A Time for Reinvention

From the Executive Director

By Ben Cameron

What on earth is going on these days? In recent months, the National Endowment for the Arts has hired a development director; Mayor Bloomberg of New York has announced his intention to solve the city’s fiscal crisis by raising charitable dollars from foundations, corporations and individuals; and the New York Times reported that several state attorneys general are insinuating themselves into the affairs of not-for-profits by handpicking new board members and inserting them into organizations—new board members who frequently have been significant donors to the campaigns of said attorneys general. Former senator Bill Bradley has released a report critical of not-for-profits, chiding us for not attracting bigger gifts—a report both depressingly wrongheaded (as if we weren’t doing our utmost to maximize every gift) and shockingly naïve (bearing no understanding of what donor cultivation is about). In short, for those of us long accustomed to viewing with some concern the blurring of lines between the for-profit and not-for-profit, this accelerated intrusion of the government sector is alarming. Clearly, it’s not easy being a not-for-profit these days.

In The Radical Center: The Future of American Politics, authors Ted Halstead and Michael Lind suggest the confluence of five factors—the polarization of wealth, economic depression, war, major demographic shifts and accelerating technological reinvention—has produced a redefinition of our social compact. These reinventions, occurring roughly every 60-80 years, the authors argue, produced the American Revolution, the Civil War / Reconstruction, and the Great Depression / New Deal legislation / entry into World War II. From his side of the aisle, Karl Rove, too, sounded this identical theme in a recent New Yorker interview, describing the current political system as broken and defining his aspirations as a fundamental reordering of a social compact that will entrench the priorities of his party for the long term.

What might this mean for us? First, we must lift our sights above our current financial distress. Imagine, for a moment, living in 1929, when the Great Depression hit. How easy it would have been to say, “Let’s just keep our heads down and pull back. If we can weather this for five or six years, we’ll be back to normal at last.” But when the economy rebounded, it did so in a radically different context—a context informed by New Deal legislation, by social security and new tax structure, by the prevalence of the talking picture, by wildly different assumptions about organized social behavior. There was no return to 1928.

Similarly, we cannot approach our current situation as if we will return to the bounty days of the 1990s if we can only persevere. Those days are gone forever, and we are in the early stages of a completely new reality.

In this moment, we must recognize that the very not-for-profits we take for granted in education, in social services, in health care, in the environment, and, yes, in the arts, are emblematic of one and only one chapter in our history. Our existence as a sector is far from guaranteed, and, indeed, our portion of the sector, at least—always recognized as fragile—may more accurately be described as imperiled. It’s not only about the survival of not-for-profit arts: It’s increasingly about the survival of the entire not-for-profit sector.

We must be ever more vigilant as private citizens in participating in a myriad of public issues. It’s time to write letters to our representatives at every level of government, whatever our individual political perspectives might be. These are moments of potentially seismic change, and we have no one but ourselves to blame if the changes are not those we would want.

On the other hand, we must be sensitive to important trends around us, positioning ourselves to take advantage of the new chapter, whatever it might be. In his depiction of the deteriorating social impulses of Americans in his best-seller Bowling Alone, Robert Putnam reminds us of three counter-trends that suggest new social power: grassroots political movements, new telecommunications possibilities (reminding us that the telephone was originally seen as a threat to the neighborhood, but merely redefined it) and the explosion of therapy and encounter groups. Surely these trends are ones with profound resonance for us: The wild success of the recent coordinated Lysistrata readings around the world suggests that people are hungry to confront issues of importance, to talk about their feelings in a well-orchestrated social context.

It’s easy to despair about the turn of recent political events, but as Halstead reminded us in to our biennial National Conference, reinvention is not antithetical to the American tradition—it is squarely at the center. Yes, clearly we are seeing an acknowledgment that the system with which we have been comfortable—indeed, the system that fostered many of us and gave us our careers—is inadequate to the task at hand. But we must move beyond despair and see this time as an opportunity for us to declare a new set of priorities, a new set of principles. The moment is not about repair: It is about reinvention. We cannot wait for others to define our destinies, but must engage anew in the political battles that surround us.

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