The New Year seems to be a good time to try to set down some of my basic thoughts about the need for and the path to effective community engagement. As often happens on this blog, this is a very rough first draft. Refinements will follow.
Whereas
The environment that nurtured the development of the nonprofit arts industry has changed radically. The sum of these changes create an existential threat to the future of that industry.
- Economics
- As a particularly labor intensive industry, increases in productivity will never keep up with rising costs. Future expenses will only rise, usually exponentially.
- The pool of arts-specific funders (individuals, corporations, and foundations) is shrinking.
- The industry is largely rooted in the European aristocratic cultural tradition. The percentage of the population raised in that heritage is declining rapidly.
- For at least two generations public elementary and secondary education has severely curtailed arts learning/participation opportunities.
- The number of leisure and expressive options available to people has skyrocketed, leaving arts participation as but one of a myriad of choices.
- Marketing that depends on a population inclined to be interested in the offerings of an industry (merely “getting the word out”) will fail when the number (and percentage) of “the inclined” is plummeting.
Be It Resolved That
For the future viability of the industry and the health and vitality of communities, substantial change in orientation and practices is necessary. These changes must include:
- A revised vision of the core mission of our field–from focus on art to focus on connecting people with the arts.
- An understanding that the arts are a resource for individual betterment and community improvement.
- A belief that service to individuals and communities is one (but not the only) important aspect of our work.
- An intense focus on expanding the number of people we serve and who value our work as essential, that is, community engagement. We must do this by
- Developing more effective attendee-focused marketing practices; and
- Building relationships with new communities. This must be based on:
- Understanding of the long-term nature of this process.
- A genuine interest in creating an environment that welcomes new communities.
- Approaching communities with humility and respect along with a genuine desire to learn about those communities. This must be accompanied by a deep commitment (with demonstrable results) to equity and inclusion.
- Clarity that our survival depends on success in this endeavor.
Engage!
Doug
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I would navigate your second to last point, “Approaching communities with humility and respect along with a genuine desire to learn about those communities” as something radically different from what you state in the first point of resolution, as “A revised vision of the core mission of our field–from focus on art to focus on connecting people with the arts.” It isn’t simply that we need to connect people with the arts but that we need to recognize their own sense of what art is so that what institutions present isn’t some awkward alien practice. That is, we need to help each other understand the broader meaning of ‘art’ and not be so sabotaged by your art not mattering to me and my art not mattering to you. Learning about a community’s own values and practices is the only sense that engagement isn’t colonization. The more we can see we are all in this creative experiment called human life, all of us together, the more we can relate to what each other does with compassion and appreciation.
Or so it seems……
Unless focus on artistic creation and arts history are at the core of the arts, there will be nothing to connect people with. Engagement doesn’t come first; creation does, then education. Engagement may come simultaneously with creation in some settings, but it should not be the “core mission of our field.”
The arts are losing ground in schools because our “experts” are often suspicious of any kinds of history and skills acquisition that define a core curriculum. In part because so many arts disciplines are afraid or unwilling to define excellence in core skills and in history for fear of being exclusionary, arts coursework is elective, pushed to the margins in an educational system that values the ability to measure learning in quantifiable ways and also encourages concrete skills acquisition intended to lead to professional careers.
Imagine how ridiculous such a claim–that “community engagement should be the core mission of our field”–would sound in science, math, or English. These are core subjects taught in every school in the country because there is a simultaneous emphasis on accessing and appreciating what has already been created and accomplished, and on skills/ expertise development so that new people can eventually do independent work that is valuable to the field.
Science education largely teaches scientific discoveries that have already taken place and methods that have already been validated, even though there are research designs that allow children and young adults to contribute to important work. The core mission of the sciences isn’t to educate or inform the public. It’s to advance the frontiers of human discovery to enrich the human race. Scientific research is funded at high levels because scientists can demonstrate that their contributions really do change humanity, from vaccines to smartphones.
Imagine if we centered and funded artistic creation in our sub-fields that way, and if funders treated it with that level of importance instead of as a footnote to who’s in our audiences. But one look at the NEA’s granting programs since the mid-1990’s and the relatively paltry funding available to independent artists compared to nonprofit organizations shows that most major arts funders haven’t centered artistic creation in decades. The field HAS been focused on at least some aspects of community engagement since at least the mid-2000’s, and I’d argue that’s part of the reason we’re in the decline that we are. Too much focus on attracting new audiences, not enough on the quality of work those audiences encounter, and whether it’s good enough to inspire them to come back as attendees or attract them to participate in careers in artistic creation themselves. (Let alone discuss how poorly paid such careers in artistic creation usually are compared to careers in almost any other field.)
We need to create great art, educate about great art that’s already been created, AND attract new and returning audiences to encounter and be inspired and delighted by that art. Without any one of those three focuses, the arts will not survive.
Welcome to the conversation. As my long-time readers know, my focus is largely pragmatic, concerned with the future survivability of arts organizations. And to be clear, I did not say that community engagement should be the core mission. I said that we need to shift “from focus on art to focus on connecting people with the arts.” Too long, whether as perception or reality, much of the public has believed, based on the messages they receive or infer from arts organizations, that “the arts” are not for them. If arts organizations are to survive, they need to address that.
I totally agree with what you say about math and science. I will point out that the marginalization of the arts in educational programming has, as one cause, the fact that it is not deemed vitally important by the bulk of the population. And one cause of that is the lack of connection between arts organizations and the public. Similarly, that same disconnect with voters is a cause of the paltry public funding of the arts.
Finally, you criticize focus on community engagement as a cause of the problems in our field. As one who has spent years studying and writing about engagement I must point out that most of those efforts, while probably well-meaning, are not examples of effective community engagement. Many of them are repackaged or repurposed (or in some cases not even “re-” anything) marketing efforts that leave the arts organization at the center and fail to establish meaningful relationships with the new communities with which we must connect for the long-term health of the field.