January 11, 2006

Postcard from Thailand - just a personal journal - you may wish to skip this.

A POSTCARD FROM PHUKET THAILAND THE TSUNAMI REMEMBERED ONE YEAR LATER.

December 26, 2005 8:00 am Phuket, Thailand

I am lying on the couch in my rooms in Patong Beach on the island of Phuket in Thailand. This is my seventh year of traveling to Thailand, to what some ex-pats call the "Kingdom" a paradise some ten thousand miles from San Francisco and my home in Marin County. I fell in love with Thailand on my first visit, and have developed enormous affection and respect for the people and the place. While the beauty of the northern areas of Chaing Mai and Chaing Rai are captivating, I prefer the tropical paradise and beaches of the south.

I have stayed at the same small guest house owned by a Thai woman and her Swiss husband that I discovered some six years ago. I have gotten to know them now the nephew who handles maintenance, the sister who runs the maid service and their son - who has grown up before my eyes.

It is early morning on a day that will mark the single most tragic loss of life to mother nature in my lifetime. Laying on the couch watching television, thinking about a shower before I head down to the beach and breakfast as is my custom several days a week, I think I feel a very slight earthquake. It is not the wind. I am a native Californian I have been in earthquakes. I know how they feel. Yes, this is an earthquake but so slight that it must be far, far away. I give it no further thought.

I read some of the murder mystery novel that I have started. One of ten or more I have brought with me. Mindless fiction satisfying on a purely pedestrian level.. But hunger calls so I shower and throw on shorts and a tee and head out the door. The beach is three hundred meters or so away a four minute walk. The restaurant is named Sabbaiâ (which in Thai means happy) is really nothing more than tables and benches on the sand surrounded by a bamboo fond fence, with a small kitchen built on a cement slab. The ocean is but forty yards away and the early morning vista and quiet are the main attractions for me to have my bacon, eggs and coffee here and not elsewhere. It is obviously run by an extended family- and all the sons and daughters, their husbands and wives and children, and the aunts and uncles work here. I have gotten to know them over time not personally or to any real extent - I don't even know all of their names, and couldn't remember them if I did but I know them well enough as a patron over two to four week periods each of the last five years so that I recognize them and they me.

My rooms are on the second floor of the first building of the guest house at which I stay, and I lock my door and walk down the stairs and out to the little Soi (meaning both street and alleyway in Thai) and head towards the beach a circuitous route through a warren of right and left turns past this building,and that house, until it opens on a narrow ten yard stretch lined by beer bars on each side and to the main Beach Road. I get about two thirds of the way, with but one more turn remaining, and I see people running towards me the kind of unmistakable panic one can recognize in peoples eyes no matter where you are, what language you speak.

I hear someone yell "water" and though I don't comprehend as the throng nears me, I turn to run with them. Over my shoulder I see water pushing what appears to be a car and a bus unbelievably tossing them over like they are toys. My mind cannot process the data quickly enough I know nothing of tsunamis, I have no reference point. I am jostled by the crowd, pushed this way and that, and I lose my balance and stumble. I scurry to get up and am pushed again as fear grabs a hold of strangers who wish me no ill but for whom I am not a priority either. I get up again and run. By the time I am back to the front of my small guest house the water has dissipated “ blocked in part by the buildings that stand in its way. Another hundred yards and I am to the main road and the water that has chased us is now but ankle deep.

Nervous banter on faces with incredulous, but relieved looks, is in the air. We keep walking to the other side of the street not sure what just happened, or what will happen next. Within minutes sirens fill the air and emergency vehicles speed this way and that. Uniformed police are blowing whistles moving people away from the beach area and people desperate to understand what it all means talk and pass on rumors amid fact. A consensus arises that a tsunami hit. What is less agreed on is what it did and what will happen next. People move towards the main street that leads into the mountains.

What had happened the world is now fully aware. The single largest natural disaster of our times, claiming 300,000 lives, many of whom remain lost a year later.

Saturday, December 24, 2006:
I arrived back in Phuket yesterday 25 hours, three planes and 10,000 miles after leaving SFO at 12:10 am on Thursday morning. I am returning to Phuket for yet another "high" season as I have for the past seven years now back to the same guest house and the same area I have come to know very well. I am anxious to see how it has been rebuilt how different is will be or not from the pre-tsunami isle of just a year ago when the beach of Patong was a sister paradise of Maui or Mexico with palm trees blowing in the gentle breeze at water's end.

After settling in and a quick nap, then shower, I walk the back entrance down the same Beach Road that had been my escape route a year ago, this time to survey the rebuilding effort. I have thought a thousand times in the past months how lucky I was – that if I had left my rooms just five or ten minutes later I would have been on the beach and likely would not have made it when the power of the tsunami hit.

