HOME IMPROVEMENT: Capacity-Building in the Media Arts
By Helen De Michiel
Capacity means the ability to accomplish, change, remodel, or act on something that is a necessity, but often invisible because it is part of the operations or architecture of an organization. Since nonprofits must focus so intently on the work that becomes their public face, they do not have an easy ability to re-engineer the infrastructure hidden below.
Since 1999, the National Alliance for Media Arts and Culture (NAMAC), our membership network of independent motion media organizations, has given out modest capacity building grants. They are like capital infusions to either start or complete a much-needed home improvement project.
This fall, there were forty proposals from member organizations around the country competing for our annual $3,000 capacity building grants. We had enough funding to choose six recipients for awards.
This cycle turned out to be one of the most exhilarating looks ever at a cross section of the independent media field as it has grown, matured and changed -- especially over the last decade as new leaders have developed and taken over from an earlier founding generation. We were seeing confident and sustainable organizational visions adapting to the pragmatic realities of the 21st century American arts environment by blending business with practice.
What do I mean by that? We were witnessing our field coming up with simple but necessary business enhancing micro-projects that would support and help nourish the long term cultural practice of independent public media now being created by individual artists, local and ethnic communities, and young people.
Behind the requests for fund development, strategic planning, leadership training, succession planning, marketing consulting, curriculum design, board development and feasibility studies, lay so many amazing and inspirational stories about human inventiveness. They spoke to a new sophistication about cultivating collaborations, experimenting with tools, and thinking about how to work productively with the deep and abiding structural change that is reshaping the media business as a whole. In this context, there was also the distinct sense of trying to protect the long view ideals of cultural mission while surrounded by the bubbly and disorienting temptations of high pressure media commercialism.
There should be no doubt that we are living through a great entrepreneurial business period fuelled by new technological advancements. But for those of us who see our work as a practice with the purpose of creating cultural experiences and strengthening democracy through media, how do we navigate this choppy terrain?
We received proposals for strategic envisioning – to step away from daily nonprofit operations, and work in clusters of staff and board to figure out stable and plausible niches in the emerging digital landscape. Others wanted to develop the next generation of leaders, in projects to transmit one generations’ knowledge and expertise to the next before it is too late, or before that intention has dissipated in the hubbub of daily operations.
Organizations were telling us about how they have creatively jerry-rigged their infrastructural technologies connecting older interfaces and hardware to the newer and newest applications – and making it all work, albeit uniquely. Or how the tools of media creation have changed so completely that to even begin reconceptualizing what it means to offer “tools” – real and virtual –requires deep and visionary planning.
Some wished to begin “succession planning” since the founders are planning to move on, but want the organization to continue and grow in new directions. And some are developing and refining their boards, and want to work with coach consultants to help them learn how to better put together these configurations of people who can make or break the stewarding of an organization.
The projects came from major American film festivals, distributors, rural and suburban micro-cinemas, remote community radio stations and national broadcast television series’. The six we chose to receive the awards offer a flavor of the breadth we saw in the larger proposal pool. The world of independent public media is changing very quickly, and as we were studying the proposals, we contemplated how different these organizations will look in even five years time.
Aurora Picture Show’s Andrea Grover is the founding director of this highly regarded Houston-based media arts exhibition space. In 2008, after their 10th anniversary, she will be leaving the organization, and is already preparing her staff and board for succession. Her project is to work with a local consultant to guide them through a process to make sureAurora
Columbia Film Society in Columbia, South Carolina, recently purchased a theater in the revivifying downtown area of town and needs a business plan to figure out, as fundraising begins, how to operate this large new facility and present it to potential local investors.
Free103point9, which cultivates experimental work in radio and audio art forms, light sculpture and installation of these ephemeral “transmission arts,” is building theWave Farm Study Center in upstate New York
Mendocino County Public Broadcasting (KZYZ & Z), the only radio station in upper Northern California that offers national and international programming to a far-flung rural audience, is poised to shed its “poverty mentality,” and use its business planning and donor cultivation project to begin the process of becoming an acknowledged core institution in the Mendocino area -- where no other radio or local television stations now exist.
Drawing on the experience of their colleagues at Appalshop, the Ozark Foothills Film Festival inLocust Grove , Arkansas
Women Make Movies, one of the handful of nonprofit media distributors still thriving, wants to research best practices for the migration of their collection to digital file formats and understand more fully how to prepare for video-on-demand, online streaming and digital rights management. Without planning in these new delivery areas now, the near future of public media distribution is threatened because dissemination mechanisms are changing so rapidly.
The micro-funds we offer stimulate an improvement project meant to give organizations some new-found ability along with the promise of increased partnerships in their local communities. For as much as media is generally migrating online into the digital domain, community-based and physically rooted organizations are more important to people and long range media creation than ever before.
