Updated
February 15, 2023
Whether you refer to it as "sunsetting" or "supernova’ing," what’s true is that there are few resources to guide those seeking to intentionally shutdown an organization’s operations. While a multitude of resources exist dedicated to starting and scaling ventures, the same can’t be said when one finds themself on the other end of the organizational life cycle.
In this episode, host Tim Cynova connects with guests who were tasked with leading companies through this final phase. We’ll hear how they came to the decision, how they approached the work, and what resonates for them as they reflect on it all.
This episode include two conversations. The first is with Michelle Preston and Megan Carter who helped lead the transition at SITI Company. The second is with Jamie Bennett who helped lead the transition at ArtPlace America. In all of this, we consider how centering values when closing a company can help us even when we’re not.
Host: Tim Cynova
Guests
MEGAN E. CARTER is a creative producer, strategy consultant, and dramaturg with a track record of sustained success in theatre, interdisciplinary performing arts and live events. Most recently, she led SITI Company, an award-winning theater ensemble, through a comprehensive legacy plan, archive process, and finale season. She is currently a creative consultant with A TODO DAR Productions on rasgos asiaticos, a performance installation by Virginia Grise and Tanya Orellana exploring migration, borders, and family. Megan has developed and produced new and classic works Off-Broadway, as well as internationally at theatres, venues, and festivals like The Fisher Center at Bard, BAM, City Theatre in Pittsburgh, Singapore International Festival of the Arts (SIFA), REDCAT (LA), Teatr Studio (Warsaw), Wuzhen Theatre Festival (Wuzhen, China), Under the Radar Festival, the Huntington Gardens (LA, site-specific), International Divine Comedy Theatre Festival at Małopolska Garden of Arts in (Krakow), the Walt Disney Modular Theater (LA), Classic Stage Company, Cherry Lane Theatre, WP Theater, the World Financial Center (site-specific). At WP Theater, she led the Lab for Directors, Playwrights, and Producers and managed new play development and commissions. Megan served as dramaturg on the American Premiere of Jackie by Elfriede Jelinek and has edited the English translations of a number of Jelinek’s plays, including Rechnitz and The Charges (The Supplicants). She has also edited the SITI Company anthology – SITI COMPANY: THIS IS NOT A HANDBOOK, coming out in 2023. Megan has been on faculty at the Brooklyn College, SITI Company Conservatory and California Institute of the Arts. She is currently on faculty at Primary Stages’ Einhorn School for the Performing Arts (ESPA). Education: MFA in Dramaturgy, Brooklyn College/CUNY; BA in Theatre, Centenary College of Louisiana.
MICHELLE PRESTON began her career in arts administration at the Columbus Symphony Orchestra before coming to New York City where she has worked with Urban Bush Women, Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company and the School of American Ballet. She began at SITI Company in 2012 as the Deputy Director and served as Executive Director from 2014-2022. While at SITI, Michelle produced 9 world premieres, 17 domestic and international tours, and 5 New York City seasons. She also led the multi-year strategic planning process that resulted in the SITI Legacy Plan, a comprehensive set of activities meant to celebrate the accomplishments and preserve the legacy of the ensemble before the organized and intentional sunset at the end of 2022. She is currently the Executive Director of the José Limón Dance Foundation. She holds an M.F.A. in Performing Arts Management from Brooklyn College and a B.F.A. in Dance Performance from Northern Illinois University. Michelle spent six years as an adjunct faculty member for the Brooklyn College Performing Arts Management MFA program teaching fundraising and 18-months serving as the Interim Program Head. Additionally, she has guest lectured at Bard College, Columbia University, Columbia University Teachers College, Marymount Manhattan, NYU, Playwrights Horizons Theater School, and St. Lawrence University. She has also served as a panelist for the Brooklyn Arts Council Regrant Program, the TCG Global Connections Grant, the ART/NY Nancy Quinn Fund, and the NAMT Innovation & Exploration Fund.
JAMIE BENNETT [he/him] works at the intersections of nonprofits, philanthropy, and the public sector with arts, culture, and comprehensive community development. Jamie has held leadership roles at ArtPlace America, United States Artists, the National Endowment for the Arts, the NYC Department of Cultural Affairs, Columbia University, and the Agnes Gund Foundation. He worked in fundraising at the New York Philharmonic and Columbia University; and serves in volunteer capacities with the David Rockefeller Fund, the HERE Arts Center, the Make Music Alliance, and The Heritage Center (Itówapi Owápazo) of the Red Cloud Indian School. Jamie has been sober since 2009.
Host
TIM CYNOVA (he/him) is the Principal of Work. Shouldn’t. Suck., an HR and org design consultancy helping to reimagine workplaces where everyone can thrive. He is a certified Senior Professional in Human Resources (SPHR) and a trained mediator, and has served on the faculty of Minneapolis College of Art & Design, the Banff Centre for Arts & Creativity (Banff, Canada) and The New School (New York City) teaching courses in People-Centric Organizational Design and Strategic HR. In 2021, he concluded a 12-year tenure leading Fractured Atlas, a $30M, entirely virtual non-profit technology company and the largest association of independent artists in the U.S., where he served in both the Chief Operating Officer and Co-CEO roles (part of a four-person, shared, non-hierarchical leadership team), and was deeply involved in its work to become an anti-racist, anti-oppressive organization since they made that commitment in 2013. Earlier in his career, Tim was the Executive Director of The Parsons Dance Company and of High 5 Tickets to the Arts in New York City, had a memorable stint with the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra, was a one-time classical trombonist, musicologist, and for five years in his youth he delivered newspapers for the Evansville, Indiana Courier-Press.
Transcript
Tim Cynova:
Hey all, Tim here for a quick preamble to this episode. Due to, well, 2022 seeming like it was about a week long, the two interviews in this episode were recorded about a year ago. So, while the content is still awesome and relevant, you might get a bit turned around when we talk about what’s coming up in the year ahead – 2022 – especially since we just entered 2023. Also, while we always invite you to check out the bios linked in the episode description, in this particular case, I encourage you to check out what our guests have been up to since we recorded. OK, now, back to the past and into the future. Hope you enjoy the episode!
