Our board is now 100 percent working artists and that was not the case six months ago.
on our part and because of that there’s a high bar. We need to implement the values not only in a structural way, but also on the level of organizational culture. It’s not just about creating a democratic workplace or hori- zontal power relations among staff. It’s also about changing how things get done. And distributing power to artists and bringing artists into positions of power over aesthetics and resources. Sima: What’s an example of how one might distribute power to artists? Or what did it look like before you embarked on this process? What’s something you might dismantle? Hope: : Our board is now 100 percent work- ing artists and that was not the case six months ago. After we announced our move to distrib- uted leadership, three of the board members, in conversation with me, decided it was time to step down. There’s been an intentional transi- tion away from a traditional nonprofit board that’s conceived as a fundraising engine com- prised of people with connections to money and networks. I think that’s an outdated model. Value-aligning the board has been an important part of this transition. We’re also having former lead artists in the Community Engagement Residency program select the next round of artists in partnership with HMD staff and I am stepping off that selection panel. We’re also talking about a paid artist coun- cil with curatorial power or the power to hold the organization accountable to our stated and aspirational values. Things like that. Karla: When I came on board, the CER program supported one lead mentor artist and a number of mentee artists. In a recent meeting a couple of artists brought up dis- mantling hierarchies within mentorship as well so it can be bidirectional. That already started happening in the CER program in 2019 where we transitioned to three lead art- ists who have collaborators they work with. The CER also transitioned from a mentor- ship program to a capacity building pro- gram. We’re still asking questions about what it means to shift, share, cede power within a program where you have an organization that’s regranting money to artists. That pro- gram could radically transform over the next few years. Sima: You write the grants that get the money to support your programs? Is there a discon- nect between how you get the funds and how you distribute them? Karla: The CER is funded by the California Arts Council Artists in Communities pro-
gram. This application supports organization/ artist partnerships for sustained residencies in community settings. For many CAC pro- grams, artists must partner with a nonprofit in order to be eligible and competitive for the funds. In terms of how we distribute CAC funds, initially the majority of the money from the grant went to one lead artist with the rest divided among the mentee artists. Now that’s more equitably distributed among the three artists for three different projects. Hope: We’ve also started implementing finan- cial transparency practices regarding how we communicate internally to each other and with artist partners about budgets and fund- ing. A lot of historically white-led organiza- tions have positioned themselves as regrant- ing organizations. They regrant funds to artists of color. That’s problematic for a lot of reasons because the regranting nonproft 501(c)3 retains control over the money and over the relationship with the funder. Often this can disempower the artist because they don’t have the direct information or direct access to the money. If there’s poor communi- cation, too often the artist pays the price. So the question is, how can nonprofits step away from that gatekeeping role and provide more direct access to resources? Hope: Sometimes it can happen even in the application process. If an artist is relying on a nonprofit for a foundation opportunity because the foundation only accepts 501(c)3 applicants and the nonprofit messes up on the application, the artist pays the price. Or if the nonprofit fails to be transparent with the artist or fails to honor their agreement, the artist pays the price. Funders need to shift Sima: What kind of problems do artists run into in that model? as well. If foundations made applications less burdensome, accessible to artists with no staff and less time, and if fiscally sponsored artists were eligible for all funding opportuni- ties, that would help level the playing field. Cherie: HMD is also connecting artists we partner with to foundations and program officers that they didn’t have a connection to previously and might not even know of. Hope’s connected a couple of our CER artists to people at Hewlett or CAC so they can start to build their own relationships with them. As an artist, no one ever introduces you to the foundations even if you’re working with a 501(c)3; they keep those relationships to themselves. That’s another way that we’re being more transparent with the artists we’re working with and also helping them estab-
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Sima: What are some of the things the artists said or asked for? Cherie: One big topic was race. What does it mean for a white founder/leader who has been the head of this organization to embed cultural equity and distributed leadership? Does it mean stepping back? Does it mean training? There are a lot of questions we don’t have answers to yet. Hope: An ongoing theme has been what combination of dismantling, evolution, and seeding new structures do we want to imple- ment. Any time you structure or restructure an arts organization, there will be different questions and tools that are appropriate. Bringing artists into the process is absolutely crucial because a lot of organizations have multiple directors—that in itself is frankly nothing radical. This is a value-driven move
that would look like in a dance company that wasn’t dance education focused. My long term goal is to start my own residency pro- gram in the Caribbean, so this was great field research for that. Then in January, I met with Hope to renew my contract and the idea of distributed leadership and moving me into a bigger role as Director of Art in Commu- nity surfaced. I didn’t know exactly what that would mean, but I was in for the ride. Sima: Can any of you name the first real step HMD took toward enacting distributed leadership? Cherie: All of us co-curated this year’s Bridge Project. The theme of improvisation was really intriguing to me as a creative dance and improvisation teacher and as someone who loves to put improvisation into my own cho-
reographed work. I was also really happy that we could focus this Bridge Project on impro- visational forms that come from the African, Asian, and Latin American diasporas and peo- ple of color who teach and perform improvi- sation because it feels like so much in the US focuses on improvisation from white artists. Cherie: There was a lot of collaboration and shared decision making. We would meet to talk about artists we’d want to invite, share videos of their work. Hope was really sup- portive of who we were interested in bring- ing. The process felt really empowering to be able to make decisions and bring my vision into what the Bridge Project would be this year. We’ve been in intense distributed lead- Sima: What did the co-curating process look like?
ership training starting with hiring Leader- Spring as consultants to help us delineate what distributed leadership means for us and for HMD. We talk about power and decision making, and some critical questions that have come up around the relationship of HMD to The Bridge Project. Sima: Karla mentioned bringing artists in to help flatten hierarchy. What role do artists play in the distributed leadership model? Cherie: Something I’ve learned about HMD is that there is a high value for artists, paying them and respecting their time. We recently had three sessions where 10-15 artists were on a Zoom call with us and LeaderSpring, talking about what distributed leadership means to them. Hope: And we paid each artist $100 for each community meeting they attended.
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In Dance | May 2014 | dancersgroup.org
u n i f y s t r e n g t h e n amp l i f y u n i f y s t r e n g t h e n a p l i f y
44 Gough Street, Suite 201 San Francisco, CA 94103 www.dancersgroup.org
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