a successful Indiegogo campaign, Adobe Books has financially found a new lease on life. At the same time, as a cooperative with a managing board of directors, we struggle with how much to curate the space rather than let the community dictate our programming.

The new 24^th Street incarnation of Adobe Books is a bit more reserved than before. With 14 directors full of their own artistic ideals, the pressure of fulfilling the promises of a successful crowdfunding campaign, and the gallery’s new fiscally-sponsored status, we feel the responsibility to be organized and thoughtful about our decisions. As an administrator by trade, I must admit I garner some pleasure from drawing up loan agreements, event MOUs, and vendor contracts. I like that we maintain a calendar, and that price negotiations on all book sales is no longer the norm. As I happily file reimbursement forms, I do wonder if all of this “organization” is slowly killing the community space that Adobe Books used to be.

Artists in the Adobe Books gallery often give me sideways glances when I hand them a loan agreement—the sort of formality that has never been instituted before. More and more inquiries about book readings, concerts, and other events are being directed to a single events manager, which is just as convenient for us as it is inconvenient for the person inquiring at the front desk who has to remember to scribble down the correct email address. Adobe is learning to be more top-down, and all the while asking ourselves if this structure is worth the exclusion that often comes with this sort of organizational map.

SFMOMA takes programs “on the go” with Mark di Suvero’s sculptures on Crissy Field. Photo by Dominic Santos.

A Museum On the Go

In contrast, SFMOMA is ever so slightly turning bottom-up, and learning that providing arts experiences with a listening ear can be more relevant and valuable to today’s population than white walls with a system for dispersing information about objects.

At SFMOMA, even the education department has a directive to curate its offerings for the public in a more or less top-down way. As with any museum, we have both the task of engaging the public as well as protecting a historical archive. However, SFMOMA is unusual in our commitment to becoming part of urban life for the residents and visitors of San Francisco. In the 2.5 years of its closure, the museum has committed to activating the city in exciting ways, perhaps echoing the recent rise of socially engaged art. Projects like Project Los Altos in the town of the same name and our decentralized exhibition of the 2012 Society for the Encouragement of Contemporary Art (SECA) awards insert art into everyday life. David Wilson’s SECA piece literally directs viewers to follow itineraries through San Francisco to find secret art interventions, with all journeys commencing from the closed museum doors. While some SFMOMA departments may see the temporary displacement as a hindrance, asking questions like “how will we keep membership numbers up with no museum admission?”, the education department frames it as an opportunity to do what we’ve always wanted to do, reaching out into neighborhoods, schools, and communities to participate in art projects and programs that reflect the dynamics of our city.

Rather than taking a soapbox approach to its educational programs, SFMOMA is developing two-way partnerships with schools and creating new public programs that rely heavily on audience participation. This year we are piloting several school projects that are part artist commission, part school curriculum, and part student-driven learning. These efforts are still in their infancy, but show promise in that both parties seem willing and excited to collaborate to bring contemporary art to the classroom in dynamic new ways. Our public educational programs are evolving as well. As part of our Project Los Altos exhibit, the Education Department is asking artists who participated in the exhibition to create a series of participatory art instructions to be printed in the Los Altos Town Crier, the local newspaper. Responses and documentation from those who choose to participate will be documented on the web as well as a few printed in the following week’s paper. After decades of hearing the likes of Paulo Freire and Sir Ken Robinson tell us that creativity and two-way communication between the educator and student are essential for dynamic learning, educators and education administrators are finally translating these ideals into actual teaching practices. We’re seeing the rise of Visual Thinking Strategies and other inquiry-based learning methods, evidence of the impact of participatory trends in our culture on museum education. The fact that education as a discipline has been at the vanguard of this shift means that museum educators are freer to adapt more quickly.

“You Do Have to Relinquish Some Control”

Forging new community partnerships is crucial to the health of  SFMOMA while it is without a building. Whether this comes as a welcome change or not, our 2.5-year closure may be exactly the catalyst necessary to transform SFMOMA into a leading 21^st=century institution, one thoroughly and intentionally engaged in its community. On the other hand, newly burdened by rising rent and the bureaucracy of organizing a cooperative (by-laws, articles of incorporation, etc.), Adobe Books is pushing hard to be structured while still maintaining its grassroots spirit. Both of these organizations have been molded by San Francisco’s unique, evolving culture, and transformed in recent months by both strong community support for the arts as well as by the money and change that comes with the city’s most recent tech boom.

