Sarah Cunningham

Get to know your assumptions, then throw them out the window.

Posted by Sarah Cunningham, Sep 18, 2014 0 comments


Sarah Cunningham

Sarah Bainter Cunningham Sarah Bainter Cunningham

New sustainability models break through belief barriers about the business of arts education.  If teens must be employed during their high school career, why not employ them to make art? One organization pays students to participate as employees and upends assumptions about student participation. If fund-raising is challenging for smaller organizations, why not gather together tackle this beast? Another organization runs common development events for multiple arts education organizations, and upends the assumptions that local organizations must be pitted competitively against one another.  Both of these examples threw out prior assumptions to create new models.

Before the National Summit for Creative Youth Development in March 2014, organizers conducted surveys of the field and produced a comprehensive report, which includes a number of significant funding recommendations. Please check it out, so you can hear the collective voice of your colleagues. Funding and Sustainability rightly emerged as one of the nine top priorities of the field. Contributors clearly articulated an ambitious agenda balanced with a sensibility that this agenda must be supported with appropriate, inventive, and modern funding strategies.  After the convening, a group dedicated to examining sustainability produced the Imperative to:

Support and advocate for a strong creative youth development sector with effective business models, new revenue sources, and partnerships that generate adequate funding and sustain the sector.  Two actions were proposed: 1) Organize and mobilize as a sector to increase capacity, sustainability, and impact and 2) Advocate for and develop funding strategies to increase the strength and long-term impact of creative youth development programs.

This Imperative was necessarily aspirational and global but already reflected in local models. Artists for Humanity, earns revenue from a variety of sources. Students conduct design services for local companies in return for fees for services. The financial model considered arts students as employees, who would gain new knowledge in the arts in order to deliver high quality artistic products to organization partners. Another effort supported by Hunt Alternatives, ARTWorks for Kids, established a coalition for 30 arts education partners to strategize shared funding efforts. By doing outreach in the philanthropic community, ARTWorks for Kids helped organizations raise more than $8 million dollars. These are only two examples, briefly cited, present in one city. Such ingenuity has less to do with business models, than cultivating an ability to see, evaluate, and discard useless underlying assumptions.

Since we’re examining assumptions, let’s look at three myths that might prevent us from expanding our concepts for funding and sustainability within the Creative Youth Development field.

Myth #1: Arts education smarts and business smarts are opposed to one another.

Clever funding strategies have their own creative and artistic merit. While the pursuit of the arts might seek objects that transcend potential vulgarities of material culture or wealth, these two activities are not opposed to one another. Meanwhile, we become models for our young people not simply by introducing them to artists and art-making, but by creating organizations and strategies that reflect a dexterity to manipulate the external vicissitudes of national and local economic policy to our advantage. If this sounds overwhelming to you or your organization, then partner with those who have the intellectual capital that you need.  As some of usual sources have been exhausted, we’ll need to develop new funding strategies if we want to move the Creative Youth Development field forward as a distinct sector.

Myth #2: Financial capital is more important than intellectual capital.

Financial capital is nothing without intellectual and creative capacity.  While arts education organization can amass spectacular non-monetary creative capital through partnerships with artists and arts institutions, I rarely see organizations amassing intellectual capital from their business partners. At the same time, more and more businesses are recognizing the creative economy. After the Great Recession, UN reported that creative industries were one of the only sectors to increased revenue by 12% in 2008. The UN trade report also noted the future earnings of this field could not be estimated because of their current rapid growth rate.  Likely, your business leaders are aware of the potential of the local creative economies. Arts education plays an indispensable role in developing the next generation of artists and arts audiences. As new economic structures develop, why shouldn't we be at the table, as co-designers of creative industries? There are some art leaders in the country who have made explicit efforts to understand the municipal economies in order to embed their organizations as a necessary component of those economies, which also include massive investments in public education and programs that address youth violence. While this can be added work for an overtaxed leader, it will be crucial to place arts education within the orbit of these inventive economic systems that recognize the humanity of the arts as a fundamental feature.  Partnerships that increase arts education’s access to the intellectual capital of the business, finance, and philanthropic communities may go a long way toward problem-solving current challenges about how our business is conducted.

Myth #3:  Arts educators and their organizations are forever subject to, and therefore victim of, the changing demands of local and national funders.

Arts education organizations can be the glue that binds the private and public investments and must remain active leaders within that exchange. Even against the best intentions, an “us” and “them” relationship tends to emerge between funder and grantee.  This may always be the case, as it feels like we depend on the funders and they don’t have to depend on us (although they do!). Too many of us have had experiences losing our primary investors as a result of new leadership or a suddenly renovated foundation mission.  The shock of lost partners can resonate throughout an organization for year, almost like a death in the family. However, the recent Creative Youth Development activity is a wonderful example of arts education organizations and practitioners, public and private funders, joining with associations and a broad array of leaders to determine how to expand our effectiveness in youth development to improve civil society in general.  Even in this conversation, however, participants were still figuring out how to talk about financing as a collective community. The fact is, in our separate domains, the work is quite different and we must tend to the collaboration to build common language...which will allow us to examine assumptions, throw them out the window, and conceive of new configurations.

Many of us are already stealing great ideas from inventive organizational leaders (inside and outside the arts) who are expansive and imaginative about financial structures, without exposing the organization to risk. What if we conducted a survey to better understand the financial creativity behind arts education organizations throughout the country? Would such a survey demonstrate the quick-witted business savvy of our arts education leaders? Perhaps we should have an “Arts Education Finance Award” to recognize occasions when an arts education organization or individual leader has been able to catalyze organization needs with local and national funding instruments. Such an award might also dispel any myths that business excellence is at odds with artistic excellence. Pioneers in the arts education business challenge assumptions, propose the unthinkable, and overturn common shared beliefs about how arts education is conducted. They might teach us that financial acuity is sometimes not financial at all but closer to the creativity we have been fostering all along.

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