The New Year seems to be a good time to try to set down some of my basic thoughts about the need for and the path to effective community engagement. As often happens on this blog, this is a very rough first draft. Refinements will follow. Whereas The environment that nurtured the development of the nonprofit arts industry has changed radically. The sum of these changes create an existential threat to the future of that … [Read more...]
Response to The Chasm of Disbelief
The following is an incredibly thoughtful response written by Carter Gilles to my post The Chasm of Disbelief. I am particularly grateful to him for pointing out the important role that doing the arts, participating in the arts, can play in overcoming disbelief. Once again, thanks Carter! Doug Borwick Carter Gilles The idea that ‘the arts are not valuable’ is not simply a statement in isolation but the conclusion from a larger point … [Read more...]
Mission Creep??!!
A colleague recently shared that when they advocate for community engagement in their organization they get pushback about "mission creep." Mission creep??!! If connecting the arts with communities is not an arts organization's mission, what is it?! I know, I know. There is an assumption (conscious or otherwise) on some people's part that arts organizations owe their allegiance to the art they present. I will spare long-time readers (and … [Read more...]
Donor Myopia
In Grass Is Greener? I recounted discoveries about arts organizations with adequate or more-than-adequate government funding. They face problems that might surprise those of us working in the arts in the U.S. And more to the point of this post, my colleagues in South America and Australia were envious of the ability we have to tap private money–individuals, corporations, and foundations. In that earlier post I promised a consideration of the … [Read more...]
The Chasm of Disbelief
Think you (or your organization) don't understand the people you are trying to reach? If you are talking about people other than your current attendees/donors and their peers, you are 100% correct; and they understand you even less. (And if you don't think you don't understand you are probably deluding yourself.) There is, between the general public and those of us on the "inside" of the nonprofit arts industry, a gap in perception that I … [Read more...]
Community Engagement Resources
It has been seven years since I retired from three decades in academia. Yet each year, come fall, I am still aware of back-to-class vibrations in the air and my inner professor seeks to remind me he is there. This year, at the same time, I am reflecting on the materials we have put together to support community engagement work. This thinking was generated by an email I got about one of my books. It said, in part, "I have to be honest, I … [Read more...]
Benefits (Yet Again)
It has been two years since I posted my effort at categorizing the benefits of the arts. In both of my international trips this year the subject came up and people wanted to deal with it at length. The subject is an urgent one both because of the social and political pressures to justify funding (the fallback arguments are "instrumental" ones, "How can the arts improve non-arts outcomes?") and our need to be able to articulate the inherent value … [Read more...]
The Long Road
Several months ago Joe Patti of Butts In Seats blogging fame posted a reflection on advice from Seth Godin about why businesses might not be connecting with customers. While I've not met Mr. Patti, it seems that we not infrequently seem to be channeling each other on topics related to community engagement. He pulled out, from Mr. Godin's article, a list of problems that sounded way too familiar to me in my work attempting to get arts … [Read more...]
Grass Is Greener?
In my recent travels to Australia and Chile I saw two places where government funding for the arts is far more generous than is true in the U.S. (Yes, we know that is not a very high bar to leap.) In one, Australia, funding is by our standards significant. In the other, funding is nearly total, so much so that even basic concepts like audience development and audience engagement are foreign. My hosts in Santiago told me that patron loyalty is not … [Read more...]
Gaia, Healthcare, and the Arts
The arts will always exist. Wherever there are human beings the arts will be there. It is far less clear that today’s arts organizations will survive through the next several generations.(You know you are old when you begin to use self-quotes as epigrams.) This post responds to three things I've read recently that have me stewing (again) about the future of big- (and medium-) box nonprofit arts organizations, the ones that bear the DNA of the … [Read more...]