Core Behaviors and Relational Values (‘Ethos’)
The following pathways represent potential cardinal directions Americans for the Arts could pursue in this area:
Transformation: Embrace highly visible, unmistakable, and transformational behavior changes as an organization.
Progression: Beginning from Americans for the Arts’s current culture and ingrained patterns, establish consistent mechanisms for illuminating, highlighting, and revising behaviors to track incremental adaptation over time.
Redefinition: Establish clear expectations that Americans for the Arts’s focus is on results and service outcomes, and that Americans for the Arts will utilize strategies the organization finds most effective to those ends, without being concerned about meeting field expectations around values, behaviors, or internal processes.
The Arts and Culture Ecosystem (‘Environment’)
The following pathways represent potential cardinal directions Americans for the Arts could pursue in this area:
Transformation: Embrace highly visible, unmistakable, and transformational behavior changes as an organization.
Uplift the Narrative of Universal Creativity: Align messaging and programs around the universality of artistic engagement and creativity.
Serve the Goals of Civic Leaders Through Arts: Embrace Americans for the Arts’s national position and expertise in advocacy with lawmakers to prioritize and center existing goals of federal and state government leaders.
Decision-Making and Resource Allocation Centralization (‘Structure’)
The following pathways represent potential cardinal directions Americans for the Arts could pursue in this area:
Centralize: Focus all strategic decision-making and authority to a core individual or small group who deeply understand all Americans for the Arts’ stakeholders and activities.
Empower: Create a constellation of empowered leadership groups, with connections through Americans for the Arts’s executive office or board as communication and collaboration centers.
Separate: Reduce internal complexity by supporting organizations to self-govern and pursuing efforts to consolidate activities across partners in the field.
Programming Philosophy (‘Strategy’)
The following pathways represent potential cardinal directions Americans for the Arts could pursue in this area:
Go Narrow and Deep: Focus programming to engage deeply at the local, regional, and national level in targeted areas of activity.
Fill the Gaps: Prioritize identifying gaps in the service landscape and building internal or external infrastructure to act as the ecosystem’s connective tissue.
Anchor Nationally: Center on national-level activity and intentionally step back from engagement with local and state issues that can be supported by agencies closer to the ground.
