• The National Endowment for the Arts has shared a draft of its strategic plan for FY14-18, and in what I believe may be a first, is inviting public comment on it via SurveyMonkey. Ah, these modern times we live in. Now let’s just hope House Republicans don’t succeed in slashing its budget by 49%.
• A new report from the Wagner School of Public Service at NYU and the Center for an Urban Future details 15 policy innovations for cities that are “novel, proven and scalable.” While no arts-specific innovations made the list, one of the ideas is a type of “digital badging” program found in Philadelphia, Providence and Chicago that “allow[s] students both inside the K-12 system and outside to earn credentials for skills they learn in a wide variety of educational settings, from digital tools workshops at public libraries to art classes at museums.”
• The City of Buffalo is at risk of losing over $1 million worth of donated musical instruments if it follows through with cuts to music programs in its schools.
• The City of New York has taken over management of the financially troubled South Street Seaport Museum.

MUSICAL CHAIRS

• The McKnight Foundation has hired Arleta Little as arts program officer, replacing Laura Zimmermann. If she’s looking for advice on how to settle into her new role, she can check out this completely awesome video Laura made as a goodbye kiss to her old employer.
• After 25 years in various positions at the Ford Foundation, philanthropy data nut and friend of the blog Kyle Reis is now Senior Director of Global Data Services at TechSoup. Here he is writing about the Foundation Center’s Reporting Commitment.

IN THE FIELD

• Doug Borwick offers a range of thoughts from the Americans for the Arts Convention.
• So long Codaex, a European classical music distributor.
• A new national network of Latino theater companies has formed in Southern California. Service organizations will note with interest that a Theatre Communications Group conference was the forum that provided the initial push.
• In very sad news, Rick Lester, founding CEO of arts marketing consultancy TRG Arts, passed away suddenly last weekend while participating in a bike ride for charity. TRG, which is notable for its management of nearly two dozen community arts patron databases across the country, has a memorial page up with a myriad of touching tributes from colleagues past and present.

BIG IDEAS

• The NEA’s Jason Schupbach reflects on the Our Town program now that its third round of grants has been announced.
• The Internet is democratizing all sorts of things, not just the arts. Here, the Atlantic reports on the rise of citizen cartography.
• Rather than trying (or refusing) to do more with less, why not use the challenge as an opportunity to explore constructive partnerships?
• Two more than worthwhile perspectives on the past and future of online marketing, from Seth Godin and Adam Thurman.

ALL ABOUT THE BENJAMINS

• Attention study-at-home MBA candidates: the Center for Effective Philanthropy’s Phil Buchanan points us to a motherlode of Stanford philanthropy case studies made available for free recently via Laura Arrillaga-Andreessen’s ProjectU. CEP also has some tips for communicating with grantees.
• Rick Noguchi of the Irvine Foundation offers an inside look into grant deliberations and explains how the foundation made some of its decisions in the most recent round of the Exploring Engagement Fund.
• Streaming music services in general, and Spotify in particular, have come under increasing criticism from musicians for their ultra-low royalty payout rates. Most recently, Radiohead’s Thom Yorke and several associates decided to pull their music from the site in protest. But is Spotify actually undercutting music piracy rather than album sales? As usual, the folks at Future of Music Coalition have turned in the most thoughtful analysis we’ve yet seen on this issue.
• Thinking about starting a crowdfunding project and not sure how to figure out the budgeting? You might want to try Taylor Davidson’s financial modeling template in Excel.

RESEARCH CORNER

• A new report from Americans for the Arts details the mostly modest salaries of local arts agency employees. But who says you can’t get rich being an arts administrator? Indeed, the NEA’s Sunil Iyengar has a long post on income inequality in the arts, and the idea that it may be portending changes in the economy as a whole. And Diane Ragsdale considers the interesting question of whether being paid too much “crowds out” one’s existing intrinsic motivation to work.
• Can we make a dent in poverty just by teaching parents how to parent better? A long-term study from Jamaica suggests maybe so. Meanwhile, the achievement gap between rich kids and poor kids is now twice as large as that between black children and white children. The cause of poor performance by poor students? No one’s quite figured it out yet, but it’s not bad teachers, nor is it moms on crack. (Seriously – a 23-year longitudinal study in Philadelphia has revealed that being born to poverty affects kids’ cognitive development far more than whether or not their mothers were on crack while pregnant. Think about that one for a bit.) Here’s a map of poverty and race in America.
• Boston’s Charles River is finally swimmable again – a concrete example of a data-driven policy success. (And it took nearly two decades to make it happen.)

ETC.

• Congratulations to Andrew Taylor on a full decade of his blog, the Artful Manager. That is quite a milestone in this space! Andrew had it going on pretty much light years before any of us.
• Ben Huh, the head of I Can Has Cheezburger (better known as the home of LOLcats), on “bad art”:
  

  [W]e are entering an age where there is very little in the way between an idea and an expression online, and that means more and more people are participating in ways of expressing themselves. What we do is encourage that artistic expression even if we don’t recognize their creations as “fine art.”

  Human beings have this incredible desire to connect and express themselves and that is what is filling up our time on the Internet, and I don’t think that is bad. It is actually a wonderful thing.

1. Anything you could get for free, you took for free.
2. The success of a transaction was defined by the extent to which value was obtained relative to its cost — that is, whether or not it was a “good deal.”
3. Each day was a struggle to achieve program success/personal goals while staying within budget, but anytime a choice had to be made, the latter definitely had priority.

