About the Authors

Pianist, scholar, and educator, Dr. Leah Claiborne, promotes diversity in the arts by championing piano music by Black composers in her performances, research, and teaching. Dr. Claiborne received her undergraduate degree from Manhattan School of Music where she received the Josephine C. Whitford graduation award. She received her Masters of Music and Doctorate of Musical Arts degrees from the University of Michigan. Dr. Claiborne currently teaches piano and Music of the African Diaspora at the University of the District of Columbia

Sydnie L. Mosley is an artist-activist and educator who works in communities to organize for gender and racial justice through experiential dance performance with her dance-theater collective Sydnie L. Mosley Dances. She is a Bessie Award-winning performer who danced with Christal Brown’s INSPIRIT, improvises with the skeleton architecture collective, and continues to appear as a guest artist with the Brooklyn Ballet. Among her recognitions and funding, she received a special citation from Mayor Bill de Blasio and First Lady Chirlane McCray for using her talents in dance to fuel social change. An advocate for the field, she sits on the Dance/NYC Advisory Committee.

From Leah:

Breaking Points, Breakthroughs

Every person has a breaking point. These are the moments in your life where you make a decision that you will no longer continue to accept the current state of events. One of those breaking points for me came at an unusual time in my academic career, but nonetheless, it became the most pivotal and perfect time for reaching a breaking point, or should I say, breakthrough. 

In 2015, I began the DMA program at the University of Michigan in piano performance and pedagogy. It was also the same year that Freddy Grey was murdered in Baltimore. Baltimore: my family’s pride and joy of a city. Freddy Grey was murdered for being Black in Baltimore. This truly “hit home” for me, and although I was outraged and wanted to join my friends in protests, I had to take a moment of pause to ask myself, “what abilities do I even possess to effect some form of change to address the racial disparities of Black people in America?” My breaking point with toiling with the challenge of how to create impactful change became my breakthrough.  

For me, I knew I had to focus my time and talents on uplifting the next generation of Black youth through a vehicle that was true to me- music. More specifically, piano pedagogy. Through the wonderful support of my advisor, Dr. John Ellis who was Dean of partnerships and the mentorship of Dr. Willis Patterson, founder of Our Own Thing Music Program, I created a community piano program that allowed youth in Ypsilanti and Ann Arbor to come to the University of Michigan SMTD to study classical piano music for free each week while also learning about the important contributions that African American composers have had in the field of classical music. 

At the time, I felt that I wanted to give whatever talents I possessed to make an impactful change in the community that I currently lived in- and I believe that absolutely happened. Students in this program grew and expressed themselves each week in some of the most powerful ways that solidified my quest for becoming a pedagogue. 

Now looking back, I realize what I actually was doing was creating a space and a world for the next generation that did not exist for me.  

I never grew up having teachers who looked like me, nor did I study music by composers who looked like me. While attending the University of Michigan with all of its wonderful faculty, not a single faculty member for any of my classes was Black, nor were there any other Black students enrolled in the classical piano department during my six years of study at this institution. I desperately needed to allow the next generation to know that there are people who look like you who have done incredible life changing work in this field of classical piano music. I needed these students to know every week that they belonged in this space, at this school, in this community, in this world. Finally, I needed these children to know that whatever rooms they walk in throughout their lives, they have a beautiful voice that deserves to be heard. 

When I think about the word “Visionary” I believe it is a term we all have the ability to possess. For me, a visionary is someone who can see a brighter future and acts in the present as if that future is now. We all must take our talents and gifts and act now because America has passed its breaking point. I believe what we are experiencing right now in this country is the realization that America has reached its breaking point, or dare I say, breakthrough. What an incredibly pivotal and perfect time for all visionaries to act- and we must act now. 

From Sydnie:

Sydnie L. Mosley Dances (SLMDances), the dance-theater collective I founded and run, found our footing in our art-making practice creating community-engaged and accountable works. Our mission — to work in communities to organize for gender and racial justice through experiential dance performance — began to manifest in 2011 when we started developing The Window Sex Project. Born out of my own desire to walk down the street and not feel like I was being “window shopped” like a mannequin or other sexual object on display, I used my dance-making practice to organize amongst young adult women in my Harlem neighborhood to create space to share our stories, celebrate our bodies, and offer one another resources and strategies to assert our humanity and liberation in public space. 

