There have been many times when I have wished I could take the artists and collaborators who inspire me here and show them what is going on in the Connecticut I know. New London, Hartford, New Haven, Middletown—the little cities that shaped my dreams of what is possible when people embrace the arts as a way to build strong and healthy communities. I am fortunate to see the transformative power of the arts at SOMArts, an organization that enjoys city support that is almost unprecedented elsewhere in the country. Because Connecticut cultural organizations do not have the same funding resources, and because I have always rooted for the underdog, what happens with the arts in Connecticut still evokes deep admiration in me, as well as pride for what the people living there have achieved and keep striving for.

Two projects in Connecticut caught my eye this week. The Green Street Arts Center, where I was the assistant director for several years, has created not one but two murals over the past two years. The most recent one, created by Marela Zacarias in collaboration with the after school program and a local soup kitchen, recognizes the city’s homeless population.

Further north, Hartford City Councilman Luis Cotto has begun a Kickstarter campaign to fund a cultural center without walls. We San Franciscans need only look to the city-supported virtual cultural centers to know how powerful this can be. The first project of the center was a collaboration between Cotto and Oakland-based artist and activist Favianna Rodriguez, whose work I have admired but who I have not had the pleasure of meeting personally.

Although I’ve had no hand in this project whatsoever, I am excited to see that someone from the Bay Area is playing a part, and to see another example of how the marriage of great minds can help accessible art continue to thrive in Hartford. Cotto’s right-hand-man at City Hall, Brendan Mahoney, is a longtime friend of my fiance’s and will be officiating our wedding in September, and we will be hosting a gathering of many friends from around the country at SOMArts. So, while I can’t bring all my West Coast friends east, at least I will be able to share with my friends and family around the country the creative home that inspires me in the present, and look forward to future insurrection, connection and community through the arts.

Janice and I met through the Green Street Arts Center. She was one of the first volunteers I began working with who was not a friend, or a friend-of-a-friend. She was just someone new to town who was looking for a way to connect with the community. And she was a true inspiration. A writer and photographer, she played a huge role in starting some of Green Street’s community-based programs. She had tremendous talent, and despite the physical limitations brought on by aging, she was always in good spirits and found many ways to be a true helpful presence.

One of my many memories of Janice is when we started the North End Grid Project, a photography project that asked photographers to explore a much-maligned, under appreciated and often misunderstood neighborhood of Middletown. Janice was determined to get a certain photograph that involved wading into mud and she got stuck! She got her shot, though.

Janice also wrote an amazing short story about visiting a graveyard with her siblings. I wish I had a copy. I recorded her reading it and will have to see if I can locate the audio file.

I have been fortunate in my life not to have too many people close to me pass away, or perhaps it is the unfortunate result of moving so often and not having a wide circle of truly intimate friends and family. Janice was loved by many, and I feel very lucky to have met and known her through the arts.

RIP Janice, you are deeply missed.

And I need you to be better than me
And you need me to do better than you.
—Know Better, Learn Faster by Thao With The Get Down Stay Down

Over a week has passed since the 50^th Anniversary Summit of Americans for the Arts, and what a whirlwind week it was. Back at SOMArts Cultural Center we closed out an amazing turnaround year. We more than doubled our gallery attendance, revived our intern and volunteer programming, launched a website, renovated our lobby and office spaces, invested in long-overdue equipment upgrades, fought to protect our city funding, and lived to tell about it.  And yet, in many ways we are just catching up. There’s so much to do and it feels like the more we succeed, the more people we connect to who have urgent needs and high expectations.  Such is the life of a thriving nonprofit.

At the AftA convention, I connected with peers who had similar stories. We’re all exhausted. So we sat in the audience and listened to panels talk about new models, veering between skepticism and hope.

I came to convention still stubbornly hanging on to the idea that a “new model” was a structure I could study and apply to my organization—that magical combination of for-profit innovation, technology application and nonprofit altruism.

I left convention having reached the conclusion that we need to stop treating “new model” like a noun, in panels or anywhere else, when what we’re talking about is changing the system. We’re asking how we can achieve dramatic organizational change necessitated by the factors mentioned above, but succeeding via thoughtful communication and a process of enrolling (vs. influencing) stakeholders in one’s vision.

What feels new to me is the transparency. For the first time, we can look around us and see extremely detailed examples of where and how for-profit companies are recruiting and enrolling. There’s an online component for almost everything. And for the most part, small and midsize nonprofits are still hesitating to invest as much in the process as they invest in the product because, as one panelist put it, the means for enrolling (aka outreach, aka new audience development, aka getting feedback) “doesn’t feel like an internal organ of the organization.”

