Nonprofit

LA STAGE Alliance

LA STAGE empowers artists and engages audiences by building awareness, appreciation and support for the performing arts in Greater LA.

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2 Submitted Ideas

  • CREATE ·2014 Grants Challenge

    Arts & Culture Infrastructure Initiative

    Our Arts and Culture Infrastructure Initiative strengthens support for the arts community with a focus on diversity, inclusion and access.

  • 2013 Grants Challenge

    Arts & Culture Infrastructure Initiative

    Let’s Create LA … with a vibrant and thriving arts and culture infrastructure initiative.

    Greater LA has a robust and active cultural scene, with more artists and arts organizations per capita than almost any other region in the country. LA is also home to a powerful and productive economy that generates billions of dollars a year in a variety of industries, helping to make California the 8th-largest economy in the world. However, as the LA2050 Report indicates, financial support for the arts is weak compared to other major markets. This deficiency is created by a low number of private culturally-focused foundations, low levels of corporate sponsorship, and most importantly, a gap that exists between business managers and executives who want to engage with the cultural life of LA. In contrast to many other regions that have robust Board Placement programs, Arts & Business Councils, and United Arts Funds, LA has very limited programs to prepare for and match business/civic leaders for service on cultural arts non-profit boards. LA STAGE Alliance hopes to address these concerns by becoming a robust cultural alliance, providing service to the entire arts, business, and philanthropy community. We have completed the initial research for the Arts & Culture Infrastructure Initiative. A LA2050 grant is needed as ‘seed money’ to allow us to fast track this initiative by piloting test cases, developing program/operations and fundraising plans and creating a network of invested stakeholders through a series of interviews, surveys, convenings and research reports. Our research indicates that the Initiative has the potential to be financially self-sustaining through both earned and contributed revenue after the two-year pilot phase.

    The Initiative will include the following three components:

    1. Arts & Business Conduit: We want to serve as the conduit between the arts and business community. We will build relationships with the top 50 institutions with demonstrated arts board participation from our research. We will interview key leadership and corporate social responsibility officers on their formal and informal board placement, leadership development and community outreach strategies. Our goal would be for the talented employees of top corporations in the region to be trained on arts board service and be placed with a cultural organization that both matches their interests and expands their understanding of the cultural infrastructure of Greater LA.

    Engaging Los Angelinos with cultural board service by itself is not enough. We will create ongoing Board Support Networks between board members at cultural organizations for mutual support, similar to support networks in other fields through surveys, communications, convenings and networking events. Arts non-profits often run into challenges that their boards do not have knowledge in and may feel at a loss on how to effectively address. By creating networks between board members - including mentor-mentee relationships and periodic gatherings of board members/board chairs, etc - major decision-making challenges can be addressed with the knowledge base and community support of leaders from across the region. We will consult with national thought leaders in leadership development and arts non-profit management to create the program design for the Arts & Business Conduit.

    2. Region-wide Arts Fund: We will develop a plan to create a Region Wide Arts Fund through workplace giving, employee-driven corporate sponsorship support, individual donations from high-net-worth individuals and crowd sourced methodologies. By engaging with the businesses of Greater LA through the Board Placement and Development process, we expect that many LA citizens will be identified who are interested in the cultural landscape of LA, but who are not in a place to engage immediately through Board service. This component of the program will provide a pathway for those who want to support the LA cultural infrastructure without board service. The funds raised will be distributed through re-granting to support parts of LA’s cultural landscape that are often overlooked or underfunded.

    3. Arts & Cultural Alliance Pilot We will pilot the expansion of our programming, from serving the performing arts predominately to serving the entire arts and culture sector through the following channels: Current Program Outreach, Expansion of LASTAGETimes.com Arts Journalism coverage, and Research and Program Development. This will lead to a new mission, new name/branding and a more robust operation. We would conduct outreach to build awareness of these benefits to an expanded arts population while simultaneously working with the broader community to ascertain what community-specific services and programs are still needed.

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