I’m in Ashland WI for meetings with Northland College about a possible rural arts development program on campus. I’ll be attending the Chequamegon Bay Arts Council’s annual meeting tomorrow night, and have an opportunity to meet with Anne Katz of Arts Wisconsin and Noah Siegler of Stage North before heading to Washington DC on Tuesday for the “From Scarcity to Abundance” convening at Arena Stage. Plus I’m here in Wisconsin on the day the Packers won the NFC Championship — Go PACK! This Wisconsin boy couldn’t be more pleased.

Anyway, I plan to do some posting during the week, which I hope will signal the start of more regular posts from now on. My apologies for the radio silence. Suffice to say, things are starting to roll for CRADLE!

Courtesy of the Daily Yonder blog:  Taylor Stuckert, co-founder of Energize Clinton County in Ohio, describes what it will take to revitalize his community’s economy. He says that he and others have decided to take ownership of their county’s future:

“Whether it is expressed through green development, farmers’ markets, buy-local campaigns, or efforts to develop sustainably, there exists an underlying desire for independence, or ownership—ownership of our economy, our environment, and generations of culture and tradition. It cannot be overstated, however, that this ownership comes with a cost and with great responsibility. People must recognize that their presence in a community is more than just “living in another town;” it is a bridge connecting generations of understanding of a particular place.”

I would argue that, while not mentioned directly, the arts are an important part of ownership of “culture and tradition,” passing along the stories that strengthen a sense of place. Seventy years ago, University of North Carolina arts leader Frederick H. Koch addressed the Southern Regional Festival on the subject of “Folk Playmaking,” which focused on the “legends, superstitions, customs, environmental differences, and the vernacular of the common people…The term ‘Folk’ with us applies to that form of drama which is earth-rooted in the life of our common humanity.” He goes on:

We have found that if the writer observes the locality with which he is most familiar and interprets it faithfully, it may show him the way to the universal. If he can see the interestingness of the lives of those about him with understanding and imagination, with wonder, why may he not interpret that life in significant images for others — perhaps for all? It has been so in all lasting art.

And, I would add, with all lasting cultures. We need to get back to telling our own stories, singing our own songs, dancing our own dances, as well as buying our own produce. Self-reliance is not only about goods, but also about presence — our sense of place and how we fit into it. When the only stories we hear are from the mass media, who focus primarily on urban areas and exotic worlds, we begin to lose a sense of our own significance and the importance of daily life, and that makes it much easier to rely on others to fulfill our needs, and to seek out other places to fulfill our dreams. But as Dorothy says when asked near the end of The Wizard of Oz what she’s learned, “if I ever go looking for my heart’s desire again, I won’t look any further than my own back yard. Because if it isn’t there, I never really lost it to begin with!”

The dream of self-reliance is as much about the imagination as it is about the economy.

In the course of doing research to find small undergraduate colleges in small or rural communities that might be a good fit for the yet-to-be-developed CRADLE curriculum in arts leadership,  I came across an absolutely fascinating college in Ashland, WI: Northland College. Established in 1906 and with a current enrollment of about 600 students, Northland adopted in 1971 a mission to become “the nation’s leading environmental liberal arts college,” one that is “visionary by nature.” It asks potential students:

Are you independent-minded? Do you view the world differently than your class mates and often find yourself on the road less traveled? Do you stand up for what you believe in? Are you passionate about life and curious about everything? If so, we may be the place for you.

What could be more perfect for a CRADLE leader?

While there are many colleges that claim to focus on the environment, Northland College really seems to live that commitment, and you can see it in their curriculum. Their general education program, for instance, implemented in 2008 and known as the Integrated Core Curriculum, has three tracks, one of which is completed by every student within their first two years: Natural Connections, Growing Connections, and Superior Connections. “Each curriculum includes nine courses, eight of which are taught in integrated block formats and one of which focuses specifically on experiences beyond the classroom.” Natural Connections focuses on courses “organized around themes or questions, such as “Natural Hazards and Environmental Extremes,” “What is Success?” “Earth Keeping: Exploring our Relationships with Nature,” or “What Does Sex have to Do with It?” Growing Connections “focuses on the history, theories, and practices of sustainable agriculture.” And Superior Connections “focus[es] on the Lake Superior watershed. Students who enroll in Superior Connections develop expertise in the natural and human histories of the watershed, and then use these expertise to study and engage a variety of complexly interconnected environmental and cultural issues.” All three of these tracks, but especially the latter two, are highly focused on valuing place, something that is central to CRADLE values. As they say in their statement of values, “We value – as individuals and as a community – the place where we live and work, and we are committed to sustainability and good stewardship, in order to conserve this place for the generations that will follow us.”

