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Engaging Matters

Doug Borwick on vibrant arts and communities

Baby Steps

January 17, 2018 by Doug Borwick

Over the last eighteen months I have begun to put greater emphasis on the need for (and advantages of) simplicity and gradualism in beginning community engagement efforts. [Keep It Simple, Essential Gradualism] Major community engagement efforts (commissioning work, massive collaborations, large-scale productions) are cool but daunting (and sometimes off-putting to the communities we are trying to reach) to organizations new to substantive engagement and, here’s the important thing, largely counter-productive. Big work should grow out of relationships with communities and it takes a long time to build the trust and understanding required. Too much too soon can drive people away. (And yield meager benefits at best.)

Initial steps in engagement should be, must be, small. This applies to programming, marketing and sales, fundraising, governance, evaluation . . . all aspects of organizational function. Over the next weeks Engaging Matters will devote itself to an examination of the modest, doable steps that can be taken in each area to support early engagement efforts in ways that are relatively inexpensive, not time-consuming, and provide a foundation for larger efforts in the future.

To provide the CliffsNotes overview of all that will follow, the common theme is as simple, inexpensive, and excruciatingly difficult as changing habits of mind. The essential transition is to stop seeing our work as delivering a product that should be consumed by a nameless, faceless public and to view it instead as a valuable resource for specific individuals and communities whom we know (or are getting to know). When the board and staff of arts organizations makes this switch and apply it to how they go about their existing tasks, the results will begin to support the work of deep engagement with communities.

Next time I’ll share an overview of some of the means by which we can connect with communities.

Engage!

Doug

Photo: AttributionNoncommercial Some rights reserved by Kalyani

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Filed Under: The Practice of Engagement Tagged With: arts, community engagement, gradualism, simplicity

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  1. Top Posts From AJBlogs 01.16.18 - British News Cloud says:
    January 17, 2018 at 7:06 am

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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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