Can arts and culture make waves with ‘Ripple Effect’?

The U.S. arts-and-culture sector has been searching for a long time for the most effective way to tell its own story – the story that will finally and reliably convince Americans that arts and culture matter tremendously to our society, provide real benefits for everyone and deserve to be nurtured and taught, practiced and promoted and, above all, financially supported.

How can the Joe Six-Packs and soccer moms of the 50 states be persuaded to care about cultural enrichment so much that they’ll write checks and vote for more taxes?

Opinions on that have changed over the decades. In the 1960s, arts and culture were perceived and/or positioned to represent the values of great European civilizations American G.I.s had seen first-hand in World War II and the Great Society they hoped to build at home: They were the marks of a gifted, prosperous and benevolent people. Over the next 40 years, as the pendulum of political and economic reality has swung between closed minds and tight fists on the one extreme and orgiastic abandon with money and self-expression on the other, arts and culture have gone from extolling their effects on soul, spirit and status to emphasizing their impacts on economic development and students’ academic success. 

The latter arguments have been working pretty well in some communities lately, especially with civic leaders and elected officials desperate to help their cities survive the current recession and the larger transition to high-tech knowledge economies requiring trained creative workforces.  But those arguments are rather complicated – and the general public doesn’t respond to complicated terribly well.  What it responds to is the likes of “Eat Mor Chikin.”  

So now the Fine Arts Fund in Cincinnati, Ohio, believes it has discovered a simpler and better message for arts and culture – one that will make the difference with its own community and others. A study the fund released Monday finds that the phrase “Ripple Effect” best and most vividly conveys to the general public the idea of benefits spreading from arts and culture to everybody. In addition, it finds that two specific kinds of good effects prove most inspiring to members of the public and most likely to elicit their financial support for arts and culture. First: that vibrant, activity-filled neighborhoods result from arts and culture. Second: that arts and culture can connect and bring together a community’s diverse residents. 

The study closely resembles a business-branding process. It used focus groups of diverse area residents to test what arts benefits and catch-phrases captured people’s imaginations, gave them the message that arts and culture make their community better, and fired enthusiasm about “sharing responsibility” (i.e. financially supporting) arts and culture.

” ‘Ripple effect’ is a kind of shorthand – people have a common understanding of what that is,” said Margy Waller, vice president/arts & culture partnership for the Fine Arts Fund. “It’s a way of starting a conversation with them. People get very excited about it.”

The two particular ripples that move them to take action on behalf of the arts? Connectivity among people and vibrant neighborhoods.  These imply a kind of economic benefit – the benefit of neighborhoods where there’s a lot of good, engaging activity going on among residents and visitors- but they don’t stress dollars-and-cents issues or training and educational outcomes. That’s because those issues tended to elicit undesirable responses from the focus groups, the report explains: Pitching educational benefits led people to zero in on the needs of children, not the  broader community, while the topic of economic development resulted in people thinking about other economic factors, such as jobs  and natural resources, that they believed were more important than the arts.

The study concludes that the “Ripple Effect” concept has the power to reorient people’s perceptions of arts and culture, that it “positions arts and culture as a public good – a communal interest in which all have a stake – and provides a clearer picture of the kinds of events, activities and institutions that we are talking about.”  Once the two specific ripples of vibrant neighborhood and connected residents have enlisted people’s enthusiasm and active support of arts and culture, then the community conversation can expand to include other arts-related benefits, Waller said.  

 The study may represent the first time anyone has scientifically applied a standard business-branding process to arts advocacy. But arts advocacy has long embraced the very similar processes of political and advertising campaigns in trying to get legislation passed, tax issues approved and candidates elected.

What’s at all new about the “Ripple Effect” seems to be the specific tweak given to the arts-and-public-benefit argument. And whether the study’s conclusions are borne out or not will depend on how the Fine Arts Fund and other cultural groups put that tweaked message to use, said Tom Schorgl, president and CEO of the Community Partnership for Arts and Culture in Cleveland, Ohio. 

Questions such as where the ripple message will be aimed geographically within Cincinnati, what kinds of neighborhoods will be targeted, and what success will look like need to be answered before the ripple concept can be called effective and useful, Schorgl said.

Americans for the Arts, the national service organization for the arts and culture sector which has been following the development of the study, will likely help get word out about it by providing information to Americans for the Arts members, said Mara Walker, the organization’s chief operating officer. In trying to get people to recognize the value of the arts, she added, “you need as many arguments in your pocket as possible.”