This climate seems to have pushed San Francisco organizations to experiment with new methods of community collaboration, to search for the perfect balance between curatorial control and open source content. To stay relevant in today’s San Francisco, I suspect that more organizations will be striving for this middle ground—less “institutional” than the stuffy collecting museums of yore, yet more bureaucratic than the scrappy organizations that were once able to maintain cheap spaces in the city. As J.S. May, Chief Advancement Officer of the Portland Art Museum, recently said at the National Innovation Summit for Arts + Culture, “You do have to relinquish some control.” Just how much control to withdraw remains a pertinent and ongoing question for each individual institution – and as San Francisco’s experience demonstrates, large and small organizations have much to learn from each other across the resource divide.

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.

Music education in action
from Woodleywonderworks

Growing up as a pre-millennial (I’m not sure what they call my generation these days) in the record companies’ final days of splurging on million dollar music videos before the industry’s slow denouement in the face of the internet, I watched a lot of music videos. Because I have always been a fan of adult contemporary hits, a lot of the videos I watched were on VH1, then known as MTV’s less-cool cousin. Amidst this constant ingestion of popular culture, I clearly remember seeing celebrity-filled ad after celebrity-filled ad imploring me to fight budget cuts in schools as part of something called the “Save the Music Campaign.” VH1 initiated the campaign in response to education budget cuts that swept education departments. Honestly, as a pre-teen this issue didn’t concern me much—my school still had a music education program and I could play you a pretty mean rendition of Aladdin’s “A Whole New World” on my recorder to prove it. Although seeing some of my favorite artists promote this initiative piqued my curiosity, it didn’t immediately spark me to take any direct action. Sixteen years later, I was curious to know about where the initiative is now, how it has changed the face of arts education, and whether or not the endorsements are worth the time and effort.

The VH1 Save the Music campaign was initially run out of the network’s Public Affairs department until it was spun off to become its own entity, the VH1 Save the Music Foundation, in 1997. At the time, the link between music education and academic achievement was getting more public attention just as more and more school music programs were cut back or folding under budget pressure. Given that climate, the newly formed VH1 Save the Music Foundation decided its mission should be to “to restor[e] music programs in America’s public schools, and rais[e] awareness about the importance of music as part of each child’s complete education.” Since then, the foundation has supported “$49 million worth of instruments to over 1,800 public schools across the United States,” directly funding schools and school districts to create an instrumental music program for their students.

In the business realm, celebrity endorsements or partnerships have long been a proven method for raising a brand’s profile and increasing sales. This general assumption is that this model can be successfully reproduced in the nonprofit sector as well. But what do these endorsements really mean for nonprofits, especially those in the arts? TheVH1 Save the Music Foundation seems to be a good case study for using the power of celebrity to maximize impact, enabled by its connection to a popular television network and the stars that network promotes.

Beyond the cycle of public service announcements featuring popular artists on VH1, the foundation stages a few high-profile events like the VH1 Divas concert to help raise funds and draw attention to the foundation’s work. The Divas concert has featured storied headliners like Aretha Franklin, Mariah Carey, Tina Turner, Mary J. Blige and Shakira. The foundation also runs an annual “Music Ambassadors” cohort of artists and celebrities who agree to advocate and fundraise for the foundation. Current and former ambassadors include recording artists like Robin Thicke, B.o.B, Lupe Fiasco and Katy Perry. However, it’s not clear from the foundation’s website how these ambassadors are expected to use their influence to raise awareness about the importance of art in schools.

Indeed, despite its high-profile celebrity spokespeople, popular events and a highly visible platform, the VH1 Save the Music Foundation has recently had difficulty converting those assets into cash. The foundation’s most recent financial statements indicate that the organization has been facing fiscal challenges, ending the 2011 fiscal year with a deficit of over $300,000, or about 10% of its budget. In spite of the appearance of an affinity for the organizations from big names in the music industry, it has been difficult for the foundation’s fundraising efforts to match its programmatic needs. In fact, until 2012 the last year in the black for the Foundation was in 2005. Though this could be attributed to a number of factors like a large capital investment or the economic downturn which began in 2008, it does indicate that it takes much more than star-studded events and celebrity endorsements to raise funds substantial enough to cover expenses.

There is plenty of advice out there for arts organizations looking how best to engage and utilize high profile spokespeople and donors. For nonprofits seeking to elevate their work and communicate their message to a broader audience, celebrity partnerships can be a boon to the cause. However, if the sole goal of the partnership is to increase individual donations or inspire direct action, VH1’s experience suggests that organizations may want to think about a more comprehensive strategy.