Jamie Bennett:
There's a fascinating friend and colleague called Sanjit Sethi, who's the president of the Minneapolis College of Art and Design. And Sanjit is very interested in sailing, in boating. And there's a concept in sailing called the righting arm, R-I-G-H-T-I-N-G. And it's essentially how much turbulence, how much back and forth can a vessel take on before it capsizes. And there's an actual physics definition of it, center of gravity over velocity, something... Yeah, I don't know all of it. But Sanjit has actually rewritten the physics formula to think about nonprofits and particularly nonprofits that need to change direction. And so you can be very broad and very slow moving and you can take on a lot of turbulence and survive it, but it's also very difficult then to change direction.
Tim Cynova:
Hi, I'm Tim Cynova, and welcome to Work Shouldn't Suck, a podcast about, well that. On today's episode, we're exploring organizations that have intentionally sunset their operations. A few months ago I started thinking about all of the conferences, webinars, classes, boot camps, et cetera that I've attended during my career. So many of them were about how to get started launching your initiative, how to scale, how to handle change as you grow and add new services. I can't remember a single conference that offered a session about how to intentionally close up shop. So by extension, none approach sunset in conversations through people-centric or design perspectives.
As we enter year three of a global pandemic, when so many companies have been focused for the past few years, I'm figuring out how to survive in a quote, unquote, new normal. People have had to question so much about how they approach the work that they do.
What if you hosted an annual convening as a significant revenue generator each year and now you can't do that in person? What do you do? Or how do you move money if you can't access your check stock? Or how do you design an office built around physical safety of a virus that's transmitted through the air? There were so many times in the past few years when I've been a part of groups that said, "How do we hold onto this different and often better way of being when the world starts to open up again?"
For years, the disability justice community has been asking organizations to offer online options for convenings. And many organizations said, "That's too complicated, that's too expensive. It will miss what's the value of being together in person." But all of a sudden the world has a lot of online and alternative offerings to the once only in person options.
But what about when things go back to in person? Will the gravitational pull be too much for us to remember that there's a different, more thoughtful, more inclusive, more intentional way of being? And as so many people have wrestled with during the pandemic, how might I align the work that I do with the values that I hold? With that in mind, what's the quote, unquote, right work that I want or need to be doing or not doing. And it's in that not doing where we'll spend our conversation today.
This episode includes two conversations. In the first I'm joined by Michelle Preston and Megan Carter. Michelle is currently the executive director of SITI Company and Megan is its producing director. SITI Company is an organization that recently decided to shift what it does, necessitating the sunsetting of some longtime work. And later in the episode I'll be joined by Jamie Bennett, a wearer of many hats, and formerly the executive director of ArtPlace America, an organization that wrapped up operations in December of 2020. So that's what's on deck. Bios and company descriptions are available in the episode description. So let's get going. Michelle and Megan, welcome to the podcast.
Michelle Preston:
Hi, thanks so much, Tim. Michelle Preston, I use she/her pronouns. I appreciate being here today.
Tim Cynova:
So let's just start, Michelle, since you jumped in first and then Megan, how do you both typically introduce yourself, and if someone wants to pick up how you also introduce SITI Company?
Michelle Preston:
Yeah, so I'm the executive director of SITI Company. I started with SITI in 2012 where I got to work with Megan Wanlass, their previous executive director. And in 2014 after her departure, I became the executive director. I'm originally a Midwesterner that found her way to New York City. I came here to go to Brooklyn College performing arts management MFA program. And my focus at that point was really working with dance organizations. So I've worked with Urban Bush Women, Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company, and the School of American Ballet before finding my way to SITI Company almost 10 years ago.
Megan Carter:
Megan. I also use she/her pronouns. So I'm SITI's producing director. I was introduced to the company 20, almost 20 years ago when I saw a production of Death and the Ploughman at Classic Stage Company and was completely blown away. And then I had the great fortune of producing a show of theirs when I was at Women's Project, now WP Theater, Virginia Woolf's only play. So I met them and worked with them in 2008, 2009, and then just continued to have a relationship. I taught with their conservatory. I did some of the summer workshops. And I was introduced to them primarily as a dramaturg and then as a producer. So I've been on the edge of the company for quite a while, and I took this position in 2019. I'm originally from the south and made my way to New York City, also to go to Brooklyn College to get my MFA in dramaturgy.
Tim Cynova:
Nice. I'm glad we have the geography sketched out. That's a good way to start. Also a Midwesterner who made my way to New York City but did not go to Brooklyn College, I guess one of two there.
Michelle Preston:
Yeah, you'll find all the Midwesterners the longer you stay in New York.
Tim Cynova:
That's right, all of them. So our conversation is going to be about sunsetting, broadly speaking. Before we dive in, what is SITI Company? Can you even sketch us? What do the company operations look like? Where are you based? How many team members do you have? Budget, size, surf, the lay of the land there?
Michelle Preston:
So SITI Company is an ensemble theater company. We were founded in 1992 by Anne Bogart, Tadashi Suzuki, and a group of like-minded artists to redefine and revitalize contemporary theater in the US through an emphasis on international cultural exchange and collaboration. We started our work in Saratoga Springs, New York, and SITI stands for Saratoga International Theater Institute. But we quickly expanded and established ourselves in New York City.
We now have a year round season where we create new work. We tour and we cultivate the next generation of independent theater artists through our training programs. SITI is well known nationally and internationally for highly innovative physical productions that have ranged from new plays to original devised pieces to reinventions of classics. We are also recognized as the preeminent US institution for training young artists in the Suzuki method of actor training and the Viewpoints technique.
So the Suzuki method was developed by theater director Tadashi Suzuki in Japan, who many SITI company members have studied and worked with for over 30 years. The Viewpoints were first articulated by choreographer Mary Overlie, and over time Anne and SITI have continued to research and expand Mary's original work, exploring the relationship between time and space and movement. Together, the Suzuki training and the Viewpoints from the creative vocabulary of SITI's productions, and passing these tools onto future generations of theater makers, is essential to our mission.
