Arts Advocacy: Read the blog comments on this one too

go to the blog for the full story, and don't forget to read the comments...

Begin quoted material

Arts in Crisis: Elements of scale
The Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts announced their Arts in Crisis initiative this week (covered here in the Washington Post), designed to provide emergency planning assistance to cultural organizations in trouble during tough economic times. Through the system, any nonprofit arts organization can request advice and counsel -- both from the leadership and staff of the Kennedy Center, and from a growing list of mentors who can sign up through the web site.

It's a wonderful example of an established and well-resourced cultural institution embracing its position and its privilege as a platform to help their smaller peers. And it's great to see such quick and proactive response from an organization who could easily have claimed it was not their job.

But while I applaud and honor the effort, I hope it also comes with a willingness to embrace a larger truth: The Kennedy Center is part of a network of networks, part of an ecology of resources focused on the task. Their impact will be exponentially more profound if they do not assume they are going it alone.

The crisis in the arts, or any other industry, is an ecological one. Any crisis can certainly benefit from unilateral and independent action. But a more resilient and encompassing response would also include recognition and interconnection of the entire ecosystem that provides coaching, counseling, mentorship, and responsive strategy support to organizations and leaders at the edge of collapse....

end quoted


This useful blog
...The Artful Manager
What if we fundamentally misunderstood what it meant to run the arts "like a business"?
by Andrew Taylor
can be found here
http://www.artsjournal.com/artfulmanager/