Exploration of their majors and minors revealed, to my great excitement, a major in “Sustainable Community Development“! The Major in Sustainable Community Development

is designed for students who are interested in the interdependence of environmental, economic, and social issues and who want to strengthen their abilities to become effective community change agents. Sustainable Community Development offers courses in a wide range of areas including the theory and practice of Sustainable Community Development, community-building, co-operative economies, globalization, and social enterprises and leadership for Sustainable Community Development….Central to this curriculum is the development of the whole person—a process that emphasizes social values, creativity, and the recognition that community involvement is necessary for individual growth and the enrichment of our society.

The rich and fascinating course list includes “Introduction to Social Justice,” “Methods of Sustainable Community Development,” and the “Sociology of Community,” among others in this 49-credit major. But what I didn’t find included were any courses in the arts. No Drama Department, no Dance Department, no Music Department, a traditional Art Department and Writing and English Department. But the connection between the commitment to localism, environmentalism, and the arts hasn’t yet been made. Classical conductor Benjamin Zander, in his outstanding TED talk, opens with a joke about two shoe salesman who go to Africa. One cables back, “Bad news — none of them wear shoes.” The other cables, “Fantastic news — they don’t have shoes yet!” That’s how I feel about Northland College: good news! They don’t have a local arts leadership program yet!

This isn’t at all surprising, by the way, as even the national organizations and thinkers that focus on the development of strong local economies haven’t made this connection as yet, but to me, in order to change our relationship to the environment and to our communities, we need to change the stories we tell ourselves. As George Gerbner, a scholar of mass communications and a leader of the Cultural Environment Movement, has written, “Stories socialize us into roles of gender, age, class, vocation, and lifestyle, and often models of conformity or targets of rebellion. They weave the seemless web of the cultural environment that cultivates most of what we think, what we do, and how we conduct our affairs.” But, he warns, “stories no longer come from families, schools, churches, neighborhoods, and often not even from native countries. Increasingly, they come from small groups of distant conglomerates with something to sell.” In other words, “today [stories] are no longer handcrafted, homemade, community inspired.” As David Diamond says, “Today a vast majority of people buy theatre, buy dance, buy paintings, buy books, buy movies; the list goes on and on. We now pay strangers to tell us stories about strangers. But when do we use the symbolic language of theatre, dance, etc., to tell our own stories about our collective selves?” The human consequences of this, Gerbner asserts, are “far-reaching. They include cults of media violence that desensitize, terrorize, brutalize, and paralyze; the promotion of unhealthy practices that pollute, drug, hurt, poison, and kill thousands every day; portrayals that dehumanize, stereotype, marginalize and stigmatize women, racial and ethnic groups, gays and lesbians, aging or disabled or physically or mentally ill persons, and others outside the cultural mainstream.” One might add that these stories also encourage the constant moving from place to place that characterizes contemporary American lifestyles, a single-minded focus on the national over the local, and a disconnect from what Patrick Overton, head of the Front Porch Institute, calls the “poetry of place.”

David Diamond, the author of the excellent book Theatre for Living: The Art and Science of Community-Based Dialogue, asks “What is the result of the living community’s inability to use primal language to tell its own stories?” His answer: “Alienation, violence, self-destructive behaviour on a global level. Living communities have fallen into a stupor, hypnotized by a steady diet of manufactured culture.” This is how identities are created and commitments are formed.

Interim Vice President of Academic Affairs and Academic Dean Alan Brew, who has a passion for “literature and the natural world,” seems to fully understand the importance of stories to the development of a sense of place. As a teacher of courses that “reflect my special interest in exploring the relationship between humans and the natural world,” courses that take him and his students to “to the canyons of the Southwest, the Apostle Islands National Lakeshore, and the lakes of the Boundary Waters,” Brew says that he is “committed to the preservation and exploration of stories, and I strive to connect individuals with narratives that comfort, challenge, guide, and, ultimately, place them in the rich complexities of the human experience.”

This is where, I would suggest, CRADLE comes in. The focus of a CRADLE arts leadership curriculum would be an interdisciplinary program designed to teach students how to help small and rural communities preserve and explore their own stories, strengthen their identities, and enhance the social cohesion and confidence that allows small communities to thrive instead of wither. We must do something to balance the global corporate stories that reinforce the very behaviors that are destroying our environment. Clay Shirky, in his new book Cognitive Surplus, quotes a 2009 working paper written by Marco Gui and Luca Stanca that says, “television can play a significant role in raising people’s materialism and material aspirations, thus leading individuals to underestimate the relative importance of interpersonal relations for their life satisfaction and, as a consequence, to over-invest in income-producing activities and under-invest in relational activities.”  In other words, we spend less time with friends, family, and neighbors.

