Last Updated
April 30, 2020
Work. Shouldn't. Suck. LIVE: The Morning(ish) Show with special guest Cathy Edwards. [Live show recorded: April 27, 2020.]
Guest: Cathy Edwards
Co-Hosts: Tim Cynova & Lauren Ruffin
Guest
CATHY EDWARDS is Executive Director of the New England Foundation for the Arts (NEFA), where she has served since January, 2015. She believes art has a unique role to play in engaging people and communities, and is committed to building opportunity and equity in the creative sector. NEFA invests in artists and communities and fosters equitable access to the arts, enriching the cultural landscape in New England and the nation. The organization administers an array of grant-making programs and professional services, and conducts research into New England’s creative economy. NEFA works in partnership with the National Endowment for the Arts, the nation’s Regional Arts Organizations, and New England’s six state arts agencies, in addition to private philanthropy, to accomplish its work, with an annual budget of over $8 million. Cathy previously served as director of programming at the International Festival of Arts & Ideas in New Haven, CT; as the artistic director at both the Time-Based Art Festival at PICA in Portland, OR and Dance Theater Workshop in New York City; and as co-director of Movement Research in New York City. She has served on the board of directors of the Association of Performing Arts Professionals, as chair of the board of directors of Movement Research, and as vice-chair of the board of directors of the National Performance Network. She holds a BA from Yale College. Cathy has two children, both young adults, is married to an activist law professor, and lives in both New Haven, CT and Cambridge, MA.
Transcript
Tim Cynova:
Hi, I'm Tim Cynova and welcome to Work. Shouldn't. Suck. LIVE: The Morning(ish) Show. On today's episode, Lauren Ruffin and I are joined by Cathy Edwards. Cathy currently serves as the executive director of the New England Foundation for the Arts, or NEFA for short, found online at NEFA.org. NEFA invest in artists and communities, and fosters equitable access to the arts, enriching the cultural landscape in New England and beyond. Cathy previously served as the Director of Programming at the International Festival of Arts and Ideas, as the Artistic Director at both the Time-Based Art Festival at PICA in Portland, Oregon, and Dance Theater Workshop in New York City. And, as co-director of Movement Research in New York City. She has served on the board of directors of the Association of Performing Arts Professionals, as Chair of the board of Movement Research, and as Vice Chair of the board of the National Performance Network. We're so excited for her to join us today. Without further ado, Cathy, welcome to the show.
Cathy Edwards:
Thank you. It's great to see you both.
Lauren Ruffin:
Same. I realized this live stream is a steady parade of people that I love talking to, but I don't ever pick up the phone and call. Totally my fault, but it's really good to see you. Our first question is, how are you doing and how is the NEFA community doing right now? What are you hearing and seeing?
Cathy Edwards:
I'm doing okay. I lead a kind of itinerant life during my normal pre-COVID weeks. I vote and pay my taxes and my car is registered in New Haven, Connecticut, but I work in Boston so I spend a lot of time back and forth. And actually, it's been great to be living with my husband again, full time in New Haven. That was an unexpected upside. My two young adult kids came home. It's been great to have two young 20 somethings in the house. And so on a personal level, my day-to-day is fine.
Cathy Edwards:
I think all of us at NEFA, the NEFA team and staff, were holding it together. I really feel for my colleagues who've got little kids at home and are trying to work some crazy miracle of staying sane, while homeschooling and also trying to do some work and it's insane for them and there are constituents, like Diors, artists, folks who run cultural organizations and venues. Life sucks for them right now, things when it's really bleak. Many of my peer executive directors in the nonprofit sector or laying staff off, furloughing people figuring out, especially in live arts, are we going to reopen in September or is it going to be January? It's just really hard and artists and creative workers are suffering so massively. So things are not great in that regard.
Lauren Ruffin:
Yeah. Yeah. So Tim gave you an intro, I mean a bio, but how are you thinking about yourself and your work right now?
