{"id":1939,"date":"2012-10-09T10:33:17","date_gmt":"2012-10-09T15:33:17","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/artfulmanager\/?p=1939"},"modified":"2012-10-10T15:38:39","modified_gmt":"2012-10-10T20:38:39","slug":"vibrancy-by-proxy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/artfulmanager\/main\/vibrancy-by-proxy.php","title":{"rendered":"Vibrancy by proxy"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>The discipline of Economics studies and describes\u00a0the\u00a0allocation of scarce resources to competing ends. In other words, economists explore how individuals, collectives (aka, businesses), communities, societies, and civilizations decide where and how to spend their time, talent, and treasure — in a world where each of those things is in limited supply.<\/p>\n

Some economists study this so they can describe, model, and even predict how these complex decision systems will behave over time. Others study this so they can intervene in these systems, and influence their directions or outcomes.<\/p>\n

Foundations, individual donors, and public funders are therefore, essentially, economists of the second kind described above. They seek to change the direction of a complex system toward a specific end — generally toward more, different, or ‘better’ outputs than would exist without their intervention (‘better,’ here, could mean more robust, more vital, more accessible, more technically excellent, more aesthetically focused, or a thousand other things). And they, themselves, make choices about how to allocate scarce resources against competing ends — not just money, but focus, energy, civic discourse, and other such rare jewels.<\/p>\n

Which is why I always find it intriguing when a funder describes, in some detail, what kind of change they’re looking for. A recent case-in-point is ArtPlace<\/a>, in their release of their new set of Vibrancy Indicators<\/a>. ArtPlace is in the business of fostering creative places through the arts. In the organization’s own description, it is ”a collaboration of eleven leading national and regional foundations, eight federal agencies including the National Endowment for the Arts, and six of the nation’s largest banks to accelerate creative placemaking across the U.S.” The new set of indicators describes how they will observe success in their grants and grantees, and what evidence will inform their future investment or philanthropic decisions.<\/p>\n

In short, their premise is that creative places are more vibrant places, and that ‘vibrancy’ is the thing to be observed over time. And since you can’t generally observe and measure something as ethereal as ‘vibrancy’ directly — particularly in consistent ways across the country, and in ways that describe how it’s changing over time — you need to define the things you would expect to see surrounding it, the proxies of vibrancy. These proxies should be readily available, and consistently so across your region of inquiry (here, nationwide), and offer some logical connection back to the actual thing you’re hoping to observe.<\/p>\n

So, what are the proxies of vibrancy and their rationale, according to ArtPlace?<\/p>\n