But unlike in Banda Ache where the tsunamis wake was measured in miles, in Phuket the waves traveled less than a thousand yards inland. It was only the beach road hotels, corrugated tin mini shops and the two main streets leading from the main thoroughfare - Rat-U-Thit road Soi Bangla and Sawaddirak Road - where property the debris of smashed, overturned busses, cars and motorbikes gave such dramatic emphasis to the loss of life that the tsunami wrecked on this community. And eerily, the mound of debris from the beach and the twisted vehicles on both Soi Bangla and Sawaddirak Road stopped half way up the street between the Beach Road and Rat-U-Thit as though a powerful dragon that simply ran out of breath mid way on its charge.

Last year they had begun to bulldoze the beach road debris even before I left some five days after the tsunami and the cleanup had made noticeable progress on my last foray to the beach. Now a year later, virtually everything is re-built much of it the same as before the tragedy same businesses, same locations, often the same look to the building. Tourists who have never been to Patong before would be hard pressed to realize that such a devastating act of mother nature had even occurred. Yet as I talk with local merchants, what is obvious to anyone who has spent time here is that tourism is down maybe by as much as fifty percent. The farrang (Thai slang for foreigners) just haven't yet returned in numbers anywhere near the past. There are normally three seasons in Thailand the "High Season" from mid-November through April when the weather is not so oppressively hot, but rather a pleasant range of the mid to high 80s in the day, and 70s at night, the "Hot Season" when the temperature tops 100 and the humidity drives one into the air conditioned edens of the countless 7-11 convenience stores that dot the landscape of the country, and the "Monsoon Season" that runs from August or September into November and causes mild to severe flooding depending on the year and location (particularly long this year I am told). Christmas and New Year weeks are traditionally the peak of the high season here, and account for a healthy percentage of the tourism trades annual take and tourism is Phukets lifeblood. Americans count for only six percent or so of the tourists, with most coming from China, Australia, Japan, Germany and Scandinavia roughly in that order.

Somehow it seems to take at least two years for any area to recover from the precipitous drop in tourism that inevitably follows a calamity from mother nature. No matter that 95% of the entire island of Phuket, including over half of the beaches, saw absolutely no impact from the tsunami, or that those areas that did suffer are now rebuilt as though nothing had happened; no matter too that the chances of another tsunami are doubtless far less than having lightening strike your head repeatedly over a week period people stay away. I guess they just have it in their minds that the recovery will not be complete, that they will be stranded without conveniences, that the jeopardy of another awful event looms likely  and so they just aren't yet ready to throw their money away on a vacation in what they perceive as a disaster zone. Not good for the Thai people.

As I walk down the Beach Road on the ocean side, the thing that strikes me most is that the beach the sand is now several feet higher than it was last year. Where before, in places, you walked down seven or eight stair steps to get to the sand, today there are only three steps down, and in places, none at all. Last year along the stretch of the Beach Road where there are shops only on the opposite side of the street leaving a view to the water from the road, there were steps down every hundred yards or so, with cement / brick columns framing each set of steps. On the tops of each of these columns were embedded in the cement iron sculpted dolphins, turtles and other animals, with man made patinas of aged copper green. The force of the tsunami had cracked several columns, and in places had simply knocked off these embedded sculptures as though the were made of balsa wood. Two men with sledge hammers might have spent a hour or two trying to accomplish a similar result.

It is hard to watch the video footage of the waves as they first hit Patong in the amateur shot films and appreciate the real power of the tsunami. If you imagine a crescent shaped beach a mile long, and that each cubic yard of ocean water weighs something like 1200+ pounds, and that the tsunami was two to four stories high, containing millions and millions of cubic yards of water, all traveling at over 500 miles an hour when it broke and it is easier to understand that very little could withstand its awesome power certainly not little children and older retirees unfamiliar and inexperienced in the ways of tidal waves and drawn out of curiosity to the retreating water that left fish and shells uncharacteristically exposed that is the way of the tsunami; too late for those who would have the least chance of running fast enough on sand to escape. If the tsunami had hit at noon instead of at 9:30 am, there would have been 10,000 dead in Patong instead of the thousand or so on this part of the island that didn't make it.

The next morning I make a pilgrimage to the one beach location that has haunted my thoughts all year. For many seasons now, on half the mornings of my time in Patong, I would wind my way through that backdoor warren of turns and make my way to the beach to have my breakfast at one of three or four small restaurants on the sand some fifty yards from the water. These restaurants were little more than tables on the sand, surrounded by a few trees and a makeshift palm frond enclosure. The only real structure to the one I frequented was a cement slab that housed the enclosed in kitchen area where food was prepared.

Sabbai was a little restaurant with a million dollar view of a pristine and beautiful Patong Bay and it was owned, as I said, by an extended family that I had come to know if not by name then by sight  if not intimately then well due to the passage of time.