Cathy Edwards:
Oh God. As you guys both know, because I've had the opportunity periodically to connect with you over the years, which has always been so great, I think a lot about how I can actually be of any service as a leader. And so this is for sure testing any of my nascent growing leadership skills. It's kind of like, "Wow, I think I realize I am a linear and logical person and leader, and this is the most complex time possible." Actually, to lead in a complex time, I think you really need to have so many sensory abilities and you need to, especially if you're a linear person, I need to double down on my listening skills all the time, every single day because there's so much that isn't being said directly, can't be said directly because the situation is so uncertain right now. But all of those things need to inform setting a direction and a human focused kind of approach to everything we do, as much as budgets and scenario plans and all of the other tools that we have as leaders to project into the future. So yeah, complex.
Lauren Ruffin:
Yeah, I think that's really interesting. We haven't talked about that yet on the live stream, the sort of listening component. And then when you couple that with so much about listening is actually body language, and how much of that's lost over screens right now, I think that's a really, really great point.
Tim Cynova:
Yeah. I teach a class on leadership and team building at the new school and in the first class we run down a list of traits that most high performing teams demonstrate, and it's trust, psychological safety, the ability to listen and then social sensitivity, picking up on cues. And without any foresight into everything going online, and I think it was the third session we went all online, we did it on Zoom and talked about the difference between what you can pick up from the upper third of everyone. When you lean into the screen, you're not getting any closer to the person. You can't tell if someone's really relaxed in their chair or paying attention really or looking someplace else and the different skills that we need to develop, increasingly, in this world where this is the only way we're seeing people, and if you're writing it can be read differently. You could resend an email or you could resent an and the things there. But I like you said, "Tim gave you a bio." I've just pulled together a random bio for Cathy. Everything was based in Cathy's real bio based.
Lauren Ruffin:
It was totally based in fact, it was not fake news. Cathy really did all of those things.
Tim Cynova:
Yeah.
Cathy Edwards:
Yeah.
Tim Cynova:
You can leave it like, "Tim gave you a bio."
Lauren Ruffin:
Tim gave you a bio. It's Monday, okay, cut me a break. Day five million and 72 of this dang pandemic.
Cathy Edwards:
One think I want to add to what you were just saying because it seemed really resonant to me is I do think the ways that we work creatively, we really need to lean into those right now. It's the deep listening, but it's also being creative, working in collaboration and in solidarity to figure something out that is meaningful right now. And actually, I do think at NEFA and for a lot of teams probably, but maybe I'll just say at NEFA and with me being in the same space to be collaborative and creative and really service as many voices as possible is something that I've realized over my five years that NEFA helps us to do our best work. So it's definitely, yeah, it's a big lift to try and stay true to the values and the vision of the organization, but actually change some of the strategies because the world has changed and the people that we are supposed to be serving have some shifting needs right now that we need to be responsive to.
Tim Cynova:
Well, that goes right into one of the things that's on your website. NEFA's values include equity, diversity, inclusion and accessibility. There's a great section on the NEFA website about COVID resources and there's a subsection in that social justice and inclusion resources, including silent rhythms, inclusive distancing, a guide for arts and culture sector on the inclusion and accessibility of persons with disabilities during COVID-19. I'm wondering, can you talk a little bit more about this journey that the organization's been on, how you were thinking about your values and this time and maybe what comes from this, that might be different or similar to what you were thinking three months ago?
Cathy Edwards:
Sure. I think for us at NEFA, when we basically kind of went through our last strategic planning process, which we do periodically, it coincided with the awareness that if we didn't really articulate what we meant when we talked about equity or diversity or inclusion or accessibility, we were holding ourselves back and we were not being accountable to a concrete vision of what we wanted our future to be and how we wanted to develop our skill sets and our strategies as an organization. So one of the most powerful things we did was kind of define some terms for ourselves. And really for the first time ever, I think, created a group of six core values the organization. And those have really served us as our bedrock aspirations, especially when we go through hard times and this is the hardest. So I think imagining forward to a future post COVID-19, I think about who are the organizations, who are the individual leaders in our sector, who are the ones that we just can't do without because they're so in tune with community needs and aspirations and humanity and art is their vehicle.
Cathy Edwards:
Art is the way that they do that. But fundamentally they're making our communities better and our places better and they're leading by living values of equity and inclusion. So even as we figure out where we are in the temporary normal of this disruptive period, really lifting up the leaders who we have been relying on at NEFA to articulate a course for us that is about a more just and equitable world. We have to be in that process with them as we think about how we take care of our employees and how we recruit for our board during this pandemic. We have to think about that when we approach loosening restrictions on grants and trusting and listening to our grantees when they tell us what they need. So it's the key. I think it's the key towards exiting this period of COVID-19 with any sense of setting the table for greater participation and inclusion in the arts.
