These are challenging times for nonprofit arts organizations. In May, for example, hundreds of arts groups across the country received emails notifying them that their National Endowment for the Arts grants had been withdrawn and terminated. Dance, music, theater, and other groups, still reeling from the financial devastation wrought by the worldwide Covid pandemic, now face renewed threats to their existence.
Alan Harrison, whose career spans 30 years in nonprofit theater and opera, wrote Scene Change: Why Today’s Nonprofit Arts Organizations Have to Stop Producing Art and Start Producing Impact, which upends conventional wisdom regarding a misunderstanding of mission and a rethinking of what success for nonprofits should look like. Instead of focusing on putting butts in seats, for example, Harrison states, “The purpose of nonprofit arts organizations is not about the telling of stories or the production of art, but the production of impact using the arts as tools.”
Along with other provocative proclamations such as “donors donate so that donors can attend,” Harrison has mic-dropped a manifesto that Kirkus Reviews praises as “a radical new vision for nonprofit arts organizations [that] many in the nonprofit arts sector will decry as heresy, only validating its necessity.”
The nonprofit arts sector has never exactly been a get-rich-quick enterprise. “More like get-agita-quick,” Harrison jokes. So its present precarious state is not exactly new. Near the conclusion of Scene Change, Harrison includes this quote:
We are in the midst of a momentous catastrophe of world history, of a transformation of all aspects of life and of the entire inner human being. This is perhaps fortunate for the artistic person, if he is strong enough to bear the consequences, because what we need is the courage to have inner experience.
That quote is from 1919 and is credited to Walter Gropius, architect and founder of the Bauhaus School. “The arts are reflective,” Harrison says. “They can inspire, and they can instigate. But today’s nonprofit arts organizations have not adapted to today’s obligations. We require them to act like nonprofits and to do charitable work. For the most part, they don’t—especially the largest ones—and that has to change or they will all close. It’s like that episode of The Simpsons in which it is revealed that as a child Ned Flanders was worse than Bart. A psychiatrist asks his beatnik parents what they are doing about his behavior, and they tell him, ‘We’ve tried nothing, and we’ve run out of ideas.’ I think that’s what’s going on in the boardrooms of nonprofit arts organizations across America.”
Harrison did not grow up in a household where the arts were encouraged. In fact, his parents for the entirety of their lives did not support his decision to pursue a life in the arts. “I came from a very academic house,” he said. “My brothers are attorneys; my sister got three master’s degrees in education and became a clinical psychologist. I went into the arts because of all that.”
He grew up in Los Angeles, specifically in Beverly Hills, where his love of theater was stoked at Beverly Hills High School, a famous hotbed of talent at the time. At the University of California, Irvine, he acted in seven productions in his freshman year alone. In his sophomore year, he beat out graduate students for the leading dual role in Georges Feydeau’s Belle Epoque-era comedic masterpiece A Flea in Her Ear. “I decided I didn’t need a bachelor’s degree to be an actor,” he said, “so I went to New York to train and work. It was in New York that I found a pinball path to nonprofit arts producer.”
Now living and writing in the greater Seattle area, Harrison penned Scene Change with himself at 30 as his initial audience. “That’s when I got my first directorship. I wish I’d had someone tell me all this stuff back then,” he said.
Scene Change is the first in a trilogy that includes Scene Change 2: The Five REAL Responsibilities of Nonprofit Arts Boards and Scene Change 3: The Ones Who Get It, which will be published by Changemakers Books in December. The first book lays out the problem: “Excellent art is irrelevant,” Harrison says. “Nonprofit arts organizations have to stop being about money and focus on being about impact. This will come as a shock to most board chairs, some executive directors, and most development directors, but money is not the bottom line for any nonprofit organization, including those in the arts. The bottom line answers this question: What positive impact did your company make on your community? And then provide proof of that impact.”
Harrison cites the Grammy-winning Louisville Orchestra as a forward-thinking example. “They talked to other Kentucky leaders and government officials in this very red state and learned that one of its biggest issues was the divide between urban and rural folks. They said, ‘We can help with that.’ They set out to use music to bridge the divide. They visited every county in the state, they went to the high schools to work with their music programs, they performed in public libraries. They did all this free of charge; the money for this initiative came from the state budget.”
Harrison believes passionately in diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI). This puts him at odds with the present administration, which has targeted DEI programs in schools, the military, theater, well, everywhere. Harrison is undeterred. “Raising levels of diversity, equity, and inclusion is simply the right thing to do,” he writes in Scene Change. “Doing the right thing is always the right thing to do, even if it’s unpopular.”
“There is nothing at all wrong with theater groups who stage crowd-pleasers such as The Odd Couple,” he elaborates. “Go make people laugh. But if you don’t have even the intent to be charitable, stop hoovering money from those who are. Go be a commercial organization; you get investors instead of donors. There’s this idea that running a nonprofit is easier than running a for-profit. It’s not. It’s harder, because the goal is not money, the goal is impact, and it’s hard to get board members from a corporate mindset to understand that. It’s a different language altogether.”
Scene Change is meant to be a lifesaver for leaders of arts organizations that continue “to flail and burn out,” Harrison says. “I hope organizations will take a look at why things are being done the way they’re being done, and not just continue to do them because it’s always been done that way. They need to consider what they are actually trying to achieve.”
For example, Harrison suggests that well before students attend a performance, organizations meet with educators to create a rubric describing exactly what the company is aiming to achieve with students. “Then, give students a test of some sort that gives teachers a baseline about how they feel about the arts. You give them another test after they’ve seen a show. If you measure for the right things, they learn how students feel about their community or a topic from the play, and what they are moved to do about it. This is opposed to them just sitting there and enjoying the show, which is great, but it can’t end there.”
At the end of the book, Harrison provides a positive vision for the future that includes strong support for the arts as a solution to civic problems, not as an adjunct entertainment luxury. “If enough people get the message and take it to heart, you’ll see a huge whirlwind of love for the arts in America. That’s what I’m after. If that doesn’t happen, I’m afraid that one day we’ll all look back on live performing and visual art as something that was pleasant once, the way we look at vaudeville now.”
Donald Liebenson is a Chicago-based writer who is published in the Washington Post, Town & Country magazine, the Saturday Evening Post and on vanityfair.com.