Currently the ensemble has 17 members, which includes actors, designers, Chuck Mee as a playwright, Anne Bogart as our director and also a stage manager. We have a shared artistic leadership structure with three co-artistic directors. So Anne Bogart working with Ellen Lauren and Leon Ingulsrud are our three co-artistic directors. We have a administrative staff of about three full-time folks and one part-time archivist. And our annual budget is just above the million dollar level.
Tim Cynova:
Can you talk a little bit about how the shared leadership model came to be?
Michelle Preston:
Yeah, I would say they really started to articulate it in like 2010, 2011. And SITI Company is very committed to non-hierarchical structures. It's actually how they build plays in the rehearsal room where everybody's input is as valuable as the next person's. And they really wanted to find a way to take that sort of old hierarchical, top down artistic leadership structure on the admin side or on the decision making side and really turn that on its head a little bit in the same way that they do in the rehearsal room.
Tim Cynova:
Nice. So how has that been working?
Michelle Preston:
It's really useful at times and really complicated at other times. I will say that the greatest benefit of it is the number of viewpoints coming into a conversation to make a decision. And there's certainly, like there are decisions in my day-to-day world that don't necessarily need to go through the artistic leadership or go through the full company. And also there are decisions that do. And so we as a group have figured out how to layer those or test what kind of decisions really need full company buy-in, or what decisions really could be made at the sort of three artistic director level and myself and Megan and then come out to the company and say, "This is what we're doing. Any concerns?" It takes a lot of time.
Megan Carter:
There is a lot of consensus building, not just with artistic leadership but with the entire company.
Tim Cynova:
Is that something that was articulated to begin with or did that evolve?
Megan Carter:
I think that's actually a good question that I'm not sure that Michelle or I can answer since we were not there at the very beginning. But I do know that consensus has been a very important part of the company for at least 20 years. They have to talk through things. The discourse is really important, and it's important that there's buy-in so that everybody's facing the same direction.
Michelle Preston:
Yeah, we're really known for our collaboration. We've collaborated with dance companies, we've collaborated with Bang on a Can, which is a music ensemble. We've collaborated with visual artists. And we love to talk about how collaboration is not the absence of conflict, but it's in fact the ability to move through the conflict to make a decision and move forward and to do that with respect and with integrity. And so I think that is the key component of that shared leadership model.
Tim Cynova:
Well, in speaking of decisions, we're recording this at the very beginning of 2022, so we're two years into a global pandemic, and SITI Company made a pretty significant decision before the pandemic. You want to unpack what that was, what that process was like? Actually, let me end that with the punctuation. Do you want to pack what that decision was and what that process was like?
Michelle Preston:
Absolutely. So SITI Company has given the American theater and the world 30 years of powerful ensemble driven art. And we've done this by investing deeply in each other and in the ensemble company itself. So starting in 2017, we began a very intensive strategic planning process to explore who we were as an ensemble and how the organization might evolve in the current artistic ecosystem.
So we discussed and researched a wide range of scenarios including growth models, partnerships and mergers, acquiring a physical space in order to build a center for our training. I mean there was a lot of financial modeling, there was a lot of research on fundraising, there was a lot of looking at different structures for the organization as part of this process. And what became clear as we worked with the ensemble members and the board and the staff, is that the identity and the purpose of SITI Company is inherently tied and tethered to the artists who make up the ensemble.
And so the ensemble articulated throughout that process that they weren't interested in real estate or more infrastructure, and ultimately they weren't interested in immortality. And we believe that the ephemerality of theater is what makes it so compelling as an art form. And SITI's legacy exists in the fragments of our work that have taken root in our collaborators, in the thousands of artists who have trained with us and have made their own companies, and in the people who have seen our work and then looked at the world differently than before.
So once we got to that point of understanding, which took a couple of years, the company and the board decided in early 2019 that SITI in its current iteration as a touring, teaching, performing ensemble with an administrative staff and a studio and a million dollar budget, would conclude at the end of 2022, which was our 30th anniversary year. And after that point, the artists that comprised the company could become a more flexible collective.
So in many ways it was our way of continuing to innovate how an ensemble theater functions in the US, and we are creating one example for the field of what the lifespan of an ensemble can be and can do. And in many ways we are responding to the realities of our situation with the same courageous, innovative spirit that we always have and that we imbue in our work. And we want to continue to forge a path for those who come after us by leaving a clear trail of documentation to learn from. And so it was at this point in 2019 that our strategic planning activities really shifted to be what we are now calling our legacy plan. And Megan, do you want to talk about that a little bit?
Megan Carter:
So I was aware of all of the strategic planning that was happening. I was aware of the conversations that the company was having about sunsetting. I was aware that the conversations were very complex and difficult and I was actually brought on to take the company to sunset. They voted to sunset right before I started. And I had had individual conversations with every single company member, conversations with artistic leadership, conversations with Michelle. So I knew what I was coming into, which was that the company was going to end in three years and that my mission was to create a celebratory finale season, to build an archive, and just to help Michelle think through all of the pieces that would allow us to leave something behind for people to understand how an ensemble company in the United States works or could work.
Tim Cynova:
So it sounds like it's not a complete dissolution.
Megan Carter:
It is not a complete dissolution. We are not dissolving the 501(c)(3). So at the end of 2022, it's going to shrink a lot, from a million dollar organization to under 20,000. It's going to be really small. And the purpose of the organization, the entity that remains, will actually be much more about learning and sharing.
So for instance, there will be a portal to the digital archive through the SITI Company website, which will continue to exist. There will be a place for SITI alumni to network, a portal for that as well. There will be training opportunities that continue with the members of SITI Company and this entity will be a way for folks to find SITI Company members. So if somebody has a research question or somebody wants Leon Ingulsrud and Akiko Aizawato to conduct a training in Oslo, this will be a place for them to go. But it'll be one part-time staff, a very small board, it won't have the operations that we have right now.
Tim Cynova:
What's going to be part of the digital archive? What's that going to look like?