Since developing The Window Sex Project, I have embarked on an ongoing journey of deepening my practice as a community-accountable artist. Here are five points of consideration that I follow when moving from idea to action with any community-engaged art project, along with some resources that have helped me think more deeply about each.

ONE: An Invitation

adrienne maree brown teaches us that “Relationships are everything.” SLMDances only considers art-making in communities that we have a personal stake in, or where we have been explicitly offered an invitation to collaborate. We understand ourselves in relationship to those various communities that we are rooted in; we nurture and remain accountable to them through collaboration. Any community we engage with is involved at every level of process. We believe that mutually beneficial partnerships are the mode to serve and uplift the needs and wants of all those involved. 

To learn more about entering communities with integrity engage with Urban Bush Women’s EBX: Entering, Building and Exiting Community Workshop and Summer Leadership Institute. 

TWO: Deep Listening

Ebony Noelle Golden introduced me to the idea of deep listening. She says: 

“Deep listening is a whole body process.  It is a type of fact gathering that requires cultural organizers commit to a community’s cultural practices for an extended period of time.  Deep listening requires multiple conversations, community walks, interviews, meditation, and cultural participation without judgment, recommendation, evaluation or expectation.”

As a movement artist, I have developed a physical practice so that I know what it means in my pores and nerve-endings to listen to community with my whole body. When you are a community artist, it is as if you are navigating your collaboration with eyes closed. You don’t move until the community moves you; until you feel their touch, nudge, pull, push. You are in total consideration of their needs and concerns. Based on your participatory listening, what do you know they want and need? Sometimes community will move in a way that you hadn’t planned for or in a way you were not interested in going. You can follow the impulse and see where the work takes you. If it’s not for your leadership and skill set, pass the work onto others who are better equipped to follow community needs/requests and be in dialogue about how/when/why your collaboration with the community needs to transition.

Where do we start getting immersed in community? Try the Community Mapping Workbook by The Laundromat Project.

THREE: Asset Mapping & Resource Sharing

As artists, part of what allows us to create is who is in our networks and the resources we share with one another. This way in which artists often function can model a utopia of mutual care and aid for our communities. Working from a place of abundance, we already have everything we need. 

We understand that money is not the only resource. If you consider what resources you REALLY need, you might come to discover you don’t need money for event space rental, when in fact a collaborator has access to event space and can offer it to you free of charge. 

We understand that those who hold positions of leadership in formal structures (i.e. the Executive Director of an organization) might not be the most important stakeholder or person who holds the most power to get your work done (i.e. the custodian with the keys to let you in the building).

As an art maker, it is also urgent to consider how your skills in your practice lend itself to working on this particular project. As a dancer, I am always asking: How is this work embodied? What tools do I have as a mover that may be essential to this work? How can dances do the things we need them to do? How can my dance practice not just present a problem, but creatively solve a problem?

Mapping your assets and engaging in ongoing processes to exchange resources is essential to meeting the needs of all collaborators. Check out this resource for Asset Mapping by Diane Dorfman. 

FOUR: Collaboration in Project Design and Execution

It is essential to define shared values, objectives, and communication practices when relationship building with community members. This means defining and clearly articulating your own values before entering into conversations with collaborators to see where your values intersect. SLMDances begins all of our work with an articulation of our values: Dreaming, Humanity, Community, Activism, Learning, and Transparency. We have found that naming our values upfront helps us to engage in healthy collaborations more frequently. Shared values often leads to clearly defining shared objectives to fulfill mutual missions. 

Next, no partnership is functional without the definition of roles and clear communication. How do you make decisions? How is everyone involved in the making? How is feedback facilitated? What are your boundaries? One of my favorite rules of thumb is that everyone has a job. There is space for everyone to contribute and in fact, the work will be better when we are working collectively. Defining the processes for working together as a collective are just as important, if not more important, than executing the project itself. 

Take a look at this Interpersonal Communication Rubric to dig deeper into your communication practices. 

FIVE: Sustainability

How have you and your collaborators defined success? What is the life of the project beyond its first iteration? What are your plans for evaluation and assessment? How are you documenting the process throughout? How will you maintain an archive of your documentation? These are just a few questions to consider for the sustainability of your work. 

