In the fall of 1980 while traveling on a Eurail Pass in Germany, I
ran into a fellow traveler from Poland named Josef.
We were at a Biergarten in Cologne and despite his lack of English
and my lack of Polish, we quickly discovered that two or three liters of
Germany’s finest greatly facilitates any conversation. It wasn’t long before I learned Josef was in
the process of completing his doctorate in political science at a “Uniwersity”
in Poland, and as the evening wore on, he shared with me, quite vigorously, his
views on the future.
“Computer is key. With
computer I speak Harward. I speak Berkeley. I speak Moscow. I speak
Beijing. Uniwersity professors
everywhere speak computer. Have access
to same informations. Without
informations we are like dinosaur.
Strong in what we know, wulnerable in what we don’t. Informations is key. Informations change world. You watch.”
Well surprise, surprise…within 10 years a Polish Pope had
supported a Polish union leader in helping to facilitate the downfall of the
Soviet Union. I always wondered about who, exactly, Josef was and what he did
for a living...
The longer I live, the more I realize how essentially correct
Josef was in his broken English.
Information is key. Information
does change the world.
I work in a field, however, that often frustrates those seeking
information. It’s not that the arts
aren’t studied, and it’s not that the arts don’t have a measurable value. And it certainly isn’t that artists and those
that support artists don’t have the same level of passion that my friend Josef
did.
But, for those of us in the arts, the challenge is discerning
which information matters and which does not.
Even today, after nearly 50 years of the National Endowment for
the Arts and the cumulative investment of billions of dollars, society still
argues about the value of public funding for the arts.
I’ve gotten fairly good at making this argument over the years. The difficulty I have, however, is with
grant-making organizations like large foundations and even the National
Endowment for the Arts whose applications invariably ask questions like How do
you evaluate your programs and services? How do you know if they are successful
or not? What specific things do you measure that serve as indicators for
success?
The smug answer is “The public value of supporting the arts is
self-evident. Humans have supported
art-making of all types since long before the Paleolithic Republic of Gaul gave
its first Art in
State Cave grant to a spectacular cave artist named Pablo P’Lascaux some
17,000 years ago.”
This “art for arts’ sake” response works for arts supporters, but tends
to isolate them from everyone else. The
truth is, there really are things that we should do, and that we should do well
because the bulk of the money we spend comes from tax-payers all over the
country!
So as my old friend Josef might ask, “what informations do you
have?” Well, that’s a simple question with a somewhat complicated answer.
Our five-year Strategic Plan is pretty clear on two things. One is a focus on arts education and the
other is a focus on marketing and promotion.
One is in deep trouble and the other offers us the best opportunity and
most engaged allies at the state and local level in years. But to do both, we need resources, a plan and
clear outcomes that can be used to see how well we do.
Let me start with the resource question first. According to our plan, we gave ourselves two
years to develop and successfully make the case for matching National Endowment
for the Arts Funding 1:1. As I hope all
of you know by now, we beat that benchmark by a full year. Thanks to you and
hundreds of advocates from all over the state, the Governor and legislature
approved a 26% increase. This increase
means that for the first time in our history we do not have to use our own
grantee’s funds as match.
This is good news for several reasons. We can now begin to unpack the many issues
surrounding the delivery of a meaningful, sequential, and integrated program of
arts education in our schools even as we start a new collaboration with the
Agency of Education to develop an operating plan that balances student and
school needs against the state’s (and our) capacity.
We can also help our partners at the Agency of Commerce to infuse
their marketing and promotion efforts with much more timely information about
the arts and culture. Remember, as Josef
said 33 years ago, “Informations change world.”
At the very least, we hope better informations about the arts will change
Vermont by bringing an ever-greater number of cultural tourists to explore our
treasures.
But what will we measure? Where arts education is concerned, our
biggest challenge is finding out what data is currently collected. Our primary strategic objective is to support
educational activities particularly in the pre-K through 12 cohort that have
arts-enriched/arts-integrated curricula and programming. Why? Because we want Vermont to be known for
turning out civic-minded citizens who recognize and appreciate the arts not
only for their intrinsic value, but for the value they offer to
communities. We further assert that
learning in the arts is a critical path to success for all students. So what will we measure and how?
We are giving ourselves until the end of this calendar year to
fully answer this question. I will say,
however that the 2 to 5-year Outcomes that we articulated in our Plan are
already starting to happen. We have
identified key partners and are actively working with the State Board of Education’s
Education Quality Standards Committee to ensure that the arts are an integral
part of how Vermont defines a “college-ready” high school graduate.
