ARTSblog

This title is neither violent onomatopoeia nor a Femi Kuti reference, rather I quote my mom’s favorite phrase which is synonymous to “check, check, check.”  While I’d cringe whenever my mom exclaimed this in her Filipino accent, I think it captures my enthusiasm around the three key accomplishments (some unexpected) that resulted from the Los Angeles emerging leader mentorship program.

People rarely wield the science to invent and hand-craft their own mentor. I’ve observed that mentors tend to emerge in unlikely places and heighten or recede in their presence throughout one’s life. But, in 2007, a nine-member taskforce of Los Angeles Emerging Arts Leaders (EAL/LA) had lost patience with an organic model of mentor acquisition, and began scheming on how to meet a dream career mentor through professional connections and a structured program.

After a year of monthly meetings to strategize recruitment, the matching process, the structure, marketing, and evaluation, we officially launched the Arts Professional Advisors Link (APAL) in the fall of 2008. Each emerging leader member completed an “application” which described professional development needs and wants in a mentor. As a team, we reviewed one another’s applications and leveraged our connections, to help match advisors to the profiles drawn up in the applications. Advisees were charged with all of the administrative work around the program and were to initiate and organize all advisor meetings (four at the least) over the course of the program year. The advisee was to steer the content of the meeting conversations and bring clear, yearlong goals to the table around which the advisor might provide guidance. Over the course of the year, we threw a kick-off orientation mixer, a mid-year opera outing and mixer and a culminating mixer. Read the rest of this entry »

When I joined the Emerging Leaders Council, I learned that many of my peers, like me, were interested in mentoring.

I realized, though, that my outlook on mentoring was very simplistic and traditional: someone with more experience advises someone with less experience in a formal and formalized relationship.

I wanted to know more. When, where, and why did mentoring start? How has mentoring changed? What makes a mentoring relationship work?

(The image above of Telemachus and Mentor was created by Pablo Fabisch for The Adventures of Telemachus.)

Like a true millennial, I turned to Wikipedia.

I discovered that the term “mentor” has its roots in Greek mythology. When Odysseus leaves for the Trojan War, he entrusts Telemachus, his son, in the hands of friend and confidant Mentor. Later in The Odyssey, Goddess of War Athena, who has a soft spot for Odysseus, takes the shape and voice of Mentor when she urges Telemachus to travel abroad to determine what has happened to his father.

Many, many years later in 1699, French writer François Fénelo penned The Adventures of Telemachus, which fills in gaps in The Odyssey with the tales of Mentor and Telemachus. Think The Adventures of Telemachus is to The Odyssey what Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead is to Hamlet — but with a decidedly more serious, philosophical tone.

Today’s term “mentor” traces back to Fénelo’s work — a mentor being an advisor, tutor, or counselor.

In developing the Mentorship Tool Kit for the Emerging Leaders Council, I learned that this traditional definition of mentoring is giving way to more informal, but just as effective forms of mentoring.

Over the course of the summer, we’ll be sharing some examples of how Emerging Leaders Networks are making mentoring work in their communities.

In the meantime we’d like to know, what is your definition of mentoring?

A week and a half ago, Americans for the Arts staff were in trains, planes, and loaded down automobiles, headed for Charm City, aka Baltimore, MD, for our Half-Century Summit. Since I work directly with Americans for the Arts’ Emerging Leaders network and our leadership development programs, I spent time participating in Goucher College’s Leadership Symposium, and many of the leadership themed sessions at the Summit.

At the Summit, a recurring conversation in our sessions centered on how we as individuals and organizations could make professional development for our field a larger priority. And by priority, we don’t mean a larger piece of our dwindling budgets. The majority of arts organizations are struggling to figure out how to do more with less, and we need to develop ways to continue making professional development a priority during this tough economy.

In the results from the 2009 Survey to the field of Emerging Arts Leaders, I was shocked to discover that while 70 percent of our current emerging leaders consider arts administration their long term career, only 28.5 percent either strongly agree or agree that there is room for career advancement within their organization.

How will the remaining 41.5 percent of those who want to stay in the field realistically do so when they don’t feel they can grow? Read the rest of this entry »

Podcast: Download (Duration: 7:43 — 7.1MB)

In Part II of our conversation, Jeanne Sakamoto, Senior Program Officer at the James Irvine Foundation, and Marc Vogl, Program Officer at the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, speak about leadership development in California and how their two foundations have partnered to help support the next generation of arts leaders.  This is a follow-up to the recent blog salon, New Strategies to Support Next Generation Leaders.

