Dog Days

A colleague shared this Soul of the Community Knight Foundation/Gallup Poll research with me. It has fantastic findings for arts and culture advocates. My two favorites are

After interviewing close to 28,000 people in 26 communities over two years, the study has found that three main qualities bind people to place: social offerings such as entertainment venues and places to meet - the top factor in 21 of 26 communities, openness (how welcoming a place is) and the area's aesthetics (its physical beauty and green spaces).

Access to quality education - whether at the elementary, secondary or college level - was also an important factor.

and

The study also looked at the relationship between how passionate and loyal people are to their communities and local economic growth. Researchers did find a significant relationship between the two. For example, from 2002-06, the most attached communities had the highest local GDP growth.

I love the idea that economic vitality is connected to how strongly people feel attached to their community. And the number one factor in giving them a strong connection to their community is having places to meet and socialize. The arts are absolutely part of the solution for economic growth and this data makes new correlation. Let's use it!

In just a few hours I will introduce the San Diego Youth Symphony and Conservatory's "Celebration of Music Education" concert. It is the one time in the year when all of our 500 students perform on a single concert. We annually honor a local music teacher for a lifetime of acheivement and provide free tickets to private, school, and university music teachers. We're actually honoring one of our alumni from the 1950s, JoAnn Ford, for her years of teaching music in the schools and privately. 

This year, the local public radio station used the occasion to focus on music education during its morning talk show. Along with our award honoree the stataion invited Dr. Diana Hollinger of San Jose State University, the creative force behind the California Music Project, and Russ Sperling, the VAPA Coordinator for the middle and high school district that covers the entire south end of San Diego County, to speak about the current state of music education.

The transcript of the full interview is now posted here. The most important statement from the 45 minute session got passed over by the host but offers all of us a new argument for the importance of the arts. Diana demonstrates that arts education is a social justice issue. 

Samuel Hope, who's the executive director of the National Association of Schools and Music, he says we have five ways to communicate and organize thought and knowledge. The first one is letters and words, which is our language. And the second is numbers and symbols, which is mathematics. But the next three are still images, which is art in architecture and design, moving images which is dance and film, and abstract sound which is music. And we tend to only place emphasis on the first two. And if a child does not excel at the first two, then we spend more time teaching him that or her that rather than - at the expense of the other three. And so there are other ways besides numbers, mathematics and language, to communicate and to organize sound, and music is one of those. And if we have a child who doesn't communicate well with the first two, then he or she just doesn't do well in the education system as we have it set up today. And, of course, we're going to have students at risk. Imagine if you spend eight hours, as a seven year old, just studying words and numbers and you're bursting to express something and you can't do it. I mean, this is just an accident waiting to happen. And I don't - I mean, we don't - we can't just do a little music. Let's outsource this and sing some songs after school. That's not how you teach. You don't teach algebra that way, you don't teach somebody to read that way, you don't teach science that way. You cannot teach anything that way. So it's very important that you have a structured, you know, step-by-step education so that students have access. Understanding how to read music and to sing music and to play music is access. It's social justice...  

I look forward to seeing Diana again tomorrow during California Music Project activities in San Diego and exploring this idea with her further. I'm sure others have been making this case before and I've just not heard it. Have you?

Last week we had the California Arts Advocates lobbyist in San Diego to present a briefing on the current political realities in Sacramento. The message I took away was simple: change is coming because every aspect of state government is broken. This is echoed in our California headlines about the need for prison reform, education reform, water infrastructure investment, and budget reform. Even the infamous Prop. 13 of thirty years ago is up for reexamination because of the state's chronic budget crisis in good times and bad.

The recognition that reform is needed at the national level has also dominated the headlines for the past year. Whether we're talking health care, finance and banking, or green house gases, the basic subject is the same: how to organize policy and regulation to ensure sustainability. The degree to which reform happens now or is swallowed by politics remains to be seen.

I'm not hearing many of the same conversation amongst arts and culture colleagues. We are all proceeding with the assumption that whatever super structure overhauls come out of DC and our own state capitals we won't need to radically rethink our own business model or change how art is experienced. My impression is most people devoted to the arts think we will just adapt. Even more worrisome, we are treating the macro-trend of declining arts participation as a marketing and programming problem. We aren't thinking of it as a structural probelm.

The arts will be much better off if we lead government agencies and foundations to a new reality instead of waiting for them to push, pull, or overwhelm us with their own agendas. We are undergoing a national redesign and the arts have an important role to play in it. 

Some efforts are underway. This New Cultural Policy proposal for improving our nation through the arts launched last week. It is full of broad ideas. I assume the specificity is still in development or for individual artists and arts organizers to create. And I'm not sure how the authors are communicating these ideas to elected officials or building partnerships. I see it as the beginning of a conversation.
 

Becoming an arts advocate really takes little more than getting over the hurdle of one's own reluctance. My friend and colleague Victoria Saunders articulates this very well in a piece she recently wrote for Americans for the Arts about accepting the role as leader and hub for our local efforts to save the San Diego City School District's Visual and Performing Arts Department. I documented the effort earlier this year here and here.

If you are passionate about the arts you are an arts advocate. All you need to do is start working with others. A little effort and coordination can go a long way. In San Diego our advocacy efforts are all volunteer. There is no staff for the San Diego Regional Arts and Culture Coalition nor dedicated advocacy staff at any of our local service organizations. Wtih volunteer energy working together we've sustained city funding for arts and culture, established strong relationships with local elected officials at all levels of government, and secured media recognition for the impact of the arts in our community.

You can do this too. And now is a good time to start. It's National Arts and Humanities Month. In this quiet period before next year's budget battles, use this national focus to start a small coalition, engage elected officials, and get stories in the media about the local importance of the arts. Don't wait for a crisis. And if you need help from outside your community ask for it.

All artists and art lovers can be powerful champions for the arts. They just have to start.

While leaders from the G-20 nations met in Pittsburgh this weekend to further pave the road to globalization, Michelle Obama shared the arts with her fellow spouses, and protesters tried to interrupt the meeting, one artist quietly and clearly detailed the relationship between free markets, democracy, genocide, and middle-class consumerism.

If you only know Arundhati Roy through her Booker Prize winning novel "The God of Small Things" then you only know half her talent. She is a remarkable commentator on the subjugation of people in the name of progress. The US occupation of Iraq with 150,000 soldiers is nothing compared to India's 700,000 soldiers in Kashmir, its own territory. You can watch the interview below or read the transcript here to find out what is happening in the world's largest democracy from the perspective of its most activist artist.