That means the way to reach community leaders about arts and culture may still be through economic development and education, even if the “Ripple Effect” ends up favorably influencing the general public. Because which argument works best, Walker said, really depends on who you’re talking to.

Mek Mor Rippuls

Vacant properties + artists = creative land use in Cleveland

I was working at the From Rust Belt to Artist Belt II summit in Cleveland, Ohio, on Friday when some exciting action broke through the flow of talk. 

Amid the two-day discussion among artists, community developers, arts agencies and funders from around the country about how to transform aging industrial cities to vibrant arts communities, a three-partner collaboration was announced: The Cuyahoga County Land Reutilization Corporation (or Land Bank) will work with the nonprofit Community Partnership for Arts and Culture  (CPAC) and Village Capital Corporation, a community-development loan organization,  to provide artists with low-cost properties for live-work spaces. 

The collaboration’s overall goal appears to be having the Land Bank, a new county venture headed by County Treasurer Jim Rokakis,  make a number of the foreclosed and/or abandoned properties it receives available to artists, who would be chosen through a process that CPAC would help develop. Village Capital would provide financing to the artists for house purchases. Tom Schorgl, who heads CPAC, said during the announcement that he estimates the purchase program will take six to nine months to create and be a national model. 

There aren’t many details yet and since I was at the summit as an independent contractor for CPAC (which organized the event) and was helping chronicle panel discussions for its archives, it wasn’t my place to ask journalistic questions. But you can find out more about the organizations involved by clicking on the links above. Also, learn about the successful and precedent-setting property-purchase program in Paducah, Ky., that will no doubt be one of the models for the Cuyahogy County program.

Saving Detroit creatively

TIME magazine has a great story this week about Detroit trying to reimagine itself as a smaller, greener city with gardens and urban farming where dense neighborhoods used to be before the auto industry started dwindling decades ago.

Those interested in the revitalization of post-industrial cities, especially in the U. S. Rust Belt, should read the part about scores of artists taking over the Russell Industrial Center’s one million square feet of  vacant, decaying space and starting to give the structure new life.  It’s another vivid example of the power artists have to redevelop troubled communities if they’re encouraged to take over abandoned buildings, generate economic activity and fuel community spirit.

For more information and stories about the role of artists and other creative people as urban rescuers, read the executive summary of From Rust Belt to Artist Belt, a white paper issued by Cleveland’s Community Partnership for Arts and Culture following its May 14, 2008 symposium of the same name, which drew experts in arts and community development from around the nation. For the full report, go to www.cpacbiz.org.

Detroit’s Russell Industrial Center

Some facts about the arts’ effect on the economy

An interesting comment was posted here over the weekend. The writer said he used to work for a consulting firm that assisted the National Endowment for the Arts in the 1970s. He observed, “Bureaucratically funded arts endeavors remove dollars from the economy they [sic] do not add tax revenue directly.”

Wow. Where to begin? Well first, a little back story: On Friday, I posted a press release from the office of U.S. Rep. George Miller (D-Calif.), chairman of the House Education and Labor Committee, stating that  the Congressman planned to hold hearings this spring on the economic and educational value of the arts. Miller’s staff has promised to forward to the Congressman some questions I e-mailed that afternoon in regard to these hearings; in the interim, I’m guessing that Miller’s decision to hold the hearings may be a reaction to the apparent elimination of some arts- and culture-related businesses from the list of those to be supported by the national stimulus package currently being considered by the U. S. Senate. Perhaps he’s interested in giving citizens, or at least his fellow elected officials, an accurate picture of the effects that arts have on learning and the economic health of communities.

But even if his intent is something completely different from that, the fact remains that the arts do have measurable effects on both education and the economy. 

Perhaps the commenter doesn’t realize that not all arts businesses are nonprofit. Broadway productions, the popular-music industry, most of the film industry, art galleries and auction houses, publishing houses, commercial and journalistic photography, graphic design - all these and more are for-profit, and immensely profitable they are, too.  

Perhaps he also doesn’t realize that even nonprofit arts organizations have a tremendous effect on local, regional and national economies through both direct and indirect economic impact. Like for-profits, nonprofits employ people and buy local services and products. They generate tourism, drawing visitors who not only buy tickets and paintings, but also pay for hotel rooms, parking, meals, drinks, souvenirs and other goods. Local residents buy many of those same things because of the arts; they also hire babysitters. 

In addition, excellent arts and cultural amenities help cities attract new businesses and help established businesses attract new employees.  

