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Weekly Features (scroll down to find them)
​Function of the Week: Finance | Framework of the Week: Core Mission Support
Questions? Ask ArtsManaged

Dear Reader,

There is a persistent (and often productive) belief that to understand something you need to disassemble it. Discover and describe the component parts and how they function, and you will know the whole. Accounting works this way – sorting financial items and actions into categories, clustering categories into types. Finance builds on the logic of accounting to do the same.

Accounting and finance teach us to organize financial bundles and flows by source and by use, to separate direct expenses that relate to a particular product or service from indirect expenses that do not, and to count things that have discernable economic value – ignoring things that don't.

When we follow these teachings, important stories are revealed to us – stories of expense and revenue, capacity and constraint, surplus and deficit, profit and loss. But if we only follow these teachings, other important stories are left unseen and unsaid – stories of purpose and meaning, effort and energy, resilience and entrenchment.

Which is why successful practice in Arts Management requires a portfolio of approaches – reductionism among them, but not alone. As philosopher Mary Midgley puts it:

Any thriving arts initiative demands a deep and disciplined understanding of the value it creates and the costs it incurs. These have financial aspects, of course, where reductionism can play a powerful role. But "true value" and "true cost" in human endeavors are also integral and entangled in ways that cannot be divided. That's where subjective, social, aesthetic, empathetic, and ecological forms of inquiry are necessary.

The true crime of reductionist true costs is that they dismantle a system into parts. That certainly helps us understand its function. But it can blind us to "the whole messy lovely true story" of its life.

Andrew

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* POEM SOURCE: Ewing, Eve L. Electric Arches. Chicago, Illinois: Haymarket Books, 2017. https://www.haymarketbooks.org/books/1129-electric-arches.

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Function of the Week: Finance​

Finance involves designing, maintaining, and sustaining systems of money and stuff.

Framework of the Week: Core Mission Support​

Nonprofits are often evaluated (harshly) around their proportion of "overhead" costs – the portions of their budget that doesn't connect directly to particular programs or services. Reframing "overhead" or "indirect costs" as "core mission support" can help tell a more compelling (and correct) story about how your organization works.

Questions? Ask ArtsManaged

Do you have a puzzle, problem, or persistant concern about Arts Management? Post your question to this online and anonymous form. I’ll select questions to answer in the Field Guide, or in this newsletter, so that we can all learn together about the real-world messes we face.