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

Note: This blog post was originally published in the July/August, 2015 issue of Nonprofit Colorado, a publication of the Colorado Nonprofit Association .  I think we all might agree that the most important relationship in the success of a nonprofit organization is that between staff leadership and board leadership: the president or executive director and the chair. Executive directors MUST prioritize this relationship, and realize that its success – or lack thereof, can effectively trump almost everything else they do. Can an ED on their own effectively recruit high-level board prospects? Can they make peer-to-peer asks of major donors? Can they align trustees to support the most effective strategic direction of the organization? Can they effectively motivate and inspire trustees to perform at the highest level as trustees, and to gently but firmly move them off the board when they are not contributing? I would answer to all these questions almost invariably, no – these functi...

In his blog ( CSR Now! , highly recommended) Tim McClimon, President of the American Express Foundation, recently devoted a couple of entries to re-capping an interview he did with Reynold Levy, whose book They Told Me Not to Take That Job: Tumult, Betrayal, Heroics, and the Transformation of Lincoln Center , recently came out. Tim worked at the AT&T Foundation during the time that Levy was president there, before assuming the presidency of Lincoln Center. Tim recaps some of the 25 leadership lessons that Levy lays out in his book. I thought it would be valuable, given the commitment of the Bonfils-Stanton Foundation to leadership (a focus we have in common with the American Express Foundation ), to share some of these by excerpting from Tim’s blog. If you want more visit Tim’s blog, or better yet, buy and read Levy’s book ! I think his advice resonates – perhaps because it mostly mirrors what I have learned in my career. (It's always gratifying, I suppose, to have ...

Recently the Bonfils-Stanton Foundation completed a comprehensive assessment of our programs and operations, and one of the key findings was that we had not adequately told the story - or stories - of our good work and the work of our grantees. The need for more robust and effective communications was made more acute by the relatively recent decision to focus our grantmaking on arts and culture, and nonprofit leadership. We began working with Launch Advertising - which had done similar work for the Denver Foundation - to assess our existing communications assets, strengths and weaknesses. This led to several months of deep work clarifying to whom we wanted to communicate with, to what end, with what messages, and how. We have developed a new web site , a refreshed logo, and will be rolling out an e-newsletter, and more aggressive use of social media. (Interestingly, after lots of experimentation, our new logo is exactly the same as the old logo - same typeface, but with a dif...

New York City has recently been engaged in a debate around cultural planning. The New York City Council is developing legislation that would mandate that a cultural plan be created and then updates every few years. Details are still in development, such as whether a plan might be required every ten years, twenty years, etc., and how much detail should be in the legislation in terms of mandating specific components be included in the plan. Because of the enormous scale of New York City and its cultural sector, this effort has provoked considerable conversation and even contention. Tom Finkelpearl, Commissioner of the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, is working to ensure that this plan does not end up creating a complex and expensive "unfunded mandate," and also wants to avoid Council specifying in too much detail the structure or process the plan must use. And a local coalition of funders, led by New York Community Trust, has been working to support the conce...

Dancer Jin Young Woon of Cedar Lake Contemporary Ballet source: Cedar Lake Facebook page, photographer not credited The recent case of Cedar Lake Contemporary Ballet in New York City shuttering as a result of the withdrawal of support from their major benefactor, Nancy Laurie, an heiress to the Wal-Mart fortune, has sparked a dialogue around the pitfalls of over-reliance on a single donor. The New York Times wrote about the dance company's closure  here , and Michael Kaiser addressed the larger issue in a blog post here . Clearly, significant dependence on a single donor by an arts group poses serious challenges, and adds to institutional risk. On the other hand there has been a significant growth of arts institutions, largely in the visual arts, that are the creation of single donors/collectors. Would the excellent Neue Galerie in New York be able to survive without the support of Ronald Lauder and his family wealth? Unlikely. And many of our now-great institutions with d...