I was delighted and almost giddy to arrive at Sabbai's back entrance and to almost immediately spy one of the young men who was a waiter and whom I recognized from the family. He recognized me too and there was a genuine moment of shared something. I asked about his younger brother and he assured me he was at their family home elsewhere in Thailand and was indeed ok as well. But without asking I knew that not all of the family had made it out that some must have been caught in the deadly undertow of one year ago. I could tell it wasn't something he wanted to talk about and I did not press him.

While Thailand is often referred to as the land of smiles because the Thai people surrender their smiles so easily and effortlessly, and while my friend with no name at this restaurant smiled again I could tell it wasn't the same, nor would it be again for him. He was young and had lost something that he had not yet replaced and wouldn't for awhile.

I shed a silent tear for him as he was, in that moment, for me the embodiment of the whole of the suffering of last year I grieved for him for the loss of his loved ones, and for the loss of his innocence as well, for he was no longer a boy, but a man reluctantly I suspect, at the hand that the fates had decreed.

Monday December 26, 2006 One Year Later

I get up early this morning. I want to go to the planned morning event to commemorate the one year anniversary of the tsunami. I have no idea what is planned, but I want to be there. It is to take place in the small park at the north end of the beach where the Beach Road again has open space on the ocean side of the street.

When I arrive a little before 9:00 am, a sizable crowd has already gathered. There are plastic chairs provided for guests, and reserved seating under canopies to shield the VIPs from the hot sun. The Prime Minister arrives a few minutes later in shirtsleeves to pay his respects to the families of the victims. I sit down on the last step of a large circular fountain immediately behind the plastic chairs. A podium stands in front of a makeshift monument announcing the one year anniversary of the tsunami. A woman soon sits next to me in the one remaining space on the step I share with a score of other people. We talk. She is Swedish, was not here at the tsunami last year, but has lived in the south of Thailand for the past dozen years. She and her brother and mother have driven up to Phuket. Her name is Tina. Blond, mid-thirties I guess she looks the part of the tsunami victims surviving family. I tell her what it was like to have been here last year and we share an abiding respect for the Thai people.

There is no shortage of television cameras set up to cover the event, and roving reporters are working the crowd looking for likely interview subjects. A woman reporter with the Sky Channel logo on her microphone stops and asks Tina if she was a tsunami survivor. Tina tells her no, but tells her that I was and nods in my direction. The reporter asks me if she can ask me a question on camera and I say "sure". She asks if I was in the tsunami last year and what has brought me back. I tell her that I am here because I have come every year for the last seven, and that I have come to this remembrance this morning out of respect for the Thai and foreign people who have lost loved ones and out of affection and admiration for the Thai people who were so caring and generous to their visitors last year. I tell her that this is an amazing country and that the Thai people who suffered the greatest loss were extraordinary in their generosity to their guests during that tragedy, in their ceaseless efforts to comfort and help the victims and that all of us who were here a year ago are grateful to be alive and share a bond that will last us our lifetimes. Like my generation knowing exactly where they were when JFK was assassinated, those in the affected areas on the rim of the Indian Ocean when the tsunami hit will likewise never forget that moment. She thanks me and moves on.

The Prime Minister is apparently gone. In his place, the Minister of Tourism and Sports (an odd combination) delivers the official remarks and hits just the right tone of sympathy, respect and hope for the future. The ceremony ends with guests invited to place flowers previously distributed to those present at the base of a marker denoting the day and time of the worlds worst natural disaster in recorded history. I get in line and fight the surge of people making their way to pay their respects. The television camera crews surround the site and make it that much more difficult to navigate to the monument which sparks the ire of a woman in the crowd, who mounts the stage and, using the microphone, decries the insensitivity of the press from her perspective in an emotional harangue. She is met with a smattering of applause from the crowd many of whom agree with her assessment. I understand her need to lash out somewhere her pain is just too much for her to cope with.

I think about last year again as I leave the area and make my way along the beach and then I think about the victims of hurricane Katrina. For a fleeting moment the question enters my mind why tsunamis aren't given names as hurricanes are but I guess they are too few and infrequent and thank god for that. A tear or two stay in my eyes as I pass the Sabbai restaurant and and continue down the beach the water calm and tranquil so very different than the angry and ranging powerful sea of a dozen months ago. Life goes on as it always does, and my guess is that more people were born on planet earth during the week after the tsunami than died as a result of its wrath. I am again so very glad to be alive and I say my silent thanks to god, buddah and the powers that be.

Have a good week.

Don't Quit!

Barry

December 13, 2005

HESSENIUS Group Year End Wrap-Up

Hi everybody.

"And the beat goes on..................."

