Member Reports

As a program officer at The San Francisco Foundation, I say “No” to artists and arts organizations daily. I try to soften the blow, detailing the reality of limited resources and an overabundance of projects, seldom discussing quality or appropriateness, thinking I am kinder in vagueness.

“What are we doing to cultivate new generations of arts activists—artists, arts managers and arts philanthropers?” This question—often asked and long massaged—has an equal number of answers to the individuals attempting to answer it. Under the broader umbrella of inspiring young people to make a difference—through the arts or otherwise—Do Something is an organization that is effectively answering that question with meaningful action.

Founded in 2003 by GRAMMY Award-winning songwriter and producer Dallas Austin, the Dallas Austin Foundation, Inc. (DAF) aims to transform the lives of young people by enriching their educational experiences through the use of music and film.

Working at a busy foundation involves a lot of reading and listening to smart people who are working hard to improve the world we live in. One thing comes across loud and clear: how little value added is being contemporaneously realized from the definitional leaps of our unsustainably complex verbiage.

In other words, it's time for us nonprofit people to learn to MAKE IT PLAIN.

If you want encouragement about the future of music, spend some time around youth orchestras. I had a wonderful experience in Great Falls, Montana. For two one-week residencies every year, the extraordinarily generous violinist Midori immerses herself in a small community (for which she dramatically reduces her fee, by the way), performing on its orchestra's subscription concert, and working with that orchestra's affiliated youth orchestra. She also visits schools and coaches chamber music, spending so much time with so many young musicians that one feels there must be two of her.

In June 2007, the Broward Cultural Division and the local arts incubator, ArtServe, Inc., implemented the first "The Artist as an Entrepreneur Institute" (AEI) in South Florida. Presented on four consecutive Saturdays, the AEI offered eighteen classes during three full-day sessions and an extra half-day Business Plan Clinic on the final Saturday.

When Kathy Freshley (The Meyer Foundation), Marian Godfrey (The Pew Charitable Trusts), and Janet Sarbaugh (Heinz Endowments) planned a roundtable discussion, "General Operating Support: Making It Strategic," for GIA's 2006 annual conference in Boston they imagined that they would greet a small, if passionate, group of familiar GIA members that Wednesday at 8 a.m. Instead, the session turned out to be one of the conference's true dark-horse surprises. Over fifty people showed up!

In the Reader last issue I reported on the Cleveland Foundation's decade-long effort (in partnership with other area funders, cultural institutions, and the Community Partnership for Arts and Culture) to make the case for local public support for the arts here. At the GIA conference last November, anyone within shouting distance of those of us from Cleveland must have heard that we were suc-cessful. The grins on our faces lit up the host celebration that first night.