Community Engagement Training?–Request for Assistance

For the last four years my professional life has been focused almost exclusively on community engagement advocacy, workshops, and training. Most of the work has been advocacy and workshops, along with some one-on-one work with arts organizations.

State and local arts agencies–due to their broad accountability to communities and to public officials–most consistently see the need to change our mental models for doing business in the arts. Individual arts organizations, as a result of the press of day-to-day operations and habits of thought, are sometimes less open to and have less ability to change. This is compounded by confirmation bias, in which we tend to see what we are doing as what needs to be done. [Yep, We Do That; Yep, We Do That-Sequel (Part I); Yep, We Do That-Sequel (Part II)] Audience development is thus sometimes seen as community engagement. (Both are important but they are not the same.) As a result, there is limited readiness for movement to a more community-aware framework for their role.

I have also observed that significant numbers of young professionals and pre-professionals in the arts are individually passionate about making the arts meaningful to their communities. They sometimes feel frustrated by the nature of their organization’s commitment to community engagement.

This has led me and my company, ArtsEngaged, to consider implementing a program or programs to provide individuals with arguments supporting deeper engagement, examples of successful engagement work, principles of effective engagement, and skills necessary to lead arts organizations in connecting more deeply with their communities. The operative word in that overlong sentence is “consider.” It is not certain that there is a market for such organizationally-focused training. To help us address that question, we are seeking a group of people interested in encouraging arts organizations to develop stronger relationships with their communities. From them we will be looking for advice on need, content, delivery modes, and related services.

If you are interested in participating in this process, please contact us at info@artsengaged.com. Since the summertime is a down time for us all we may repeat this request in the fall. However, anyone reading a blog post about community engagement in the summer is, by definition, someone we would like to participate in evaluating the options. We would welcome your input.

Engage!

Doug

Photo: Some rights reserved by elycefeliz

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Engaging Matters will take the week off next week. See you in August.