Megan Carter:
So we're actually building it right now, literally building the backend of it. So it will be quite seamless from the website to the archive. So if you go to the SITI Company website and you want to learn about bobrauschenbergamerica, the show, you go to the productions page, you click on bobrauschenbergamerica, there will be all sorts of information on that initial page. And then as you click deeper, without you even knowing it, you will end up in collective access, which is the database that we're using for the digital archive.
So through that database, you'll be able to access things like programs, production photos, press quotes, all sorts of details, video clips. You will not be able to access full videos because the unions will not let us do that. However, part of the deal with the archive is if you have the right credentials as a scholar or researcher, there will be ways for you to access full video. And that's one of the things we're figuring out right now with how those sort of gateways work inside of the database.
It'll also be a place, if you want to see every show that Ellen Lauren did with SITI Company, you'll be able to click around and it's all connected. Collective access, the database that we're using is the same one that BAM uses for their archive and Martin Rose uses for their archive. So there's quite a few examples for us to look at.
Michelle Preston:
Yeah, and we're calling it the SITI Living Archive, is one of the four big pieces of the legacy plan and we want to make sure that the digital side of it is retained on siti.org and that can be accessed outside of the archival partner, but there will also be an archival partner that we're working with where all of the hard copy physical things will get shipped off to and taken care of. And we're not ready to announce that partner yet, but it will be coming this year. It's very exciting. So that everything is really taken care of in a way that is beyond our staff's capacity to create and take care of right now, because it is really a big piece of preserving SITI's legacy.
And also putting together almost a transparent blueprint for the ensemble field or the theater field to see how did this company who started in 1992, who ended in 2022, how did they build work? How did they grow as an organization, how did they come to this decision? Like allowing intersection points for the field on everything that we've learned and everything that we've done well and maybe some of the things that we didn't do well, is really important to us.
Megan Carter:
One of the models that we've looked at on that end, and it's not an archive as such, but the 13P website, which is fantastic, and as an organization that knew when it started that it was going to have an end, and the way they documented how they made things, and it's like a user's guide or a toolkit that people can use. We're hoping that there's some aspects of that in the siti.org website as well.
Tim Cynova:
Megan, for people who aren't familiar with 13P, can you give a quick description of what it is, what it was?
Megan Carter:
Yeah, of course. So I can't remember what year it started, but it was in the early 2000s that 13 playwrights got together and decided that rather than waiting for people to produce their work, they would produce their own work. And they did one show a year. I think they may have done two at one point. But they did one show a year and the playwright who was being produced was also the artistic director of 13P for the year.
Sheila Callahan was part of that. If I start listing them, I'm going to get their names wrong, but some really important playwrights were part of that and it was hugely successful. And Maria Goyanes, who's now the artistic director at Woolly Mammoth in DC, was the producer. But they figured out how to raise money to get spaces. It was this very DIY thing and it was incredibly successful.
But they also knew when they got through the 13 playwrights, they were done. And so they built, they left this website, I think it's still there, and you can go and you can look at early grants that they wrote and strategic plans. And it's super, super smart.
Tim Cynova:
So we've glimpsed a bit of the future. I'd like to go back to that decision in the conversation that you all had, that interestingly happened before the pandemic. I think a lot of organizations right now are wrestling with a very uncertain future, and what the future might look like with touring having changed and live performance having changed. And so what was that like making that decision as a group? How did it feel? And let's start with that.
Michelle Preston:
It took a long time, it took years, it took really years of conversation, company meetings with just the company, company meetings with the company and the board, board committee meetings, artistic leadership and me meeting. It really took a lot of time and it really ran a course of feelings and of emotions and of frustration and excitement. I think we got excited for a moment about every potential scenario that we looked at. There was a moment that we dreamed about mergers and got very excited about it, and there was a moment where we dreamed about real estate and got very excited about it.
And then once I was able to put some budget numbers and some planning in place for each of those scenarios and really had to outline how we as an organization would change and maybe how our priorities would need to shift to incorporate each one of those, you could just see the excitement deflate. And we really in those conversations got to hear how committed the company were to each other and to this process that we created and this idea that this group of people doesn't get to live forever. So at some point we were either going to have to really drastically change or we were going to have to accept that the organization also couldn't live forever.
Megan Carter:
So Michelle did an enormous amount of heavy emotional lifting prior to 2019. As I said, I came in when the decision was made. However, the emotional process after the decision was made, is still happening. It is still very complicated. It is bittersweet. We were just in Pittsburgh. Actually, the company is still in Pittsburgh, remounting The Medium at SITI Theater. The Medium is the company's first device show, first seen in 1993 and then prior to this year, last seen in 1996 or 97.
And the process of rebuilding this very early SITI work was an extraordinary thing to watch because you saw 30 years of relationships and collaboration and how these people work together and how they build things together. And it's so emotional. And also I think the company doesn't stop very often to be proud of themselves. And I think maybe in the remounting of the medium, they remembered or realized how much they've done and how much they've contributed to the American theater, the international theater.
And bittersweet, because Michelle and I have been beating the drum of, we will have a celebratory finale season. And there have been moments where the company just look at us and they're like, "What are we celebrating?" We're like, "We're celebrating you. This is what we're celebrating." So we've had to overcome some of that self-effacement.
And obviously the pandemic put a bit of a wrench in things. We were planning for the finale season to last for two years. We were going to do eight shows, so there were going to be revivals and new stuff. And that's had to shrink, because we actually still get to have a finale season. And the fact that we opened the show in Pittsburgh a couple weeks ago, the fact that we did a hybrid show in the Singapore International Festival of the Arts last year, last spring. We were supposed to go to Singapore in 2020, postponed because of the pandemic, rescheduled for 2021. Really worked to get to Singapore.
Ultimately we're not allowed to go to Singapore. So we made our part of it on film and our Singaporean collaborators did their work in Singapore, and we sent them the film and sent our sound designer who was also co-directing it, and we made a hybrid production, and that was the kickoff of our 30th anniversary. So things are happening and it is actually celebratory.