Podcast: Download (Duration: 6:21 — 5.8MB)

Jeanne Sakamoto, Senior Program Officer at the James Irvine Foundation, and Marc Vogl, Program Officer at the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, speak about leadership development in California and how their two foundations have partnered to help support the next generation of arts leaders.  This is a follow-up to the recent blog salon, New Strategies to Support Next Generation Leaders.  In Part I of this podcast, Jeanne and Marc expand on some of the themes discussed in this salon.  Stay tuned this week for Part II.

by Emily Spruill and Stephanie Evans

As the Americans for the Arts’ Emerging Leaders Council started to develop our focus for the coming years, we kept asking ourselves, who is our audience?  What do they need?  So before we start assuming how we can help emerging leaders, we decided to ask you.  The Emerging Leaders Council spent 2009 drafting the questions for an Emerging Leaders Network Field Survey.  By January 2010, 554 of you had let us know about yourself and what’s on your mind.

The survey confirmed a lot of what we thought to be true:  Most of you are very active in seeking out professional development – either within your community or at national convenings.  The majority of you (over 75%) are also very involved with advocating for the arts at the local and/or national level.

While the survey results indicate that emerging arts leaders want and need professional development, only 31% of you indicated that there is a budget line for professional development in your organization’s budget. It is clear that organizational support for employee’s professional development has been reduced or eliminated entirely in 2009/2010 budgets. Read the rest of this entry »

(My thanks to Jean Cook of the Future of Music Coalition and Adam Huttler of Fractured Atlas for their contributions to this article.)

We hear a lot of talk about the coming leadership transition in the arts. Baby Boomers are nearing retirement age, and Gen X’ers and Millennials are itching to take on increased responsibility. Both for the good of the arts as a whole and for the individuals involved, we need to make sure that, when the time comes, the people getting behind the wheel will have had some experience riding shotgun first. Hence our conversations have frequently centered on professional development, training, networking, and mentorship as strategies to better prepare our young(er) drivers.

It’s important to recognize, though, that the conversation isn’t—or shouldn’t be, at any rate—solely about passing the keys from one generation to the next. That’s something that has been happening since time immemorial, and is part of the normal cycle of nature and humanity. What’s so newsworthy about that, really? Naturally, there are lessons about leadership to be handed down from the elders to the newbies – and our conversations on ArtsBlog have boasted some elders’ generous attempts to do just that. Every so-called “emerging leader” who knows what he or she is talking about acknowledges that there is much to learn from those who came before, and that we would be foolish to pretend that we already have the answers. After all, the calls for mentorship are coming more from the younger generations than it is from the elders. Read the rest of this entry »

So how do we, emerging arts leaders, embrace the new creative economy, but not become what Angela McRobbie described in her essay “Everybody is Creative: Artists as New Economy Pioneers” as “a society of lonely, mobile, over-worked individuals for whom socializing and leisure are only more opportunities to do a deal”. How do we stay afloat, while helping to drive innovation and keep a diversity of (popular as well as thoughtful, well-crafted) art alive in our communities?

What do we do first?

Get organized. As individual arts and culture workers each of us must build our own capacity for risk and to make mistakes. Build it, try it, fix it is my new mantra. I am working to be both a planner and doer, to be ambitious and creative, while building in time for self- reflection, evaluation and course correction. I’ve also found that risk and learning can be supported through shared leadership, mentorship, collaboration and coordination. Read the rest of this entry »

Marc’s Seder post about the youngest person in the room asking “why are we doing things the way we’re doing things?” got me thinking—are we really letting the youngest in the room ask the questions?

I want to remind myself and my fellow Millennials that with all our pounding on the “glass ceiling”, our subversive questions, and our demands to sit at the adult table, let us not forget that there are others that follow us. In our fit to close the generation gap before us, we are not always as attentive as we could be in preventing a gap behind us. Who’s that behind us? Who’s the youngest in the room? She’s the one that you’ve had silently de-duping the mailing list for the last two weeks at the desk in the basement by the boiler. She’s your intern.