Furthermore, we are working very closely with the consortium of local agencies
in Burlington to develop and refine a significant body of knowledge about arts
integrated curricula using the
Integrated Arts Academy (formerly known as the H. O. Wheeler School) as a
model for best practices.
As for what we will measure in the area of marketing and
promotion, it’s important to understand first what our strategic objective
is. We support communities that
collaboratively engage the arts sector in their promotional efforts about their
local economic vitality and vibrancy because the arts are not only a valued
tourism draw, but they also serve as a significant attractor for new business
development. We will measure increases in the quality and number of materials
that the state uses to market and promote Vermont through the arts (most of
which we hope to provide), but we will also look at and report out on the
significant amount of data collected through the Pew Trust’s Cultural Data
Project.
The CDP, as it is called, is an information-gathering protocol
that is designed to do what the IRS Form 990 could only dream of doing: provide consistent, comparable data across
the range of nonprofit arts organizations on things like employment, solvency,
in-state and out-of-state attendance, management efficiency, trends, and
comparison analysis. We expect our first
report on this to drop sometime early this fall. And so far we are pleased that more than 100
organizations are participating, of which nearly 60 so far have submitted at
least two-years’ worth of key operating and financial data.
And what of the outcomes?
We have given ourselves two years to figure out how to work with a
variety of state departments, most of which are in the Agency of Commerce and
Community development. A draft
Memorandum of Understanding is already circulating that outlines how we hope to
become better engaged in promoting Vermont’s cultural assets.
But there is one more important point I want to make.
Sometimes the most important things we do don’t appear in a
strategic plan or a Memorandum of Understanding.
No one expected that a series of quiet conversations in 1997
between the then-new Tourism Commissioner and the equally new Arts Council
Director would result in a robust Cultural
Heritage Tourism Toolkit that remains as relevant today as it was when it
was published in 2001.
No one knew in 1999 that a single session at a day-long arts
conference would result in something as huge and dynamic as the
soon-to-be-completed (finally!) Danville
Project.
Our 2001 plan did not include a line directing us to have lunch
with Warren Kimble in 2005 and ask him to come up with the Palettes
of Vermont.
But all those things happened, and I like to believe they happened
because we, the Council and the arts sector in general, are flexible,
responsive, and imaginative—and not rigidly tied to a strategic plan. So I have to ask:
What are we doing today so that in another 15 years the Arts
Council’s Executive Director can look back and report on some unexpected
outcome that we didn’t identify today because we couldn’t describe what success
might look like, much less explain its outcomes and outputs? Where is the next
generation of Cultural Tourism, or Danville, or Palettes projects going to come
from? How will we know whether and how much to support them? How will we
improve our odds of success?
I believe that at its core, the value of the Arts Council is not
just in what it can measure, but in what it does to position itself to take
advantage of opportunities that are at present unknown. More importantly, the value of the Council is
really more about the quality of the work done by the artists, arts
organizations, and arts educators we serve.
In that context, and to stay relevant over time, I believe we need to
search outside of our comfort zones.
When asked what the Council does, most people respond that it gives
money to artists, arts organizations, and arts educators. Giving away money is what we have always
done, and (in all likelihood) will be what we continue to do in the
future. But this work, while
time-consuming, is not hard. It does not
stretch us to look beyond our comfort zone.
Here are some things that surely will:
·
Preparing Vermont to become known as the most
accessible arts state—the most welcoming to people with disabilities—in the
country
·
Embracing new Americans (especially people of
color) and help them to assimilate on their terms to their new home here in
Vermont
·
Helping people and institutions physically and
psychologically prepare themselves for an increasingly warmer climate with increasingly
violent weather
To address these, and many other, issues, the only thing I can
think to do is to set a large table and welcome to it a broad array of state,
state-wide, local and community partners from all fields with a stake in these
and other issues. Our combined wisdom and
knowledge will surely steer us towards solutions tomorrow that none of us on
our own could possibly imagine today.
It’s messy, non-linear, and somewhat contradictory to Josef’s
“information-will-fix-it” world-view.
But that’s the way the arts roll sometimes.
For now, those of you who are interested in the health of your
state arts council, rest assured: we are of sound fiscal mind and body,
expected to finish out the current year with a very small surplus all due in no
small part to the stellar group of people who respond to your calls day in, day
out all year long—the amazing
staff of the Vermont Arts Council.
Thank you.
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