I think the grief process is not linear, and I think we will continue to have difficult conversations. And this is a company that they veer toward the philosophical anyway. Nothing has an easy answer. So it's going to be quite a year.
Michelle Preston:
And I think too, in some ways, I won't speak for you Megan, but certainly I have been delaying the emotional work that I need to do around this decision because I keep thinking, okay, what's the next step? What's the next press release? What's the next booking? What's the next fundraising proposal? I just keep moving us forward because there's no other option. We have, the stakes feel so high to create a season and a year and final training programs and to get so much work done on the archive so that at the end of 2022 they can all look back and be really proud of this celebratory thing that we've created for them, that I can't even imagine how I'm going to emotionally process in 2023.
Megan Carter:
Oh no, no, no. Yeah, I'm not thinking about that. I did almost burst into tears opening night of The Medium in Pittsburgh, but yes, I'm kicking that can down the road.
Tim Cynova:
I think it's interesting that the sort of journey to get to the session you mentioned took years. It feels similar to when I was at Fractured Atlas and we made the decision to become an entirely virtual organization. For years we had, at least half of our staff who worked in 12 states, six countries, and we're like, we're maintaining multiple organizational cultures. This is not sustainable, it's stressful for everyone. And we made the decision probably about 12 months, maybe 18 months before December, 2019 of when we officially went entirely virtual, which was great.
And then February, March, April happened of 2020, the COVID pandemic arrived and then everyone did what we did over a course of 12 to 18 months in like a day. Overnight they went entirely virtual. And then there's something nice about the intentionality around having those conversations, rolling around all those different options, the merger, the physical space, whatever it might be.
And then there's also when the hits the fan, you're like, someone grab the check stock, we're going to use Zoom. And you don't have that time. You're sort of all going through it in the same process. And it's interesting to think about those stages of grief that through any change initiative we face, and if people aren't going through them at the same time, we have to circle back to that person who's going through that stage. And then what does that conversation look like as you very much have an end date? This is all going to end at a certain time. And trying to be human and understanding at the same time. It sounds like you all are balancing a lot of different balls right here. It's not balancing a lot of balls. You have a lot of-
Megan Carter:
Juggling.
Tim Cynova:
Juggling a lot of balls, yeah. Balancing a lot of something. Plates? I don't know plate.
Michelle Preston:
Yeah, it's interesting this, outside of myself, the administrative staff who were working with us in 2017 when we were trying to start making these plans and to figure out a new strategic direction, and the staff who were there by the time we made the decision in 2019, is a largely different group of people because it really takes a lot as a staff member to hold on for that many years of conversation about where to go.
Tim Cynova:
The uncertainty too of holding, like what's happening. And this leads me to another question around, I always am interested in how organizations retain staff until the very end when you're, everyone knows it's going to end and human nature would be like, "I got to start looking for what's next here." What have those conversations looked like for all of you?
Michelle Preston:
One of the things that I've closely studied over the course of this is the Merce Cunningham legacy plan document, which is on the Merce Cunningham Trust website and it outlines their process. And one of the key things that they did really, really well is to sort of monetarily incentivize staff members to stay through the end once they made that decision. We absolutely have a transition grant portion of the legacy plan that is really much more focused on stabilizing income for the company members as they transition onto the next thing, and is a big piece of what we're fundraising for.
I think that for me, having spent 10 years with this company now almost, and having taken us from the strategic planning process to making this decision to hitting the pandemic, to rolling out the decision, it's really important for me to see that this comes to the nice tied up conclusion that it can be, because I want the best for this organization and these artists.
That being said, you can't expect the same thing from younger or lower level staff members. And so certainly who we have on staff now, were brought on with a contract that extended through the end date. They knew that this transition was in process, or for Claire Mantle, who's our special projects manager, was hired after it was announced. And they sort of know that there's a deadline. And I believe know that both SITI Company members and myself, Megan, will really do everything in our power to make sure that they're, can transition onto the next thing that they want to.
Megan Carter:
And I've known the company for so long, these are some of the most extraordinary artists in the American theater. I'm really, really committed to what the next thing for them is as individuals. And who knows, there'll be other things that some of these folks make together. So I'm definitely in it for the long haul. I think it would feel, I think like I would feel like I was missing something if I were to leave early. So it's very, the staff we have right now as opposed to the staff we had two years ago, is very mission driven around this particular sunset mission.
Michelle Preston:
And also the thing to remember is, everything doesn't end all at once either. We are producing through December, so there's a lot of producing activity, but fundraising activity tapers off in a different way. And so there's the ability in some ways to be flexible. Maybe as a fundraiser your work is done in October and then we find a way to transition you out a little bit sooner, or that you're super production heavy and so you're going to be in it through December. It's unreasonable to think that everybody's job phases out at the same time or everybody's responsibilities phase out at the same time.
Tim Cynova:
One of the most disappointing things that I find is organizations that don't live, people are not here forever. And we find this in the nonprofits. I mean you find it everywhere, but having worked in the nonprofit space for two plus decades, you see it where there's this belief that if we just don't talk about it, people won't leave or people won't think about what's next. And even people who say, "We're not here forever, everyone's going to leave." You might not think that.
It's interesting to me that you have an end date. And I think that sort of finality of it causes people to show up in a different way than if it's just like years will go on and "Oh shit, I've been here for 15 years and I didn't realize time was passing like that." But when your time is done, I mean research has shown too that people approach their work in different ways and I'm wondering if you've seen that in practice.
Megan Carter:
I mean I feel like I've certainly seen it with myself to lecture each other on self-care and not taking on too much, and then we ignore each other. But I think part of that is that there is this end date. We have a finite period of time in which to do all of the things that we want to do. And we probably will not get to do all of the things, but right now it feels like we have to try to hit the marks because this is it. Which then it gives the work an urgency that is both important I think, to do the work and also exhausting, especially with the pandemic on top of it.