A CRADLE arts curriculum would not be about the selling of art to communities, art as commodity, but rather empowering communities to create its own art, to tell its own stories, to sing its own songs, and dance its own dances — to tell stories that are specific to the place, not simply buy the homogenized stories provided by the mass media. It would be as much about localization and import substitution as a farmer’s market or a small-mart.

Northland College’s mission, values, and overall approach to education is an inspiring example of how the liberal arts might be used to change the way we relate to our environment and to our community. Everywhere I looked on their website, I saw teachers, administrators, and students committed to creating a better future based on an understanding and appreciation of the local environment. I came away convinced that Northland College would be the perfect partner in the development of a CRADLE arts leadership curriculum. Even if they were not willing or able to implement such a course of study, I am convinced that the general orientation of the faculty would help release the collaborators from the pre-conceptions that tend to tether us to the current model of education.

That is why I am committing myself to contacting Dr. Brew to propose an exploration of how CRADLE and Northland College might explore a partnership for the development of a rural arts leadership curriculum. Until then, I urge you to spread the word to any future undergraduate students you know who are interested in environmental issues and the humanities to consider Northland College. It is the kind of school that, looking back, I wish I had attended as an undergraduate.

As I noted in the previous post, I think an important part of CRADLE’s mission is getting rural arts education into the colleges, universities, community colleges, and distance education. We need more arts leaders who can (to borrow Robert Sternberg’s triarchic mind) think critically, creatively, and practically; who are committed to a community, and who have an interest in learning entreprenurial skills. That will be a big challenge — the arts in higher education have been focused very narrowly on educating for virtuosity, claiming to “train” young people in the skills necessary to “make it” in their chosen profession. The problem is that there is far more supply than demand, especially when that supply is centralized in a few metropolises. CRADLE seeks to forge new pathways for young people to follow.

The other focus, equally pressing, is to create an on-line reference library of resources for arts leaders in small and rural communities. Over the past year, I have become increasingly aware that there are a great many people who have written blogs, created websites, written articles and books that pertain to the creation and running of arts organizations is the small communities of America. The problem is that they are scattered all over, and have not been reviewed, evaluated, annotated, and organized. In the past, people like Frederick Koch and Robert Gard created repositories for plays and other information. In our time, organizations like Community Arts Network have provided a similar service for the broader field of community arts development. But to my knowledge, nobody has pulled together materials specifically for rural arts.

It is my hope to begin to “build out” this website to do just that. It will be a slow process, one that could be sped up through the work of volunteers interested in exploring a specific subject, and through the freeing up of time through grants and fundraising. I would be grateful to anyone who can contribute to either of those!

A while ago, I promised a series of blog posts concerning forerunners to CRADLE. Since then, I have been far too busy to do it, but it is my hope to begin in the not-too-distant future.

A side note: you may of may not have noticed that I have changed the name back to its original Center for Rural Arts Development and Leadership Education. The broader name (Center for Rooted Arts Development in Local Economies) would have created a “bigger tent,” but ultimately I felt it threatened the unique mission of CRADLE. While I believe deeply in arts “rooted” in a place, I also believe that rural and small communities are seriously underserved by our arts community, and deserve to have an organization focused on them and them alone.

For personal reasons, this blog has been dormant for a while, and it is time to bring it back to full wakefulness again.

The latest news is that CRADLE has recently applied for a grant to bring together a working group of community artists with connections to education to create model curricula to support CRADLE’s commitment to educating people in the skills and knowledge necessary to found and/or operate arts organizations in small and rural communities. I am becoming more and more convinced that this movement will begin to gain speed when colleges and universities begin to acknowledge that running arts organizations in small and rural communities is an exciting career path for their students.

Report after report shows that we are facing a leadership crisis in arts organizations across the country, with a generation of arts leaders wishing to retire but seeing nobody following behind to take their places. I think this is particularly true in small and rural communities, who have received little attention from the mass media, and who are virtually ignored in higher education.

I have a lot of new ideas percolating for CRADLE, and I will begin writing about them soon. I apologize for the extended silence, and wanted you to know that it does not represent a cessation in CRADLE activity, We are alive and well, and ready to start making an impact.

