A leadership deficit in the arts

Read this . . . see if you notice what I did.

About six weeks ago, the Stamford Theatre works closed their doors.  Here's what they had to say about it on their homepage:

"Unfortunately over the last five years, our ability to raise money could not keep pace with our increasing operating expenses . . .

And despite our fundraising gala last May, which primarily helped to raise funds to finish the construction of the new theater at The Palace, we remain without a viable financial plan that would make it possible for us to afford the new theater's vastly increased operating expenses."

Did you catch it?  Did you catch the mindblowing contradiction in that statement?

Ok, so for five years or so they have either been running at a deficit or close to it.  That's a huge problem.

Last May this theatre did a fundraiser.  What was the fundraiser for?

"construction of the new theatre"

They ran a fundraiser for the construction of a new theatre . . . even though they (by their own admission) had no viable way of affording the new costs that would arise when the building was built!

Is it impolite for me to ask how the f*ck something like that happens?

Actually, it sort of is impolite because we all know how it happened.

It's a failure of leadership.

I'm willing to bet every member of that theatre knew, on some level, what they were doing didn't make sense.

The problem was, no one was willing to deal with the possibility of ridicule that may have come from standing up at a Board or Staff meeting and saying "this is crazy, we should be having this fundraiser for a capital campaign . . . hell, we shouldn't even be having a capital campaign."

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This is what bothers me.

We all say we love the arts.

So why don't we fight for it?

Or to be more accurate, why don't we the fight the right battles for it?

Sure, we are all willing to battle corporations or the government for more funding.

That's a fight we are all willing to jump in.

But often the biggest battles we need to fight are within our own organizations.

It's the battle against the status quo.

It's the battle against misguided or short sighted decision making.

Those battles . . . the battles that often mean the difference between winning and losing . . . we rarely fight those long enough or hard enough.

Comments

[RLewis]

Ya fight the battles that you can win. I'd guess in this case, like many, a company can get money from the City, State and Fed', if they are buidling something. It's much harder to get money for staff and artists. And money for art is about as thin as it gets. So, you build cuz that's what you can get money to do, hoping that once folks see the new castle, they'll want to give to support it - maybe a pipe dream at best, but sometimes dreams are all ya got, and folks expect you to do something.

[Adam Thurman]

RL,

I'm guess the Stamford folks had much more then dreams, they just chose to go with the safer option of talking about a building.

They may argue they had no other choice, but they did . . . the other choice (actively dealing with the deficit) would have created short term pain with the chance for a long term payoff.

[Chris Casquilho]

How about this for a radical idea? Sell so many tickets and subscriptions you have to expand your season. Then sell so many that you don't have any more room in the year to add shows. Then expand your theatre. Theatre is the only industry I'm aware of in which the supply is rapidly outstripping demand while the prices continue to rise faster than the general rate of inflation.