Unpaid internships are quite the racket. Our parents didn’t intern at all but now there’s inflated pressure to spend every summer from 14 to 22 and often beyond in servitude (no, not service) just to get into college, then into grad school, and THEN get a job. I’m exaggerating a bit, but I think we’ve all seen the trend. Read the rest of this entry »

I was reading Shannon Daut’s post on the lack of executive opportunities for emerging leaders and it got me thinking:  true – there are very few Executive Director positions available, and usually those are offered to seasoned, rather than next generation leaders. Of course this makes sense when experience (or a name) is held higher than untapped vision. With the emergence of more graduate programs focused on arts administration, the competition is even greater: we are becoming more educated, more skilled, and we are looking for a challenge.

So perhaps we should be creating our own challenges.

Last year I joined fellow community members and arts-minded neighbors to create the North Brooklyn Public Art Coalition, which produces, presents and supports public art while addressing the needs of the North Brooklyn community. In keeping with its advocacy efforts, I moderated a conversation of 25 arts leaders of Williamsburg, Greenpoint and Bushwick. We gathered to discuss the role of public art in our open spaces and, more broadly, the state of the arts in our community.  Read the rest of this entry »

I am of two minds about leadership trainings. On one hand I believe any time invested in thinking about leadership is worthwhile. On the other hand, we should not expect classroom-based, curriculum-driven instruction to work in a vacuum. Whatever combination of the words “leadership,” “management,” “academy,” “institute,” “fellowship,” or even, “university” we use, if we think packing ourselves off to leader camp for a day or a week is some sort of silver-bullet solution to either our demands for professional development or our organization’s whimperings for change then we are sorely mistaken.

Yes—we can read about and listen to mantras on teamwork, ethics, giving and receiving feedback, results-based decision making, strategic planning, emotional intelligence, and business acumen but without a complimentary system with which to practice these skills are we really supporting leadership development? No amount of leadership lecturing can help a young manager who is returning to an organization that doesn’t want to change. Read the rest of this entry »

What is it about cross-sector collaboration that turns on young arts professionals? Whether its art therapy, eco art or political activism through the arts, my peers seem particularly drawn to social service, urban design, environmental, health and economical revitalization partnerships. This inclination speaks to our interest in expanding the scope of our organization’s artistic work so that it may touch and speak to a broader public. It also speaks to emerging leaders’ diverse professional interests.

Los Angeles-based institutions have picked up on the trend of cross-disciplinary art practices and art programs. Artist collaborative Fallen Fruit recently curated an exhibition and participatory event series at LACMA that brings together concepts of urban farming, sustainability, politics and architecture called EATLACMA. Edgar Arceneaux and Watts House Project wants to ignite economic revitalization through community engagement with the arts. LA Commons invites the public to investigate the LA urban landscape through cultural treks through the city. The Unusual Suspects brings play-writing, play producing and acting opportunities to probation camp teens to inspire, change lives and ultimately reduce recitivism. These are the types of civic engagement projects that my peers and I are eager to conceive and be a part of. Read the rest of this entry »

When someone leaves an organization one has to ask: did they jump or were they pushed?

The ‘arts leaders of tomorrow’ are leaping, and getting shoved out of the arts non profits all the time – and it’s one of the biggest problems those of us who want to see dynamic arts organizations contribute to a vital society must solve.  (By the way I know everyone is sick of debating what ‘emerging’ means in the leadership discussion but can we get a cool acronym or something to shorthand the group of people in the early part of their careers in the arts?). Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve been writing about leadership and young nonprofit professionals for the past three years, and what I’ve finally come to is this: one of our biggest misconceptions about leadership is that it has something to do with a title.

The nonprofit sector often operates as if leadership were a noun. They look to “the leadership” to provide the answers, and blame “the leadership” when ideas fail or solution don’t come fast enough. I’ve heard many a young professional talk about leaving their organization because of disappointment in “the leadership.” The problem with this sentiment is that it assumes that leadership is a position at the top of the org chart and that it’s the responsibility of one person (or a select few) to lead the agency to success.

That’s why we use the term “emerging leaders.” Because we think that until you’ve reached the CEO position or ascend to a senior management role or reach the ripe age of 50, you have not yet “emerged.”

But what if we thought of leadership as a verb?

Read the rest of this entry »

First off, you need to know how hard it was not to type “Knot knowing the Ropes,” but I managed to resist at least for a few seconds.

Inexperience, like a bad pun, is undervalued.

By that, I don’t mean ignorance of one’s field, or bring unprepared, but being free of the self-imposed limits can easily come with working in a field for a period of time. Our new and (in the best sense) inexperienced colleagues are often a great source of new ideas and creative solutions. And this creativity is often born of not knowing the “best practices” or the traditions of our lines of work. Read the rest of this entry »