Prototype Issue
Youth in the Nonprofit Arts Sector: A Call to Action
By Polly Cole
(page 1 of 1)America does not pump a lot of money into the arts. In the year 2005 the United States population was estimated to be hovering at 296,410,404 people.
That same year, the National Endowment for the Arts spent $108, 810,635 on arts funding. That’s $2.72 a person. By comparison, the budget in 2005 for the Iraq War was $67.2 billion dollars, or $226.70 per person.
Needless to say, there’s a disparity there. And America’s art institutions are suffering because of it. Youth involvement has especially suffered. Nonprofit arts organizations are bereft of young leadership because there is simply no interest.
There is no national platform to prop up arts and culture and there is no corporate incentive to put money into anything but Hollywood movies, which are rarely art and even more rarely cultured.
Theatres, ballets, operas, and museums are slowly drowning. They desperately need young leadership and a thorough reinvigoration. So what is the nonprofit arts community to do?
In 2006, The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation commissioned a study to address this very question. Prepared by Barry Hessenius, former Director of The California Arts Council, the study is called “Involving Youth in Nonprofit Arts Organizations: A Call to Action”, and its findings were presented and released in April 2007.
Hessenius says that recruitment of young people into the field of the arts must become a grassroots movement, similar to the environmental movement, which has been largely successful in bringing youth awareness to its cause. He says that arts organizations must strive to include young people on their boards of directors, and that they should be intricately involved in the decision and policy making procedures of the business.
“The nonprofit arts sector is missing an enormous opportunity by failing to recruit, mobilize, and train young people to advocate on its behalf, lobby legislators and other decision makers, and put pressure on both corporations and the media to support the field. Young people might constitute another arm of the sector in its attempts to make its case – and bring fresh vitality, energy, and passion to the effort. Moreover, this introduction to grassroots advocacy might move young people to greater future involvement in nonprofit arts organizations and set a foundation for future public support. To this end, the arts sector should set a goal of creating a nationwide corps of young grassroots activists and develop and implement a strategic plan to realize that goal.”
If the nonprofit arts sector fails to recruit young people to succeed them, the arts will disappear. If the arts in America disappear, we might as well be dropping those expensive bombs on our own culture. To read more about youth involvement or to download the entire report, visit www.Hewlett.org.
Discussion