For SLMDances, the projects we choose to engage in are long term — whether it is responding to sexual harassment in public spaces with The Window Sex Project, or addressing economic justice in the NYC dance field through our work BodyBusiness. We are clear that sustained, responsive creative practice for the socio-political issues we are invested in will strategically move our communities toward a more liberated and just world for us all. 

Want to hear more?

Join Leah, Sydnie, and the EXCEL Team this Thursday, August 6th from 5-6 PM EDT via Zoom. This conversational session will delve into their posts in greater depth, providing a chance for participants to ask questions and engage with these authors in real time.

About the Authors

Katherine Banks is a Midwest based actor and educator. Last season, she reprised her role as Joanne in Mindhunter (Netflix) directed by David Fincher. She performed Every Brilliant Thing at Tipping Point Theatre (Wilde Award – Best Performance in a One Person Show). In Chicago, Katherine appeared in the Jeff Award winning Men Should Weep with Griffin Theatre and in the sold-out production of She Kills Monsters at the Steppenwolf Garage. Katherine teaches at Greenhills Middle School in Ann Arbor and works as a freelance corporate spokesperson and communication trainer. She is a proud graduate of the University of Michigan.

Bill Kalinkos, clarinetist, has been called “a powerhouse” (San Francisco Chronicle), “a superb performer” (San Jose Mercury News), and his playing has been lauded as “ethereal, yet grounded” (Oakland Tribune). His performance of Aaron Copland’s Concerto was praised in the Oakland Tribune: “Kalinkos played casually, with the mysterious ease one hears in an accomplished musician.” Bill enjoys a diverse musical career as a member of critically acclaimed groups such as Alarm Will Sound, Ensemble Signal, Deviant Septet, Eco Ensemble, and Splinter Reeds. Recognized by the Washington Post as a “notable contemporary music specialist,” he has been fortunate enough to work with and premiere pieces by many renowned composers. Bill was most recently featured on the New York Philharmonic’s “Nightcap” series performing Yann Robin’s “Art of Metal II” for solo contrabass clarinet and electronics. As an orchestral player, he is the principal clarinetist of the Oakland Symphony, a member of both IRIS Orchestra and the New Hampshire Music Festival Orchestra, and he has performed with The Philadelphia Orchestra, The Cleveland Orchestra, and the Kansas City Symphony. Bill has served on the faculties of the University of Missouri and the University of California at Santa Cruz and Berkeley. As a recording artist, he can be heard on the Cantaloupe, Nonesuch, Euroarts, Naxos, Mode, Orange Mountain, Albany Records, Deutsche Gramophon, and Harmonia Mundi labels.

From Katherine:

When I was a BFA acting major at the University of Michigan, I received many pieces of great advice that I still reflect upon when thinking about my craft and my career, but today, I’d like to share the most questionable piece of advice a professor ever gave me: “If you can do anything else, anything at all, then go do that thing, because acting is so, so hard.”  I understand the good intentions behind this sentiment. (I really do.) Acting teachers seek to instill a reverence for the craft, to nurture a seriousness of purpose, and to prepare students for the challenges of a career that not only requires you to expose your most vulnerable self in order to make art but also asks casting directors, agents, and critics to place a value on your raw, naked self. Also, there aren’t a lot of jobs. Totally! Acting is difficult, but I also think that the all in or bust model is outdated and ultimately does not help a young person fully expand into their unique self. It denies the actor’s identity as an entrepreneur, as a family member, and as a complex artist with multiple channels available for expression. All in or bust sets you up for a single path towards success, but that path does not work for every person, and as we’ve seen in the last few months the path can quickly disappear. 

Let me clarify: I’m all in for you following your dreams. Please do add “make Broadway debut” and “star in episodic” to your vision board, but what happens when Broadway shuts down for a year? What happens when the TV industry isn’t making space for your gifts? Well, here’s what I don’t want to happen: I don’t want you to quit because your career doesn’t currently look like you had planned five years ago. I don’t want you to quit because your career doesn’t look like somebody else’s. I don’t want you to devalue yourself or dim your brilliance. My advice to you: Don’t quit, but do re-define what it is that you were thinking about quitting in the first place. Broaden your identity from actor to artist,then figure out how you (unique and glorious YOU) can be that. 

There isn’t one right way to frame a portfolio of artistic pursuits. (Have you figured out that no single right way is a personal favorite of mine?). You might spend time crafting an artist’s statement or a values list that provides clues as to how you want to spend your time and energy. You might come up with an umbrella theme or line of inquiry. You can try on identities and collect those that are true to you and support your mission and reject those that don’t serve you in this moment. 