We've been super lucky. SITI has been well managed for a very long time, but because of the size of the organization, we've been able to be incredibly nimble during this last couple of years, which means that we also, I feel like Michelle and I have a sense of agency as well in the work that we're doing that we go, "Oh, okay, here's a hurdle. How do we figure out a way around it, because we know we have to do X, Y, and Z." And it's just that constant kind of reshuffling and problem solving and moving things around the board to figure out what is going to work and what is going to accomplish the most in this finite period of time to uplift these artists, this company, this legacy.
Michelle Preston:
To add to that, I think we have a really good sort of internal guiding star when ideas for new projects or new initiatives come out of the company, they come out of the board, they come out of the various task forces that we have with board and non-board members. Megan and I, I think at this point have a great shorthand to be like, "Can we do that? Can we do it well? Can we do it well with the other priorities that we have? Yes or no?" So that we are not trying to take on more projects in this year than we can do well and to make sure that the projects that we are taking on really have value to the legacy and the 30th anniversary season and these artists.
Tim Cynova:
One of the things that we talk about a lot at Work Shouldn't Suck is how do we reimagine HR and organizational design while centering values like anti-racism and anti-oppression? And I know that SITI holds these values as well. If you visit the website, details your commitment to anti-racism. I'm curious how those values have shown up practically in the transition conversations that you're engaged in.
Megan Carter:
It's interesting. SITI's EDI work began, before my time at SITI Company there were certain initiatives that Michelle spearheaded. But along with many other predominantly white organizations in the wake of George Floyd and all of the conversations coming out of that, we really started talking about anti-racism and what that meant. And for SITI, it had to be about what it meant in the time we had left.
And I will say the company was all in. I feel like they could have said we're ending, it doesn't matter. But we worked with two different consultants to do planning as well as anti-racism training. And we really focused on what it means to our community. That seemed like the thing that made the most sense. So looking at the folks who have done the training for the years and how we're serving them and specifically looking at our Black, indigenous, Asian, Latinx community members and asking them what they needed and what was missing.
And so we focused on that for the last couple of years and we decided that was where we wanted to put that. The energy of being an anti-racist organization was how can we serve our community and how do we build bridges for this work moving forward, a more expansive group of people. And to that end, we have partners at Skidmore College who really stepped up to and got us more scholarships for our Skidmore program last year, which we had to do virtually. But looking at scholarships for our other programs, looking at our recruitment, creating an alumni committee in which we are working with a diversity of alumni to talk about how these things should work.
Tim Cynova:
One of the questions that I meditate on frequently is simple, but it's how do I, fill in the blank, in an anti-racist way? So it might be like, how do I walk my dog in an anti-racist way? Or how do I move to a new community in an anti-racist way? And I'm fascinated by how do I sunset an organization in an anti-racist way? And how you answer those questions. That conventional wisdom, you know, you pull the book off the shelf, you're like, "Here's how you do it." And you're like, "Shit." I mean it's like this all white supremacy culture of urgency and everything else that goes into that. And how might you question everything about the quote unquote best practice of sunsetting an organization while centering race, anti-racism and anti-oppression? And I think it's a really interesting exploration that could yield some important learning to go in the digital archive. What worked, what didn't, what you would definitely not try again.
Megan Carter:
Yeah, I think so. And I also think, I had some conversations with other folks who were on staff with ensemble companies and we're this sort of closed group. Decisions were made early on, or rather, decisions weren't made, intentionality versus just sort of things come together the way they come together. But suddenly what you have is a predominantly white company, and what do you do with that and still be authentic and still actually be true to yourselves? Because it wouldn't make sense to suddenly, after a whole strategic plan saying SITI Company is this group of people, what do you do with that? And I think the alumni community has always been very important to SITI. During the pandemic, it became closer. The company did what they called SITI socials, just hang out with whoever showed up, started training online. It allowed access to the international community in a way that we hadn't really had before.
And obviously we could have done this before the pandemic. It just, like many theater companies, it didn't really occur to us that we could be online. So it opened up a whole new world and I think it really brought the community together. And I think that one of the things that's going to come out of all of this, the pandemic, the anti-racism work, the sunsetting of the company, I think what's going to come out of it is these communities that spring forth from this SITI alumni. And it's around the training and it's around a certain kind of engagement with theater and engagement with art. There's a depth to it. And we're really, we're super excited about how that's going to grow. And that can grow post the existence of SITI Company. So that's really where we're thinking right now.
Tim Cynova:
As we start to come up on time, I'd be curious what you each have learned about yourselves during this process, or what you're learning and what you might take with you from this that influences your careers besides maybe figure out how to get better at self-care.
Michelle Preston:
One of the things that I learned early on in the pandemic in a couple of different ways is, we're all going to look back on this moment and either we're going to be proud of ourselves because we made decisions that are in line with our values, or we're not. And so far, I really think that I can look back on the decisions that we made and be actually quite proud of them. And one of the reasons is we really forefronted taking care of people. As an executive director of an artistic ensemble, there's a lot of people to take care of and there are a lot of people with voices who let me know how they want to be taken care of. And when I first started here, that was quite shocking. It took a lot to get used to. And now this far into it, in some ways I prioritize that more than anything else I do.
I want to believe that I'm a very artist driven administrator at this point. And having made this decision to sunset allowed us to have real clarity in how we were going to spend our funds in the pandemic when we didn't know what the next income source was going to be, and how to talk to funders about what we needed, because I no longer needed to try to take care of a company for 10 years. I needed to take care of a company for two more years and do some really exciting things. And so there was never a conversation of, "Oh, let's lay off half the staff or let's furlough everybody for two months and not do anything." All of the work and the decisions that were made focused on how to pay people, how to keep people safe and how to keep people connected. So I really hope that I will be able to continue using those values as a touchstone in every opportunity that I find myself in.
Megan Carter:
In the middle of it, it's hard for me to say what my takeaways are right now, but I do think being able to... I'm going to quote Laura Penn, who's the executive director of SDC, who I've known for a very long time. But she talks about going fast and deep, and I feel like that has been my experience of the last two years is that we can't slow down, but we also can't just skate along the surface of things. So we have to go very deep, very fast. And I feel like I've gotten to practice that skill of going very deep, very fast, of surfacing things that need to be surfaced and constantly reminding myself to be honest and kind at the same time. Knowing that I'm going to fail at that a lot. But I feel like I've gotten to practice some things that I'm going to carry forward.
