Americans for the Arts

I’d like to take this opportunity to brag about a very exciting creative economy effort in Wisconsin, in the Milwaukee region. National arts and culture leaders from around the country experienced Milwaukee’s vibrant arts and culture sector at the 2006 Americans for the Arts conference. Now southeast Wisconsin is leading the way in assessing, strengthening and sustaining the regional creative economy for the 21st century.

The Cultural Alliance of Greater Milwaukee, the regional cultural development/service and advocacy organization, has recently received a $146,250 grant from the U.S. Economic Development Administration (EDA) for “Creative Works!”, a visionary project to turn cultural and creative vision into action and results.

When Americans for the Arts rolled out its National Arts Index in January, it presented a new way to measure the health and vitality of the arts and culture sector by examining various indicators and comparing them to a 2003 baseline.

“Healthy” would not be a word used describe what the corporate giving figures will look like in 2009 and 2010, and there was some discussion as to whether business and corporate giving  to the arts would ever again be vital. Arthur C. Brooks, an advisor to the index, a musician, and president of the American Enterprise Institute, went so far as to declare that this, ladies and gentlemen, is the new reality for corporate giving in American, and we will never again see even the modest levels of support that arts organizations received in the mid 2000s.

Recently I was interviewed for a piece on the Keep Arts in Schools website and thought it might be useful to adapt that conversation for this blog conversation. The focus was on the establishment (ore re-establishment) of my office and the specific case-making needed to support the value of arts education from a public policy perspective. I am going to focus here just on my comments about case-making, but encourage people to check out the full interview.

The cultural sector benefits from strong support among elected officials. Mayor Michael Nutter - my boss - was elected in 2007 on a campaign platform that included a strong commitment to arts and culture. This support is also shared by City Council, which ultimately must vote on the cultural budget as part of the overall City budget. The Philadelphia business community is strongly supportive of the arts, but like many other cities has lost most of our corporate headquarters as a result of mergers and consolidation. We have strong support from most of the companies that are headquartered here, as well as from regional headquarters of companies based elsewhere.

Business understands that a thriving cultural sector and creative economy helps them attract and retain workers. It makes this a city where their employees want to live and work, and also fosters the creativity that is increasingly important in business. This does not mean there isn't always more work to be done educating political and business leaders - it is a continual task.

Expanding on my first post, we need to:

1. Identify what business wants from, thinks about, and considers the obstacles, challenges and opportunities to continued, substantive talks between the two sectors, and;
2. Ascertain what changes in the arts sector’s approach to building meaningful coalitions and collaborative efforts are essential prerequisites to address the business community’s needs. 

This knowledge would help the arts sector to move the status of potential collaborative efforts from the current “conceptual level” to more active status by developing strategies that could move towards specific action steps in fostering working alliances – by designing action steps that are in alignment with stated business needs.   Specifically, it is incumbent on the arts sector to fully understand and appreciate what factors the business community identifies as essential for its involvement to be of benefit to them.

That kind of inquiry might include the following discussions with business: