I would say organizational capacity is definitely a challenge. We are a small organization. We’re headquartered in a town in the Northeast, so it is a challenge to go to the West Coast or the Midwest or to really be able to spread ourselves out. We have such a small staff, so we’re looking at what model organization, what kind of structure we might need to best maximize our capacity. But we’re kind of lean and mean at this point.

One of our challenges is sustaining programs. We received funding from a national partner to start a program where we trained and hired artists as facilitators. We would then coordinate workshops drawing on this stable of artists as our presenters. For a time, it worked well and we were able to hire artists regularly. When the funding dried up, the artists wanted to continue doing the work they were trained to do, but we couldn’t afford to pay them anymore. Now, some artists will occasionally find funding and we’ll partner with them to help host a program. Other artists are volunteering their time. Our board feels that the artists should find the funding themselves and work as a partner to us, but we feel that this is asking too much of the artists to make up the gap left by our lack of funding and commitment to this program. It’s definitely something we need to discuss further to try and get the staff, the board, and our local artists all on the same page.

For a lot of the projects that we do, we hire artists, but there is a distinct hierarchy. There is a project manager, and then there’s teaching artists, and then apprentices, in that order. While we want to value artists with more experience, the really well-known artists in our community, we find that this “top down” system reinforces those structures so that the same artists always get the best commissions and the other artists are not advancing. Our challenge is that our board is still very committed to traditional notions of artistic excellence and look to measures such as exhibition history, formal education, and even the medium used as the only legitimate ways to evaluate the value and career of an artist. We have a long way to go, but we are starting to have these conversations with our board to help them understand both the intentional and unintentional results of perpetuating this cycle.

Ruby Lopez Harper, Director of Local Arts Services for Americans for the Arts, reflects on how the artists in a community can struggle when the staff of the organizations working with artists are struggling to access the training, resources, and peer network they need to do this work effectively.