arts & business council

MetLife Foundation National Arts Forums Series

Business Arts Council
San Francisco , California

Business Leaders in the Arts
05/20/2004

Moderator: Alex Zwissler, Executive Director, Fort Mason Foundation Business Arts Council Board Treasurer

Panelists:

• Carolynn Atherton, Director, Account Development, Northern California American Express
• Ashraf Habibullah, President and CEO, Computers & Structures, Inc.
• Dr. Dan Kelly, President, San Francisco Board of Education

With so many great nonprofit organizations to support, why have leading corporations and prominent individuals chosen to support and advocate for the arts? What are the benefits of taking on such a leadership role? This forum discussed why business leaders have aligned themselves with the arts: whether they have developed innovative national programs for the arts, made significant changes through arts advocacy, or launched new nonprofit arts organizations.

Naomi Sheridan, executive director of the Business Arts Council, gave an overview of the Business Arts Council's involvement and thanked Program Manager Simone Cameron, the Program Committee, and the Board of Directors. She also gave information about upcoming programs and events.

Alex Zwissler introduced each panelist and asked them the question, "why do you personally support the arts?" Carolynn Atherton explained how her personal passion is music and theater. She believes the arts to be the universal language and feels extremely fortunate to work for a company that so heavily supports the arts.

Ashraf Habibullah said he believes each person has both a logical and an artistic side. In school, courses teach exactly the same thing to everyone. These courses are taught logically and he believes that it is the artistic part of a person that allows them to put their own personal touch to everything they learn and that makes them different, which in turn allows them to advance in the business world.

Dr. Dan Kelly spoke about how art is in every aspect of our daily life. He then stressed the importance of arts in education and how, in particular, they have been neglected in public schools. Dr. Kelly said he believes true learning is not achieved through rational discussion but through artistic expression and creative thinking. Any good school includes arts in the curriculum. In order to improve a school it must build a community focused on artistic expression. When the arts are added it not only affects the children, but the community as a whole. Dr. Kelly personally supports the arts because he finds them fun, stimulating, and exciting to be around, and we are around them all the time.

The next question Mr. Zwissler asked was, "how does your company or business organization support the arts?" and then asked if each panelists could give some pointers on how the people attending the forum can connect with the corporate world.

Mr. Habibullah, who co-founded the Diablo Ballet, does all the advertising, photography, press photos, etc. As a member and president of board of the ballet, he doesn’t feel he should thank the audience for their support. He believes that the people get something from the art that they just witnessed, and that the art he supports also supports his business. Mr. Habibullah gave an example that he would bring about 300 of his engineers to a ballet, and then use his introduction as a forum to speak about his software, auctioning a package off to the engineers in the audience. This would spark an interest in the rest of the audience and introduce not only what his software is, but also what engineers do in general. He uses the arts events as a way to get information about his software out into the community. He believes what he does is "not a favor to the arts. It is an integral part to my business plan."

Ms. Atherton of American Express said her company’s perspective emphasizes its business plan, which focuses on customers in all forms. Arts organizations are customers, and card members are customers who spend at arts organizations. American Express is interested in the business aspect, but the overarching philosophy is about involvement and engagement in the community. They get involved on a national level with the National Arts Marketing Project, which helps arts organization around the country become better marketers and improves business relations. On a local level, they try to give grants to arts organizations and community development organization. American Express believes in the commitment to the community and that its employees should be involved in the community. This helps the company to serve its customers, expand the brand, and improve its presence in the market place. American Express is about more than just a being a business, it is about "being good to the community and helping to develop new thinkers with new thoughts that will ultimately expand our customer base."

Dr. Kelly, the president of the San Francisco Board of Education, responded about how the school district has an interest not only in teaching art but also in supporting the arts community. One such program is the Elementary Arts Program, which provides arts education to young students through a series of grants to artists who work with the students for six to eight weeks and develop some sort of performance, display, or other such project. Another project that is being worked on is to bring the School of the Arts High School to the downtown Civic Center. They are trying to reconfigure the whole building to be a high school for visual and performing arts. The location will also be used to cement relationships with all the major arts organizations in San Francisco, benefiting both the students and the organizations. Dr. Kelly then went on to say that "supporting the arts makes my job easier, more fun, and makes the job of the teachers much more enjoyable and rewarding. It increases stature in community of the school district when we are engaged in the arts in such a public way and it is to our best interest to support the arts directly and not just take from the artist."

Mr. Habibullah then mentioned how when he is working to raise funds for the Diablo Ballet, it is very important to come up with a plan that shows what is in it for the funder. He is constantly trying to raise funds from other sources to meet the budget, and these sources need to be provided with value and justification for where their money goes.

Ms. Atherton stressed that one of the considerations American Express has when deciding what organization to support is whether it has a business plan. They want to make sure that the organization is looking for ways to develop its audience and measure the impact of the program. They look at it not only from the arts perspective but also whether the organization can sustain itself over the years.

Dr. Kelly went on to mention how he has recently visited Beijing. While he was there he took a tour of the Forbidden City, and when he was reading an interpretive sign and saw in the bottom corner a logo that said that American Express had sponsored the presentation. He felt that this is a good example of the impact business supporting the arts has on changing cultural expectations and political reality on the world. Good art stimulates thought, emotion, and reconsideration of pre-existing assumptions.

The third question asked was, "how do you balance your demands both personally and professionally?"

