Mass Culture is an arts support organization that strives to harness the power of research to learn and generate new insights, enabling the arts community to be strategic, focused and adaptive.
Mass Culture is an arts support organization that strives to harness the power of research to learn and generate new insights, enabling the arts community to be strategic, focused and adaptive.
In the spirit of Twain’s “I didn’t have time to write you a short letter, so I wrote you a long one…,” the output of the first phase of work (read more here) was valuable but far too long and unwieldy to corral into productive information. So, in the ever-present day-to-day management of COVID-19 response in the arts sector, we decided to narrow the focus to one of the elements that came up often in the LEAN initiative, in the research, and in the conversations in the sector as of late: Board governance.
This report thus looks at one dimension of the future of people systems by focusing on Boards of Directors and their related governance models in Canadian not-for-profit (NFP) arts organizations. The aim of this report is not to replicate the myriad of resources and tools available in an exhaustive literature review, but rather to capture the conversations of the moment in Canada’s arts sector about Board governance innovation—specifically, SHOULD we innovate our Board structures, what are some examples, and what can/should we do. What we share with you here are some select foundational secondary research pieces for context, some examples of “current” conversations about innovation, and the results of a survey held with the sector this year.
We hope that the information shared in this report provides some useful insights and provocations for people to bring to their work, their organizations, and their Boards towards creating a healthier arts ecosystem. We look forward to continuing the conversation!
Following the report’s release, Business / Arts hosted an excellent webinar: Emerging Ideas on Arts Governance.
They have also made the presentation slides from the event available here.
As part of Mass Culture’s Futures of Arts Work report launched in November 2021, Co-Authors Jeanne LeSage and Shawn Newman asked the question: What Can We Now Do To Design our Governance?
Included in the report is the Governance Pathways Worksheet, offered as a tool to organizations to design their governance, in a process including board, leadership and staff.
On January 17th, Mass Culture hosted a hands-on knowledge-gathering workshop, bringing this preliminary tool to the sector to test it out. We worked collaboratively on adapting it, pulling it apart, adding to it and generally exploring it for participants’ organizations’ governance needs. Participants were assigned to breakout rooms dedicated to one of the 3 subject areas detailed in the worksheet: Mandatory requirements (facilitated by Jasmine Spei and with an introductory video from Jane Marsland), Duty of Care (facilitated by Nicki Kahnamoui, intro video from ELAN), or Strong Organizational Oversight (facilitated by Kate Cornell, intro video from Mass Culture’s Robin Sokoloski). Guided by a knowledgeable facilitator, participants had the opportunity to discuss a specific worksheet section, suggest edits and share resources that could also provide guidance to others who are interested in shaping strong governance for their organizations.
It is our hope that this workshop will result in an improved Governance Pathways Worksheet that is designed for the community by the community and that collectively we will amass resources that are useful and applicable to a wider diversity of organizations that are embarking on a journey of improving their governance.
In addition to sharing the reports and outcomes from the Future of Arts Work project, Mass Culture is pleased to share the report and results from the Leadership Emergency Arts Network (LEAN) initiative. LEAN was an immediate, grassroots, pro bono response network to help Canadian professional non-profit arts organizations (big and small) deal with the COVID-19 crisis. Celia Smith, Jeanne LeSage and Michèle Maheux launched this national initiative on March 31st 2020 and sunset the initiative after a six month run in October 2020. Provided here are the final report and summary presentation which represents a compilation of the LEAN initiative’s process, statistics and feedback from participants. These reports provide a snapshot in time of the challenges and struggles facing arts organizations in the first six months of the pandemic in the midst of the unprecedented shut down of our sector.
The Future of Arts Work project was an idea brought to Mass Culture in 2019 by Co-Author and Research Lead Jeanne LeSage of LeSage Arts Management. The project was conceived as a way to think about new pathways for the arts sector to look at “HOW” it works. The initial project embodied a larger scope—looking at the future of people systems needed for arts organizations in Canada—and started to look at four key areas: Future Arts Institutions, Future Arts Workers, Future Arts Workplaces, and the Future Arts Sector. There was great interest and support in this first stage of the work, as many practitioners were seeing that HOW they worked in their organizations was not supporting their organization’s mission and/or artistic goals. And perhaps ironically, while they could be incredibly innovative in their programs, they were not innovative in their “People Systems.”
Then in March 2020 the global COVID-19 pandemic descended upon the world, and it would be an understatement to say that this changed everything in our sector and in our lives. While the first months of the pandemic became a sped-up backwards fox trot in crisis management, cash flows, and contingency planning to stay “whole,” this notion of being better at HOW we work became even more important. These early pandemic months prompted Celia Smith, Michèle Maheux, and this project’s Lead Researcher and Co-Author, Jeanne LeSage, to create the Leadership Emergency Arts Network (LEAN), which ran from April to September 2020. The initiative offered mentorship and guidance from volunteer advisers for arts organizations across the country grappling with the pandemic. It also highlighted some long-standing issues within the sector and revealed news ones that came to inform the Future of Arts Work and the survey upon which this report is largely based.
And while many projects that started pre-pandemic necessarily shifted focus in efforts to triage the massive impacts of the pandemic on the sector, only minor adjustments were made to the aim and direction of the Future of Arts Work. What we found was that this research was not so much needing to change direction but rather that we needed to double-down on how the sector’s systems and processes impact the people that work in it, and that we should focus on something that was practical for organizations right now.
However, what did shift in this process was the timing and the focus. With the initial broad overview of the four key areas noted above, a first phase of research resulted in the creation of a larger bibliography/reading list and a dialogue with sector participants at the Mass Culture Study dates in June 2020.
I’m interested in the future of Arts Work and Workers because I am one! The precarity of arts work and labour is even in more need of research and real investigation in the middle of this pandemic. As parts of the industry is getting eradicated, it’s also getting redeveloped. I am interested in finding ways to aid in that redevelopment and finding a holistic picture of culture within arts work.
I am interested in the Future of Work in the Arts Sector project because I have worked with cultural organizations throughout my career in many different roles. I know the invisible labour that it takes to create successful cultural activities, and how arts workers are often sustained by the passion for their work but lack administrative support. I want to find better ways to support this often undervalued and overworked labour force, so that they can focus on creating an exciting creative landscape in Canada.
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