Additional links:

1. VH1 Save the Music vimeo: http://vimeo.com/vh1stm
2. Chronicle of Philanthropy group discussion about celebrity endorsements: http://philanthropy.com/article/CelebritiesCharity/63247

As a program that began with a few young musicians playing classical music in a garage in Venezuela in the 1970s, the phenomenon of youth orchestras known as “El Sistema” has captured the hearts and imaginations of renowned artists and arts organizations around the world. Today, over fifty organizations in the US self-identify as “El Sistema-inspired,” presumably because they have some combination of rigorous musical study, a social justice mission, or a community development mission. As these music for social action programs emerge and evolve, they are grappling with questions about how to collectively support this new movement, what informs this type of work in our communities, and what this new hybrid leader of advocate, educator, administrator, and musician looks like.

Organizations around the country are exploring partnerships as a way to achieve greater impact than they alone can accomplish. Bard College and The Longy School of Music saw a need to support musicians in well-rounded careers as extraordinary musicians with strong teaching skills, and recently announced that the two schools are in the process of merging. The Los Angeles Philharmonic saw a need to supply El Sistema programs with high-quality teachers, and has partnered with Longy and Bard to train teachers and host conferences that bring together leaders in the El Sistema movement to discuss the needs of emerging programs. The New England Conservatory continues to support 10 people each year in a rigorous program (Abreu Fellows) that prepares them to start and/or support El Sistema programs in the US.

As a current Abreu Fellow, I’m seeing this connectivity in the spirit of El Sistema first-hand. In September, the Fellows joined about 35 music teachers and El Sistema program leaders from around the country in a professional development workshop called “Enacting a Teaching Practice through El Sistema Philosophy,” a joint initiative of New England Conservatory, the Longy School of Music, and the Conservatory Lab Charter School (CLCS) in Boston, where first-year Abreu Fellows Rebecca Levi and David Malek direct an El Sistema program. This was not your garden-variety conference: we embodied the learning by making music together, singing with the children’s choir at CLCS, playing in the children’s orchestra, and learning how to play in a bucket band. By the end of the workshop, many of us felt so connected that we ended the evening harmonizing “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot” outside of a restaurant.

Cross-pollination from different fields is happening institutionally, as well. When Harvard University hosted a session at the Kennedy School for Public Policy with El Sistema leaders in the US to discuss possible implications of El Sistema-inspired programs on policy, the Abreu Fellows turned the group of 40 public policy grads and arts education leaders into a choir. This is the change that is happening through the inspiration of El Sistema: creative entryways into experiencing excellence, community-building, performance, and most importantly, fun.

As Doug Borwick says, “As more established arts institutions come to understand the need to establish community relevance as part of their long-term prosperity (or survival) the more necessary it will be to develop models of work with communities that produce impressive results.” The good news is, we’re just at the beginning, and the conversations and rich connections are well on their way to making relevant music for community development programs a reality. Through these connections, we’re establishing an infrastructure for the next step: gathering information to better understand the impact that these programs can have.

What should we do about arts advocacy and communicating our value at the NATIONAL level?

Organize a national media campaign with celebrity spokespersons, catchy slogans (e.g. “Got Milk”), unified message, and compelling stories – 27%

• Create a Department of Culture/Cabinet-level position which is responsible for implementing a national arts policy – 23%
• Lobby elected political officials for pro-arts policy and funding; demand arts policy platform from candidates – 14%
• Create a coordinated national performing arts policy campaign involving artists and organizations – 12%
• Collect, analyze and disseminate data demonstrating the value of the arts (e.g. economic, intrinsic, developmental/educational values) – 12%
• Establish a National Arts Day/Festival with free performances, open houses, and art-making opportunities – 8%
• Explore interactive new media initiatives to increase access and relevance (e.g. create a “Google Arts”-type resource, blogs,YouTube) – 5%

I’ve talked before about the national media campaign idea. My favorite among these, though it wasn’t a strong one, was “Lobby elected political officials for pro-arts policy and funding.” My experience at the Saving Our Cultural Capital event last month reminded me that politicians will listen to pretty much anyone if they just squeak loud enough. Artists up until now have been hopelessly disorganized in their grassroots political engagement, so this is the area with perhaps the most room to grow. Best of all, it doesn’t require cash falling from the sky in order to make happen.

