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Engaging Matters

Doug Borwick on vibrant arts and communities

Well Rounded Organizations

December 1, 2012 by Doug Borwick

A recent NY Times Sunday Magazine featured an article about child prodigies, musical and otherwise. In it there was a discussion of well-roundedness (or the lack thereof) of extremely gifted young people. The author, Andrew Solomon, says in the article, “Musicians often talked to me about whether you achieve brilliance on the violin by practicing for hours every day or by reading Shakespeare, learning physics, and falling in love. ‘Maturity in music and in life, has to be earned by living, the violinist Yehudi Menuhin once said.'”

This concern about the children’s musicianship was not resolved in the article. But reading it raised for me the question about arts organizations being part of the world rather than separate from it. As I write this, I am in the midst of preparing for the first of my Mainstreaming Engagement workshops which I will have presented in Illinois by the time this post gets published. One element of the workshop will be examining the community in which the arts organization exists.

Based on work done by a friend of mine, Harv Thompson, a retired U Wisconsin-Madison professor who serves on the Gard Foundation Board with me, I’ve compiled a list of questions about community for arts professionals to ask themselves. The questions ask who the “people to know” are in government, schools, not-for-profits, and grassroots associations. As I was putting them together I realized that I knew the answers to some, but by no means all or perhaps even the majority of them.

The purpose of the questions is at least three-fold. First, community partnerships can only be forged with people you know. Engagement is about creating and maintaining relationships after all and you can’t develop those relationships until you know the names of the people! Second, the questions highlight the many facets of the community that there are that might be useful partners for improving community life. Simply thinking about the questions may inspire ideas for collaboration. And third, they have the potential for reinforcing an awareness of just how disconnected we in the arts sometimes are from those outside the arts world (other than donors/potential donors). If any of you are interested, it is my hope to make these questions generally available in some way before too long, probably via the ArtsEngaged website. But I’m running too fast simply to stay ahead of myself to figure out how and where right now. [OK. Here’s a late addition to this post: see the questions at Understanding Your Community.]

The principal awareness for me here is a reminder that arts organizations historically have had (again with the exception of donor relationships) a prodigy-like remove from the community around them. If engagement is critical for their well-being, becoming organizationally well-rounded, experiencing and “being of” the community in partnership with others, is a vital element of sustainability.

Engage!

Doug

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Filed Under: Principles Tagged With: arts, community engagement, partnership

Comments

  1. Robert Swedberg says

    December 3, 2012 at 7:14 am

    I agree! Great analogy.

About Doug Borwick

Doug Borwick is a past President of the Board of the Association of Arts Administration Educators and was for nearly 30 years Director of the Arts Management and Not-for-Profit Management Programs at Salem College in Winston-Salem, NC. He is CEO of Outfitters4, Inc., providing management services to nonprofit organizations and ArtsEngaged providing training and consultation to artists and arts organization to help them more effectively engage with their communities. [Read More …]

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About Engaging Matters

The arts began as collective activity around the campfire, expressions of community. In a very real sense, the community owned that expression. Over time, with increasing specialization of labor, the arts– especially Western “high arts”– became … [Read More...]

Books

Community Engagement: Why and How

Building Communities, Not Audiences: The Future of the Arts in the United States Engage Now! A Guide to Making the Arts Indispensable[Purchase info below] I have to be honest, I haven’t finished it yet because I’m constantly having to digest the ‘YES’ and ‘AMEN’ moments I get from each … [Read More...]

Gard Foundation Calls for Stories

The Robert E. Gard Foundation is dedicated to fostering healthy communities through arts-based development, it is currently seeking stories from communities in which the arts have improved the lives of citizens in remarkable ways. These stories can either be full descriptions (400-900 words) with photos, video, and web links or mini stories (ca. 200 words) […]

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