Last Thursday at the Boston Public Library, alongside a group of theatres, funders, and field partners, we asked what it would mean to organize around the idea of a Theatre for Public Good, and how one might resource it. We are just beginning our synthesis process, and I expect more cohesive report-outs in the coming weeks and months. In the meantime, here are a few of my personal takeaways –
1. Theatre FOR Public Good vs. Theatre AS Public Good
In the wake of the crisis impacting our sector, where the current resourcing structures are failing us, the field is talking a lot about theatre as a public good aka theatre as civic infrastructure aka theatre for democracy. As we navigate this landscape and build our cohorts and coalitions, we need to be much more specific about what we mean. We use the same words, but they mean different things at different institutions.
For instance: Theatre FOR Public Good is not the same as Theatre AS Public Good. (And honestly, this holds no matter what art form you swap in. Dance for Public Good and Dance as Public Good are different projects too. The distinction is about the relationship between the art and the community, not the discipline.)
To me, Theatre as Public Good argues that the convening power of theatre, and the belonging and connection it creates, is essential, and should therefore be classified as a public good. Theatre for Public Good asks something different: how might a theatre use its space, its craft, and its convening power to strengthen community health, inspire community action, and build toward a more equitable democracy?
There are many reasons the distinction matters, but here is the one I care most about: the financial structures underneath each one are different. Theatre as Public Good centers the art form. You can charge what the market will bear and subsidize access for those who cannot afford it, often through partnerships from outside the field. The case you are making is that the act of engaging with theatre is an essential service, and it deserves to be funded like one.
Theatre for Public Good makes a different argument. If the work is to strengthen community health and inspire community action, then the theatre has to be embedded in its community, in long-term relationships that extend well beyond the mainstage. That work cannot be captured in a ticket price, because the people it serves are not customers, and the outcomes it produces (a healthier neighborhood, a more engaged public) do not show up at the box office. The resourcing has to look more like how we fund libraries, community health centers, and other civic institutions: sustained public and philanthropic investment in the service function, not transactions around the product.
2. Resourcing this work requires a mindset shift
Organizations need to rethink how we ask our funders and resourcing partners to engage with us. This is multifaceted, and I am still working through it myself. So bear with me.
Starting with where these conversations usually begin, too often in this kind of work, a theatre’s default position is to organize around its marginalization. We open with what we lack, what was cut, what we were never given. From there we talk about collaborating with other institutions, and we talk about mutual aid. I understand this position entirely. I have been in it many times. But the more I engage in this work, the less comfortable I find myself with it. Mutual aid keeps us alive, and I am grateful for it. But if mutual aid is the end result of our collaboration, all we are doing is redistributing scarcity. Our movement work has to push to expand the resources themselves.
The trouble is what happens when we do get to expansion. The conversation tends to jump straight to how endowments should pay out more than their 5 to 6 percent. Here is my challenge with that (please don’t throw stones at me). I am down for the conversation. But there are entire other movements already engaged in that fight, with more leverage than we have. We should support that work. What we should not do is make it the core of our resourcing strategy, because this is what I find both processes have in common: mutual aid and endowment payouts are both ways of waiting for relief to arrive from somewhere else.
That is the habit we have to break. We have to stop looking to funders and resourcing partners to pull us out of this. We are the practitioners. We are far closer to understanding who cares about the impact we are having, and therefore who within our ecology cares enough to resource us so that we do not disappear. And that closeness cuts both ways: it requires an honest conversation within our theatre about whether we are actually having an impact in our communities, and therefore whether we have earned the claim of being a public good at all.
Creating our own revenue strategies also means that we also have to accept that there is no magic bullet or single revenue source that will fix our issue. Similarly, no ideal percentage of earned to contributed to corporate revenue will unlock sustainability. (Honestly I think sustainability in a crumbling democracy is nonsense and we need to talk about that. But that’s a whole other essay!) To me there is only how adaptive we are willing to be, and how early we see financial needs coming, so we can adjust our revenue strategies to meet the moment.
All of which points to the real shift underneath this whole section: everyone, in every organization, has to contend not with their marginalization but with their power, and how to use it to move the work forward. Funders included. A theatre holds power: space, craft, community trust, convening muscle. A funder holds power: capital, access, influence over what the field treats as fundable. A movement gets built when everyone brings their power to the same side of the table, instead of one side pleading and the other side granting.
We should not be petitioning for our future. We should be actively building it, and inviting our resourcing partners to build it with us.
3. Movement work needs operational infrastructure (yes, I am about to say logic model)
Words and slogans matter, but you cannot build a movement out of verbiage alone. I would argue that both the field of theatre and the movement-centric conversations happening within it right now suffer from a lack of systems leaders designing the platforms and frameworks to support them.
We do, in fact, need more logic models!
Okay, maybe not a logic model exactly. But we need some structure that aligns how we intersect around HR, finance, fundraising, and operations. Not because a funder is demanding it, but because we need systems that keep us aligned to each other. We need structures that operationalize our words, because that is the only way to find out whether your actualization of the vision is the same as mine. And if it is not, we need to talk about that. Better to discover our differences in a spreadsheet than three years into a coalition.
We also need people who actually enjoy this work. The folks who nerd out about Google Sheets formulas. The folks who will troubleshoot an annoying accounting issue for hours because on the other end of it you unlock a payroll issue only you care about. The person who reads 990s for fun and can tell you more about a theatre’s values from its balance sheet than from its mission statement. Every movement needs its dreamers. It also needs someone who is genuinely excited about the shared services agreement.
4. Movements need governance, not just relationships
This is not a new concept, but it bears repeating: movements fail when they rely on leadership alone. If our movement depends on a handful of leaders staying connected to each other to move the needle, then the movement dies the moment you remove those leaders and relationships from the equation. People change jobs. People burn out. People move.
Governance is how a movement outlives its founders. It answers the questions relationships alone cannot: How do decisions get made when we disagree? Who speaks for the movement, and who decides who speaks? How do new organizations join, and what do they commit to when they do? How does money get accepted, distributed, and accounted for? What happens when a member acts against the values we claim to share?And if the movement asks its member theatres to share real power with their communities, then the movement itself has to be governed the same way. We cannot organize for shared power using a structure where three people hold all of it. The governance has to practice what the framework preaches.
More to come as our synthesis takes shape.