What should we do about arts advocacy and communicating our value at the LOCAL level?

Create an arts coalition to get involved in local decision-making, take leadership positions, and strengthen relationships with elected officials – 21%

Forge partnerships with other sectors to identify how the arts can serve community needs – 21%

• Foster cross-disciplinary conversations to share data and best practices, develop common goals, and create joint activities/ performances – 14%
• Mobilize audiences to be advocates for the arts – 13%
• Utilize existing advocacy and data to influence local funding, policy and public support for the arts – 9%
• Create collaborative local marketing campaigns in mass media and public venues – 8%
• Develop and promote recognizable champions for the arts – 7%
• Create new cross disciplinary events and festivals to promote the local arts community – 6%

My favorite for this one was “Create collaborative local marketing campaigns in mass media and public venues.” Unlike national advertising, local advertising is cheap enough that pooling of resources among arts organizations really can make an impact. There is an effort not totally unlike this in the Bay Area that was initiated by the Wallace Foundation: arts organizations are banding together to create a giant mailing list of arts patrons in the region. The first of the winning suggestions (creating an arts coalition) is a good one as well. I really believe that local is where it’s at as far as advocacy for the arts is concerned.

What should we do about arts advocacy and communicating our value at the ORGANIZATIONAL/INDIVIDUAL level?

Build relationships with non-arts groups, including governments, corporations, community development organizations, etc. – 26%

• Create opportunities for active participation in the arts for all ages (including interactive websites, open rehearsals, etc.) – 24%
• Expand relationships across the community to find and develop new leaders (e.g. through Board development) and local champions for the arts – 12%
• Participate in the local political process by lobbying city council, school board, etc. – 10%
• Create multi-media marketing strategies (including YouTube, Facebook) to communicate and demonstrate value and relevance – 9%
• Connect the stories and experiences of local community members to new and existing artwork – 9%
• Create arts supporters out of our audiences – 7%
• Build relationships with local media to widen their coverage and exposure of the arts – 4%

Again, I feel that local is where it’s at for advocacy. Having arts-aware and -friendly leaders is the surest path to achieving policy changes when we need them. Thus, I voted for “Participate in the local political process by lobbying city council, school board, etc.” The most popular suggestion also addressed this idea in a broader (but vaguer) way.

What should we do about arts EDUCATION on a NATIONAL level?

Devise an advocacy campaign to promote the inclusion of performing arts in core curricula – 36%

• Enlist artists as full partners in all aspects of arts education through training and creating an AmeriCorps/WPA-type program – 22%
• Lobby for education reform, including rescinding No Child Left Behind – 20%
• Form partnerships with national education infrastructure (e.g. National Education Association, PTA, teachers unions) – 13%
• Invite new constituencies to experience the performing arts and create opportunities for lifelong learning by providing more points of entry – 5%
• Research successful models / best practices and disseminate via the web – 2%
• Establish diverse cross-sector committee to create an enriched arts curriculum – 2%

This is the topic on which I’m least knowledgeable, so take my suggestions with a grain of salt. I voted for “Form partnerships with national education infrastructure,” since I’m always for collaboration whenever possible, and this one seems like a natural fit. I considered voting for rescinding No Child Left Behind since that just seems like a good idea regardless of its bearing on the arts.

What should we do about arts EDUCATION on a LOCAL level?

Mobilize and collaborate with K-12 and higher education institutions to strengthen arts education and arts participation as core curriculum – 23%

• Strengthen relationship with school boards and policy makers through lobbying, electing “arts friendly officials”, involvement in local politics – 17%
• Innovate financial models to fund the arts: link to tax base, develop dedicated sales tax, connect to corporate funds – 15%
• Integrate arts teaching in educators’ professional development and integrate teaching programs in artist organizations – 16%
• Bring art into non-traditional spaces (e.g. parks, workplaces, social programs) to create new educational opportunities — “enter into the communities we serve” – 14%
• Develop joint arts education programs across disciplines and within the community for fuller distribution and comprehensive programming – 8%
• Establish and share assessments that create empirical data to demonstrate correlation between arts and educa
  tional impact – 7%

I chose “innovate financial models to fund the arts” not because I see any connection whatsoever to the issue of arts education (I don’t), but because I think this is desperately needed. Denver has a very interesting system tied to the local sales tax that has resulted in a funding base for the arts of $40 million a year, quite remarkable for a city its size. Money isn’t everything, but it’s amazing what actually having enough of it can do for achieving one’s goals.