I asked some of the group members to share their thoughts on this year and next. I asked them this:

ISSUE ONE: What happened last year -- what one (or two) major events, trends, etc. -- do you think had particular (significant) impact on the arts field this year (for example -- the merger of Business & the Arts Council with Americans for the Arts, or the publication / debate over the Rand Study, or the continuation of depressed arts funding). Or it might be something that happened within the whole of our culture, society, political arena etc. that had -- or continues to have -- impact on the arts field - e.g., the economy, Katrina or the impact on donor giving), and

ISSUE TWO:
What do you think will be the biggest challenge / opportunity for the arts for 2006? What do you suggest would be the best move the arts could make to improve their lot in 2006?

DIANE MATARAZA:
Top on my list, Barry, for 2005 is the economy, how the war in Iraq and this year's rash of natural disasters affected it and, in turn, how the state of the economy has impacted the solvency of arts organizations. Costs to keep the doors open, lights on and pay staff livable wages outpaced most organizations' budget projections. For-profits passed on unanticipated increased operating costs to the consumer. Arts organizations have been reluctant to increase the price of participation for fear of driving away audiences or, worse, fueling perceptions of elitism. Given unprecedented compelling need for disaster relief, sustaining contributed income levels, never mind increasing them, has become an all-consuming activity. In my work in communities across the country, both small and large organizations with a broad, diverse loyal following (and the contributor base to match) are holding their own. Organizations and artistic genres with narrow audience appeal are being far more serious about audience development. And I'm seeing the realization among arts organizations whose existence has depended on the largesse of a few big funders that diversification of their support base is probably a good idea.

The biggest challenge/opportunity for the arts in 2006 and beyond is increasing arts relevance to the public. Endless excellent research and studies have been conducted on arts participation. Somehow, someway, we need to better translate for our field the volumes of participation research. That, plus adequate resources and assistance to help them apply it.

JERRY YOSHITOMI:
Biggest Impact in 2005

The publication of Gifts of the Muse http://www.rand.org/publications/MG/MG218/ and Creating Public Value Through State Arts Agencies http://www.artsmw.org/start/CreatingPublicValue.pdf, marked the completion of a series of tools that can fundamentally improve our capacities to increase participation in the arts as well as reveal the personal benefits and the public value of that participation. These publications joined A New Framework for Participation in the Arts http://www.rand.org/publications/MR/MR1323/, The Values Study, Rediscovering the Meaning and Value of Arts Participation http://www.ctarts.org/pdfs/CT_Values_Study_Report.pdf, Engage Now (disclosure: written by Jerry Yoshitomi) http://www.artsmarketing.org/marketingresources/files/JYNotes-Apr022003.pdf, and many other resources that build participation, personal benefits and public value.

This work was initiated primarily by the arts program at the Wallace Foundation, first led by Holly Sidford and then by Michael Moore. Through a carefully orchestrated program of research, direct grants, convenings and communities of practice, significant advancements have been made in thirteen state arts agencies and in arts organizations throughout the country. Leadership in recent years was also provided by David Fraher and Emily Maltz at Arts Midwest and Kelly Barsdate at the National Assembly of State Arts Agencies.

Results have included increases in:

State funding for participating SAA's
Broadened, Deepened and more Diversified Participation
Ticket Sales and Earned Income
Contributions
Communications with Ticket Buyers and Donors
Evidence of Personal Benefits and Public Value

Biggest Challenge/Opportunity for the Arts in 2006 will be making more of a transition from old ways of doing things to new ways of doing things. It will be about learning and putting into practice more of the new tools. Those that do will see increasing success. Those that don't will see a widening gap between aspirations and accomplishments, as well as between expenses and revenues.
I'm pleased to respond to any questions the readers might have. They can email me at meaningmatters@aol.com.

SAM MILLER:
1. Significant event in 2005 - the death of Susan Sontag - revealing the lack of meaningful thinking & writing about art, culture & ideas in her absence.
2. Challenge in 2006 - the increasing pressure on necessary dissent, finding the will to offset the multiple guises censorship comes dressed in these days - market, institutional, political, philanthropic, etc.
That will be a challenge.

ANDREW TAYLOR:
HARDWARE AND SOFTWARE
Two trends of significance in 2005 involved the political devolution of America's cultural "hardware," and the rapid evolution social networking software on the web. The two may seem like separate trends, but they carry a common thread.

On the hardware side, America's built cultural infrastructure got more massive and more contentious in 2005, with controversy over several arts facility mega-projects. The Miami-Dade Performing Arts Center continued its trials with massive construction cost overruns and political bickering. The Kimmel Center for the Performing Arts discovered higher operating costs and lower-than-expected revenues, along with continuing acoustical problems...filing suit against their architect for the lackluster sound quality of the hall. The Overture Center for the Arts in Madison had a public spat with the mayor over a proposal to refinance the facility just prior to its completion.

