Arts Organizations and For-Profits Sharing Resources Together
Jan 18th, 2012 | By | Category: The Creative Economy
By Karen Harlin for The Dance Journal
A small group of about a dozen Arts Administrators, Artists and Art supporters met on Tuesday evening, January 17th at the Community Education Center in Philadelphia to discuss how working together, sharing their talents, resources and assets can benefit all the participating organizations without conflict.
Attendees came from varied backgrounds, such as, Carla Morales founder of Landmark Productions a stage, film and television production company; Ola Solanke of The Arts Garage which is a live-art venue that features literary and contemporary performance artists and nightly DJ dance music; Lela Aisha Jones creator and choreographer of the dance company Flyground; Marc Miller the new Managing Director of Flash Point Theatre; and Stanley Porkras from Nonprofit Technology Resources.
The workshop was by Joseph Morrison, who is the CEO of Raiser Sharp Consulting. While it was clearly an opportunity for Mr. Morrison to market himself as a consultant for nonprofits, it did create an important dialogue amongst participants with the notion of sharing professional resources between different companies to maximize their own efforts, while fulfilling their missions.
Often small arts organizations are self-focused not realizing that other organizations may be open to collaboration, not necessarily in artistic projects, but in the day to day needs of the partnering organizations. This workshop provided a chance to state needs, explore resources and reach out to others to find complimentary goals.
It was generally felt that the Philadelphia arts community is very disconnected. Joseph Morrison plans to create a web site to enable organizations to share their needs and resources with each other. The overall consensus was that future meetings should be scheduled to further the dialogue. In this way, important connections can begin to be created in order to establish a broader network of arts organizations and for-profit partners, who can mutually benefit by sharing resources.
Thank you to both Karen and The Dance Journal for this article.