Cathy Edwards:
And I love the work, especially in public art around like, well, what does it mean to engage in public space? Who set the terms for that? Because right now, we've got a lot of folks who are kind of experiencing like a second reckoning of almost a Trump administration coming into power. It's just a sense of like who belongs? Who is this country for? Who is our public space for? So really making sure that we're centering those concerns and those voices as well as envisioning strategies for when we come out of this that folks who have been historically underrepresented and marginalized.
Lauren Ruffin:
Yeah. Tim, you were going to say something?
Tim Cynova:
Yeah, no, I was sitting with that response, that was really powerful, Cathy, really thought provoking. We've had conversations over the past month or year or so about physical space as it relates to the workplace, and we're talking a little bit ago about NEFA is in this process of looking at way of different office workspace might look like, but you've not gotten there before everything shut down. So I'm curious how you're now thinking about what is a workplace making any adjustments to the plans?
Cathy Edwards:
This is a really tough one. We, I think, are moving forward. We've got a space identified. We actually found a fantastic space. We are in a real estate market in Boston that is absolutely crushing and punishing and we were able to negotiate access to a space that needs to be used for a kind of cultural or startup organizations and as a result, we'll have access to pretty much, I think, half of market rate class A space.
Lauren Ruffin:
Yes.
Cathy Edwards:
So that's the main thing.
Lauren Ruffin:
Scream that from the rooftops. We can hear you in Boston from New Haven on that.
Cathy Edwards:
I do not want to let that go. And on the other hand, our board chair did say to me more than once, "Cathy, I hope we're not doing all this work and spending all these capital build-out dollars for a space nobody's going to want to use because you're all used to working remotely." And I had said that to our team at NEFA, our space force who's really organizing this whole thing a few times.
Tim Cynova:
Space force is the name. That is amazing.
Cathy Edwards:
We have a space force, and space force team of Doug and Abby and Steven are amazing and they have just kind of talked me down each time like, "No, we're still going to need a space. It might not be used exactly the way we had envisioned using it, but we're still going to need a space." So I keep repeating that to myself and thinking, I have to trust my colleagues and they say we're going to need a space, we're going to need a space. On the other hand, what I really think is that all these issues of flexibility in the work force and in the workplace. I remember when I started at NEFA, or before I started, I said to the chair of the search committee that hired me, "What if I work a couple days a week remote from Connecticut?" And he was like, "No, that's not fair." If you want the job, you've got to show up in Boston. I was like, "Okay." So there you go.
Cathy Edwards:
That's the impact of sort of reality, but it's one that's kind of been the de facto reality for everyone. We've got a very flexible workplace. If you need to work a day a week from home, if you can, if something comes up, no problem, just do it, no stress, just tell whoever you're going to talk to that day that it's going to be by the phone. And over the past five years, two of our employees have actually moved out of State and we let them do that and they've worked remotely and it's all been fine. But now I feel like, "Oh, this just happened and everybody's making it work." I don't know. It's hard for me to imagine us ever really going back to the kind of mandated five days a week in the office sort of situation that we generically were a part of because I'm even thinking about all the commuting time.
Cathy Edwards:
Boston's a tough city to get around in. Now 24 people are not spending up to an hour or two a day, getting back and forth. And then I think about the safety of our people. What's it going to be like? When is the T and public transportation going to be safe for people to travel on? Those are existential issues for us in the arts sector because we can't solve them. We're trying to figure out how front of house folks and box office people, arts educators can feel safe and confident being in public space. But anyway, I have a feeling that there will be even more flexibility where we work from and how we do our work in the years to come.
Tim Cynova:
What's your personal default? If you could just sketch what your personal workplace schedule would look like, are you more of like, "I need to be in the office four days a week. I can do one day remote." Or if all things were equal, you would just work offsite four or five days a week and pop in and maybe once a month?
Cathy Edwards:
That's a really good question. I've almost not allowed my own personal imagination to go there. And I think partly it is kind of like I do feel again, for my own style where I need to continually practice my deep listening and my emotional intelligence at work, being in the same place as other people really works for me. But I don't think I'm ever going to feel like I need to be in the office.