The most resonant statement at the convention came from Keri Putnam, executive director of the Sundance Institute, who said, “Nonprofits are too focused on product. If you are not constantly considering how to reach out and engage with the public …”. That was it. No answer, no question. A jumping-off point.

Her point was echoed in the panel “Technology’s Impact On the Future of Traditional Arts Delivery Systems,” where Tim Svenonius producer of Interactive Educational Technologies at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, warned us to “stay away from the edge” and figure out how the masses decide to utilize cutting-edge technology before investing scarce resources in that fancy new app. We talked about the importance of transitioning from monolithic undertakings (cd-rom, anyone?) to bite-sized and consistent streams of content.

At “Testing New Nonprofit Business Models,” the idea of investing in the process was again echoed when Cheryl Ikemiya of the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation talked about the Innovation Lab, a program that provides facilitation and funding to help organizations design and prototype innovative strategies.

One of my favorite “ah-ha!” moments was when Dewey Schott, senior manager of leadership services for the National Alliance for Media Arts and Culture, espoused the significance of enrolling versus influencing at the “Leadership and Influence” panel. It takes a special type of courage to put excitement about one’s own ideas and work front and center, a quality more often found in artists than administrators. Some of the most influential organizations I’ve worked with are still resorting to fear and force tactics, aka “if you don’t do x for us then we will do y, the economy will collapse even further, arts workers will lose their jobs, doors will close.” I’m not saying that doesn’t work, but this is an area that could use some new thinking.

Enrolling is more about excitement than power. It’s about joining a group that could be as small as a classroom or as big as an army, but it stands for something. Which is good, because as a strategy, leveraging communities and passionate perspectives plays to the strengths of the arts sector.

So I’m back home in San Francisco, and when I look around at what for-profit organizations are doing to enroll people there are some interesting case studies. This week, my inspiration is Coffee With Square, and ForageSF: Should the Market Get Bigger. I wrote a little about them both below in the hope that others would share their own enrollment case studies in the comments section.

Case study #1: Enrolling Amidst Adversity

Coffee With Square

A square is a credit-card processing device that allows one’s smartphone to collect payments. It was created when a glass artist Jim McKelvey couldn’t accept payment for his goods and proposed a solution to Twitter founder Jack Dorsey. The idea caught on fast, so fast that the company quickly ran into legal and production issues.

Inspiration: to update people about the company’s progress, Square launched “Coffee With Square,” a low-key Friday webcast with employees.  The first one featured Dorsey and had 1300 views. The Square homepage is also all about enrollment—there’s very little info and the most dominant element on the homepage is a big blue button that says “Get Started!”.

Case study #2: Meaningful Membership.

ForageSF: Should the Market Be Bigger?

Iso Rabins was having a hard time getting his foraged food into Bay Area farmers markets, so he started the Underground Farmers Market at a friend’s house in the Mission District. The Health Department came calling, and Rabins found a loophole: membership. People who want to attend the market are all members, the only requirement of membership is that you sign up for the email list.

Inspiration:  Rabins could have treated membership as a red-tape necessity, but instead he uses the large membership to his advantage, explaining decisions such as whether or not to move to a larger venue and asking for meaningful feedback. As a result, ForageSF’s popularity has exploded, including an upcoming feature in the New York Times Magazine.

Note: this post was originally created for and published on the blog of Americans for the Arts.

Almost a year ago, something happened at SOMArts … I didn’t realize at the time, but it was the beginning of a movement I now call the “Shaping Up On A Shoestring Movement.” Someone who came to SOMArts for Day of the Dead exhibition contacted me, he was part of the National Council on Aging and worked with their employment training program.

Like most SOMArts opportunities, this one came about as the result of the NCOA’s contact with a friendly and inspiring staff member. SOMArts needed someone to monitor our galleries and the NCOA provided Lynne, whose role quickly expanded to include reception and administrative support.

Around the same time, a client of SOMArts suggested that we look into Philanthropy by Design, a charitable organization that connects a network of design industry professionals with community benefit organizations and saves tons of furniture from the landfill through creative reuse. Caroline Ranere of Ranere Design Group donated her time and talent to transform the SOMArts lobby, clean up our office spaces and create a more functional and welcoming workspace.