Lighthouses in the sea of media, these organizations offer a remarkable interface that connects people to one another across vast differences: artists to audiences, skills to users, citizens to policy, programs to viewers, and history to the future. They explore and protect the humane uses of technologies -- from professional creators finding dialogue and new ideas to young children for the first time holding a camera, editing a sequence and being able to upload it online for the entire world to see.
NAMAC capacity projects also give organizations the ability to do what media people are attracted to doing the most: partner and collaborate in an “open source” spirit. Hardly islands of precious artistic sensibilities, our nonprofit members are well aware that their own future well being is wrapped up in having the agility to move quickly around new opportunities with others who may not appear at first to be likely collaborators. One organization wanted to bring in researchers and leaders from academic fields to help them understand where ethnic media and their festival fit into a larger cultural and social environment. Others are trying new experiments in community dialogue around the media work they produce and distribute.
There continues to be a consistent vision to connect and engage with people who are passionate about the possibilities for transformation that our public media holds. It is about discovering and boldly applying new forms of communication to make that dream manifest itself. It is about linking authentically to neighborhood, town, city, local culture and local vision to creatively use media to improve people’s lives.
Media is fraught with paradoxes and conundrums that will never be resolved, but always be in a process of motion and movement. It is a highly emotional and simple medium. What literature, theater and music can do, media cannot. Nevertheless, it permeates consciousness deeply and is not going away.
It is completely dependent on highly complex technologies, which although simpler to use, are virtually impossible for the non-technician to fix. It is ephemeral, and more so than ever, since we have no one stable preservation platform to turn to. Will all we have left of 21st century media stories is a gated, global, and corporatized database?
Our local public media and arts organizations are not afraid to take on these challenges. Why? Because it is so exciting to create an alternative world to the grid of corporate media, and have it live in a real place, a real city or town, and invite real people to come in and take part in its activities.
We want to invest in capacity building for our field, and advocate for this kind of funding where so little is available. Each of the proposals we saw recently told a clear, genuine and moving story of how media organizations are continually learning anew to serve as models for cultural practice, and how, in practical and grounded ways, they serve as living and changing embodiments of democratic media in motion.
In the media world, “business as usual” no longer holds. More than ever, this type of grantmaking is vital to the life of our field. Much like a drip irrigation system hidden beneath the soil, capacity building is one key component that we absolutely need to keep this fragile ecology from being disrupted. By caring for the gardens where the crops will find a chance to grow, funders can contribute mightily to supporting a strong web of roots that will hold our community media structures intact. Consider capacity building support as giving the organization a supreme gift: the ability to make choices and practice self-determination. And isn’t this one of the most vital principles that the independent media movement was built upon?
Helen De Michiel is the Co-Director of NAMAC.
Capacity means the ability to accomplish, change, remodel, or act on something that is a necessity, but often invisible because it is part of the operations or architecture of an organization. Since nonprofits must focus so intently on the work that becomes their public face, they do not have an easy ability to re-engineer the infrastructure hidden below.
Since 1999, the National Alliance for Media Arts and Culture (NAMAC), our membership network of independent motion media organizations, has given out modest capacity building grants. They are like capital infusions to either start or complete a much-needed home improvement project.
This fall, there were forty proposals from member organizations around the country competing for our annual $3,000 capacity building grants. We had enough funding to choose six recipients for awards.
This cycle turned out to be one of the most exhilarating looks ever at a cross section of the independent media field as it has grown, matured and changed -- especially over the last decade as new leaders have developed and taken over from an earlier founding generation. We were seeing confident and sustainable organizational visions adapting to the pragmatic realities of the 21st century American arts environment by blending business with practice.
What do I mean by that? We were witnessing our field coming up with simple but necessary business enhancing micro-projects that would support and help nourish the long term cultural practice of independent public media now being created by individual artists, local and ethnic communities, and young people.
Behind the requests for fund development, strategic planning, leadership training, succession planning, marketing consulting, curriculum design, board development and feasibility studies, lay so many amazing and inspirational stories about human inventiveness. They spoke to a new sophistication about cultivating collaborations, experimenting with tools, and thinking about how to work productively with the deep and abiding structural change that is reshaping the media business as a whole. In this context, there was also the distinct sense of trying to protect the long view ideals of cultural mission while surrounded by the bubbly and disorienting temptations of high pressure media commercialism.
There should be no doubt that we are living through a great entrepreneurial business period fuelled by new technological advancements. But for those of us who see our work as a practice with the purpose of creating cultural experiences and strengthening democracy through media, how do we navigate this choppy terrain?
We received proposals for strategic envisioning – to step away from daily nonprofit operations, and work in clusters of staff and board to figure out stable and plausible niches in the emerging digital landscape. Others wanted to develop the next generation of leaders, in projects to transmit one generations’ knowledge and expertise to the next before it is too late, or before that intention has dissipated in the hubbub of daily operations.
Organizations were telling us about how they have creatively jerry-rigged their infrastructural technologies connecting older interfaces and hardware to the newer and newest applications – and making it all work, albeit uniquely. Or how the tools of media creation have changed so completely that to even begin reconceptualizing what it means to offer “tools” – real and virtual –requires deep and visionary planning.
