Triangle Community Foundation has partnered with ARTS Action Research to bring a series of workshops to the Triangle designed specifically to help nonprofit arts organizations with planning, resource development, knowledge building, and assessment to further their artistic missions.
The Arts Matter Workshops are free and designed to be relevant for nonprofit arts organizations across the arts spectrum, from performing, visual, and presenting, to service arts organizations. While there will be themes and concepts referenced across the workshops, it is not necessary to attend all five. Come to one or come to all!
Arts Matter Workshop 1: Organizational Process and Planning: The Plan and the Path
Planning is about the dynamic relationship between time, space and conditions in our organization’s life, which is change. Change is ongoing, unrelenting, a fact of life. But it’s also a sign of life, especially when we acknowledge and work with it.
This first workshop in this year’s Arts Matter workshop series will focus on two closely related but separate aspects of organizational process and planning. First in articulating, affirming or reaffirming an organization’s core values and vision narrative, making sure that all involved are clear about why this work and why this organization. Mission statements are effective describing what an organization does. But that can sound a lot like what all other arts organizations do. What distinguishes one organization from the many is why this work and this organization.
The second aspect is about connecting the why and what with the organization’s actions and ambitions. Plans and planning can get trapped in idealized, sometimes romanticized futures. While keeping eyes on the vision of the future, it’s the immediate path that will present new and/or unanticipated opportunities previously not considered. Each organization needs to dream and imagine future possibilities; however, opportunities are revealed and inform direction today, tomorrow and all the next tomorrows.
As a function of ‘the Path’, this initial planning workshop will lay important conceptual groundwork that will be built upon and extended in subsequent workshops on audiences, fundraising, boards and assessment.
ARTS Action Research works with performing, visual, literary, presenting and service arts organizations in both single and cross discipline configurations. AAR’s Team of Associates address a range of needs from the most basic developmental to complex restructuring and repositioning of veteran arts organizations. Learn more at https://www.artsaction.com/
