Mile-High Musings on Arts, Culture, Creativity and Philanthropy

I recently watched a video of a talk by Gabe Klein at the 2013 Aspen Ideas Festival about the new world of transportation planning. He is the head of transportation in Chicago, previously headed the transportation office in DC, and before that was a VP at ZipCar, and it got me thinking about the changing modes of transportation in my own life. In Philadelphia, I was one of many people who lived without owning a car, living downtown and walking to work and most places I needed to get to. Most places I could not get to on foot, I used mass transit, and very occasionally a taxi. When for work reasons I needed to get somewhere best reached by car I was able to draw on a Mayor's Office pool car, and for personal use when a car was needed I used ZipCar. I used a bicycle mostly for recreation but occasionally for transportation as well, at which time I did take advantage of and appreciate Philadelphia's relatively new bike lane program. As one of the nation's most walkable big ci...

Winslow Homer's Lost on the Grand Banks, for which Bill Gates paid $36 million in 1998 A recent interview in the Financial Times with Bill Gates, that was widely quoted and shared in the media, including this piece in Hyperallergic , reported his equating of giving to a museum with blinding people. Seriously. Essentially he was citing the work of ethicist Peter Singer, whose work has fostered a new "effective altruism" movement, and posing the question that if a significant gift could prevent illnesses that lead to blindness, was giving that money instead to build a new wing of a museum effectively blinding people? [Gates] questions why anyone would donate money to build a new wing for a museum rather than spend it on preventing illnesses that can lead to blindness. “The moral equivalent is, we’re going to take 1 per cent of the people who visit this [museum] and blind them,” he says. “Are they willing, because it has the new wing, to take that risk? Hmm, maybe this ...

October 20-23 Denver was host to the National Innovation Summit for Arts + Culture , organized by Emc Arts , locally sponsored by the Bonfils-Stanton Foundation , and nationally sponsored by the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation , James Irvine Foundation and Rockefeller Foundation . The roughly 250 participants included staff from organizations in several different communities such as Charlotte, Chicago, Cincinnati, Cleveland, Denver, Minnesota/Dakotas, New York, Oregon, San Jose, St. Louis, the Bay Area and Washington DC.; as well as staff from funders in most of these cities. Participating organizations were chosen by their local funders, which also covered their cost of participating. Many of the organizations had already done some work with EmcArts locally on innovation and adaptive change. This was a unique opportunity to bring together arts leaders - management and artistic leadership - from many communities around the country, all grappling with challenges of how to build...

I have just returned from the annual Livingston Fellows Retreat, a component of the Bonfils-Stanton Foundation 9-year-old Livingston Fellowship Program , and can't resist posting a quick summary of my reaction/perceptions. This program was launched nine years ago in honor of Johnston R. Livingston, who was Chairman Emeritus of the Foundation, and passed away in 2008. He had a personal passion for leadership in the nonprofit sector, and was deeply invested in this program. Even as the Foundation has shifted its grantmaking entirely to arts and culture this year, there is a steadfast commitment to retaining the larger nonprofit sector reach of this program, including arts as well as other nonprofit leaders. I believe this is extremely healthy as it integrates arts leaders into larger conversations about leadership, making a difference in our community, balancing personal and professional obligations etc.  These problems are not "special" in the arts and benefit from be...

As some may have already heard, I have been appointed the new President and Chief Executive Officer of the  Bonfils-Stanton Foundation  in Denver, Colorado. I am so excited about taking on this new challenge but, of course, sorry to be leaving my friends and colleagues here in Philadelphia. Here is the link to the  City of Philadelphia press release , and to  the Foundation release . Someone congratulated me with the quote "Go West Young Man", which I took as a reference to Horace Greeley who coined the term. He meant it as a reference to the Pet Shop Boys Song , which somehow passed me by completely. (Well, I know how it passed me by - I have a 90's popular culture black hole from the era when I was parenting two young children!) I feel proud of my accomplishments in Philadelphia as Chief Cultural Officer and director of the  Office of Arts, Culture and the Creative Economy , and feel that I am leaving a strong legacy, and a great team in place. I will als...

On June 19th I delivered a commencement address to the graduating class of Philadelphia's High School of the Creative and Performing Arts (CAPA). A number of people asked me to post it. Text is below... Greetings everyone, Principal Whaley, parents, students, faculty and all special guests. I am Gary Steuer, the Chief Cultural Officer for the City of Philadelphia, and I run the City’s Office of Arts, Culture and the Creative Economy. It is my great honor to be here to today to celebrate these outstanding graduates, the best creative young people that our City can produce. Being a part of this program has a special resonance for me. While I did not go to CAPA, or even grow up in Philadelphia, I can relate to all of the students graduating today. That is because I graduated from LaGuardia High School for the Arts in New York City, which is the equivalent of CAPA in New York. In fact I graduated 40 years ago, almost to the day. So I was in your shoes a long time ago. I al...

First off, let me apologize for having been so remiss in my blogging activities the past few months. I have tried to keep up with my social networking connections, so I have not disappeared entirely from the digital universe, but I have dropped the ball on my blog. No excuses other than the usual: work, kids, STUFF. So what momentous news has lured me back to the blogosphere? It is the launch of an exciting new project this week in Philadelphia: CultureBlock s. Click this link for the press release announcing the project. And here is a link to a one-sheeter describing the project. CultureBlocks is a web-based mapping tool that has built into it over 50 different types of data that can be layered onto a map of Philadelphia in infinite ways. The project was initiated by the City of Philadelphia Office of Arts, Culture and the Creative Economy along with several core partners: The Reinvestment Fund , the Social Impact of the Arts Project of the University of Pennsylvania (SI...