What holds a nonprofit together?

Sometimes we learn the answer by watching them fall apart.

Some things become such a part of us that we forget them.
—Antonio Porcia (translated by Gonzalo Melchor), “from Voices”

One way scientists explore how matter holds together is by breaking it apart. In particle accellerators, for example, tiny bits of matter are smashed at extraordinary speed to reveal the features and forces that form them. We’re in a similar moment of civic discovery as nonprofit arts organizations are hitting multiple obstacles at significant speed.

A current case in point is The Kennedy Center, whose governing board was radically revised in a relative instant, and whose board chair shifted from “arm’s length” to the actual arm of the U.S. President. The question now becomes whether and how the national cultural center can hold together, or retain its shape, when so many of its dynamic forces have been disrupted.

Physics defines four fundamental forces that shape our universe (gravity, electromagnetism, weak interaction, and strong interaction). I’ll suggest an alternate list of four forces that shape and cohere arts nonprofits:

• Confluence
  Nonprofit arts organizations form and thrive at the intersecting flows of people, stuff, and money. For an arts organizations, this includes the confluence of creative purpose and preference, buyers and donors, staff and contractors, and the like. While this confluence in for-profit businesses is largely shaped by economic logic, and in governments by political logic, nonprofits are plural-sector enterprises driven by social logic.

• Contract
  Nonprofits are also legal entities, usually incorporated with their home state’s government and regulated at the federal level by the Internal Revenue Service. They are authorized to operate with fiscal privileges (tax exemptions for their donors, for example) as long as they comply with non-stock, non-profit corporate rules. They also retain their shape through a nexus of contracts with employees and suppliers.

• Convention
  Nonprofit arts organizations are complex ventures that rely on common and shared work practices to get things done. Just as a stage manager can move from one proscenium theater to another and have a strong baseline for how things function, arts managers work from a shared set of practices (how to raise money, how to market, how to budget, how to manage people). Conventions can bog us down from time to time, but they’re also essential to coordinating difficult work over time.

• Culture
  Here I don’t mean the artworks themselves, but rather the generational shared meanings, symbols, rituals, and beliefs that shape collective understanding and action. Countries, communities, and corporations all have durable cultures that shape behavior. Cultures can be stubborn in the face of change, which makes them both a feature and a flaw of coherent cultural businesses.

Many of these forces run below our conscious attention until we are surprised or confused by the outcomes. Think, for example of how you intuitively and automatically turn a handle to open a door, only becoming painfully conscious when it doesn’t work as expected. And many of these forces exhert variable strength depending on context. For example, contract forces have less power when there’s no consequence to breaking them.

The rapid shift in the Kennedy Center’s governance immediately impacts confluence and convention (donors, audiences, and creative partners may all revisit their sense of a common cause, and how to approach it). It may (or may not) implicate contract, since the White House also controls the likely enforcement agencies (the US Attorney General and the IRS). And culture will be an open and evolving question, as it is made and maintained by hundreds of employees and other constituents over extended periods of time.

This is a terrible and troubling moment for this national cultural icon. But it’s also an unraveling that may reveal what holds our own organizations together, and how we might make them more durable, more responsive, and more resilient to sudden shock.

Andrew

From the ArtsManaged Field Guide

Function of the Week: Governance
Governance involves structuring, sustaining, and overseeing the organization's purposes, resources, and goals (often through boards or trustees).

Framework of the Week: Three Sectors
The Three Sectors offer a useful way to categorize three common domains of collective effort. Each sector has a different structure and logic. Each has access to a different bundle of resources. And each is governed by a different array of control and decision structures.

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Photo by Terry Vlisidis on Unsplash