As I mentioned in What Was Said, the report on the Community Engagement Network’s May and June Conversations on Benchmarking Equity, participants frequently commented on the relationships between community engagement and work in pursuit of equity. I’ve long held that without a commitment to community engagement an arts organization’s DEI efforts are not likely to succeed (Doomed to Fail). But the Conversations went way beyond that. In particular, … [Read more...]
Music As Care
Music as Care by Sarah Adams Hoover is a book devoted to “arts in health.” The topic is light years from my area of expertise so I was surprised when Sarah asked me to take a look at it. I am extremely glad she did. The book provides an excellent (and fascinating) overview of a rapidly growing field, one that appears to hold much promise for the future of healthcare. But what struck me most was the way it humanizes music; for the arts to be … [Read more...]
Engagement Readiness Quiz
The verdict in the George Floyd murder trial provides your arts organization with an opportunity to take a very simple quiz to determine its readiness for engaging with communities. Here are three questions: Did your organization immediately think "In what ways can we help the people of our community deal with this?" Awareness of community issues is one of the most basic elements of community engagement. (Of course, it's a little difficult … [Read more...]
The Pursuit of Equity
Last week Selena Anguiano (Benchmarking? Maybe Not) cautioned us about attempting to develop benchmarks for progress toward equity. She was responding to the announcement of the Community Engagement Network's next Conversation, Benchmarking Equity. In her post I see her identify two primary problems with benchmarking. First, there is no one size fits all approach that's workable (no two organizations are even remotely alike) and, … [Read more...]
Reimagine Yourself
I had already clicked Save on Build Back Better when I saw the NY Times article about GM's plan to sell only zero-emission cars by 2035. Wow. Just wow! A world leader for decades in the production of vehicles with internal combustion engines has decided its business is personal transportation and is not specifically tied to those engines. This is exactly like the reimagining that libraries have been/are doing transitioning from a self-image of … [Read more...]
Viability
For years, my work has been built on three simple premises. First, the combination of skyrocketing costs and rapidly withering traditional arts funding represents an unavoidable, near-term, existential crisis for arts organizations. Second, the only path to viability is a dramatic increase of arts organizations' reach–the pool of people who could realistically become arts supporters. Third, the means to that end is the development of trusting, … [Read more...]
Trust
Crazy-making. So much so that, of course, it's hard to concentrate on issues around community engagement. The troubles are simply too numerous, too big. Even so, occasionally something bubbles up that returns me to my CE thinking. One such instance was a New York Times article about masks and vaccines: How to Actually Talk to Anti-Maskers. The initial story was about doctors trying to get Guineans to take the vaccine for Ebola in 2014. There … [Read more...]
There Is No “Try”
My post last week (Justice) prompted Jerry Yoshitomi to comment, "It seems that we must ask our Black colleagues to share some benchmarks/metrics that we as a field might strive to meet." So maybe this could be the catalyst to get us past good intentions (the industry equivalent of "thoughts and prayers") to action. Long ago Barry Hessenius charged us to move from thinking of the pursuit of equity as a "issue" to making it an obsession. So, if … [Read more...]
Community Citizenship
Do you consider your organization's deepest responsibility to be to art or to people? I don't mean what is your mission. (That's a question for another time.) Rather, in extreme instances, what is most important? If many in your community are hurting is your focus on art? The tendency to focus on art almost exclusively is one reason people outside of the arts view our work as insular, out of touch, and/or irrelevant. In times of crisis, such … [Read more...]
Ask
Ask not what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country. Like most people on the planet, I have been consumed with reports on the pandemic threatening us all. I have also been trying to figure out what I can do, both in reducing the spread and in making things better for people. I've had much more success with the former. I've also been watching with great interest the number of arts organizations making content … [Read more...]