Mr. Habibullah didn't perceive it as balancing; to him it is not one or other. You do it all. He gave an example of how he incorporates his photography to promote the Diablo Ballet. He briefly mentioned how image creation is all about perception and public relations. Good advertising and marketing brings everything together, and that a company doesn’t have to have the best product to be the biggest company. He then went on to say that "When you're passionate about stuff you work on 16 hours a day and you don’t even feel it because its not a job."

Ms. Atherton then mentioned that it is all about blending time. Her company calls on customers who are arts organizations and brings customers to arts organizations. It’s all about blending and making it work from both a business perspective and a personal perspective.

"The next question the moderator asked the panelists was, "how do we get more people involved as you are so passionately involved in supporting the arts, and are you doing this within your organization?"

Dr. Kelly said that in the school district, the best way to improve the school community is to start with a pot luck dinner with all the families bringing food. After a few times, he will have a few students perform. This, he said, is the key setup that starts to build the school community. It uses the engagement with the students’ performance or artwork to pull together for common interest in the schools and it also builds supports for arts in general. Also, the School of the Arts has partnerships with arts organizations, so they are constantly expanding exposure to the arts. When discussing school reform and improvement, the arts are always brought up in the discussion with school board members to make sure the arts are included in the curriculum. Dr. Kelly said that it is "advocacy, but also doing what we are advocating for," and that "arts are not in a little box by themselves, they are in our life every day."

Mr Habibullah added that the thing he has learned from being involved with artists is the concept of people being passionate about things. Artists will work 16 hours a day for practically no money and yet you still cannot pull them away from their work. Mr Habibullah sees this type of passion within the Diablo Ballet. Over the past few years he’s witnessed how the company has struggled, especially when the stock market crashed, and yet not for one moment did the company even consider closing down. To see this passion and commitment is something that Mr. Habibullah believes is often overlooked. He stressed the importance of being passionate about what you do and said that it is hard to resist someone who has passion; it just excites people when you are passionate about what you do. He claimed that you can work long hours and not even feel it, and it is this passion that is what most people are missing. They are going to work simply waiting for the weekend. He said that "if you are not passionate about what you are doing, get out."

Ms. Atherton said that the way American Express creates more art lovers in the community is by the way that they review the people in their company. They look at not just what was done, but at how it was done. They judge performance based on leadership in the community, which "ultimately creates more passionate observers in the world and the community in the particular organizations that they are involved in."

A member of the audience asked, "how do corporations plan on balancing arts and arts culture with other competing priorities and how do you make arts stay a priority?"

Ms. Atherton responded by saying that American Express grants its money by strict percentages. Forty percent goes to cultural heritage, which includes arts organizations; 40 percent goes toward economic development, which includes homelessness, education, etc.; and 20 percent goes toward community involvement, which is a blending of arts and economic development. It requires a certain amount of volunteerism to fund it, and they have strict guidelines that the company must adhere to, making sure each group gets its fair share.

Dr. Kelly doesn’t try to balance art; he tries to push arts as much as possible. In education it is often overlooked. The arts help in the success of children by building confidence, improving understanding and communication skills, and teaching children to think in new ways. Dr. Kelly believes that pushing the arts is about "pushing human potential and pushing growth and pushing education, and that it is all one."

Another audience member asked "what part of the business plan makes nonprofits more attractive to sponsors?" and to Mr. Habibullah specifically was asked "what is actually in it for the company?"

What American Express looks for in a business plan is what the organization knows about its customer or audience and what it can tell American Express about this audience. American Express wants to know any plan the organization has about expanding its customer base, who else the organization has gotten funding from, whether  the organization is operating efficiently, and what the organization's goal or outcomes are.

Mr. Habibullah said that his involvement with the arts is what sets him apart from the crowd. When he speaks at seminars that last four hours, he said that if he simply jumps into all the technical details of his software, within 20 minutes half of the audience is asleep. Instead he starts by talking about his involvement with the ballet. It helps to create an image that he is a structural engineer who does all sorts of other things, and then explains how all of these other ventures have impacted his business.

Each panelist was then asked about his or her own connection to creativity. Ms. Atherton responded that her role in American Express is a creative process. She must pull random bits of knowledge together to create a concept or program that is meaningful and drives behavior from a consumer perspective. On a personal note, she has been singing for many years, and has a brother who is an opera singer.

Dr. Kelly spoke about how his connection to creativity is the ability to see new connections and express them to people, to make a new realization and a new insight, and to stimulate other people's thoughts and reflections. Creativity in arts, business, and politics is about communication. When he advocates for arts in education he tries to tell stories or point out meaning and implications of stories that people wouldn’t normally see. When Dr. Kelly was in China he taught an English as a second language class. The students could all read and write English quite well, but they did not have much experience speaking the language. They were reluctance to speak even though that was the point of the class. Finally he decided to have each student write on a card one happy memory from his or her childhood. He then redistributed the cards and had each student read aloud someone else’s memory. This soon started a discussion, sharing their common stories and memories we’ve all had. The students made connection, and Dr. Kelly believes that making connections is what creativity is all about.

Another question that was asked specifically of Ms. Atherton was, "at what point does American Express distinguish between an organization dealing with the corporate sponsorship side of American Express versus an organization dealing with corporate foundations?" Ms. Atherton said that the unlike the corporate sponsorship side, the philanthropic side is not about promoting American Express, but helping the individual organization.

Mr. Habibullah made the comment that arts organizations are not getting the recognition that they need. He believes that it is very important for the artistic side of people to be supported and nurtured, and like anything else it must be imbedded when people are young. With all the cuts in funding for arts in education, it is proliferating the problem. He believes that the arts programs in schools need to be enhanced.

The forum ended with Mr. Zwissler thanking the panelists.