The thing about this is, most goods in this country cost the same whether they are purchased by little ol’ you or me or a giant like Hewlett–and most of the time, the cost structure is built for the former rather than the latter. As a result, the opportunity costs of day-to-day expenditures are far less noticeable in big-budget land. So all of the sudden, my decision-making process had to be readjusted: my goal was no longer to maximize value relative to cost but rather total value, assuming the cost didn’t exceed some arbitrary high amount. I found this unexpectedly difficult, because the kinds of cost benchmarks I had relied on before had always been the same ones I used in my personal life. Ian David Moss, composer and graduate student, sure as hell would never drop a few hundred bucks on a data resource just to find out whether it was useful or not–but for the Hewlett Foundation, it might well be a good investment. I’m used to situations in which the minimum acceptable option is the only one I’d be willing to pay for.

There are good things and bad things about budgeting in an intensively resource-constrained environment. Obviously, the downside is that smaller nonprofits and lower-income people are often forced to settle for imperfect solutions. So, Curtis the squatter’s friends eat unhealthy fast food and canned fruit in order to survive from day to day, even though a healthier diet would help them avoid more serious problems down the road. On the other hand, limitations like this foster an appreciation for efficiency and utility that I would argue is absent from plusher environments. I became quite proud of my ability to spot market inefficiencies and take advantage of them during my pre-business-school days, whether that meant using printing companies that catered to cash-starved, image-conscious rockers and charged much less than the traditional press down the street, or eating at the taqueria with the $4 burritos. Rich people like to think that they know something about managing money. Well, let me tell you something: being poor will make you an expert in the subject. Poor folks, the smart ones anyway, beat the market on a more consistent basis than any hedge fund manager alive, and with higher stakes to boot.* That’s why microlending has worked in the developing world, and that’s why I’ve argued in the past that small arts organizations are a more cost-effective use of philanthropic dollars. What I haven’t been able to figure out yet is how to balance the quality gain of having the “optimal” solution over a “good enough” solution, versus the efficiency gain from distributing resources more stingily across a wider range of uses and looking for deals at every turn. Oh, where’s a logic model when I need one?

* given the diminishing marginal utility of money.

At noon on Saturday I asked Michael and Curtis: “With only $20, how will you survive for the weekend — from now, until Monday morning?” (Curtis and I agreed to exempt rent. It was hard enough using $20 to meet food and personal needs — Michael would never figure out how to squat.) Michael wouldn’t sleep at Curtis’s place — he stayed at the Four Seasons, but to his credit, he hung out in Curtis’s neighborhood.

It’s not long before Michael finds himself flummoxed with the realities of life below the poverty line. In particular, he is incredulous at the dearth of options for healthy eating (fruit comes in cans because people don’t always have access to a fridge, for example). Throughout the course of the weekend, Curtis dispenses street wisdom in a similar vein:

“Why not stay at a shelter?” Michael asked.

“Not enough of them around,” Curtis replied. “And you have to be out by 6 a.m. If you got kids, you can’t take them out in the cold. So you stay in a store, or you stay in a vacant building. And no more food kitchens since the projects went down. Not a lot for poor people.”

Curtis then took out a cigarette. “See this? Always have a loose cigarette. You can always use a bathroom in somebody’s house — maybe even get a shower — for one. Maybe your kid took a dump in his pants. Maybe you need some toilet tissue. Always keep a cigarette for emergencies.”

I grew up in what I would characterize as a lower middle class household. My family always had everything we needed, but rarely everything we wanted. Thanks to generous financial aid programs and good test scores, I was able to attend two outstanding private schools from 7th grade through college for a tiny fraction of the cost of tuition. In both of these institutions, I was among a minority of students who received any financial aid at all. Following graduation, I worked several nonprofit arts jobs in Philadelphia and New York, going for a period of time without health insurance, and never achieving more than a break-even budget. In 2005 and 2006, I was supporting a very active performing ensemble that drained, even after donations and grant support, up to $5,000 a year from my already meager coffers. I learned how to avoid social situations that required me to buy drinks at a bar, or involved eating out at a restaurant more than once a month. I took girls on dates to pizza places. I enjoyed living in New York, but it was an incredibly draining experience, principally because I couldn’t really afford it. At any given time, I felt excluded from about 90% of what the city had to offer because of my financial situation. So I made do with the remaining 10% as best I could and tried to smile.

Though my upbringing was modest in comparison to many of those around me, I am well aware that I have lived the lifestyle of a king by Curtis’s standards. In New York, I lived in safe neighborhoods with easy access to public transportation, amenities, and entertainment. I managed to avoid any long-term credit debt and paid down some of my student loans. I had a computer and furniture and clothes and a roof over my head. And I always knew that no matter what happened, even if things got really bad, there were many, many people I could turn to for help.

Michael met Lena, a 45-year-old woman with three children who works part-time at a fast-food restaurant. She agreed to let Michael observe her strategies to put food on the table and keep her family together. Michael offered to pay her a fee for a week of conversation. Lena said, “How about we exchange our paychecks for one month.” Michael turned bright red.

So I’m not surprised at Michael’s shock and discomfort while immersed in Curtis’s living environment. I feel that I can say with some confidence that it’s not possible to truly understand what it’s like to be resource-constrained until one has experienced it oneself. There’s a reason why Knowing what’s best for poor people is #62 on the list of Stuff White People Like. At the end of the weekend, Michael’s brilliant solution for how to survive for 48 hours on $20 was “buy $20 of Yahoo stock. Hope for the best.”

It’s certainly worth reading the entire blog post over at Freakonomics, but be sure to read the comment thread as well. I particularly enjoyed this gem:

Touché!