And the proposed multi-venue arts development in Richmond, Virginia, exploded into a political free-for-all when the committee behind it couldn't meet a fundraising deadline.

Meanwhile, Dallas broke ground on a new $275 million performing arts center, and Kansas City took steps toward its proposed $326 million complex.

The massive multi-venue arts center has been an icon of civic pride and boosterism for over 30 years...drawing inspiration and original concept from New York's Lincoln Center. Wealth and under-served arts markets sparked the trend, and a string of public arguments for professional arts facilities helped fuel the flame (economic impact, healthy cities, creative class, civic engagement, and on and on).

But the public challenges of these developments in 2005 suggest that a tide is turning. With the growth of wealth slowing or even dipping in the past years, with more saturated culture and entertainment markets, and with fiscal troubles in local and state governments, the multi-venue arts center is becoming a bit of an albatross. Managers and consultants are quietly suggesting that the economic model driving these facilities isn't working anymore (touring Broadway isn't the cash cow it used to be). Local arts groups and resident companies are seeing local philanthropic dollars and ticket sales sucked into the higher-cost infrastructure, and away from their programming budgets.

On the software side, other areas of society and business are moving in the opposite direction from large, central, professional-grade infrastructure. Social networking software -- like the Flickr photo sharing site, weblogs, Google maps and groups, and even podcasting -- are pushing production and content development out to the edges.

Passive audiences are now active producers of creative content on- line, and curators of their public self and personal entertainment mix.

As the arts have become more professional, they have also tended to become more detached from the daily creative lives of their communities. The big, boxy, multi-venue arts center will need to reinvent itself...perhaps not in 2006, but in the decade to come.

Problem is, we continue to build these facilities according to the old model of how they work. It will be difficult to reshape the granite and glass to a different focus.

The biggest challenge, suggested above, is to stop and take stock of the role of professional arts infrastructure in a participatory society. Audiences don't just want to sit and listen anymore, if they ever did. Sitting and listening are still powerful forms of participation, but only as part of a spectrum of creative experiences and expressions. That spectrum also includes participatory practice (a much less charged term than ''amateur'' arts), lifelong learning, curatorship of identity and self, creative expression through living (cooking, fashion, personal appearance), and ambient arts experience.
The wise arts organization will be finding ways to foster and support the creative lives of their communities, not just selling them content.

BETTY PLUMB:
*The on-going war in Iraq and the soaring Federal debt;
*The impact of national and international disasters on individual and corporate giving;
*The "branding" and "ownership" by conservatives of the term "moral values" and a sense of growing intolerance;

Representing my colleagues in the State Arts Action Network, Allen Hoffman suggests that philanthropic trends will have major implications down the road as public funds continue to dry up. Developing individual investors in the non profit arts sector is critical and how that might be developed should be of primary interest. A secondary issue would be a discussion of the Rand Report with participants that are both pro and con. He'd like to see that report taken apart as an in-depth discussion.

For question #2: What I hear from the local arts council field as issues of concern are:
*Leadership Succession - the "graying" of the arts administrative field;
*The challenge of building participation in the arts -- in the broadest of definitions;

ANDREW TAYLOR FOLLOWS UP:
Barry:
After I sent off my Hessenius Group contribution, an associate sent me news of a radical restructuring at the Weidner Center for the Performing Arts in Green Bay, Wisconsin. They're basically discontinuing the venue as a professional performing arts center, and returning it to a university function hall. Among the driving factors:

The financial picture changed even more drastically than expected due to a decline in quality new Broadway product, changes in funding models and increased local competition for the discretionary entertainment dollar.

I was hoping not be so immediately reinforced in my gloomy outlook on large performing arts centers.

BARRY:
I think the Americans for the Arts Action Fund - an ARTS PAC - while still embryonic, is an encouraging sign that someday the arts might take back their own future by organizing and becoming a political force. As a sleeping giant, our field might wield tremendous clout if we were to accept lobbying as part of our jobs and were to make the financial commitment to becoming an effective, competitive "interest group" (which is what we are in the political arena).

I think moving along - city by city, state by state and nationally - the effort to become poltiical players is the challenge for the future.

GARY STEUER:
Well, Barry, you kind of gave me a hand-off in that first question that I can't resist grabbing!

It would perhaps be self-interested to say the merger of Arts & Business Council and Americans for the Arts was the most significant event of the year, but it certainly was the most significant in MY year, or even my decade. But let me instead highlight what I think this merger represents, and what it might mean for 2006 and beyond.

The merger was driven by heightened interest in the challenge of generating more private sector support for the arts. It was also driven by the challenge of achieving some greater scale and clout in the pursuit of that challenge. I think the issue of private sector cultural support and earned income was a theme of 2005, and will be with us for some time to come.

