Call To Action: Leading In Crisis
As we were putting this archive together, one of the things that surprised me the most was the roller coaster of crises the arts community faced during my 40+ year tenure as an arts leader. Funding crises, censorship crises, policy crises, major external events like the AIDS crisis, 9/11, The Great Recession, and COVID, to name a few. Add to that mix the internal crises that most organizations face periodically, like personnel crises and board crises, and you have quite a volatile stew of the kinds of things you are expected to “handle” if you are running an organization. There is very little training for this, so mostly you are figuring things out as you go.
-
The articles included in this section reference a number of the crises that occurred during my tenure as an arts leader. What I am thinking about now is this: if crises in the arts (and external crises that affect the arts) marked the past half century, perhaps (sadly) the next 50 years won’t look that different. It definitely won’t look different if we don’t make an intervention into what now seems to me to be a predictable pattern.
The question for all of us is: What is the armature and the infrastructure we need to have in place to prevent, or at least mitigate, these disruptive crises?