What should we do about arts EDUCATION on an ORGANIZATIONAL/INDIVIDUAL level?

Lead lifelong education programs that actively involve people in multigenerational groups. “Make the arts part of a lifelong wellness plan.” – 23%

• Directly engage teachers to integrate the arts into their teaching and create professional development programs to address their needs – 19%
• Commit your entire organization to arts education in mission, budget, programs, and collaborations – 13%
• Create new partnerships to share responsibility for planning and delivering local arts education – 11%
  
• Leverage new technology to create art, engage more people (especially young people), and support learning. – 10%
• Run candidates for school boards and local government – 9%
• Use comprehensive education models to engage the whole family in your mission and programs. – 8%
• Join, be active, and take leadership roles in civic organizations – 7%

I may sound like a broken record, but of course I voted for “Join, be active, and take leadership roles in civic organizations.” Local is where it’s at!

What should we do about DIVERSITY on a NATIONAL level?

Charge national service organizations to create dialogue at convenings, create training programs, promote diverse art and artists, and partner with grassroots organizations who are already connected to diverse communities – 43%

Diversify boards, management, and staff in all national arts organizations – 26%

Create a media campaign with artists from diverse communities including celebrities to provide exposure to diverse art – 15%

Raise national funds to support internships, reduced price events, and under-represented artists – 9%

Create national forums, listserves, and websites to support sharing of successful diversity efforts – 7%

So, my question about this one is: why put it all on the service organizations? Why is it their responsibility to create this change? I mean, of course they have a role to play, but I really think this thing is larger than that. As I said to my table, any discussion of diversity has to acknowledge that there are groups of people in this country that simply don’t talk to each other. A few band-aids here and there won’t do anything to solve the underlying problem, which is that our social circles are too often defined by these stupid labels, and that our school funding systems (among other things) exacerbate race and class divisions in particular instead of easing them. So my reluctant first choice here is “Diversify boards, management, and staff in all national arts organizations”–because I think these social divisions make it important to welcome people who can serve as bridges between communities into the fold–but realistically, that will at best make a small dent in a problem that is much too large for the performing arts community to handle alone.

What should we do about DIVERSITY on a LOCAL level?

Open an honest dialogue across community groups and sectors to share priorities and identify barriers to participation – 31%

Partner within the arts, as well as with community organizations, to build relationships – 23%

Expand beyond traditional venues to establish new points of access – 17%

Create programming to address the experiences of the diverse elements of the community – 11%

Engage community leaders from outside the arts to serve in arts leadership positions – 7%

Use diverse voices, experiences, and traditions to market arts programming – 7%

Organize a recurring local performing arts convention – 4%

I actually agreed with this one. I think an honest dialogue is so important, and once again, the local level is where to have it. I got so frustrated with being at tables with other white people at this conference and feeling like we were talking in circles around this issue. But the dialogue can’t be a one-off kind of situation–it has to be sustained and fed and followed up on. And both (or all) sides have to want it, too.

What should we do about DIVERSITY on an ORGANIZATIONAL/INDIVIDUAL level?

Discover arts in your community offered by cultures other than your own and establish peer relationships – 37%

Set long term goal and plan to have staff, board, programming, and audiences reflect the demographics of your community – 32%

Program more diverse artists and content – 15%

Create an internship / entry-level staff program that attracts and recruits diverse staff – 6%

Convene diverse ad hoc steering committees (including youth) for specific projects – 6%

Produce at least one large-scale, publicly accessible event per year – 5%

I agreed with this one too. At one point one of my caucus table-mates was talking about how audiences tend to want to stay inside their comfort zone, and I said, “Yeah, totally–like when was the last time any of us at this table went to a hip-hop concert?” Of course, nobody could remember the last time. So much of the performing arts community is afraid to collaborate outside of its own peer group, much less with an entirely different culture (unless the group representing that culture is from another country–then it’s hip).

Oh, and while we’re on the subject, can we talk for a second about the internship program idea? Someone thought that the way to empower underrepresented minorities is to have them stuff envelopes for $100 a week for three months? Because that’s what most internships in the performing arts are, slave labor masquerading as “educational opportunities.” I would call that one problematic.

Anyway, I think that’s the last post I’ll do on NPAC, at least for now. These are important issues and I’m glad we at least got a conversation started about them.

Note: for more on this, read Adam Natale on the Fractured Atlas blog.