This does not mean that public sector advocacy has become less important “ far from it. We still must have a rigorous and effective effort at the national, state and local level. But increasingly we must realize that 90% of the average arts organizations revenue stream comes from private contributed and earned sources. Many newer arts organizations are highly entrepreneurial, sometimes generating almost all their income from earned sources, and sometimes even structuring themselves as for-profit organizations, transforming the model of what an arts organization is. Several of the artist-practitioners we are working with in our Creativity Connection program, for example, are structured as for-profit or sole-proprietorship entities rather than nonprofits. They are using the arts to inspire and educate a segment of the public (corporate employees), are employing artists, and are stimulating appreciation of the arts in potential arts attenders/participants. Does this mean they are not part of our community, or do we embrace them? And, of course, the traditional model of nonprofit arts group has not gone away if anything, their numbers and financial needs continue to grow. Are the resources available in our country to meet their growing needs, even with the best advocacy efforts possible? Are mergers like this one part of the solution, as we seek greater efficiencies in pursuit of our mission and goals?

Much has also been made this year of generational shifts in a variety of different ways. There is the issue of the aging Baby Boomer generation, leading to heightened interest in cultivating this populations segment as audience members, board members and donors; their leisure time will increase as they begin to retire and arts organizations must figure out how to capture their interest, or other causes will, and we will lose out. At the other end of the spectrum, we have a new segment of the population who have considerable wealth at much younger ages than in previous eras. These new philanthropists behave in a totally different way. They see the arts as represented by the major institutions, which they see as stodgy, belonging to their parents or even grandparents, and not having an impact on the community or needing their money. How do we change their attitudes, getting them to value our great cultural assets, recognize they need support too, yet also convey the message that the arts are also about changing lives, building community, and bringing people together values that resonate with this generation?

I believe 2006 will bring further dialogue on some of these tough issues: 1) making our case better to the private sector, and related to that the issue of how to develop better messages that resonate with the broadest population; 2) striving for more clout and more efficiencies in our operations, even if it means radical change; 3) rigorously examining the nonprofit arts model, along the lines of the recent paper by Bill Ivey, and figuring out how to embrace new models, including for-profit arts and informal arts, without undermining the case that needs to be made for the continuing support of our great nonprofit cultural assets. I think in 2006 we will see more mergers, maybe a few more major nonprofit arts bankruptcies or dissolutions, but also perhaps some high profile announcements of extraordinary cultural projects that break the mold and demonstrate new ways of operating and funding.

Happy Holidays to all!

NOTE:
Others in the HESSENIUS Group may add their own thoughts this week, and everyone is invited to chime in and enter their own comments.

The Hessenius Group will begin 2006 on Tuesday, February 14th.

I would like to thank all the members of the Group for their participation in this experiment this year. As an ongoing enterprise, I hope it will only get better as we can refine it. I would also like to thank the many readers who were kind enough to email me with encouragement, good wishes and sage advice. I hope too that more readers will share their perspectives and thoughts -- my whole purpose is to generate a real dialogue about the bigger issues the arts face. I welcome your comments and suggestions.

I wish all of us Peace on Earth - and I hope next year sees the arts prosper and thrive.

Thank you.

And remember: Don't Quit!

Barry

November 08, 2005

HESSENIUS GROUP 3 online now.

Hello everybody.

"And the beat goes on.................."

This week's participants include:
Ben Cameron - Theater Communications Group
Shelley Cohn - former Executive Director of the Arizona Arts Commission
Moy Eng - Hewlett Foundation
Nancy Glaze - Packard Foundation
Sam Miller - LINK

[A QUICK NOTE FOR US AGING BABY BOOMERS WHO WOULD PREFER THAT THIS BLOG USED A LARGER TYPE FONT (so we could read it easier). Go to the 'VIEW' tab on your toolbar, scroll down to "text size" and make the font as large as you would like.]

ISSUE ONE:

As the baby boomer generation of arts leaders nears retirement from the field, how do we insure that the storehouse of knowledge, experience, contacts, and understanding (of both the practical aspects of arts administration and the broad policy issues and their implications) is best preserved to the advantage of all of those of us who remain? How do we archive that knowledge and experience so that the maximum number of people can access it in the future?

Shelley Cohn, you've just retired after 21 years in your post as head of the Arizona Arts Commission. What are your thoughts for other leaders who might retire in the near term:

SHELLEY COHN:
Now that I am actually one of those baby boomers who has retired (for all of three weeks), I have some thoughts on this issue.

Leave a legacy of your values and information both practical and conceptual through mentoring of staff members and students before you leave; I chose a time to leave when there was a firm foundation and relative calm with the legislature giving a new leader time to get their grounding.