I am an artist. That can be broken down into actor, educator, and communications specialist, and further broken down into theatre actor, on-camera actor, voiceover artist, classroom teacher, teaching artist, drama teacher, dance teacher, writing tutor, corporate trainer, corporate presenter, and speech coach. Through all of these jobs, I’ve found a web of interconnected ways to work that help me explore my changing lines of artistic inquiry. How do we strive toward clarity and specificity in expression? How is an individual able to reveal their unique point of view in service of an ensemble or greater community? These guiding questions help me when I’m designing curriculum for a preschool ballet class and they help me when I’m coaching a sales representative on how to make connections with customers. 

In cataloguing the actors I know who work a great deal in theatre and film, I find a career coach, an event planner, a sommelier, a home stager, a web designer and video editor, and multiple arts organization administrators and fundraisers. Of these people, none of them refer to their non-traditional acting work as a 9-to-5 or a survival job because that’s not what it is to them. They are artists who have been able to find a wide array of channels for their creativity.

It is certainly a challenging time to explore how you want to relate to the world as an artist when many of the aforementioned channels for creativity have been temporarily shut off or limited. I was watching a webinar recently in which an actor expressed fear about aging out of certain parts that she wanted to play before the pandemic is over and another actor discussed his grief at losing all of the positive momentum he had gained before productions shut down. For actors, there was so little in our control before the pandemic and now there’s even less. It stinks and I’m sorry.

In pondering what I can control right now, I’ve been thinking a great deal about starting at the end of my now. Educators will be familiar with backwards design, the approach to curriculum creation that asks teachers to consider desired learning outcomes first and then work backwards to choose instructional methods. Similarly, many theatre artists are familiar with the text Backwards & Forwards, which teaches you how to read a play starting at the end and working backwards to understand how it can be shaped onstage. As a classroom drama teacher who had to transfer my instruction to the remote sphere, my goals for my students didn’t change, but the instructional methods certainly did. As a theatre artist, perhaps performing in stageplays is your endgame, but I encourage you to find a deeper objective. Why do you want to do theatre in the first place and how do you fulfill that desire right now? Art is still happening, so how are you going to go about exploring the human condition even when we can’t gather in the same room?

So many questions, so few answers, but I would like to leave you with two things:

• This interview of Anthony Hopkins conducted by Brad Pitt. Did you know they are both visual artists? Read on.
• Daniel Tiger’s “You Can Be More Than One Thing”

Keep creating! You got this!

From Bill:

What am I going to do now? That is a question that has frequently occupied my mind since I played my last live, in-person concert on February 29th in Berkeley, California. I have spent most of my adult life building a unique career in music that, in turn, has shaped my life – where I’ve lived, where I’ve traveled, who I’ve collaborated with. In the past few years, it was not uncommon for me to spend somewhere between a third to half of the year on the road. I left a university teaching position I had occupied for two years and turned down another tenure-track teaching position that was offered to me. Instead, I spent the next year traveling from gig to gig, not even needing to pay rent. Now, there are no gigs. What am I going to do now?

My portfolio career began to develop organically during my undergraduate studies. A breakthrough moment playing a piece by Xenakis in the new music ensemble opened my eyes and ears to the existence of sound worlds previously unknown to me. Enthusiastically embracing these sound worlds led to collaboration with so many inspiring musicians and composers, many of whom I am fortunate enough to call my friends and colleagues today. Alarm Will Sound, Splinter Reeds, Deviant Septet, Oakland Symphony, IRIS Orchestra, New Hampshire Music Festival – these are a few of my musical homes. They are places that embrace adaptability and musical openness. I am happiest when playing live music with these folks and others in as many different scenarios as possible. But now, how do we play live music together? What are we going to do now?

We’re going to figure out ways to continue sharing music with whomever will listen to us. We are digging through our archives to find music to share with our followers. We are creating silly music videos that we had been talking about making for years but now finally have the time to do so. We are attempting to raise money so that we can continue to commission works from people whose work we admire. We are figuring out how to get every member of an 18-person band set up at home with decent audio gear and attempting to play music together, in real time. As someone who is technologically averse, absent on social media, and dislikes looking at screens, making music during Covid times has been challenging for me. I will continue to try to adapt. I know that I can rely on my collaborators to push me in the right direction.