As we were cleaning and painting, we realized that although we had lots of volunteers at different times throughout the year, we didn’t have a way to track their time or interests so that we could make the best use of their skills. We also weren’t keeping track of all the volunteer time that was donated and relied upon as an essential resource for our organization. I remembered an article published on Blue Avocado, Tracking Volunteer Time To Boost Your Bottom Line, and we used the templates from that article to start building up a real volunteer program. We reached out to the California College of the Arts Center for Art and Public Life and applied for a student  to work as our Communications and Community Outreach Fellow. Staff members Deb Bok and Rene Yanez held volunteer orientations to help introduce new volunteers to the opportunities at SOMArts. We attended the Volunteer Center’s Board Match to connect with people who were interested in donating their skills as Board Members for nonprofits. We applied to Rebuilding Together and they brought more than 50 volunteers from The Belden Club to repaint our theater and Bay Gallery during National Volunteer Week (they even put photos of the day on their website). Amber Hasselbring of the Mission Greenbelt Project guided our growing volunteer team to revive our garden. Project 20 volunteers helped repair our floors and deejay at art openings. Curator & Gallery Director Justin Hoover developed internship descriptions for the gallery and reached out to local university programs to help develop the Ramp Gallery in our new lobby and prepare for exhibit installations.

Less than a year later, we’ve partnered with over fifteen organizations and logged more than 2,000 volunteer hours. More importantly, we’ve made significant improvements that will benefit all of the arts and community-building cultural groups who depend on SOMArts and expanded a fun, diverse community of individuals who believe in our mission. Getting strategic about our repair and maintenance efforts means that more donations directly support our programs, and that our donors can feel confident that every dollar they give is going as far as it can. (in case I am being too subtle this is a PITCH to donate to SOMArts—it’s worth it!)

When I think back, the most amazing thing about our little shaping up on a shoestring movement is how easy it was to undertake these projects and how much we got in return for our efforts. In-kind volunteer and employment programs saved SOMArts many thousands of dollars this year and all it took was small, intentional, progressive changes over the course of a year. The organizations (who I’ve linked to for the benefit of other arts managers who might read this) were without exception excited to work with arts organizations, and those of us who work at SOMArts made new friends who are full of great suggestions and enthusiasm.

If you live in the area and haven’t been to SOMArts in a while, there is a beautiful exhibit in the Main Gallery right now: (Re-)CLAIM, an exhibition by the Asian Pacific Islander Cultural Center. And next Saturday is a fundraiser to support SNAG (Seventh Native American Generation) youth in attending the Allied Media Conference. There will be a skateboard art exhibit, vendors, drumming, Pomo dancers, Mohawk acoustic soul music, LOTS of other music and dancing, visual art and good food. It will be a very fun time for a very good cause.

Today, we went to the Luc Tuymans exhibition, which Dan blogged about here.

In addition to the shows, I am also enjoying SFMOMA’s new lineup of bloggers, er, columnists. They just got started and already there’s an interesting post by Renny Pritkin about artists who’ve left town (and those who have stayed). I discovered Pritkin’s Prescription For A Healthy Art Scene on the Open Space blog shortly after moving to San Francisco last year, and it was posted on my office wall for quite a while. Glad to see that he is now an official poster, creating an interactive online space for dialogue.

Speaking of dialogue, there was quite the turnout for SOMArts’s Saturday afternoon talk about politics and printmaking. Sixty-five people showed up to see the work of more than 30 Bay Area artists represented in the exhibition, and to hear the differing opinions of Art Hazelwood, Robert Flynn Johnson, Steve Lopez and Don Farnsworth. Somehow, there is a connection to be made in the tremendous (and growing) local turnout at SOMArts shows, and the response by artists and curators on Pritkin’s blog who are seeking the kind of business, finance and critical rigor that will sustain them here. The lack of posts on my own blog is due partly to a desire not to make this site an annex to my work space … but these artists’ needs, and how to support them with our limited resources, are very much on my mind.

So, over at SOMArts we’ve been doing some advocacy in the face of budget cuts to the cultural centers. We’ve been writing grants. And we have been working damn hard.

And right now, I wish there was another day to this weekend! This one was good, and too short. Thanks San Francisco, for living up to expectations once again.

This morning, I found two new sfBlogs that I am excited to throw in the mix: Bikes and the City, and  i live here:SF. ilivehere is a portrait project by artist Julie Michelle, who got her first camera in 2008 and is using it to help people tell the stories of their lives in San Francisco.

Bikes and the City (subtitled “bikes, boys y coffee”) provides a glimpse into to the bike culture here, courtesy of Meligrosa and her bicycle, Frenchie.

I can count the number of plays I saw last year on two hands: Evie’s Waltz at Magic Theatre, The America Play by Thick Description, Skin at Climate Theater, Culture Clash and Friends and Over the Mountain at Brava, You’re Gonna Cry at Red Poppy Art House. Overall, they were some of the most social, entertaining and educational evenings I’ve had at local arts events. And within this list there are major omissions, things I wanted to see but couldn’t, theaters I’ve been meaning to get to, even tickets purchased and not used because when faced with the possibility of a free evening, a good night’s sleep won out (according to Ben Cameron, that last one makes me a Yankelovich poll statistic).

