Making Art - Making Community - Making Cents

Three experiences converged into one idea for me this week: if the arts can be viewed as a part of the solution to social problems they will increase their standing in the hierarchy of public causes.

1 - I attended the partners' lunch for San Diego's Monarch School, our local charter school for homeless teenagers, where I heard story after story of individuals and businesses initiating projects to raise resources, including money, for the school.

2 - My youth orchestra participated in the League of American Orchestras/Feeding America national food drive.

3 - I participated in the preparation of the local arts and culture economic impact report.

The simple trajectory of my thinking started at the luncheon when I realized arts organizations do not generally have people and businesses offering to organize fund raising initiatives (a 5K run for example) independent of the staff with the intention of donating all proceeds to the organization. If we do get such a call, we are likely to hesitate and quite possibly decline the offer because we lose control of how our name is used for fund raising in the community. Monarch School gets these offers and accepts them.

In fact, I understood that as a participant in the national orchestra food drive my organization was behaving like the businesses that give unsolicited help to Monarch. The staff we called at our local Feeding America affiliate was thrilled to get an offer out of the blue to collect food. We filled four collection bins with over 550 pounds of food in one day. But this wasn't a mission related activity for us, and not one we could likely sustain. Nor did this project bring our program or students in direct contact with food bank staff or clients.

I saw through juxtaposing these poverty related experiences with the preparation of our San Diego arts and culture economic impact report that the language and data arts advocates share with policy makers does not carry the same weight with the general public. Trumpeting economic impact does  not draw unsolicited offers to help with our mission. Elected officials want to have information they can quote to show investment of public dollars into the arts will create jobs, draw high spending tourists to their city, increase tax revenues, and keep youth engaged in safe activities.

Of these impacts, I believe the general public, including our arts audiences, only thinks about the benefit to youth. Our audiences think about the art but give almost no thought to the job creationg or tax generating side of the arts. (Haven't we all been asked at least once in our arts career, "Is this is your full time job?") The public cares about mission, purpose, and impact. People offer to help Monarch School because they see the school helping students get out of poverty and integrating them back into society, not because of the student/teacher ratio or curriculum.

The wider public does not see the arts participating in other community causes. Though artists and arts organizations work in education, health care, job training, economic development, and elder care, this work isn't very visible compared to professional productions and exhibits. An opera company with a high school program that works with students to create their own opera is hard to notice amidst a season of large scale productions. Likewise, a museum program for Alzheimer's patients is much less prominent than its gallery exhibits.

There is great work being done to create healthy communities through the arts, but its space of the public mind-share is limited. This is probably because much of this work is being done by small organizations or individual artists that have limited resources for trumpeting their impact while the rest exists as small programs inside large civic arts organization like opera companies, symphony orchestras, museums and regional theaters.

I believe that the more we highlight arts activities that create community and touch individual lives the more successful we will be at persuading the public of the value of the arts. These community service programs at arts organizations have to become a core component worthy of the same promotional attention as other activities. This may be the most important step to communicating the arts' value to the broadest swath of the public; a result that will bring greater support for the professional art making we all love to see and do.