I hope to write about this in the near future, after we talk about it today in my “Creating Arts Orgainzation in Small Communities” class, but this is a game you don’t need me to to play, you can figure it out yourself.

What is the connection between Dudley Cocke’s 2000 “theory of cyber compensation,” Clay Shirky’s idea of “Gin, Television, and Social Surplus” (video below, transcript here), and the March 2010 National Endowment for the Arts Report Come As You Are: Informal Arts Participation in Urban and Rural Communities?

“I knew that there must be plays of the people filled with the spirit of places… I felt the convistion then that I have maintained since — that the knowledge and love of place is a large part of the joy in people’s lives. There must be plays that grow from all the countrysides of America, fabricated by the people themselves, born of toiling hands and free minds, born of music and love and reason.”

Robert Gard, Grassroots Theatre

I received an email over the weekend from Robert Gard’s daughter, Maryo Gard Ewell, a prominant community arts promoter in her own right, who told me:

I’m working on a conference to take place later this month in Wisconsin, the Gard Symposium.  We are trying to look at community arts by looking across disciplines – we always say that the “arts build healthy communities” but often we mean “I think that more arts build healthy communities, I help create more arts, therefore I help build healthy communities” which is kind of circular.  Lew Feldstein, co-author of “Better Together,” is the conference keynote speaker, and then we’ll hear from a political leader, a technology specialist, a religious leader, an economist, and a medical social worker, and finding out what THEY think a “healthy community” is; then artists will respond.  We hope that we can help elicit thoughts on what the “local arts agency” of the next decade could believe, look like, and do.

To this end, we have a conference blog site, and each of the “healthy community specialists” mentioned above has written a very short essay on what they think a “healthy community” is.  We’d love for you to respond.  That’s http://gardfoundation.blogspot.com

Please forward the address to people you think will be interested.  We don’t want just artists to be involved.  Perhaps your students?  You?  Your colleagues?

An artists’ “zine” picked up information on the conference/conference  papers, so you may want to see what they think – really cool! – here’s the link – before you go to the blog.

http://www.crickettoes.com/blog/2010/09/the-gard-symposium-gives-boring-the-heave-ho.html

Let’s get into a good discussion!

If you are able to attend this conference in Madison WI, I think your time will be well-spent. I would like to go myself, but it is difficult in the midst of the semester, and I doubt I’ll be able to manage. But if you go, please send me a report, and I will post it here on the blog.

This is an excellent blog overall for CRADLErs, and I particularly recommend the August 31st post entitled “Growing Local” — Not Just for Tomatoes. Craige Hoover makes explicit the parallel between farmers markets and local arts. Once he’s done so, he concludes, “Returning to the neighborhood scale is a movement that is not localized to the development, retail, and farming industries, it’s a cultural-wide movement that has only just begun to take root (pun intended).”

Exactly, and well said, Craige!

Richard Florida is at it again. In a post today on The Daily Beast, he writes about which regions have higher incomes:

The gap separating the regions with the highest and lowest incomes is substantial. With a median household income of more than $85,000, and median individual income and per capita income levels in excess of $40,000, Greater Washington’s income levels are more than double those of America’s lowest income metros. The flip side of this growing income inequality is a deepening economic geography of wealth and class.

This gap is only likely to worsen as our economy continues its inexorable transformation from a manufacturing-based industrial system to an idea-driven post-industrial one and as highly skilled people, high-tech industries, and high-paying jobs continue to concentrate in some regions and not others. This is an issue of pressing national concern; new and innovative public-policy strategies are badly needed.

I’m sure that all of this is accurate, and Florida is careful to also point out that the cost of living in the highest paid places are also much higher. What I object to — and this is something that has become a Florida trademark — is the constant drumbeat about the “inexorable transformation [of America] from a manufacturing-based industrial system to an idea-driven post-industrial one,” as if it is a force of nature rather than a clear policy choice made by our government leaders who, through treaties (an ironic word, given its history with the Native Americans) like NAFTA, have exported most  jobs that are done by people who labor, who make things, who do things, including (and especially) farming and manufacturing.

An economy that is based on ideas is an economy that is completely reliant on other countries for goods and food. All it takes is a slight change in the international political scene — say, a war or a drought or an economic collapse — and America will suddenly find itself helpless. As a culture, we need to be following the lead of the Transition Network, moving our local economies to become more self-sufficient and self-reliant in terms of food, in terms of goods, in terms of art.

We need to look at Florida’s work not as tips in a game that can be won, but rather as warnings (like the melting icecaps and gushing deep sea oil wells are warnings) that our lifestyle is unsustainable.