Three foundations — Pew, Wallace, and Philadelphia — are ponying up $6.3 million to boost cultural engagement in Philadelphia over the next 12 years. It’s a bold initiative by any measure, but vulnerable (already it seems) to some common sandtraps around goals and means.
The biggest sandtrap is to conflate observed attendance with ”engagement” or ”participation.” The observation usually presumes you have a specific frame to do your counting (attendance at professional arts events). And the attendance expectation usually means you want more volume, rather than more impact.
Even this short article goes back and forth between volume and depth, beginning with a goal to ”double audience participation at area arts events over the next 12 years,” and ending with an emphasis on casting a wider net (at least around how ”engagement” is defined…although still with a bias toward more formal cultural experience).
So, what’s the problem? Nothing necessarily. More money to help arts organizations engage their audiences and communities is a good thing. More inclusive metrics to measure their success (the proposed ”Cultural Engagement Index”) can be extraordinarily helpful in focusing long-term strategy, as well.
The trick in advancing ”cultural engagement,” however, lies in truly embracing the complexity of the concept, and the many channels that facilitate it. A rich cultural ecology includes thousands of entry points and connections — some small portion of them provided by nonprofit, professional arts organizations. The larger universe of ”engagement” and ”participation” is provided by informal groups (book clubs, knitting circles, amateur photographer clubs), commercial venues (paint-your-own pottery, Home Depot, the local music store), and social organizations not primarily about the arts (churches, schools, social services, hospitals). Funding by arts-focused foundations and alliances tends to favor the professional, nonprofit arts (understandably so), even though that part of the system has little influence on the rest.
It should be fascinating to watch how this initiative becomes operational — what projects are funded, what measures emerge, and what outcomes (attendance vs. engagement) take precedence when the two are mutually exclusive.
(Thanks to Mark for the link and the thoughtful commentary.)
I attended the announcement in Philadelphia of this program, and it was not at all portrayed as being arts-organization-centric. On the contrary, the Cultural Alliance staff made it clear that participation and art-making of all kinds is on the rise (writer Lynne Conner spoke about the divide between audience and performers and the sacralization of the arts in the late 19th century), and this program aims to go way beyond putting butts in seats. They made it a point that short-term audience attendance goals are not the answer. I came away from the announcement happy that the program will be so user-centric — exactly the opposite of how we usually view things in the nonprofit arts world, automatically thinking “what is good for our organization” instead of, “what is good for the people we serve.”
Thanks Maryann,
Glad to hear the launch was so open and inclusive. I’m eager to see where the rubber hits the road!
I found this article by the Canadian pollster Allan Gregg to be very intersting on this topic:
http://allangregg.com/?p=22
I’m also greatly impressed by Montreal’s approach of having local “Maison de l’Art” in each community.
– Dave