Lauren Ruffin:
Yeah.
Cathy Edwards:
Those days are gone.
Lauren Ruffin:
Yeah. Yeah. For most of my work history, I've had atrocious commutes, 90 minutes, two hours, horrible commutes around D.C. And so starting to work at Fractured Atlas, I definitely appreciated being able to work remote because I was living in D.C. and our office is in New York. We've had people who, as we slowly transitioned to being a hundred percent remote organization, who are really clear about their need to travel to an office. And I do wonder how this time is going to make people really think about time differently and that piece around commuting I think is so important, like how much productivity and energy can we unlock just without having to do two hours a day, five days a week of getting back and forth to the office. I just think that's such a great point.
Tim Cynova:
Yeah. I'm reflecting on, I think it was Mica Scalin last week, talked about how people are developing new habits. We've done this long enough now that you've gone over the 30 days or whatever, the book habit says that people develop new habits. And what's it going to look like in six months of this and as you wrestle with those questions, how valuable is my time? Do I really want a three hour commute? Like some of our team at Fractured Atlas had a three hour commute coming from the outer reaches of the boroughs into Midtown Manhattan, an hour and a half each way, and all of a sudden have that time back to them. But also, the people who like are really high performing who are like, "I need that space in that physical place with other people to really do my best work." And I'm curious how this is, I mean I hope some organizational psychologists, organizational designers are capturing this massive experiment that's happening right now to try and figure out some things when, what is it, like millions of people all of a sudden are not traveling into the office?
Lauren Ruffin:
Yeah, yeah. I think that's got to be a psychologist because there are some cities where it's definitely trauma getting around them and Boston and New York are two of those cities. Just walking when I'm in New York staying block away from Fractured Atlas's office, just getting across 8th Avenue, going past the Ghostbusters McDonald's to our office was just enough.
Cathy Edwards:
I think it occurred to me balance is a key word coming out of this. I mean balance is something we're all struggling for right now because we're working from home. I need to be pretty highly disciplined. I'm like, I have to get up every morning. I have to go for a walk before I sit down at my desk and I'm like nine to five, put on makeup or whatever. It's like I got to be in my work mode and then I've been so much more unplugged. Like at five o'clock, I get up from the computer and I don't look at it all weekend, and that was not typical before work was in my house. So then just reflecting on, oh, there's some probably some good things to learn about balance in this time, but there are so many things that I just miss so, so, so, so much. Commuting isn't one of them. But being in the same space with other people to collaborate, think creatively, to have fun, to experience art.
Lauren Ruffin:
That's a great transition into my next question because I know that you're thinking a lot about what performance art will look like, and on your website you talked about shared experiences being core to artistry. Can we talk about how are you thinking about what the future of performances will look like, and shared experiences?
Cathy Edwards:
I think in probably weeks one through three of the pandemic, I was just like, "It's going to be bad. I don't know exactly when, but we'll be back in our spaces doing our things." The longer it goes on, the more I have come to realize that there is a rewiring that's happening and that the employee and the audience safety considerations are not going to be solved any time very quickly, at least with the very hands off approach of our government right now. So it could be quite a while before we're back in space together. And people are actually doing amazing, creative things and they're really moving. And for the first three weeks of this I was totally resistant to that. I was like, "I am not going to be consuming more art online. I will read a book and all my hours looking at the Zoom, no, no more screen."
Cathy Edwards:
But I've also been amazed and moved and I feel like I'm practically going to start getting teary, but it was like just this weekend it all opened up for me and I watched some of the Met Opera Gala online. I was like, "This is amazing," to see all of these opera singers in their living rooms or by their pianos doing what they do and completely creatively opening up a new space that we would never have had access to before. I watched a live streamed concert that UMass Amherst Fine Arts Center hosted a cellist, a musician, Leyla McCalla, in her home in New Orleans with a facilitated discussion. And the sound quality wasn't very good, but I just felt like a new dimension of the humanity of artists was opening up for me. And that was beautiful. Onassis Foundation has a really great project called Onassis ENTER where they've been commissioning artists to create work within 120 hours for online. And there have been some really beautiful things there. So I'm starting to just crave that being part of what artists are thinking and how they're making.
