Lest you think Carter Gillies and I are lone voices arguing against the use of economic impact of arts and culture as a measure of their value to society, in March the Global Education a…
Via CityLab is a NY Times story about how the Boyle Heights community in Los Angeles has recently hosted a “play street.” The program, which apparently started in London, shuts d…
Back in February I wrote about how the Akron Art Museum and Akron-Summit County Public Library were teaming up to lend art to local residents. At the time, the only other similar program I w…
Over the last few years, I have frequently written about the problem with using metrics as a measure of value and performance. As long as we continue to be told that use of quantitative …
I have written before about the visual arts fair I started about two years ago to provide an opportunity for students and artists in the community to sell their work and get experiencing tal…
Intriguing video came across the old social media feed today in the form of a review calling the visual art oriented MMO Occupy White Walls as “The Weirdest MMO I Have Every Played.…
I wrote about Giving Circles on my personal blog last June, noting that the number of Giving Circles in the U.S. is growing. The appeal of this form of philanthropy is that it that the struc…
Hat tip to Nina Simon for calling attention to a post about how the Barnes Foundation is working toward changing their user experience. Even though the Barnes Foundation art collection was m…
Short post today because I just returned home after serving on a grant review panel for the state arts council. The deputy director of the council was reminiscing about the days in the not s…
In his reflections on attending the 2018 Nonprofit Technology Conference, Drew McManus noted how many presenters at the conference packed too much text on to Powerpoint slides. He observes t…
For over a year now I have been excited about the session on writing Requests for Proposals (RFP) Drew McManus and Ceci Dadisman are presenting today at the NonProfit Technology conference s…
I don’t know what inspired me to do so, but last week I visited ProPublica’s website and learned that Free Street Theater and ProPublica Illinois were teaming up to offer theater…
Last week Arts Midwest held a webinar to provide some examples of the way in which different arts organizations were putting the Creating Connection messaging and research into practice. The…
I was recently involved with a strategic planning session for a non-arts group where staff and representatives of community constituencies were intermingled at different tables. When…
Back in February CityLab covered an effort by residents of the Frogtown neighborhood of St. Paul, MN to get people invested in contributing to the Small Area Plan for their neighborhood. …
A common complaint in live performing arts is that no one has an attention span anymore. The sense is that cell phones, videos, bright flashing lights, etc have ruined our brains. But accord…
Hat tip to Andrew Taylor for calling attention to ever awesome Springboard for the Arts’ “Year In Review” report which consists of a short letter from Executive Director La…
A couple weeks ago Ali Webb wrote the provocatively titled Philanthropy's Seven Deadly Sins on Non-Profit Quarterly. According to Webb they are, Blindness to privilege Dismissing community k…
Last month the BBC had a story on their site about the creative benefits of being a loner. One reason for this is that such people are likely to spend sustained time alone working on their c…
National Geographic had a photo essay featuring pictures of ballet dancers in Nairobi’s largest slum. As I looked at it, I was reminded of El Sistema, the effort that provided free…
Really interesting research piece on Plos One asking if the arts are the “secret sauce” that helps drive innovation or if it is the nice to have “cherry on top.” They…
Though it was only a week ago, I can’t quite recall where I came across a link to Ozan Varol’s post, “Stop asking children these seven questions (and ask these instead)R…
I recently had a piece on ArtsHacker addressing questions about copyright which I see as a complement to an earlier piece I wrote for ArtsHacker that directed readers to tools that can help …
Last week CityLab wrote about the European Union’s plan to offer 18 year old residents a free 30 day Interrail pass this summer. What this means is that potentially 20,000-30,000 t…
One of the toughest tasks when it comes to programming for a performing arts venue is trying to bring new experiences to the community that audiences will attend in large enough numbers to m…