Cultural Workforce Forum
Live Webcast, November 20, 2009
9:00 am - 4:00 pm Eastern

• Rent - pay for limited-term use of a reasonably complete capacity. This can be for a physical asset like a performance venue, or for a professional capacity like strategic planning consulting or third-party box office solutions.
• Buy - find and internalize the capacity to your organization, either by purchasing a capacity outright (like a theater or gallery space), or by adding the capacity to your professional set (hiring artists, staff, or administrators through an on-going salary contract rather than per service).
• Build - identify an individual, group, or asset that's not quite ready to deliver the new capacity, and prepare it to do so (building out an old warehouse into a performance space, sending current staff to professional development for a new skill set, constructing your own software solution).
• Borrow - leverage your organization's access to volunteer labor, shared space, and community goodwill to get the capacity without direct expense.

• failed to connect with and involve readers on a personal and emotional level, and
• failed to tell stories about real people whom readers might actually care about

• Independent curators without trust funds -- There's a saying, ''No trust, no love.''
• Artists who can't speak English, French, German, or Spanish. While the world is filled with approximately 6,800 languages, artwork must adhere to the linguistic realities of economics.
• Beleaguered Administrative Assistants at MoMA -- This is a group that knows what it's like to be underpaid, under-appreciated and powerless -- the trifecta!
• Anyone living in only one place, as opposed to ''between Berlin and Beijing,'' or ''based in London, Amsterdam, Sao Paolo, and Los Angeles.'' Where have you been, mono-urbanity is so 20th century...

It turns out that 1952 to 2000 was an aberration. We had a combination of tremendous stability brought on by two monolithic superpowers -- danger, yes, but stability, combined with unprecedented prosperity. Very rarely in human history -- maybe the Egyptian empire or 200 A.D. in Rome -- only a few times you can go back and find those.

"Economic equilibrium is upset by our unbalanced pursuit of material wealth.... My plan is to offset materialism with modern science, by exploiting the economic potential of antimatter, which is the physical opposite of anything made with atoms, from luxury condos to private jets."

1. I keep returning to this thought: the organization needs to go in a new direction (or to a new level) and I'm not the right person for it.
2. I'm burned out and I know it.
3. I don't think I'm burned out, but other people think I am.
4. I can't stand my board anymore . . . and/or, I can't seem to please the board no matter what I do.
5. My clock is ticking.
6. Family roles are calling me.

Orchestras are notoriously dysfunctional places, often filled with talented people suffering from acute frustration at their lack of autonomy or of artistic self-expression. And the conductor of stereotype is an autocratic figure who doesn't care if his musicians are happy or not.

...orchestras with conductors have not traditionally been the happiest places for their employees; orchestras without conductors do not necessarily make the best music; and yet orchestras are being presented as holding keys to business success.

In an orderly world where change takes place incrementally, the Nook might be a smart long-term strategy to shift Barnes & Noble's base from physical stores to e-readers. But we don't live in that world. The book business has shifted into hyper-space with dramatic change taking place within a compressed time frame.

The conference is traditionally closed to all but staff of grantmaking organizations and invited speakers. In addition, there is a strict policy against solicitation of any kind... The result is that the conference creates, as GIA board member Janet Rodriguez characterized it, a ''safe space'' for the sharing of ideas among colleagues. However, at the only major national convening for arts funders every year, this strategy can also remove the possibility of healthy confrontation in a field in which getting honest feedback can be a challenge.

Like the CSA model, Stolen Chair hopes to build a membership community, a "CST", which would provide 'seed' money for the company's development process and then reap a year's worth of theatrical harvests.

There is no such thing as an arts economy since non-commercial arts by their very definition don't follow market logic and can't compete in the market place without dependence on non-profit support structures and the government. So we can embrace our role in the margins of the economy and struggle the way that performing artists have struggled since theatre and religion parted ways, or we can model ourselves on the only other two positions left to us in a market-driven economy: as charity (quite like an endangered species) or as community resource (like a neighborhood garden)....

I don't want to be a charity, in large part because I don't think our social cause has enough merit to compete with other charities who actually change lives on a grand scale.  So, the only round hole we can force our square peg of a "business model" into is as community resource.

In this interconnected, digital age, if our art can serve as a meeting place for communities of like-minded individuals to connect, celebrate, and be challenged, then we might find a way of restoring theatre's primacy in people's lives and creating sustainable theatre-making organisms (not organizations).

1. Search for and select high-potential professional leaders for arts and cultural enterprise;
2. Connect those individuals to curriculum, hands-on learning, and professional networks to help them become not only masters of the task at hand, but also ready for the task ahead;
3. Build and grow an international network of alumni and colleagues in the professional world and in academia to ensure we know what success looks like for items one and two, and that we have the capacity to achieve it.