Arts Intranet

For me, it all started the third week on my job, in June 2003, at an arts marketing conference hosted by the California Arts Council (CAC) in Sacramento. Right in the middle of the luncheon, someone came bursting into the banquet hall announcing that the Legislature was about to "zero out" the CAC. We conferees leapt up from our rubbery chicken and raced the two blocks to the Capitol. Engraged arts administrators stormed into the ornate office of the Senate Pro Tem, screaming at the staff, and demanding to see the Senator. I grabbed one of my board members, and we slipped out to see if we could meet privately--and quietly--with our local reprentatives.

Over the past ten years, Americans for the Arts has developed a close working relationship with many of the nation’s lieutenant governors, their staff and the staff at the National Lieutenant Governors Association (NLGA).

$5 million dollars is a notable rate of return on one’s investment for a $100,000 a year organization! That’s what Texans for the Arts secured for Texas’ state arts agency—the Texas Commission on the Arts (TCA) Cultural & Fine Arts District program—through a well-executed legislative strategy in the 84^th Texas Legislative Session!  Who-what-how did we garner one of the largest state arts appropriations in the U.S. in 2015?

I started doing trainings for arts advocates almost a decade ago. At that time, I gave a lot of thought to what advocates need to know in order to start being advocates. I came up with two messages. First: you already know enough to be an effective advocate. And second: carry a little water for all of us.

Arts learning standards represent a double standard, and that’s good news.

They do not hold different groups unfairly to a different set of rules–that would hardly qualify as good. Instead, they constitute a double standard in a more nuanced sense: the word “standard” has a double meaning, and both meanings apply to updating your state’s arts learning standards.

California, known for its creative economy among many other things, offers no teacher credentials in dance or theatre. California Dance Education Association has been hard at work on this issue this year, and a bill restoring these credentials is slated to be decided upon by California Gov. Jerry Brown in early September.