Michelle Preston:
Megan and I also got this really unique opportunity when we brought her in, and I learned so much from this, is that in a small organization, in that million dollar non-profit budget size, you really don't get a lot of peer partners when you're at the level of leading the organization. Yes, you have your artistic director, your executive director model of the two of you working together to move everything forward. And in my case, I have three artistic directors. But really having somebody who had a varying level of experience who complemented me really well, and who was really a peer. I could tell Megan things that I was worried about or things that I was afraid of in a way that I would not tell people who were my staff, who reported to me. To be able to find that kind of partnership in this moment has been so invaluable. And I want to know how to recreate it in every job I go to, because it really nourished me in the difficult moments and it helped me celebrate every win to have Megan by my side.
Megan Carter:
Aw, thank you.
Tim Cynova:
Well, Megan and Michelle, we're at time. How do you want to land the plane?
Michelle Preston:
I will say that there are a couple of really great opportunities to come see SITI Company in the finale season, especially if you're in the New York City area. We will be at BAM in March 15th through 20th with The Medium. We are coming back to New York City this fall for an extended run at La Mama of Chuck Mee's Still Under Construction. And if you can go just a little bit north of the city, we're going to end the year with SITI's radio Christmas Carol up at the Bard Fisher Center just north of the city.
Megan Carter:
And this is a Christmas carol that you want to see, I promise.
Tim Cynova:
That's awesome. Thank you both for taking time out of your busy schedule where you are landing a plane and taking time to land a podcast plane. It's been really fascinating and interesting and wonderful to learn more about this journey that you all are on. And I wish you all the best in the last couple of months that you all are together on this. And thanks so much for being on the podcast.
Michelle Preston:
Thank you, Tim.
Tim Cynova:
And now I'm joined by Jamie Bennett, a wearer of many hats and formerly the executive director of ArtPlace America, an organization that wrapped up operations in December of 2020. Jamie, welcome to the podcast.
Jamie Bennett:
Thanks, Tim. It's great to be with you.
Tim Cynova:
So we met many years ago, and you're someone who has worn multiple hats, so how do you typically introduce yourself these days?
Jamie Bennett:
Well, in terms of day job, I'm currently the interim resident and CEO of United States artists. But during the pandemic we, like everyone else in the world, seemingly became dog owners. So I also introduce myself as one of Buddy's humans, is probably how I end up introducing myself more often these days.
Tim Cynova:
Unpack for everyone, just sort of a little bit of your career trajectory, that led you to this ArtPlace America role and then now to interim as a USA artist.
Jamie Bennett:
Yeah, so I, like many people moved to New York City when I was young because I was really interested in working in the theater, and pretty quickly figured out that that didn't pay so well and often didn't come with that many benefits. So I accidentally became a fundraiser. And along the way I sort of have developed myself as a kind of utility outfielder for nonprofit arts and culture having worked in policy, philanthropy and in nonprofit.
So I've done fundraising for places like the Museum of Modern Art in New York, Philharmonic. I've worked with grant makers, extraordinary individual called Agnes Gund. I've worked as part of local and federal cultural policy jobs. My last two gigs, ArtPlace and the current post at United States Artists are what are lovingly called philanthropic intermediaries, which means we take big chunks of money from major foundations and funders and redistribute them in smaller amounts in ways that are closer to the ground. So in general, if you have a sort of 101 question about a nonprofit arts and culture in the US, I can probably help you out with it.
Tim Cynova:
So this is a conversation about intentionally sunsetting organizations, and it's not a topic I've heard a lot about or had an opportunity to hear a lot about it. It's not like you go to conferences and it's a packed schedule of, "Let's figure out how to shut down our organizations." It's usually like, all right, how do you market them? And more about how do you spin up organizations and what support do organizations need. So I'm curious from an organizational standpoint, from a people standpoint, sort of what this whole process looks like. What questions do organizations need to wrestle with and how do you center your values in all of this work to craft a kind, caring and humane organization right to the very end? Can you sketch out what those conversations were like for ArtPlace America that from the very beginning knew that it was going to end, right?
Jamie Bennett:
Yeah. And let me start by digging into a couple of things that were in your framing of the question that I think are interesting. I think it is true that maybe too often in nonprofits and in philanthropy there's an assumption that everything has to last forever. So that if you stop doing something, it's seen as a failure.
But if we actually pause for a moment and think about why philanthropy and nonprofits were set up in the United States, they actually weren't originally meant to last forever. They were set up to address gaps in government services or in the marketplace, because the assumption was that either the market or government would take care of all our needs. Sometimes there were gaps, like not enough people could get enough food. So you create something like a soup kitchen that's meant to be a stop gap measure until we can fix the government and market systems, get people enough food.
So that's sort of thing one. Thing two, so I would say that we conceived of ArtPlace as a project, not as an institution. And one of the reasons we conceived it as a project is that meant that we had a timeline involved. And in general, knowing human beings, if you ask someone to do something and tell them they have forever to get it done, they usually take that long. And this way we could actually use the project management 101 skills to say, "Okay, we have 10 years. We have about 150 million. Here are the things that we want to get done. Now let's figure out how we're going to use 150 million dollars over those 10 years to do those things and we could actually get that done."
And so we were very different than something like a museum, which is a collecting institution, which could make a case about why it should last forever. There's care of physical objects, that's an important part of what they do. So you can't stop doing that. Zoos, aquariums, botanical gardens have living collections and you sort of can't stop doing that.
So we sort of saw our work as a project, and as I mentioned to you as we were prepping for this, one of our colleagues, Eric Takeshita actually gave us the gift and said, "Sunset is entirely the wrong sort of metaphor to use. This isn't the end of something." He suggested instead we think of ArtPlace as supernova ing, so we would actually go out with such a bang, we would seed new galaxies throughout the universe. And so in many ways we really did see our work much more like a supernova or Johnny Appleseed. You know, you've got a bag of seeds, you'll go out and distribute them to get new things started. And when you're out of seeds, your work is done, and it's much more of a relay. We ran our leg and at the end of that we handed off our baton.
