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August Arts Advocacy Challenge!
So far, 2019 has been a banner year in the world of federal arts advocacy. Throughout the spring, we saw promising bipartisan benchmarks for support of an increased budget for the NEA in FY 2020. However, our work advocating for pro-arts policies doesn’t stop with funding for the NEA. Americans for the Arts, along with national coalition partners, has pursued more federal legislative priorities this year than ever before. From tax policy to transit, healthcare to education, we’re working to ensure expanded arts access and opportunity throughout the country. You can get more information and send a message to your congressional delegation about any of these bills through our Action Center.
The U.S. Congress will take its traditional month-long recess in August. Members of Congress will be in their home states and districts holding town halls, making visits to local organizations and businesses, and taking meetings in their local offices. Wondering how to continue your arts advocacy momentum during the long recess? Participate in the August Arts Advocacy Challenge to stay involved and make an impact.
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102849
Leadership in Arts Education
In early May 2019, I had the honor of being one of 75 participants of the Spring 2019 American Express Leadership Academy (AELA). I gathered with others from across the country to explore our own personal strengths and weaknesses as leaders, and to collaborate on strategies to take that information and be better. Towards the end of the week, we each met for 90 minutes with an executive coach who’d reviewed all of our assessments, self-reflection, and organization information. We also began to reflect on how we could practically use our epiphanies and discoveries. The experience was incredible. Never before have I been afforded the luxury of three and a half days to focus on myself, not just myself in the context of the work I do. The information I received allowed me to ruminate on what I was learning and how it specifically impacts leadership in the field of arts education—and what I can pass on to my colleagues in the field.
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102813
Arts and the creative economy
On my recent road trips across Vermont, I was reminded how essential cultural organizations are to the vitality of each of their communities, and how the arts are, in fact, economic drivers in urban and rural economic development. The Flynn Center, which I ran before becoming a legislator, employs 300+ people with an annual payroll of over $2.8 million. The Vermont Arts Council recently released a study showing that the creative economy in the Northeast Kingdom employs 3,327 individuals, 9.4% of the workforce of 35,500. The Arts Council is expanding its research statewide to illustrate how substantial the arts sector is in each community. As a state legislator, I feel Vermont can do more for the arts. As we seek to encourage younger people to relocate here, added support for the cultural sector will make our region even more attractive and deliver immense returns on investment.
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102799
The U.S. Census and the Arts
At the Americans for the Arts’ Annual Convention this past June, quite a few members voiced concern about the upcoming U.S. Census. In many communities, there is worry that an inaccurate count could negatively impact towns, cities, regions, and even states, and disproportionately affect people who are already marginalized. This blog is meant to give information on the Census, its impact, and what arts and culture agencies across the United States are doing to ensure a comprehensive and equitable count. The U.S. Census is a consequential tool for distributing time, attention, and money in all sorts of ways—including ways that are deeply impactful on the arts. It is also an increasingly politicized tool, and as we round the corner into the 2020 U.S. Census, it is important to understand what the U.S. Census is, what it influences, what the implication of certain proposed changes could be both generally and for the arts, and how arts and culture agencies and organizations are mobilizing to ensure a fair, full, and unthreatening U.S. Census count.
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102791
Your Fans Don't Care How Excited You Are (and Other Lessons on Social Media Authenticity)
The digital landscape is crowded, and with human attention spans coming in at 8.25 seconds (yes, that’s shorter than the attention span of a goldfish), arts marketers need to create content that not only stands out but also helps them connect with their audiences.
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102774
Arts & Military Connections: Missouri American Legion Tom Powell Post #77 Celebrates 100 years
In September 1919, American Legion Tom Powell Post #77 in St. Louis was the first of its kind to become chartered as an all African American Post, decades before the military would desegregate. Post #77 takes pride in having members who served with distinction with the Tuskegee Airmen, Buffalo Soldiers, Montford Point Marines, and many other distinguished military units. Post members also have a proud history of assisting disabled and unemployed veterans, and a strong legacy of providing community youth arts programs. Tom Powell Post #77 was instrumental in bringing the concept of competitive marching music to the community through the development of the Spirit of St. Louis senior drum and bugle corps, and mentored the famed American Woodmen Cadets junior drum and bugle corps programs. The Tom Powell Post Junior Drum and Bugle Corps was organized on September 1, 1935, to help curb juvenile delinquency in and around the neighborhood and to provide music to the Post members marching in the American Legion parade held in St. Louis. The Corps as a competitive group won many honors, including perennial Missouri State championships and placing in the top 10 of numerous national conventions. The Corps was the only Black Corps in the country participating in American Legion competition.