On May 17th, my wife and I welcomed our daughter Amelia into the world. She is our first child and has made these few months in lockdown not just bearable, but incredibly enjoyable. Being stuck at home with nothing else to do is probably the best time to have a newborn. Life has slowed down and become much simpler. Having the space to focus solely on life’s essentials is a joy. For instance, not traveling to play in a festival in July means being able to tend to the garden in the backyard. Doing some volunteer work in the past few weeks has me thinking about ways to become more involved in the community where I live. What am I going to do now? In actuality, that question has always occupied my mind; it has shaped the career which has shaped my life. So I will continue to do what I have always tried to do: see what the future has in store for us, adapt as needed, and move forward with lots of help from my friends.

Want to hear more?

Join Katherine, Bill, and the University of Michigan EXCEL Lab on Zoom this Wednesday, July 29 at 3:00PM EDT. This conversational session will delve into their posts in greater depth, providing a chance for participants to ask questions and engage with these authors in real time.

About the Author

Currently serving as Composer-in-Residence with the storied Philadelphia Orchestra and included in the Washington Post’s list of the 35 most significant women composers in history, identity has always been at the center of composer/pianist Gabriela Lena Frank‘s music. Born in Berkeley, California (September, 1972), to a mother of mixed Peruvian/Chinese ancestry and a father of Lithuanian/Jewish descent, Gabriela explores her multicultural American heritage through her compositions. In 2017, Gabriela founded the award-winning Gabriela Lena Frank Creative Academy of Music, a non-profit training institution held on her two rural properties in Boonville, CA for emerging composers from a vast array of demographics and aesthetics.

It began in a practice room

If ever there was a time for social activism, this would be it: Thus far, 2020 has birthed a planet-wide pandemic, cataclysmic economic decline, and a chilling reckoning with historically-embedded racial violence. In my native California, we also face a predicted worse-than-usual fire season, already made hellish these past three years from climate crisis which ominously predicts more pandemics in the future.  

Yet, it wasn’t until last week when my husband and I buried Beau, our canine companion and surrogate son of eleven years, that I finally lost it. Digging a spot on our mountainous property and burying our gentle giant, a golden-hued Pyrenees mix with an impossibly worried brow, I cried so much that I gave myself hives. At my age, that’s a particularly demoralizing first. And one that somehow elicited a weak chuckle: Now 2020 is taking our boy, too. What else can go wrong?  

While embers may burn in our civic psyche, it may take large and unmistakable events symptomatic of unbelievable times to stir one to change life habits. I am seeing this in beloved friends, spurred by recent social unrest, chagrined to realize how indebted their safety and overall good fortune are to white privilege set at our nation’s founding. When inequity hums along at an insidiously quieter pace, however, and criminality is not in plain view, social activism may, too, burn privately, witnessed only by a few.  

My first day as a freshman music composition major proved that to me with an early painful lesson that seared into my soul. I was seventeen, blessed to enroll at a music conservatory, having only discovered that such institutions even existed the year before. Thrilled, I spent the morning wandering the practice halls of a brand new state-of-the-art building (They built this just for me!) before selecting a room with a Steinway and a view. After warming up, I placed Ravel’s Jeux d’eau on the stand, beginning on page three with the perilously wide black-note arpeggios that only flow if anchored by a relaxed thumb.  

I was mesmerized, so much so that when the door flew open to reveal a scolding faculty piano professor, my brain wasn’t able to immediately skip track —“What are you doing here? What are you doing on that instrument? I’ll be talking to your supervisor!”  Dumbfounded, I realized he’d seen me through the small window in the door, and mistook me for cleaning staff, one of the largely Mexican workers who flitted in the backdrop of the school as shadows. My skin color and build has always carried the imprint of Latin America, from which my mother hails, and which didn’t pass the professor’s litmus test for inclusion.  

I was calm. And I explained. He apologized, angry. I thought, And would it be so bad if I were indeed a cleaning lady, enchanted by the instrument?  

