Over the last year I have noticed a change in the reactions by major donors, especially foundations, to serious fiscal problems experienced by important arts organizations.

In the past, if an organization with a history of major contributions to the field became seriously ill, donors would rally and work to shore up the organization until it could clean house, strengthen its board and hire new staff leadership. This was not always a clean or easy process but arts organizations with strong reputations were not allowed to go out of business without a fight.

There seemed to be a belief that organizations with important histories of artistic excellence, or organizations that were leaders in communities of color, should be saved and given a second (or third) chance to create stability. I was involved in such turnarounds at the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater and American Ballet Theatre in the 1990s. I could not have saved these institutions without the tremendous support of important funders. The Ford Foundation, for example, played a key role in saving Ailey and the Mellon Foundation was instrumental in the turnaround at ABT.

During this recession, however, funders have taken a harder tone. "When there are well run organizations that are struggling to replace donors who have evaporated, why support those that have poor management, weak boards, and unrealistic plans and budgets," the funding community seems to be suggesting.

It is hard to argue with this logic, but it is also dangerous not to. The line between sickness and health is a slim one in the arts. It can take one competent staff leader or a few energized board members to initiate the process of fixing a troubled arts organization.

Letting organizations like the Baltimore Opera, Charleston Symphony or the Las Vegas Art Museum close comes at a huge cost to their communities. And it is especially sad when they are allowed to disband when their deficits are modest compared to their histories of service.

It seems disingenuous for major funders to chastise or ignore organizations with poor management when these same funders have avoided funding programs to improve the quality of arts managers. We spend billions of dollars to train singers, dancers and actors, and insignificant amounts to train the people who employ them.

I have said it before and I will continue to say it: the biggest problem we face in the arts is a lack of trained arts managers and board members. One can trace the demise of virtually every bankrupt arts organization to a lack of competent staff and/or board leadership. There are many, well-managed arts organizations that are surviving this recession. It is not easy for any arts manager, but those with knowledge and skill are seeing their organizations through this most challenging environment.

Until the funding community addresses this issue of arts management training, they will continue to be faced with organizations of artistic and educational merit that are going to ask for emergency funding and be forced to close if they do not receive it.

Isn't it time to discuss this fundamental problem in our arts ecology?

Source: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/michael-kaiser/a-fundamental-problem-wit_b_551555.html

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Lidia Varbanova's comment:

Great that the issue of importance of arts management training is again a "hot topic"! It has always been in the last 20 or more years. This is indeed a basic necessity in the arts irrespectively of the type of the organisation or a project, and is also not a country specific area - every well elaborated country's cultural policy requires, in one way or another, an advancement of arts management training and education at all levels. What we do need more I think is a cross-border exchange of managerial experiences in the arts, as well as cross-country collaboration. There is no good and effective education without exchange of experiences and without learning by sharing practices.There is no effective training without engagement and without reflections. And the best way to do it is through learning from our collaborative experiences.

We talk a lot and we do a lot about European cultural cooperation and exchange nowadays. On my opinion, we still do very little about cross-country exchanges - especially in such large as territory countries like Poland or Ukraine. It seems that there is not much (or not at all) exchange of people and practices in the arts between the east and the west part of one country, even between its regions, partially because there are not many (or not at all) mobility funds for cultural/arts managers, placement schemes, exchange programs, etc. on a country/region level.

Training is indeed a basic necessity to equipt cultural organisations with better capacities and higher professionalism. Where we need to invest and conceptualise more is in the methods of effective learning by sharing, exchange, collaboration and understanding audiences, not just educating them - this is what could really help : understanding our communities and our audiences: why they come to us, what they think is improtant, how would they work with us, what they expect in a short and long term. Engagement is a key word. It is not anymore about "audience development" but about "active audience engagement". This is especially valid for young audiences, who look more on online creative content than offline. Therefore, our understanding and implementation of arts management practice, as well as arts management trainig, need to also change with the trends of our time...