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102768
Introducing the Renewed pARTnership Movement
First launched in 2012, the pARTnership Movement is a program and online platform of Americans for the Arts which demonstrates that by partnering with the arts, businesses can gain a competitive edge. Over the past seven years, Americans for the Arts has developed toolkits, shared stories of success, published how-to workbooks to engage employees, and continued to celebrate America’s best businesses supporting the arts—all for the purpose of supporting the work of local arts organizations and businesses as they seek to build creative relationships. Our goal has always been two-fold: build the capacity of the arts field to cultivate and sustain mutually beneficial partnerships with business; and make the case to businesses why partnering with the arts is good for their people, their companies, and their communities. We are pleased to introduce a new pARTnership Movement website to help us (and you) further this work.
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102731
The Impact of TCJA on Individual Giving and a Plan to Do Something About It
Donations by individuals are the oxygen of nonprofit organizations. The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017 (TCJA) has added new urgency to the question of what is the future of charitable giving by individuals in the United States. Specifically, how large of an impact, and for how long, will the new tax law affect individual giving—and which charities will be most adversely affected? In 2018-19, Indiana University Lilly Family School of Philanthropy and Americans for the Arts set out to understand the challenges that TCJA could pose on the philanthropic landscape. We reviewed philanthropic trends, donor behavior research, data-lag issues, tax policy, and economic models of the TCJA’s impact. After careful consideration of this material by academics, fundraising professionals, and tax policy experts, it is clear there are troubling phenomena in motion that, without intervention, could bring the nonprofit arts sector to a critical tipping point.
To address the issue in a timely manner, the Lilly Family School of Philanthropy and Americans for the Arts have designed a research solution that will bring reliable data to the table within a single year of deployment. It is built around a national panel study of 2,000 nonprofit organizations representing the full range of size, subsectors, and geographic regions. We will track key fundraising metrics and pair those with a qualitative on-the-ground perspective about shifts in contributions by individuals, changes in demand for services, and the ability to meet that demand. In other words: Real people at real organizations telling real stories about the impact of the tax law changes.
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102668
pay artists.
THEM: “We can’t pay you, but you’ll get lots of exposure!”
ME: “I can’t eat or pay my bills with exposure!”
If I had a nickel for every time the sentiment of exposure as compensation was offered to me as an artist, I probably would not need to be writing this blog post about the importance of compensation for creatives. Too often artists are asked to provide their services in exchange for nothing or for compensation that is not comparable to the time and effort that is required to create and efficiently develop their artistry. Soul Artistry LLC’s goal is to push a new culture and narrative forward that begins to normalize the practice of artists being compensated for their work. Soul Artistry LLC is the company I started in 2012 when I began to understand the importance of artistry professional development and adopting business practices as an artistic entrepreneur. At the beginning of 2019, Soul Artistry LLC launched the pay artists. campaign. The idea for the campaign was birthed from many conversations and experiences that fellow creatives and I had been having very frequently.
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Out of the Mouths of Babes: The Nation’s Youngest United Arts Fund Speaks to a Winning Tradition
Tulsa has a storied history in the arts. As the one-time oil capital of the world, arts and cultural enterprises have been prevalent in our community for well over a century. We are still the smallest large city in the U.S. that maintains an opera company, a ballet company, and a symphony orchestra. Add to that renowned museums like Gilcrease and Philbrook, along with unique offerings like the Woody Guthrie Center, the Bob Dylan Archives, and the future OK Pop Museum, and you have the ingredients for a cultural tourism mecca. Despite a strong cultural community, when we started Arts Alliance Tulsa in 2012, local corporate giving was stuck at an average of 3% to the arts, while it was at 58% nationally if you combined corporate and workplace giving. After the first two years of AAT’s existence, overall giving to our individual member organizations (not including what AAT allocates) grew by 18%. We are a living example of a city that has seen all the boats rise with the tide as a result of the presence of our United Arts Fund.
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102645
Creating Space for Human Connection
Every day, the sound of jackhammers provides a soundtrack to my workday. My organization, COCA–Center of Creative Arts in St. Louis, is expanding with a 50,000 square foot addition. Historically, arts organizations have built facilities and spaces in service to their art, such as grand museums and acoustically pristine symphony halls. In planning for our expansion, we have done more than our fair share of discussing, debating, and decision-making about the technical specifications and “performance” of our new space. However, as the project has evolved, I’m more interested in thinking about how our space, and our art, can be in service to humanity, not the other way around. Can we, as arts organizations — with our abundance of theatres, studios, museums, and community spaces — do a better job of serving as cornerstones of community connectivity and human engagement?
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