Be available after you leave, but don't be a shadow expecting to influence decision making and direction as you did before you left.  Support the new and emerging leadership on their terms, not yours; speak when asked and avoid imposing yourself when not asked.

This transition has actually been very liberating on both sides. I have seen the remaining staff demonstrate their maturity and knowledge, taking responsibility and initiative, that maybe I stood unintentionally in the way of when I was there. We are very respectful, exploring new boundaries. Neither the staff nor the board nor the retiree has the chance to practice these changes. I am the only person who had residence in my particular space (for 21 years as director and 30 years at the agency).

Where I might have been fearful about how the work would move forward, I am pleased by the initiative of both the staff and the board.

I also know that there is energy around dealing with issues that I had begun to find tedious and irritating or too much trouble. I see others dealing with those issues for the first time with positive energy and an ability to make lemonade where I had begun to be satisfied with lemons.

Trust and be calm have been among my annual resolutions throughout my career in state arts agency work. Those qualities are still at work through this transition.

BARRY:
Sage advice Shelley. Now how do we make sure your three decades of arts experience and all that you have learned during that time is somehow preserved and not lost to the future? Sam, can we do that?

SAM MILLER:
I'm not sure you can. It would be nice if this generation of leaders could transition from active to emeritus roles within their respective organizations but there would probably be a bit of resistance to this idea - lack of space, lack of funds, previous leaders looking over the shoulder of new leaders - that sort of thing, but maybe, in some cases, they could be placed at aligned or proximinate academic institutions where they could teach (or team teach) a course informed by their experience.

It would also be nice to imagine these leaders "downloaded" into interactive databases - some material available to all, some password protected and restricted to the organization(s) connected to this leader. This material could include oral history, previous writings, annotated publications (maybe even board minutes), and a timeline documenting key events, etc. This idea assumes that organizations are maintaining instituitional histories, that might also need to be encouraged.

I could also imagine commissioning some time-based cultural histories that would not be institutionally specific, sort of like Edmund Wilson's review of literature by decades (the Twenties, Thirties, etc). These would capture and contextualize the movement of people, ideas, and policies across and between institutional practice - the CETA Years, Dance Touring, the legacy of American Dialogue, Backstage at the Ford Foundation - that sort of thing.

And then a series of dialogues at field convenings might be fun - multiple leaders could look back with some facilitated rigor and then these could be documented and disseminated.

BARRY:
Moy, you've thought about this a lot, what's your take on this?

MOY ENG:
The decentralized nature of the US nonprofit arts sector has enabled the proliferation of artmaking of staggering breadth and diversity. Yet that decentralized nature coupled with low salaries have conspired against the creation of a system to develop and nurture leaders. Yes, there are a handful of respected arts administration and nonprofit management university programs to train potential new managers. I graduated from one of them: the master program in arts administration at New York University which melded the study of nonprofit arts management practice with M.B.A. training. And there are also a number of good management intensives for professionals. That said, the development of leadership remains informal, decentralized and fragmented.

Could we create an organization or program that could comprehensively address the issue of leadership development from "cradle to grave": training, professional development, regular forums for conversations, networking, coaching throughout arts manager's careers, archiving of e- and print-resources on arts and culture from performance studies to cultural policy to arts management "how tos"? And could we capture the power of technology in this effort?

Riffing off of Sam's response, perhaps we could share the knowledge and experience of our elders through live interviews and conversations over the net - of those who played a pivotal role on critical issues over the past sixty years such as the 1990s politicization and demonization of contemporary artists, 1970s appearance of identity-centered art: African-American, Chicano, Asian, Queer film and live arts, and 1980s emergence of performance art, fusion and mixed genre work. A combination of contemporary arts, US history and leadership development. These conversations could be recorded live and then virtually housed within an organization centered on cultural policy, leadership, nonprofit sector and scholarship such as Harvard University and the Leveraging Investments in Creativity initiative. Supplementing this effort could be written essays by mature and mid-career individuals addressing critical historical matters, contemporary issues and future trends.

There might also be a way to create and link on-line a network of mature leaders in the field with mid-career and younger individuals working in the field. Using the net this way could provide e-coaching: immediate access to experts across the country (if not internationally) for problems from how I do gracefully transition a board of directors which is comprised of fatigued board members to successful advocacy strategies on easing visa application practices for international artists appearing in the US and US artists performing and teaching in Canada.

BARRY:
Nancy, didn't the Packard Foundation fund a program that addresses this issue?

NANCY GLAZE:
For the past six years, Bill Moskin and Jill Jackson, with funding from the Packard Foundation, have been exploring ways to nurture the next generation of arts leaders. The program that was created, Arts Leadership for the Future, includes the use of world-class mentors (all boomers) and hands-on problem solving. This model program mines the knowledge of the old-timers and combines it with the fresh thinking of the newcomers.

