It has been a while. I am not someone to post just to post. I only post when I have something to say, and I do have something to say right now.

I have been watching a Wayne Dyer series, which I tend to do from time to time to gain some perspective. This series is all about love and purpose. I have been thinking a great deal about my purpose. I have been through a great deal, both good and bad, and I still feel that I am not quite there yet with a definition of my true purpose, but I do know I am a child of the arts. It must have something to do with the arts, I think.

I have been working on audience development since 2006. I can’t believe how fast the time has gone. I hope in my small way I have been a voice advocating for a new way of building audiences (community, really). I am not sure how many people have been aware of my work, or have listened, but the message is out there. And, other people have come to chime in as well.

I feel there is something deeper going on that needs to be healed in the arts. One of Covid’s blessings was to take a step back. Or course I never wanted the arts to shut down, but it has been a time of reflection (or it should have been). We are almost to the point we can open up again. However, do we really want to go back to the way things were?

To be honest, I see that the arts need healing. Ever since the ’80s, which is when this all started, the arts began attempting to act like a typical business. I mentioned this before, the arts are a different type of business, but mainly this is getting lost in the need to make money. Of course we need money to keep the arts organizations going, but the way we are attempting to make this money, like non-arts business as usual, I feel is hurting the arts big time.

The arts, like many nonprofits, are businesses with big souls. They are created based off of the human desire to express our humanity, and to help humanity heal in some way or another. When you take the humanness out of how we run our nonprofits/arts businesses, it creates a wound within the organizations.

Let me explain further. We all know that there is a thing called burnout. Why does burnout happen though? It could be the individual isn’t taking care of themselves, yes, it could be this. Or, perhaps, it could be the organizations stop caring for the individuals (sometimes in addition to the individual lacking self care). The people that work at nonprofits should be lifted up. They take positions with less pay and more work due to loving the mission and wanting to be a part of the solution in this world. However, they get squeezed dry working the candle at both ends without enough compensation. They become burned out, and the organization tends to lose these really great people. Burned out people either quit, or become complacent and get fired down the road.

You see, we have taken the humanness out of our very human based arts organizations. An organization is only as good as its weakest link. What if this non-arts business as usual way of running the organizations continues to create weak links, individuals not cared for enough to the point they themselves stop caring (or become too tired to be able to care even if they still wish it).

I know that many arts organizations tend to have overturn on average of three years time. In three years, many organizations get new employees. It mainly has to do with the individuals not feeling satisfied, and ultimately not feeling cared about. So, they look elsewhere. Maybe they get a slight pay increase, but normally the burnout returns. It’s a perpetual cycle and an uncomfortable one for all involved.

This grind was created by switching the humanity base of the organization to being all about making money. It became more about the numbers and not about the human creation or the humans in the organization. Then, this translates outward to how we treat our audiences, our fellow humans that we hope will participate by being audience members. They also become numbers rather than individual humans.

The churn and the burn(out) will continue until we stop and reflect on how we are running our organizations. The big point – people have to matter and be treated like humans. Not just the artists (and sometimes that protocol even goes astray), but everyone who is a part of the organization has the right to human expression and human care. Each individual in an organization should be cared for, not cut off from human benefits and a human way of life.

It was back in 2016 that I experienced first hand the worst of this phenomena. The board was fearful, and they switched to bean counting and plans for increasing numbers. They cut staff, they squeezed the remaining staff while trying to have a robust season, and there was actual chaos created within. What ended up happening is even though the remaining staff was filled with talented people, it wasn’t enough to get the organization moving forward again. The organization had to heal before they could progress.

The arts have to heal before we can move forward in general. If we want to create beautiful works of human expression by humans providing an artistic message of humanity for us to experience, be inspired by, and learn and grow from, then we have to create this same type of experience within the organization. We have to be human again for and toward one another.

It will take brutal honesty. What are you doing within your organization that is stopping this flow of humanity? Are you working your employees too hard without compensation? Do you have equal pay for equal work? Are you allowing everyone in your organization an outlet to be creative? Is there a huge pay gap between your senior staff and your regular staff? Are you thanking your employees? Are you thanking them enough? Do you have enough staff? Is your budget so imbalanced that this is the reason why you can’t hire someone new? Is there a diversity problem in your organization? What is creating less humanity?

There are many, many questions. The biggest question is, do you want to heal and create an organization that lives and breathes being humane, by treating your individual people like fellow humans, including everyone involved in your organization – the staff, the talent, the audience members, the donors…all of them?

Until we stop the insanity of catering to numbers and not catering to humans, we will never get passed this mentality of being in an arts world of starving artists and starving arts organizations.

The main message from the Wayne Dyer series is to choose love and create loving situations in your own life, and then to spread that love to all you meet. Until people are healed, the chaos will continue in our world.

There is healing to be done. Will you heed the cry to heal the arts?

Cheers to happy and loyal arts people,

Shoshana

Have you experienced burnout working in the arts?

— Shoshana Fanizza (@AudienceDevSpec) April 21, 2021