Some wished to begin “succession planning” since the founders are planning to move on, but want the organization to continue and grow in new directions. And some are developing and refining their boards, and want to work with coach consultants to help them learn how to better put together these configurations of people who can make or break the stewarding of an organization.
The projects came from major American film festivals, distributors, rural and suburban micro-cinemas, remote community radio stations and national broadcast television series’. The six we chose to receive the awards offer a flavor of the breadth we saw in the larger proposal pool. The world of independent public media is changing very quickly, and as we were studying the proposals, we contemplated how different these organizations will look in even five years time.
Aurora Picture Show’s Andrea Grover is the founding director of this highly regarded Houston-based media arts exhibition space. In 2008, after their 10th anniversary, she will be leaving the organization, and is already preparing her staff and board for succession. Her project is to work with a local consultant to guide them through a process to make sure
Columbia Film Society in Columbia, South Carolina, recently purchased a theater in the revivifying downtown area of town and needs a business plan to figure out, as fundraising begins, how to operate this large new facility and present it to potential local investors.
Free103point9, which cultivates experimental work in radio and audio art forms, light sculpture and installation of these ephemeral “transmission arts,” is building the
Mendocino County Public Broadcasting (KZYZ & Z), the only radio station in upper Northern California that offers national and international programming to a far-flung rural audience, is poised to shed its “poverty mentality,” and use its business planning and donor cultivation project to begin the process of becoming an acknowledged core institution in the Mendocino area -- where no other radio or local television stations now exist.
Drawing on the experience of their colleagues at Appalshop, the Ozark Foothills Film Festival in
Women Make Movies, one of the handful of nonprofit media distributors still thriving, wants to research best practices for the migration of their collection to digital file formats and understand more fully how to prepare for video-on-demand, online streaming and digital rights management. Without planning in these new delivery areas now, the near future of public media distribution is threatened because dissemination mechanisms are changing so rapidly.
The micro-funds we offer stimulate an improvement project meant to give organizations some new-found ability along with the promise of increased partnerships in their local communities. For as much as media is generally migrating online into the digital domain, community-based and physically rooted organizations are more important to people and long range media creation than ever before.
Lighthouses in the sea of media, these organizations offer a remarkable interface that connects people to one another across vast differences: artists to audiences, skills to users, citizens to policy, programs to viewers, and history to the future. They explore and protect the humane uses of technologies -- from professional creators finding dialogue and new ideas to young children for the first time holding a camera, editing a sequence and being able to upload it online for the entire world to see.
NAMAC capacity projects also give organizations the ability to do what media people are attracted to doing the most: partner and collaborate in an “open source” spirit. Hardly islands of precious artistic sensibilities, our nonprofit members are well aware that their own future well being is wrapped up in having the agility to move quickly around new opportunities with others who may not appear at first to be likely collaborators. One organization wanted to bring in researchers and leaders from academic fields to help them understand where ethnic media and their festival fit into a larger cultural and social environment. Others are trying new experiments in community dialogue around the media work they produce and distribute.
There continues to be a consistent vision to connect and engage with people who are passionate about the possibilities for transformation that our public media holds. It is about discovering and boldly applying new forms of communication to make that dream manifest itself. It is about linking authentically to neighborhood, town, city, local culture and local vision to creatively use media to improve people’s lives.
Media is fraught with paradoxes and conundrums that will never be resolved, but always be in a process of motion and movement. It is a highly emotional and simple medium. What literature, theater and music can do, media cannot. Nevertheless, it permeates consciousness deeply and is not going away.
It is completely dependent on highly complex technologies, which although simpler to use, are virtually impossible for the non-technician to fix. It is ephemeral, and more so than ever, since we have no one stable preservation platform to turn to. Will all we have left of 21st century media stories is a gated, global, and corporatized database?
Our local public media and arts organizations are not afraid to take on these challenges. Why? Because it is so exciting to create an alternative world to the grid of corporate media, and have it live in a real place, a real city or town, and invite real people to come in and take part in its activities.
We want to invest in capacity building for our field, and advocate for this kind of funding where so little is available. Each of the proposals we saw recently told a clear, genuine and moving story of how media organizations are continually learning anew to serve as models for cultural practice, and how, in practical and grounded ways, they serve as living and changing embodiments of democratic media in motion.
In the media world, “business as usual” no longer holds. More than ever, this type of grantmaking is vital to the life of our field. Much like a drip irrigation system hidden beneath the soil, capacity building is one key component that we absolutely need to keep this fragile ecology from being disrupted. By caring for the gardens where the crops will find a chance to grow, funders can contribute mightily to supporting a strong web of roots that will hold our community media structures intact. Consider capacity building support as giving the organization a supreme gift: the ability to make choices and practice self-determination. And isn’t this one of the most vital principles that the independent media movement was built upon?
Helen De Michiel is the Co-Director of NAMAC.