Decades have passed since that initiation by fire when I learned that simply by existing, I might be a phenomenon. It took some years to realize that by moving beyond existing to excelling, I was doing the work of activism, rare as Latinas were who brought their heritage into a western classical canon while, say, quietly volunteering at a men’s prison with a considerable Latino population. Yet more years passed before I learned that widely impactful activism, affecting people beyond my small sphere, meant doing the work on as public a stage as possible, and, crucially, paying it forward to other artist-citizens — Three years ago, I formed a music academy that supports emerging composers from a vast array of demographics and aesthetics while offering an urgently healthier way to approach Mother Earth. It has been a transformative experience, more than equal to my professional successes.  

Activism, for me? It began in a practice room and stretches into 2020, a simply unbelievable year, one for the history books. My internal compass tells me the work isn’t done (Why, you think struggle is for the past?) and as I’ve stepped into the second half of my life, I’m resolved to retain my humor and joy through it all. It is the best possible work, and I wouldn’t have it any other way. 

Gabriela Lena Frank, July 7, 2020

Want to hear more?

Join Gabriela this Thursday, July 23 from 3:00-4:00PM EDT via Zoom.This conversational session will delve into her post in greater depth, providing a chance for participants to ask questions and engage with the author in real time.

About the Authors:

Omari Rush has engaged the arts as both a passion and profession, and in each mode, he continues to enjoy discovery and deepening impacts. As executive director of CultureSource in Detroit and as the governor-appointed chairman of the Michigan Council for Arts and Cultural Affairs, he advances efforts to have creative and cultural expression thrive in diverse communities. Complementing that work, Omari is a board member of Arts Midwest in Minneapolis and both the National Assembly of State Arts Agencies and the Association of Performing Arts Professionals in Washington, D.C.

Laura Zabel is the Executive Director of Springboard for the Arts, an economic and community development agency run by and for artists. Springboard provides programs that help artists make a living and a life, and programs that help communities connect to the creative power of artists. Springboard is a nationally recognized leader in artist-led community development, creative placemaking and cross-sector collaboration. Springboard’s work has been featured by the New York Times, PBS, Wall Street Journal, Stanford Social Innovation Review and The Guardian and directly impacts over 25,000 artists each year in their home state of Minnesota. Through their free toolkits, training and resources Springboard’s programs have been replicated in over 80 communities across the U.S. and internationally. Zabel has been honored with numerous awards, including the YBCA 100, Gard Foundation Award of Excellence, Common Future Local Economy Fellowship and the Bush Foundation Leadership Fellowship. Zabel is on the board of directors of the Metropolitan Consortium of Community Developers and serves as an advisor to Dakota Resources, The Laundromat Project, Local Initiatives Support Corporation and the University of Kansas Department of Theater and Dance.  

From Omari:

What is happening?

In an environment as volatile as ours right now, this reflection question has been an essential starting place for much of my strategic action in the past four months. As I have processed this question with peers, mentors, and partners, our responses have been cartographic, illuminating in real time a landscape that is requiring new levels of adaptation to navigate.

COVID-19 has been a society-quaking event: the structural integrity of institutions has been compromised, lives and livelihoods have been lost, and tools for resuscitation and repair are limited. As an arts service organization, CultureSource is committed—especially amid this tragedy and destruction—to doing our work to advance creative and cultural expression. And as the organization’s executive director, I think of myself less as leading through crisis and more learning through crisis, constantly asking questions—including, What is happening?—and supporting our team in generating multiple answers and multiple actions.

Despite the exhausting process of living in and working through the current environment, my inspiration is surging. I see incredible opportunity for progress in relatively short amounts of time given spiking tolerance for change, sharing, experimentation, unity, and investment. As time is compressed in this crisis, we skip over some of the careful and risk-averse courting and jump right into the messy work. It is both an energizing and unnerving period. 

Below are three of the ideas I’m using this time to process and act on:

Expanding the inclusivity of arts and culture

Our field has been full of traditional or expert-created borders, antithetical to the creative spirt of our work, and the quakes of COVID have been revelatory in showing who is in and out, who has access and who doesn’t. The hard lines must be erased.

Being and artist should not be a luxury

One of many effects of social stratification and widening income inequality is that it is exceedingly difficult to dedicate one’s life to artistic pursuits. A personally memorable scene with Lauryn Hill from Sister Act Two highlights the either-or decisions facing families with budding creatives. Being creative in our society should be an aspiration, not a risk.

