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Austin360 blogs > Austin Arts: Seeing Things > Archives > 2009 > February > 04 > Entry
Kennedy Center sets up crisis line for arts managers
The Kennedy Center is amping up its national role moving beyond being a performing arts center. Beyond hosting performances, sponsoring theater festivals, competitions and otherwise serving as the nation’s theater, the center has initiated a new program to share its management experience with struggling performing arts organizations across the country.
Announced yesterday, “Arts in Crisis: A Kennedy Center Initiative” is an online support service through which arts administrators from non-profit theaters, dance companies and music groups around the country can seek advice from the Kennedy Center’s personnel on issues such fundraising and audience development.
The program’s Web site explains that it will provide information “pertinent to maintaining a vital performing arts organization during a troubled economy.” Assistance — which is free — will be provided mainly through e-mails, telephone calls and Web chats.
“These are times of economic crisis and as the nation’s center for the performing arts, we wish to help,” said Kennedy Center President Michael M. Kaiser in an official statement. “If any arts organization in the United States believes we can assist, the senior staff of the Kennedy Center and I offer our collective skills. We are at your service.”
Kaiser is the author of “The Art of the Turnaround: Creating and Maintaining Healthy Arts Organizations.”
The initiative also asks that administrators at successful arts organization get involved as mentors.
“There are many talented arts administrators around the country and we encourage them to lend their expertise,” said Kaiser. “If all of us work together, we can turn a time of crisis into a time of opportunity.”
Kaiser told the Washington Post yesterday, “I’m worried that people are cutting the wrong things first, and that makes it much harder to compete for funding,” he said. “Those who cut the programming first wouldn’t look as attractive to the funders.”
Kaiser also cited the president’s recent call to community service as reason for creating the program. “This is in the spirit of President Obama saying we have to volunteer and get involved,” Kaiser told the Post.
The new program received $500,000 from two individual donors.
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