BARRY:
Apart from the problem of funding various projects that might deal with this issue, finding the right leadership to shepard them, and figuring out how to sustain those efforts, let's explore a little further the ideas of using virtual space to preserve a knowledge / experience base, of assembling those who are making an exit at conferences where they might share some of that knowledge, of peer network mentoring, and the idea of some sort of journal that captures (in the retirees own words) their experience in specific areas. Any thoughts about how we might move on any of these approaches?

BEN CAMERON:
Frankly, this question leaves me of two minds. Especially in a technologically driven age, there seems to be no shortage of options--this blog being a prime example--of forums in which people can leave their thoughts and opinions to posterity. Between blogs, self-created websites, home video cameras, in-house archives and more, there are many opportunities to commit thoughts and practices to paper, e-espace, video and more.

The real challenges to me increasingly are as follows:
1) The plethora of options has a downside--as Deguid and Brown said in their book THE SOCIAL LIFE OF INFORMATION (and I paraphrase here), in this information age, we are drowning in information and starved for wisdom. How do we sort through the increasingly deafening white noise?--a direct reflection of...

2) Time. Who has time to record these thoughts in a meaningful way, and who has time to read/view them? I'll be absolutely frank here: while I am deeply grateful to my predecessors here, I have yet--after almost eight years on the job--to delve into their files and documents. In this moment when the pressure is on us to hit the ground running, who has the time to sort through that same increasing volume of paper, websites, and more?

3) Isn't legacy most strongly felt in the work left behind and the relationships that we make and create in our work? While there is much I respond to in both Moy and Sam's suggestions, the idea of yet another organization makes me a bit weary, and I wonder whether the issue isn't more that we think differently about our roles in our daily lives as active mentors, transmitting what we know on a daily basis, passing along our work and thoughtfully engaging others. Are we willing to think differently about how we structure the time of our leaders, encouraging them, for example, to be constantly active in teaching--at least in an adjunct capacity--on a fairly regular basis? Can we take seriously to heart Shelley's suggestions even before we contemplate transitions or retirement? Perhaps if we think about transmission of information as an exit or retirement moment, we are missing the proverbial boat: any commemoration of ideas or insights that are committed to paper/video/etc., are at best reminders of the lessons that have already been transmitted in an ongoing way through the work the leader has done, through the relationships the leader has developed, the example the leader has set.

SHELLEY:
I totally agree with Ben on the issue of who, new to their jobs, has the time and inclination to delve through the written documentation of an organization, particularly when it is not organized to share knowledge and insights.

At the same time, there is need to provide some documentation that provides context and is presented in a meaningful (rather than stream of conscious) way.

I am looking forward to the book initiated by the Ohio Arts Council and Ohio State University on the first generation of state arts agency directors (from the 60's and 70's). State arts agencies is a new field and the oral histories of these former directors provides an important story about the environment and attitudes in the arts and public sector support of the arts at the beginning of the field.

Another monograph recently published by the Wallace Foundation and writiten by Mark and Galen Moore also provides a very succinct and compelling story about state arts agencies. Until now there really was not a publication that spoke to the history, approaches and policy implications of state arts agency work. Arizona is using this monograph as a key orientation piece for new staff and board members.

BARRY:
You are of course right Ben, about no one having the time, and that there are many ways knowledge can be shared along the way, but I have seen the scenario countless times in individual organizations where new leadership comes in, and spends considerable wasted time repeating the mistakes and re-inventing the programs of a previous administration, and there ought to be some way that we could avoid that waste - if for no other reason, as you point out, we have so little time in the first place. We all share a healthy skepticism of new layers and new organizations, but sometimes it seems to me, another layer might be just what we need. As Shelley points out, the difficulty in availing oneself of past written knowledge is that it remains unorganized - and therefore, largely inaccessible. The question remains how do we share past knowlege to our benefit? How do we preserve the wisdom without the information overload?

NANCY:
I am very much aware and concerned about the generational shift in the field and from a variety of perspectives, including arts practitioners, funders, and those that are assisting and advising the arts. There is a body of knowledge, and perhaps as important, a set of principles and values of a given generation. Not only is the generation changing, but the environment in which everyone is working has changed enormously as well.

SHELLEY:
One issue for me has been this sense of wanting to download in some way the years of history, experience and stories. At the same time the person or persons on the receiving end has to be interested and ready to hear. The two partners in communication have to be ready for the give and take of the exchange; and the exchange has to go both directions.

Additionally, my generation has to also be aware that some of things that we believe are so precious and vital are not seen in the same way by the next generation. The exchange is an important and sensitive and timely one.

BARRY:
So how do we manage that download, particularly as you and Nancy suggest, there are generational concerns to consider if we want the exercise to be relevant?