In the Cleveland area of Ohio, arts and culture generate over $1 billion annually in direct and indirect economic impact.  (Community Partnership for Arts and Culture, Northeast Ohio Arts and Culture Plan, May 2000). Nationally, they generate $166.2 billion in economic activity, support 5.7 million jobs and create $30 billion in government revenue – and that’s just the nonprofits. For every $1 billion of that arts and culture spending, nearly 70,000 full-time-equivalent jobs result. (Americans for the Arts, Economic Recovery & The Arts). 

(The Cleveland Clinic is a nonprofit organization. Think it has no effect on the local – and national - economy?)      

 I won’t even go into the educational benefits of the arts here, but I hinted at the basics in my Feb. 5 post about ways that President Obama can promote American creativity.    

As the purpose of the national economic-stimulus package is not solely to generate tax revenue, anyway, but to help fund obvious economic sine qua nons such as education and to keep operational industries that employ people and provide needed products and services, I find it pretty bizarre of anyone to assert that arts and culture have no place in it.

It’s one of the most deeply ingrained and egregiously wrong myths of American society that the arts are a burden on the economy. The truth is that the arts are a large and vital part of the economy on all levels and that they enhance the educations on which our success as a nation ultimately depends.

How Obama can help America create a better civilization

The most important word in that title? ”Create.” It’s the key to our success. And the United States needs to be more successful in many ways.

That’s why at this moment – with a president in office who embodies the nation’s new attitude toward difference and change – I think America is, at long last, ready to begin the creative revolution it must go through to become the thriving, peaceful, stimulating, wise, caring and accomplished society that its citizens have always hoped it would turn out to be. 

I call it a revolution because a culture of creativity will turn the U.S. completely around, away from narrow, outmoded perspectives and failed ways of operating and toward a broader view that encourages people in every field of endeavor to imagine and experiment, discuss and collaborate – and then innovate. When we can embrace fresh ideas and support each other’s efforts, we will be able to solve a lot more of our problems.

How can President Obama lead us through this fundamental makeover? Americans for the Arts has made official recommendations to the new administration; what follow are the suggestions of other arts leaders, as well as some of my own. 

Education. As with any lasting change, education matters most.  But our educational system itself – what it teaches and how it teaches - desperately needs the same transformation as the rest of our culture. So it must be both the agent and the subject of change.

Like the military-style, 19th-century factories and workforces on which they were modeled, U.S. public schools still aim to turn out masses of identical products through a rote process. They largely emphasize conformity and uniformity - children stand in line, sit in rows, raise their hands to speak and are made to repress their natural inclinations to move around, explore and question.  They generally learn identical lessons in large groups, take identical standardized tests and are often strongly discouraged from deviating in any way from a predetermined norm. 

That may have been effective learning in an age when most people ended up working on assembly lines for rigidly structured corporations, but it doesn’t prepare today’s students for the flexible and adventurous thinking demanded by our 21st-century’information and service economy, where competition requires constant  reinvention of complex processes and products.  Even more important, a tool-and-die schooling makes most people bored, restless and miserable.

Our system ignores “the fundamental truth about how young people learn,” says Steven Tepper, associate director of The Curb Center for Art, Enterprise, and Public Policy at Vanderbilt University.  “Clearly, refocusing U.S. education around creativity and creative engagement is central” to improving educational results.  

Studies, including the RAND Corporation’s significant 2004 Gifts of the Muse report, have shown that creative teaching methods and creative subjects help people learn better, enjoy themselves more, stay in school longer and develop the creative skills they need to lead successful, productive lives including, but not limited to, better employment. Creative disciplines such as the arts can provide the inspiration, stimulus and opportunities for discovery and self-expression that students often miss in standard curricula. Arts-related teaching methods - movement, building, illustration, composition, acting a role – can also help students better understand the concepts of their academic subjects.

In just one example cited by the Cleveland-based Community Partnership for Arts and Culture (CPAC), young people attending Cleveland’s School of the Arts  – part of an extremely troubled public-school system – last year scored higher than Ohio statewide averages in eight types of Ohio proficiency tests; 100 percent of them passed their Ohio graduation tests. (Full disclosure: I work with CPAC as a free-lance writer and editor.) 

