{"id":3526,"date":"2014-04-16T07:05:09","date_gmt":"2014-04-16T11:05:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/engage\/?p=3526"},"modified":"2014-04-16T07:05:09","modified_gmt":"2014-04-16T11:05:09","slug":"but-how","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/engage\/2014\/04\/but-how\/","title":{"rendered":"But . . . How?"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Questions\"Over two and a half years ago, I began this blog as a means of advocacy for community engagement on the part of arts organizations. While that’s not been the sole topic of the posts, it has dominated. I am now beginning a new phase of my work (to which I have alluded before) in which I will try to be somewhat more practical\u2013focusing on the process of helping arts organizations transition to a more community-focused way of being.<\/p>\n

When I do introductory workshops about community engagement, an extremely common response (either in Q & A sessions or more privately in one-on-one post-workshop conversations) is something along the lines of “I get this, but how can I get [fill in the blank] to buy in to this?” Another common response is “We are doing this now.” The interesting thing is that it is sometimes [fill in the blank] that says that. The disconnect on this topic inside organizations can be quite stunning. Where community engagement is understood to be a valuable thing, inertial forces in the industry tend to make people invested in “things as they are” identify what they are doing as community engagement, even when it is demonstrably not. (This is, I believe, labeled “confirmation bias.” It has also contributed to the profound confusion about what community engagement is.) There is not room in a single blog post to address this issue.<\/p>\n

I want to reassure those who have the first question that there are things to be done to move organizations toward greater community focused efforts. I will give below a very<\/em> brief outline of one way the process might work.<\/p>\n

For organizations that do not already have a mission-based focus on engagement, engagement efforts cannot be sufficiently successful to make a difference unless there is serious, systemic commitment to it, commitment that demands change in thinking and action. The requisite work to that end is internal<\/p>\n