Nonprofit Arts Success in a Changing Environment, Tip 6 — Don’t Talk About It; Do It.

Doing the right thing is always the right thing to do. It’s right there in the phrase.

In the new/old world order of Trumpian policy, your arts organization faces the real possibility that, in the face of anti-arts, anti-education, and anti-truth political muckraking euphemistically calling itself “populism,” it will be shut down. The most intelligent thing your nonprofit arts organization can do right now is concentrate on your community. Act hyper-local. No local nonprofit arts organization can win the day by taking on the national fascist zeitgeist, especially on its own.

This sixth tip exists not just because of the wave of resentment that has emanated from the right toward the intellectual power of the arts. It applies all the time. You and your organization need to stop proclaiming things, as though you were conquering the New World. That’s how we got into a lot of this mess in the first place.

This might be the hardest task you have, given the kind of work you do and the tendency for arts organizations (both commercial and nonprofit) to create a set of activities based on funding and acclaim. It is the nature of a preponderance of artists to want a constancy of approval. With so much personal storytelling involved with the arts, it’s no wonder.

But forget about that. It’s not important.

Nonprofit arts organizations are charities, as we’ve said many times before. Doing the best charitable work you can do requires your team to do it and get on with it, not take credit for it. And leaders, if you’re taking credit for something you didn’t do (which obsequious press people tend to take at face value), that’s even worse.
There has been a lot of chatter about the elimination of DEI programs from the nonprofit sector. The arts portion, led by the news around the right-wing takeover of the Kennedy Center, is not immune, but the perfunctory DEI manifestos that were omnipresent after the killing of George Floyd have been taken down, eliminated, or merely ignored by most of the larger arts charities.

Forget about the national issues now. Your organization can’t solve national issues. However, it can solve local ones. It’s time to get seriously hyper-local.

Doing the right thing doesn’t require you to announce that you’re doing the right thing.

I know this isn’t news, but you don’t have to proclaim your every charitable activity and program before you do them. You don’t. Just do them.

• If you believe that your organization requires a more diverse set of decision-makers in core activities, you don’t need a manifesto to brag about doing the right thing.
• If you believe that women in your organization should no longer earn less than men doing the same job, you don’t need to announce to the local Business Journal about doing the right thing.
• You don’t have to seek specific funding to cover the idea of doing the right thing.
• You don’t have to get special press coverage to do the right thing.
• You don’t even have to give the right thing a name; you just do it.
• You don’t have to write anything down about doing the right thing except impact results. Those results are for your own edification in making your charity better each day.

As you enter into this looking-glass America where the left cancels the left and stands for civility and order and the right celebrates the end of personal freedoms by blowing up the democracy, all your charitable organization — especially if you’re a nonprofit arts organization — has to do is achieve a measurably better community by using art as a tool, not as a product.

If you’re one of those behemoth organizations that see their role as art producers and not impact producers, shame on you. You’re probably choosing to not perform, not play, and not fly in the face of the Trump administration. You’ve dropped your DEI programming (if you ever did anything beyond an earnest manifesto) and your corporate board members are afraid they’ll be ruined by a mafioso federal government. By doing so, you’re making it very difficult for the community leaders who want to support the arts organizations in their respective areas.

If you choose to be a public sector invertebrate, that’s your business. But when you decide to extract yourself from doing the right thing because Donald and the populists don’t want you to, don’t be naïve and adolescent and believe that you’re in good stead for doing White, Eurocentric work.

A special note: a lot of nonprofit arts organizations believe that celebrating the skills of the LGBT+ community is something to crow about. LGBT+ people have occupied leading positions within the arts community for decades. Boasting about gay participation in your organization is like White audiences bragging about the White experience being represented on your respective stages and exhibition halls.

In the book Scene Change, we talked about subversion being a required aspect of the nonprofit arts sector. Masterful director and arts philosopher Eddie Gilbert spoke about it:

“There are two types of places that use a preponderance of red velvet. Theaters and brothels. And what do they have in common? Mischief.”

These are times in which doing the right thing — using specific plays, music, visual art, dance, and opera as tools to make your community measurably, quantifiably, charitably better instead of just “puttin’ on a happy-dappy-tip-tip-tappy show ‘cuz it’s purty” — might be construed as subversive, then do the right thing. Telling people you’re doing the right thing is unimportant and may serve as a barrier to those whose sensibilities might need a kick in the conscience. As I wrote earlier, it’s right there in the phrase: doing the right thing is always the right thing to do. So take this Tip #6: stop talking about it and just do it.

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