Co-Directors’ Report
Days after the Obama post-election euphoria, we were speaking to a funder who informed us that since foundations have been losing up to 35% of their assets in the current economic meltdown, he and his colleagues were advising their grant recipients to cut their budgets now by 20%. Other arts administrators have mentioned their worries that arts funding will be marginalized as foundations reprioritize towards urgent social and environmental crises. And many of us are bracing for the possibility that the Obama administration may only get around to implementing their arts policy later, perhaps during a second term.
NAMAC members are well aware that their relationship to donors and institutions that give financial resources is always in a state of flux and subject to changing notions of why the arts should be supported and not left to the vagaries of the marketplace. This is the setting for the articles in this issue. If they have a theme in common it is that we can no longer simply generate new work or new content, but must use the generative power of content to enable our networks, audiences, and supporters to connect and collect themselves around it. The work catalyzes community, and communities can then generate attention and support.
How do we demonstrate that the work we do is an intrinsic and necessary part of the larger project that the historic Obama election signifies? We need to push hard to make sure that the arts are not left behind when the new administration takes on the challenges of our digital infrastructure and the pressing need for workforce development. Public media and the arts must push for a central role as the public sector looks for the teams of innovators who will take us into a greener and more just 21st century.
This fall we convened leaders from NAMAC member organizations in Philadelphia, San Francisco, Minneapolis, and Tucson to discuss how to strengthen their strategic communications and how to build more locally-based partnerships among organizations. The results of this series of meetings will be published online early next year. We are also moving ahead in planning “Commonwealth,” the 2009 NAMAC Conference to be held in Boston from August 26–29 at the Park Plaza Hotel. Updates will be posted online as the program develops.
With more than fifty proposals received in the 2008 round, we are committed to increasing the funding for our Capacity Building Support Grants, a program that helps members complete a specific aspect of organizational “home improvement”—from strategic, business, or technology planning to building-out a database. Because the need is so great, we are also looking at ways to partner with other providers and create “webinars” that will train our members in social networking skills and social media benefits for their organizations.
In October we were panel presenters, talking about film in a community context, at “Unleashing The Power Of Film,” a daylong symposium hosted by the Northern California Grantmakers at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco. The meeting attracted program officers from community and family foundations who were curious to understand better how partnering with media makers and organizations, and funding film projects, can advance their missions and communicate the values of their programs. It was a hopeful step forward to see makers, organizational leaders, and funders from all over the region considering how to create frameworks to use film as a storytelling platform.
Pat Aufderheide, director of the Center for Social Media, has commented about social change documentaries: “This kind of work is not only special because it is designed for education, persuasion, and action. It also is special because the best of such work treats viewers as members of the public, as citizens—as people who can and will make choices about not just their own lives but about their government, school system, environment, immigration policy. In that sense, especially, this work is critical to shaping public life. It helps make democracy work.” Her vision strikes us as one that NAMAC members can connect to, especially at this populist moment in our history.
The bottom line may be that organizations and artists seeking funding will need to organize, even redefine themselves, more and more in terms of community. At NAMAC we are continuing to explore and articulate these redefinitions as we head into a very uncertain 2009.
© 2008 National Alliance for Media Arts and Culture. All Rights Reserved.