I’ve been thinking about what it would take to ensure that theater gets more time and space between work, family, friends, visual art, readings, live music, et cetera. I’ve been thinking about who participates in Bay Area theater, after a brief but provocative talk with a colleague whose local theatergoing experience—particularly, observations about who is in the audience—has been very different from mine.

And, I’ve been wondering … do so-called “community nights” encourage misconceptions about who likes theater and decrease dialogue by surrounding us with a sea of ourselves? How much does this take away from the overall theatergoing experience? Is this balanced by an increase in attendance and other benefits?

I think a bad night at the theater can often be redeemed by the civic aspect—the opportunity to exchange ideas and opinions with other audience members. A good night of theater can become life-changing. How do community nights shift the civic aspect?

Another reason this is all stirred up in my head is that last night I was reminded, via Twitter, of a theatergoing experience that changed my life.

So the story is, I was just out of college and had moved to the Twin Cities to pursue my dream of being an actor at the Guthrie. I auditioned for a play at Pillsbury House, a professional theater that is part of a larger nonprofit network of community centers—they didn’t give me the part, but they gave me a free ticket to see a play called Dutchman, written in 1963 by beat poet and black activist LeRoi Jones. Pillsbury House was in an unfamiliar neighborhood. The play was disturbing. The post-show talk was uncomfortable.

Upon experiencing the same production, journalist Anne Ursu  wrote the following in a CityPages article:

“[cast & director]Goranson, Remington, and Blagen smile and look out at the audience with       welcoming expressions. There is silence. After a while, a white man speaks in general terms about the language of the play, accompanied by the sound of shifting in seats. Then, silence again. The troika onstage looks as if they want to be somewhere else. So does the audience. Finally Rohan Preston, theater critic for the Star Tribune, raises his voice. ‘I don’t know if I should be speaking, but I’m really struck by how uncomfortable everybody is, by how difficult it is for us to have this discussion.’ Everybody breathes in.”

“Everybody breathes in” … and then, at the performance I saw, they couldn’t stop talking.

For me, the civic aspect of that experience—different people in the same room together, sharing ideas about what they had just seen—opened the door to a place where people were making an effort to understand and appreciate each other better through art, and pursuit of that experience has defined my most significant personal and professional choices for ten years. The performance was electrifying. The quality of the discussion, once it got rolling, had everything to do with the fact that some harsh truths had been laid bare onstage before an audience with differing experience, knowledge and opinions.

Getting back to the question of seeing more theater now, that intersection of art and ideas is what I am looking for, and it is hard to find within the calendar listings, advertising and marketing for most theaters. It is easier to stay “close to home,” rely on the recommendations of friends and colleagues, attend arts events that aren’t as high-risk as theater, where once you walk through the door you are pretty much committing yourself to 2+ hours.

But when all’s said and done, I love theater. And it was a play, not an exhibition or a reading or a dance class, that changed my life. The tweet that got me thinking about this was from Howard Sherman, my former boss at the O’Neill Theater Center and now director of the American Theatre Wing. ATW is holding a Play That Changed My Life contest. Interesting to see how theater has changed the lives of others!

When I worked at the O’Neill Theater Center, one of our mottos was “Risk, Fail, Risk Again”. This especially applied to our student actors, but lately I have been thinking about risk in terms of career trajectories. As an emerging leader in my 20s, so much of my life seemed caught up in the first career choices I made, that it had all the drama of this (awesome) Judy Garland classic.

Feeling trapped in a dead-end job, or not getting the job of your dreams can seem downright tragic when you work for a nonprofit. We’re not just looking for a job. We are looking for our opportunity to Transform Lives Through The Arts. Or Education. Or whatever.

But inevitably, if you are taking risks and  reaching high enough and looking for all of the experiences that emerging leaders should look for, unpredictable and wonderful and disappointing things will happen. Some of my Bay Area peers—Evelyn Orantes, Maia Rosal, Marc Vogl and Ellen Oh—will be sharing their personal experiences at “Career Trajectories—Not All Straight Arrows,” as part of Americans for the Arts’s 2009 Creative Conversations series, presented by the San Francisco Bay Area Emerging Arts Professionals. It is next Tuesday, October 13 at 7pm at the Oakland Asian Cultural Center. It is $6. And, you can register in advance here.

Hope to see you there!

It is coming up on my one-year anniversary at SOMArts … last year I arrived in San Francisco during our annual Day of the Dead exhibition. This year, there is a big opening party on Friday, October 16 and we will be celebrating! Rene Yanez, Day of the Dead co-curator, is featured in this month’s episode of CultureWire (at 2′49) and I am at the end talking about SOMArts programs and what makes us unique (21′52).

More episodes of CultureWire are available from the San Francisco Arts Commission on Vimeo.