By Simon Mallett, Rozsa Foundation Executive Director
A couple of newsletters ago, I shared a couple of my key takeaways from my time in Banff in March attending the Cultural Leadership Forum. Immediately following the Forum was the Canadian Arts Summit, presented by Business/Arts. While I’ve attended bits and pieces of the Summit before, this was my first time attending the event in its entirety. I was grateful to B/A for the invite and for being asked to sit on a panel about approaches to new business models. I took a lot of notes over the three days and wanted to highlight some recurring themes and conversations I heard.I’ve appreciated the feedback, dialogue and outreach we received following the reflections on the Forum, and I hope that these reflections resonate for you as well. As always, I’d love to hear your comments and reflections.
Additional reflections, including a summary report on the Summit, is also available on Business/Arts website at https://www.businessandarts.org/blog/2024summit/ so check that out for an even deeper dive.
We Need Alignment in Advocacy
The importance of advocacy for arts funding was front-of-mind for many at the Summit. The recent success of advocacy efforts in Alberta in securing an increase of government funding to the Alberta Foundation for the Arts was a hot topic of discussion and was brought into even clearer focus when the timing of the Government of Alberta’s announcement of their support for the Arts Commons Transformation project aligned with the Summit. The Chair of the Board of Business/Arts, Robert Foster, spoke at the Summit’s opening about the need for stronger advocacy for the arts nationally, a message that was further amplified when Canada Council CEO Michelle Chawla addressed the attendees, and later sessions discussed advocacy for arts funding in great detail as well.
There seems to be consensus that next year’s federal election and the strong possibility of a change in government has intensified anxiety around how arts funding is viewed by the federal order of government, and that the need for immediate advocacy is critical to bring support for the arts into focus ahead of the election campaign. However, that consensus quickly falls apart when the conversation moves from the theoretical to the practical. Sure, we can agree that advocacy for strong funding is important, but what exactly are we advocating for?
Given that the recent Alberta advocacy example, which was centered around a collective ask embracing the notion that a rising tide lifts all ships, had a positive outcome, the easy answer might be to build a parallel ask at the federal level – that since provincial advocacy focused on a request to increase AFA funding, then it follows that a federal advocacy ask could be focused on increasing funding to the Canada Council for the Arts.
But the Canadian Arts Summit brings together many of Canada’s largest arts and cultural institutions, and amongst this group, seeking more money for the Canada Council seems to be anathema. When many of these same organizations supported advocacy efforts leading up to the announcement of the doubling of the Canada Council’s budget starting in 2016, they expected to reap rewards for their efforts, only to see Canada Council prioritize first-time recipients, new core funding clients, and other initiatives that made only minor increases to operating funding grants possible. Not all ships were lifted equally.
Recent advocacy efforts have also found success by pursuing other avenues of funding, including regional economic development in the prairies, where organizations are advocating for their own specific needs, or advocating on behalf of smaller collectives. And, in fairness, it is the appropriate work of those organization’s leaders to pursue their own needs, even if that means using the narrative that the Canada Council’s geographic distribution isn’t working or serving all of Canada.
The challenge is that misalignment in the cases for support inherently weakens the case itself. If there are advocacy efforts to increase Canada Council funding (including by the Canada Council itself), while others claim that Canada Council is programmatically failing to address the needs across the sector and that arts funds should be invested elsewhere, those on the receiving end of that mixed messaging could pounce on the misalignment within the sector as a way to dismiss all of the requests.
I’m a big believer that a unified case for support needs to be made that articulates the needs of large and small organizations, as well as the critical needs of individual artists. That may mean checking some of the specific needs of individual organizations at the door, but if advocacy efforts on behalf of the arts & culture sector continue to be fractured, the likelihood of success and the breadth of impact will both be significantly reduced. I would have welcomed more space at the Summit to discuss what that alignment might look like, given the critical role of advocacy in the months ahead.
We Need A New Value Proposition
As organizations continue to wrestle with the ways in which current business models in the arts are no longer sufficient to provide for their needs, conversations at the Summit revolved around the increasing role of philanthropic and private support to both balance the books and provide avenues to accessibility and innovation. Recognizing that tempered expectations around the availability of new public funds is prudent (notwithstanding any of the advocacy efforts discussed above), that organizations face a continually challenging landscape for earned revenue, and that corporate support that has largely disappeared or been refocused to other areas, the need to seek support from private giving seems to be of paramount importance within the current context.
Of course, that’s easier said than done. There is need everywhere, well beyond the arts, and the case for the arts can be challenging when weighed against other areas of need such as mental health or food security. That said, as I articulated on the panel I was on around sustainable models, and others articulated elsewhere throughout the Summit, part of the solution may be that organizations can rework the articulation of their value proposition within the community and society to best position them for success in the current competitive context.
For many years, the stated value proposition for most arts organizations was centered around artistic quality, and we looked to institutions as stewards of artistic excellence. However, as the very use of the term ‘excellence’ has come under scrutiny for its Eurocentric and colonial implications, so too has the notion of the primary role of arts organizations being centered around subjective understandings of artistic quality.
In its place is an emerging value articulation built around community relevance, and there are many reasons for this. Arts organizations receive public funding, and so what is the public benefit that is received in return for that funding? Post-pandemic questions around arts attendance have also amplified this question – if audiences are not attending a certain type of work, perhaps it’s because it’s no longer meeting what the community wants or needs.
So, what is the public benefit and what do communities want or need? I’d argue that those outcomes are more aligned with other social service agencies than traditional narratives around the value of the arts have articulated. This was on full display through the early days of the pandemic, when the arts brought people together, provided belonging, resisted isolation, supported the mental well-being of the public, and so on. I would argue that these more socially based outcomes of the arts are a stronger articulation of the value proposition of an arts organization when seeking philanthropic and private support for the arts moving forward than the more traditional approach around artistic excellence.
As was stated at the Summit (and I’m sorry I didn’t record who said it), the arts are the only cause where the donors are also the beneficiaries. To some, their personal enjoyment of the arts is still reason enough to lend their support for the arts, but as we seek to widen and deepen the pool of philanthropic and private support for the arts, we must speak the language of other organizations who enrich and address social needs within society, and it would serve arts organizations to explore and articulate specifically how their work meets those ends.
The Future is Bright
Finally, the Canadian Arts Summit provided an opportunity for the inaugural cohort of the Business/Arts Emerging Leadership Program to come together and meet. This group of 25 arts leaders from across the country were selected for the year-long program, focused on “those aspiring to hold senior roles in large cultural organizations”. The Summit also created an opportunity for participants to connect with their advisors, engage in Summit programming, and take advantage of networking opportunities.
Alberta is well represented in this first group, with six of the 25 participants coming from Alberta-based organizations, including several folks who are also alumni of the Rozsa Foundation’s Training programs. A big congratulations to Alberta participants Toyin Oladele, Su Ying Strang, Joshua Dalledonne, Alethea Bakogeorge, Mieko Ouchi, and Jennifer Rae Forsyth for your acceptance into this program. A special mention as well to Alica Hall from Toronto and Em Ironstar from Regina, both of whom the Rozsa Foundation has worked alongside on other projects.
In the year ahead, participants will engage in monthly one-on-one sessions with their advisors as well as a series of peer sessions with their fellow participants intended to facilitate reciprocal learning, provide leadership guidance, and create networking opportunities.
The entire cohort (which can be found at https://www.businessandarts.org/emerging-leaders/) boasts impressive credentials, imaginative approaches, and innovative ideas. If this cohort is any indication of the next wave of leadership, Canada’s cultural organizations will be set for a bright future.
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