In 1999, I became the executive director of an arts education organization called San Diego Dance Institute. The organization began as the education outreach of a defunct dance presenting prganization. I took the organization, re-branded it (as City Moves!), developed the board and raised a ton of money. This was before No Child Left Behind, Energy Deregulation and the Tech Bubble burst.
After five years in the business, I was ready to quit. A lot had happened, a lot of good had been done but the winds of change were coming and it was time to pilot the ship into a safe harbor and run for the hills.
This was just before whatever you want to call the economy we're in hit. It was during No Child Left Behind and I was bringing after school dance programs to the kids who needed it most. The problem with No Child Left Behind was that it meant that no child was left untested. In the early 2000s there was money to burn.
Individuals, corporations, foundations and government agencies had more than they knew what to do with. The California Arts Council had so much money that, during the year I sat on the funding panel, it gave every grant recipient exactly what it had asked for. Before that time, arts organizations would be happy to receive a third of their government request. And there were a lot of art programs for children.
The first funding problem I encountered was Energy Deregulation. California thought competition was good for the market and SDG&E thought that brown-outs, killing competition and raising rates was better. High electricity rates killed business and the taxes that fund government grants. The California Arts Council went from funding 100% of requests to, well, they pretty much didn't exist when I got out of the arts education business in 2004.
So there went government money. After that, the tech bubble burst and markets, which relied on over-inflated tech stocks started to weaken. So there went foundation support (foundations are stock speculators who give away their capital gains and there wasn't much of that.
The writing was on the wall and I was looking for a career change. But I couldn't let the kids down. In grant requests, I had told some true, touching stories about kids who found their power through after school dance programs; teachers who started to respect kids who had heretofore been troublemakers; kids who chose to be better citizens so as to be able to participate in their classes instead of doing detention, at least on Tuesdays.
So I put it out there that City Moves! was courting. I needed a good family to adopt my organization. I told my board of directors that I wanted a divorce, my management team that it wasn't their fault and put a group together to meet people and organizations. I had trained a few remarkable (and more resilient) arts administrators so I went to them first.
After several first dates and a few seconds we met the organization that would marry the needs of my nonprofit with theirs. Young Audiences. The organization was intelligently and caringly run; it supported artists in school residencies and assemblies; and was looking to expand into the after school market. After a great first date, we got our board members together.
It was really like meeting the parents. Two board members from each organization met with the executive directors. We hit it off. City Moves! went back to being an outreach program. Young Audiences took my assistant on as the program director, our board joind their board, City Moves! dissolved, my name is mud in nonprofit arts fundraising circles but the kids still had something to look forward to after school on tuesdays.
My second career as a trapeze catcher and circus school administrator didn't work out (but the midlife crisis went off like gangbusters!). I became an actor and hooked up with InnerMission Productions. They are producing No Child... a play about arts education in schools during No Child Left Behind and they're partnering eith Young Audiences to get the word out. And I'm doing marketing. Full circle.
See No Child...