Cathy Edwards:
So that will keep happening. But I have a lot of concern for the venues in the performing arts sector who have massive physical assets that cost a lot of money to maintain, at least for the foreseeable future, will not be the places where art is happening. Art will still happen, but we need to make sure we're paying artists when they create online and all those folks were, so no problem with that. But just in general, that's a new arena for commissioning and making work for artists and engaging with audiences. And the other thing is our sector needs to get a lot better about not paying artists only at the time of delivery of those procurements, but actually paying during the entirety of the process so that all the creative costs are being addressed when they're incurred. So that's a positive direction that I think we might go, in coming out of this sector, is reframing how presenters pay artists their work and how venues do.
Lauren Ruffin:
It strikes me that because you're in a region that's so diverse, and I mean in all the ways, so you've got cities like Boston that are fairly dense, lots of people of color. You've got Western Mass and Holyoke, which has people of color from a whole different background with very different economic needs. Then, if you're going all the way up into New Hampshire, Vermont, Maine, then you get into really, really white States. You're probably hearing just so many different things from your grantees right now. Very early in the program, you talked about how you're being more flexible with your grant funds. Can you talk a little bit about that and maybe if you're seeing different needs from different communities?
Cathy Edwards:
Absolutely. I think the big thing I'll lift up that we did is we actually tapped NEFA's risk reserve fund, which we have for our own periodic needs. And we tapped that fund to give it over entirely to artists relief funds in the six New England States. And this issue of the different needs in each of the States and kind of equity of distribution was one we thought about as well, and we ended up taking that money, which was almost $300,000, and dividing it equally between all six States. Even though we knew that, for example, there are a lot more artists in Massachusetts because of the density of population. But what we also saw was that the funds that we put our money into were much better resourced in the southern New England States than the northern States. So Maine's artist relief fund started out with maybe $20,000, and Massachusetts started out with $225,000. So I think we do have an awareness that there is a lot more philanthropic and public money in the Southern New England States than there is in the Northern New England States, which are not only whiter, but the population is so much smaller and they're much older and poorer. So there are a lot of very interesting terrain of need in the region. Yeah.
Lauren Ruffin:
Yeah. We don't talk about New England as a region the same way we talk about the South, but there are so many similarities in terms of wealthy, well-resourced areas and very, very rural populations.
Tim Cynova:
Well, that'll have to be for the next podcast, Lauren.
Lauren Ruffin:
Oh, sorry. I'll close my trap.
Tim Cynova:
We'll give you episode two. Cathy, as we bring the episode in for a landing, what are your parting thoughts for us?
Cathy Edwards:
For me. One of the saving graces of this whole time has been people like you, but honestly the collaboration and the solidarity with other fellow travelers in this beautiful arts and culture space, and being able to kind of lean into all the relationship building that we've done over the past years to actually make something more of it, and really achieve a mutual sense of help and purpose together. I am so grateful for that, so yeah, I'm grateful for you too. Thanks for doing this.
Lauren Ruffin:
That sounds great.
Tim Cynova:
Well, Cathy, we're grateful for you. Yeah, thank you so much for being on the show.
Cathy Edwards:
My pleasure. I'll see you soon.
Tim Cynova:
Continue the Work. Shouldn't. Suck. LIVE adventure with us on our next episode when we're joined by Edgar Villanueva, Senior Vice President of Programs and Advocacy at the Schott Foundation, and author of, Decolonizing Wealth. Miss us in the meantime? You can download more Work. Shouldn't. Suck. episodes from your favorite podcasting platform of choice and re-watch Work. Shouldn't. Suck. LIVE episodes over on workshouldntsuck.co. If you've enjoyed the conversation or just feeling generous today, please consider writing a review on iTunes so that others who might be interested in the topic and join the fund too. Give it a thumbs up or five stars or phone a friend, whatever your podcasting platform of choice offers. If you didn't enjoy this chat, please tell someone about it who you don't like as much. Until next time, thanks for listening.
The podcast is available for free on your favorite podcasting platforms:
Apple Podcasts | Google Podcasts | Spotify | Stitcher | TuneIn | RSS Feed
If you enjoy the show, please leave a review on iTunes to help others discover the podcast.