This week marks the tenth anniversary of Engaging Matters. That’s hard for me to believe. In that time this blog has had a little over 500 posts, mostly written by yours truly but also spiced up with work from some brilliant guests. When we began there was a frantic (for me) pace of two posts per week. After a few years writing that much “ate my lunch” so I cut back to one per week. Over the last two years the writing has become gradually more . . . occasional. The slowing has been largely a factor of my aging; but it is also the result of a recognition that I had presented much of the basics of my thinking about community engagement and that community engagement has gained some bit of recognition as an important element of managing arts organizations.
Over the next year it is my plan to republish some of the most widely read and/or important (from my perspective) posts. I’ll throw them in periodically rather than as a continuous onslaught of greatest hits. I will, of course, weigh in on new subjects (or new perspectives on topics) as seem important, but one of the benefits of “growing up” is the realization that there is no need to post simply for the sake of posting.
I do feel that over the last decade there is a somewhat better understanding in our field of what community engagement is and of its incredible value for arts organizations. At the same time I’m also aware that much misunderstanding and inertia exist that impedes progress in making our arts organizations more community-aware and community oriented. And, as regular readers know, I view that as being essential for the long-term viability of the industry. So the work is far from finished but I have enough self-awareness to know that I won’t be the one to finish it. I’ll simply continue trying to do my part.
For anyone who is still reading by the time you get to this paragraph, thanks for your interest and for your work in support of community engagement. We need both from many, many people to ensure a future for our organizations and to nurture ever healthier communities. It’s a critical win-win scenario if we can only realize it.
Engage!
Doug
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Congratulations Doug! Hard to believe it’s been ten years. I do think there’s been a lot of change in the engagement field in the past ten years and how arts organizations look at it. Would be interested in your take as to how it’s evolved and where we are now.
Thanks for the opportunity, Doug. It’s been invaluable. A lot of the work and thinking I have done would not have been possible w/o the AJ platform. I think there is some more acceptance of the idea of engagement today, although there is still a lot of misunderstanding (some of which is, perhaps, willful) that gets in the way of effective engagement. I also think that the vital calls for equity and inclusion provide an opportunity to get better at relationship building–the core of engagement–as we work to become more responsive to our communities.
Congratulations on 10 years and for continuing to help arts organizations be more intentionally engaged with the communities they exist in. I look forward to your “greatest hits” collection.
I want to first thank Doug for his good work on this blog and his contributions to the field of Engagement for many years before he began this blog. For me, it solidified my thinking about this “Field of Community Engagement” and it’s important to the furtherance of arts practice in the United States and beyond.
I think that our work for the next ten years could be ‘centering’ engagement in our arts practice. What happens as a result of people’s engagement with art, whether it be seeing a performance on stage, participating in a workshop, or maybe even experiencing a zoom workshop?