Digital organizational and audience development

Using digital platforms for the creation and distribution of art has been thrust into mainstream artistic practices of organizations and artists working to survive the COVID crisis without access to physical venues for audience connection. There now exists a need to offer support to adapt to new paradigms of art presentation and simultaneously support audiences in their awareness and engagement of those digital resources.

While COVID-19 pervades most decision making now, the economic recession, systemic and pandemic racism, and census 2020 undercounts all hang in the air and sit on our shoulders as worrisome forces that call on me—and I hope you—to continue asking, What is happening?, and then getting to the  good, hard work of responding. No answers, just learning and doing.

From Laura:

The last three months have been the most intense and complicated of my entire professional life. We have found ourselves living through and responding to multiple connected and compounding crises. A global health crises in the form of a pandemic; a national economic crisis that exposes systemic gaps and threatens the livelihoods of culture workers; a national call to reckon with our racist systems and the reality that our country is built on stolen land by stolen people; and the local murder of a Black man by police in Minneapolis and the anger and grief and destruction that resulted. 

Springboard for the Arts is a 25 year old nonprofit organization that builds systems of support and value for artists and creative workers. Our work is rooted in the idea of creative people power. We know creativity and culture will be necessary ingredients for a just and equitable recovery. In the last three months we have raised and distributed over a million dollars to over 2,000 artists in Minnesota in emergency relief funds; we’ve shared a toolkit and helped emergency relief funds get started across the country; we’ve hosted community painting days for Black artists in our neighborhood to tell their own stories of anger, hope and grief; and every day we’re helping people navigate unemployment, legal, healthcare and other resources. 

What I’ve learned from these and other emergencies is that the only way through crisis is to be as useful as possible. Focusing on how to make our work relevant to this moment is both what is necessary to fulfill our mission and the only path towards sustainability. Like everything hard, there will also be opportunities in this challenge. I’m learning more each day about what it means to meet this moment with our work, so I’m sure this list will grow and change, but today, here are a few of things that we’ve learned about how to make work to address multiple crises at once:

Know your principles and priorities ahead of time. An organizations’ values and principles should be a guiding force in the best of times. In a crisis, they are essential. All of what we’ve been able to build in the last 3 months rests on the deep and shared understanding of our guiding principles. In the early days of the crises these principles acted like a kind of muscle memory, helping us jump into action, adapt to new ways of working and communicate clearly even before any of us understood exactly the challenges we were facing. 

Use your existing structures where possible to do new things. We already have systems and structures – both administrative and programmatic—imagining how you can repurpose these systems around new challenges saves time and helps you lean in to the places where you are best suited to make change. Like the many stories of costume shops making masks and other PPE, Springboard was able to quickly repurpose and expand our existing emergency relief fund program to scale to meet a new emergency. 

Communicate often – internally and externally. Even as much as we had existing principles and structures to work from, we found we needed to check in a lot to keep things moving and changing at a pace that could meet the moment. Especially right now, when in person communication isn’t possible, our scheduled and impromptu zoom sessions help us talk through challenges, incorporate feedback and share the heaviness of holding people’s trauma. We’ve also found that external storytelling is vital – helping to make sure that people understand the impact of a crisis on your community is crucial to attracting support and finding the right partners.

Build and change while you go. (don’t do a survey.) Please don’t do a survey. You can gather information and provide services at the same time. Think about how to build simple data collection into programs. The persistent culture that tells us we need to know everything before we start doing something (or that if we just had the right data we’d be credible) is irrelevant in a crisis (and probably all the time.) We’ve focused on building the systems we need in real time, while people are using them, which ensures that what we’re building is useful and relevant.

Support the people doing the work. Taking care of the artists who make up the staff at Springboard is always fundamental and it’s extra important right now. The work we are doing is practical – about healthcare, emergency support, unemployment, business planning, but it is also very personal and the staff has to be able to manage and hold people’s fear, uncertainty, anger, and grief for their livelihoods, for their communities, for their work. We can’t do that unless we take care of ourselves. 

We’re still learning and changing every day. We know creativity and culture will be necessary ingredients for a just and equitable recovery. It is clear that our systems don’t need to be fixed, they need to be wholly reimagined and to do that we will need the world building, collaboration, cultural relevance and meaning making that artists can provide.

Want to hear more?

Join Omari & Laura this Wednesday, July 15th at 3:00PM EDT via Zoom. This conversational session will delve into their posts in greater depth, providing a chance for participants to ask questions and engage with these authors in real time.