America needs more arts in its schools and more creative teaching methods. We also need better teachers.  Here’s what Obama could do to help:

•  As Robert Lynch of Americans for the Arts suggests, create a Secretary of Arts and Culture position, or the equivalent, to oversee and coordinate U.S. arts and creativity policy and initiatives
• Direct that official to work with the U.S. Department of Education on a task force to develop what Tepper sees as needed curriculum standards for creative instruction, to give state education departments guidelines for what methods to use, what to achieve and how to measure success 
• Fund and foster teacher training in creative classroom methods through community consortiums of arts, science, technology and arts-education organizations similar to Cleveland’s annual Summer Teacher Institute  
• Encourage, through Department of Education funding for teacher salary enhancements, the abandonment of tenure and the adoption of merit-based pay determined by administrative, peer, parent and student review 
• Establish an Artists Corps, as Lynch recommends, to provide jobs and job-training to artists of all ages in the effort to improve America’s infrastructure – but make it one section of a permanent  Service Corps offering environmental, technological, educational and entrepreneurial services to communities, and jobs and job-training for retirees, students between high school graduation and college enrollment and adults in career or life transitions in need or desire of employment, new skills or contributing to society. Coordinate the different sections’ initiatives to encourage collaborative programs, such as having artists and environmental workers provide creative and green-practices training to businesses

Which brings us to the next area of change …

Organizational culture. Like our schools, our other organizations – from bureaus and agencies to companies and unions - tend be structured like the  Army: highly regimented, top-down outfits with their own strict class systems, ingrained operational methods and culture of absolute power at the top and absolute obedience everywhere else.

The Army is not known for its creativity. Neither is the Navy, where insiders describe their institution as “over 200 years of tradition unimpeded by progress.”  But they have missions vastly different from civilian groups, which must use the imagination and knowledge resources of all their members or risk being ineffective, inefficient, outmoded and – in the case of business enterprises – uncompetitive and eventually bankrupt. 

If American education becomes more creative and sends more inventive, unrepressed people into the world, chances are that our other organizational structures will change, too. But with all this bailout money being handed to dangerously flawed corporations and the president reevaluating the usefulness of government entities and programs, now seems a good time for Obama to urge some new organizational creativity by:

• Making a bailout contingent on the internal restructuring of receiving companies, to allow greater employee input, eliminate reprisals against whistleblowers and create transparency in communications and reporting
• Ditto for government departments and agencies, which can be made more creative and open while being streamlined to reduce spending and waste 
• Making creativity a goal for all government departments by directing them to work with the new Secretary for Arts and Culture and/or an expanded National Endowment for the Arts on incorporating arts, design and cultural heritage components into U.S. transportation infrastructure, health and human services programs and education, as Americans for the Arts director Lynch and CPAC president Tom Schorgl recommend (for more on the NEA, see Matt Charboneau’s Geniocity blog)
• Capitalizing on the unions’ delight at being included in the national agenda once more by urging a creative modernization of their missions and rules, especially as regards teacher tenure and arts unions’ restrictions on the ways their members’ work can be used. Theater companies, for instance, would be able to support themselves more effectively if Actors Equity Association permitted to them record their own professional stage performances for sale as CDs and DVDs       

Which leads to a final creative area …

Entrepreneurship. This country will never get anywhere if creative individuals and their endeavors don’t get more support of all kinds. As things stand now, people with ideas that will innovate society and the economy face a desperate struggle to get noticed and encouraged with advice, seed money and start-up resources. Whether they’re one-person projects, nonprofit organizations or for-profits, smaller enterprises generate billions of dollars in economic impact, create jobs, provide needed services and products and inject fresh energy and ideas into communities. But only if they don’t die a-borning.

To help, Obama should:

• Encourage public-private partnerships among banks, credit unions, foundations, industry associations and private investors to seek out creatively promising individuals and embryonic projects and provide them with grants, loans, mentoring, resources or combinations of all four. These services should not be open to the high-growth-potential tech start-ups exclusively favored by venture capitalists and incubators (See Will Limkemann’s Geniocity blog for more on this)
• Change any tax restrictions preventing nonprofits, including arts groups, from supporting themselves by selling products derived from, or related to, their own work and missions
• Support revisions to intellectual property law, especially copyrights, which can discourage creativity by preventing entrepreneurs, artists and others from sharing ideas and work, Tepper suggests (See Peter Friedman’s Geniocity blog for more on this)
• And because creativity depends on the even bigger and wider flow of ideas that comes from intermixing peoples, Tepper says, change American immigration policy to permit greater freedom of cultural exchange and increase entrepreneurship

We and our president have a big job ahead of us, revolutionizing America. It’ll be hard. But because it’s creative, it’ll be fun, too.