This week, we're sharing reflections on the Summit at Sundance process and on the ideas leaders in the Chief Executive Program: Community and Culture worked on during this Summit last month. We encourage you to add your voice, questions and experiences to the conversation, and to use the information and conversations to inform action! How might we ensure the arts are a convener and participant in identifying and addressing important community issues and in community planning? When we asked Chief Executive Program: Community and Culture … [Read more...]
Beyond Financials
This week, we're sharing reflections on the Summit at Sundance process and on the ideas leaders in the Chief Executive Program: Community and Culture worked on during this Summit last month. We encourage you to add your voice, questions and experiences to the conversation, and to use the information and conversations to inform action! How might we, as leaders in the cultural sector, be critical, formative drivers of building the vision for a new economy?(‘New Economy’ refers not to the high-tech economy, but a reconsideration of what the … [Read more...]
You Gotta Know Why
This week, we're sharing reflections on the process and the ideas leaders in our Chief Executive Program: Community and Culture worked on during their Summit at Sundance last month. We encourage you to add your voice, your questions and experiences to the conversation, and to use the information and conversations to inform action! Communities, funders and the environment all shift over time. Arts and culture organizations can get stuck in patterns of doing and being. How might we change so that we remain relevant when our communities … [Read more...]
The Ideation Summit: Transforming Stakeholders into Collaborators
Conversations about critical issues happen all the time. Conferences, blogs and community meetings offer any number of opportunities to raise and share experiences with these issues. And yet, we experience seemingly endless discussion with little discernible progress towards shared solutions. Throughout the field, our colleagues are working towards creating meaningful conversations that result in collective action and shared solutions. NAS is experimenting with an ideation process to lend form and action to conversations The Ideation Summit … [Read more...]
Seeking wellness in the workplace? Have an impromptu Taylor Swift jam session.
You know how it plays out. You’re watching Wolf of Wall Street and the office run by Jordan Belfore is filled to capacity with drugs, prostitutes and other fun illegal shenanigans. Imagine sharing an office building with a company where this all takes place… except without the prostitutes, drugs and fun illegal shenanigans, but the same smiles on everyone’s face and the laughter being tossed back and forth. Within only a few weeks of working at NAS, I’d taken notice to some pretty strange things with our upstairs office neighbor, The Motley … [Read more...]
What I Talk About When I Talk About Open (Education)
In late April, NAS attended the Open Education Global Conference 2015 in Banff, Canada. We were fully prepared to “wonk” out – and weren’t disappointed. If you’re wondering “what is open education?” – you're not alone! The Open Education Consortium (a conference organizer) offers a definition: Open education encompasses resources, tools and practices that employ a framework of open sharing to improve educational access and effectiveness worldwide. Put another way, open education is the application of open source principles that may be more … [Read more...]
On the Value of the Arts
Why do the arts matter at all? For some, the special characteristic of the arts and humanities to teach us to hold more than one truth in our heads at the same time (Martha Nussbaum identifies this as training in the Socratic Method – an essential skill for a functioning civil society) is reason enough.[1] The uniquely vicarious experience that experiencing a great work of art gives us allows for a particular kind of empathy – an understanding of how someone else views the world. And surely we need that now. Last year a study was released … [Read more...]
Sinéad Cusack, An Ode in Prose
In honor of Arts Advocacy Day, we at NAS are pulling back the curtain a bit and share our own thoughts on why the arts matter? We're continuing where we started last week with posts by members of our team. We invite you to add your thoughts as well. As a 14-year old boy at school in Alexandria, Virginia, I had an embarrassment of riches: the chance to see as much theater as I wished by merely signing my name on a piece of paper at school. For a short time, I decided to ignore this in favor of more important pursuits like buying a fake ID … [Read more...]
Bringing People Together to Improve the Place They Love
Before coming to National Arts Strategies, my office was a shady spot under a mango tree in the front yard of my compound in Ati Atovou, Togo. Days in Ati-Atovou passed mostly in the same manner as they do in my DC neighborhood: people wake, do good work, laugh with the people they love and nourish their bodies with favorite local dishes. When I made the decision to spend over two years in Togo as a Peace Corps volunteer, I was worried that I was turning my back on a career in the arts that I was so passionate about. What could Togo offer … [Read more...]
Everything I Know about Why Art Matters I Learned from My 5-year-old
I have the privilege of working in a museum that prioritizes making meaningful connections between art and people’s lives, and because it is my job to help frame opportunities for visitors to ask questions, to try new things, and to stretch their perspectives through art, it becomes easy to see, on a daily basis, why art matters. Art is an equalizer in those moments, helping individuals or groups make connections across diverse viewpoints, backgrounds, and ideas. But, it is my five-year-old daughter who has reminded me how naturally creative … [Read more...]
Why the Arts Matter
In honor of Arts Advocacy Day, we at NAS wanted to pull back the curtain a bit and share our own thoughts on why the arts matter? Throughout the week, we will add posts by members of the team. We invite you to add your thoughts as well. … [Read more...]
The Under-resourced Nonprofit Sector – Crisis or Chimera?
"How many times have You heard someone say If I had his money I could do things my way" – Johnny Cash, "A Satisfied Mind" (Written by Jack Rhodes, Red Hayes) Though I lack hooves, I have a burr under my saddle. In years of working with nonprofits, I have long since lost count of the number of times I’ve heard colleagues whose work and opinions I think highly of refer to our under-resourced sector. In conference panels and on blogs, in keynotes and cocktail conversations, we are witness to (and to be fair, participate in) references to … [Read more...]
Are You a Board Member or a Bored Member?
As a leader who has a strong interest in boards and governance, I try to stay current on publications and discussions about board engagement. I have heard and read many opinions on how to keep a nonprofit board engaged, but it is usually advice for the executive director. Many articles, such as Guidestar's "Keeping Your Board Engaged for Your Cause," offer tips to the executive director about keeping a board informed and clear on their roles, goals and objectives. While this advice is extremely valid, I believe board engagement is a two-way … [Read more...]
Solving Field-wide Problems Together
How do we engage collaborators in shaping our institutional agendas? How do we create 21st century boards? How do we develop transformational employees and systems? How do we maximize the field’s value in the eyes of the public? Answer: Together. Last year, NAS brought the participants of The Chief Executive Program together at an ideation conference to collectively work on solutions to the four problems listed above. We shared our framing of those issues here in hopes of starting a conversation about them. Now, we want to … [Read more...]
Resolve to Take Back Your Time
I don’t have time to exercise because I’m too busy. I can’t spend time with my husband because I’m staying late at work. I won’t be able to see a doctor until February because I’m never free on Mondays. How many times have you used a version of the above statements? Chances are, you tell yourself or someone else “I don’t have time for that” on a daily basis. My life changed when I decided to stop thinking about my schedule as filled with commitments the universe has shackled me to, but rather as choices I’ve consciously made about how I … [Read more...]