Stephanie

Creative Conversation / event ideas:

• A Creative Conversation or other event related to the idea of what artists, nonprofit arts organizations, galleries, and other potential clients would need from a soon to be launched Arts Law Clinic. This CC could take the form of a focus group that would be mutually beneficial to the participants and to the Arts Law Clinic.

• Creative Conversation around using political organizing tactics to help nonprofit arts organizations to motivate internal stakeholders. This could mean rallying a volunteer base or could support team building in order to be better external marketers too. One idea of how to structure this is to bring in a small group of experience political organizers to look at a handful of case studies and present to an audience how they would approach the issues from an organizing perspective. Case studies could be solicited in advance by a quick RFP process.

• An event to bring together development professionals working at arts organizations at a happy hour or informal Creative Conversation. Possibly focused on resource management – who has the money, how organizations get money, alternatives to cash (bartering, in-kind etc.), where you find the start-up funds, how you create a campaign etc. Who is funding and fundraising for the arts?

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To get involved with planning around these topics OR ANY ELNYA events contact:
Stephanie Dockery at sdockery@artsandbusiness-ny.org

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Here’s an idea: Use the Pecha Kucha format again. Four or five people present on fundraising topics and then similar breakout groups to discuss further. Not a full on workshop. Just a teaser to give folks intro to some best practices and emerging trends. Each presentation hits the basic what, why, and SIMPLE how. Also outlines what kind of org the tactic could work for and what types of orgs should forgo. Each presentation should end with a list of resources for further learning. Presentations are either printed as handouts or immediately available online. Possible topics/presenters (some of these, not all): Microgrants and Crowdsourcing, Getting a Google Grant, Foundation Center Resources, Planned Giving, The Give/Get Policy, Tried and True Fundraising Overview (Annual campaign, capital campaign, individual/corporate/foundation/gov)

To get involved with planning around this topic contact:
Selena Juneau-Vogel at juneauvogel@gmail.com

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Jose Serrano-Reyes shared what he is doing with Trust Art, an L3C. He and a group of friends identified a vision to create a self-sustaining community for the production of public art. Trust Art sells “shares” to build investment capital to realize public art projects. These shares could be purchased financially or through in-kind contributions. The “share” are just one strategy Trust Art is applying and is open to others as they may become available. Like with the ability to raise capital, Trust Art also challenges the artists to create different strategies to realize the vision for their product. This could include different stages or chapters of completion. So Trust Art is not only providing financial resources, but professional development and infrastructural resources as well.

The conversation bent to include Trust Art’s role as a presenter of art, but not tastemaker (saying one artist is better than another); a discussion about operating between a market economy and a gift economy; and how this could structure could be applied to the performing arts.

Trust Art is still so nascent and there is so much to still be discovered. An evening looking at Trust Art as a full-blown case study for alternative models to the nonprofit structure would be a great event in the future.

What could we do instead of creating an entire event to share this case study? How about if we take the conversation online as a series of Q&A with separate entries on ELNYA.org?

To get involved with organizing an online conversation around this topic contact:
Liz Schuster at liz@andsprig.com

—> Another idea related to the alternative business models conversation described above…

Instead of just continuing to talking about alternative models for funding and organizing the arts, we could hold a day long Booksprint – where participants would share current cases and collect stories with relevant precedent (such as Jose’s anecdote about the Statue of Liberty), research legal info, and make speculative proposals for new models. At the end of the day, we would have a pamphlet sized publication with complete content, ready for editing. More info on Booksprints: http://www.booksprint.info/ and http://www.booki.cc/

To get involved with planning around this topic contact:
Stephanie Pereira at stphniep at gmail

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Our discussion touched on ideas of economic impact of the arts, economic development, community development and gentrification. Some questions we were asking were:

What could something like positive gentrification look like? Does it involve ownership of the process? Ownership of property? What possibilities does something like cultural asset mapping give us? Are there ways to build on local assets that are not cultural? Why does one focus on the ‘arts’ as community building and not other assets?
We talked about 3 areas that community development relates to the arts 1) For the artists, developing their practice and access to outreach, audience building, etc. as well as developing live/work space for artists 2) The presence of the arts in the community. How does art and the presence of arts organizations transform public space? Livable space? 3) Application of arts/community engagement to community building, empowerment, addressing symptoms and changing systems

Future conversation format for this topic is TBD: An intimate coffee chat, a panel presentation, a series of blog posts, in depth case presentation, etc.

To get involved with planning around this topic contact:
Lisa Lurie at lisa.lurie@gmail.com

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Marit Dewhurst’s presentation set the stage for a conversation that debated effective community based arts practice. Our group included teachers, organizers and artists. We discussed the balance of power in community partnerships, and examples of community competitions where winning is not just about prizes, but serving the community. We also talked about connecting high-quality art making with meaningful community practice. Basically all the usual stuff – sharing good reading, insights and cases to look up with each other.

We mostly just enjoyed the conversation, and thought the best way to continue it would be to organize another opportunity for intimate dialogue around the same topic.

To get involved with planning around this topic contact:
Stephanie Pereira at stphniep@gmail.com

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