So then when it comes to the care of people, one of the things that I think was really helpful with that is that I had actually come to ArtPlace out of two government jobs, out of having been a political appointee in the local government and in federal government. And political administrations are also things that come for an end, that also think of themselves as a relay. Mayor Giuliani handed off the baton to Mayor Bloomberg who handed off the baton to Mayor de Blasio who handed off the baton to Mayor Adams. And we hired a couple of folks that had also worked in government. So one of the things that was helpful to us in terms of setting up an organization and caring for each other and caring for the work is the fact that a lot of us came into the job not carrying an assumption of perpetuity with us.
And everyone who was hired was hired with a date certain that we would have culminated our work and be done with it. So there was no one who had any expectation that they would be working with us after December, 2020. So I think the fact that that wasn't a change, that was the job that they were hired to, the fact that everyone was then able to build out seven years of work, five years of work, whatever each person's tenure was, was really helpful. And thinking of ourselves as much more of a relay race than a sprint or a marathon or any of the other metaphors you use, that we have a certain job to get done, we're going to do it as best as we can, and then someone else is going to pick up the baton and run forward with it. Those are some of the things that I think sort of helped us do that with intention and care.
Tim Cynova:
I think this assumption of perpetuity is really interesting. I was thinking earlier in the pandemic about what if there was this amnesty period to just for organizations declare, "Oh yeah, we're going to close in, we always meant to close in two years or a year." Because what happens is when you don't, it's sort of a failure. It's like, "Oh, you didn't last forever," but it all kind of negates the incredibly impactful work that you might have been doing for 30 years. But like, "Oh, it's because you didn't last forever because you didn't keep going because now you're struggling."
So what if you could reframe it to be like, "No, it feels like two years from now is a good time to end this and let's figure out how we can go out with a bang and seed new things and be of community and support the people and do it in a kind caring way that people know where they're going to go next." But when you don't, it's a disappointment. Which is not at all the case when you look at organizations that have just said, "Yeah, we're going to close." That that becomes the final thing that you see about them rather than whether the organization changed the community.
Jamie Bennett:
I was going to say, and where you ended is where I would even push the conversation further, which is what if we actually conceived of ourselves of having succeeded? What if we actually did the thing we were trying to do and we were no longer necessary so that it's actually a culmination or a success or a completion. And yet oftentimes when I'm talking with philanthropy or consultants or stuff like that, you end up with sort of death with dignity. What if we allowed people to go gently into the night?
But there's some things, I was in a long conversation, particularly around single choreographer dance companies. The Merce Cunningham Dance Company decided that it didn't make any sense after Mr. Cunningham passed away. So they sort of had conceived of their organization as existing as long as Mr. Cunningham was out there. They did one year of posthumous touring and then they set up a trust that licensed his dances if other folks wanted to do it. But they realized that you didn't need a Merce Cunningham dance company after you no longer had a Merce Cunningham. So sometimes things are no longer needed. Sometimes things have succeeded. We actually did the thing we set out to do, and we can move forward. And then sometimes there are organizations that have just stayed too long at the party and need to gently be escorted to the door.
Tim Cynova:
I think this is one of the really, really great things about fiscally sponsored projects. A lot of them are time delimited or project based. And you also have that dopamine hit, like we did the thing we meant to do, rather than what oftentimes feels like in organizations where you just go from one thing to the next. You don't have milestones, you just keep working hard and you don't have this celebratory moment that you can say, we did the thing now.
And I think that's really great about a lot of the fiscally sponsored projects I saw over my 12 years at Fractured Atlas where you have the film, you have the production, you have whatever it is. People come together, they do the thing, then they disband and they come back together in a different configuration and do a different thing. And I think that's one of the challenging things when you look at people inside of organizations, and especially amid this global pandemic where we're exhausted, we're stretched thin, and you don't have that arrival point a lot of times.
And then how do you care for people when they're just like, "I'm burned out, I'm stretched." And part of that is around, burnout is workplace depression. And psychologists have filed as a workplace depression. One of those things is you see, like this isn't going to change, is pessimism around the future. And when that just becomes part of it, when there is no finish line and it's day after day, really starts to impact the way people are able to show up.
And that's really a shame into organizations that we work with where you're like, these organizations were created to make the world a better, more beautiful understanding place and does it most of the time, many times, by burning through the people who have dedicated their lives to the work. And so having these moments, I think is a really interesting way if we could build that into the organizations who are meant to operate in perpetuity. And so I'm curious what you learned about the process of working in an organization that was structured as a project but also was an organization that might be helpful for other people to take a look at different frames and different ways of showing up, and in particular as you as leader who's guiding the organization through that period.
Jamie Bennett:
Yeah, absolutely. Two very different things that sort of kicks up for me. One is, have you ever run across a person called Bryan Doerries who runs something called Theater of War? So it's a fascinating organization that's actually set up as a for-profit. And so a future exit of work shouldn't suck. You might actually want to sit down with Bryan. But he essentially takes ancient Greek texts and performs them for modern day audiences as a way to discuss issues that are very present to us. And it's called Theater of War because he started doing that work with the Department of Defense and was using, I think it was largely a story of Odysseus returning from being gone for 12 years and walking into his house and no one recognized him except the dog, until he took his mask off and then his wife and his child recognized him, as a way for modern day military audiences to talk about PT, traumatic brain injury, returning, for all of that.
Anyway, too long of preamble. One of the pieces he did, he and I have stayed in close touch and he told me he was developing a new piece that was going to either take the story of Sisyphus, who endlessly pushes a thing up the hill and then falls down and pushes a thing up and falls down, or the story of whoever the person is who stole fire and gave it to humans and had his liver eaten out every day. Anyway, it was one of those two things, and he told me he was going to perform it in prisons.
And I was like, "Oh, that's really interesting to work with the prisoners and it's way for the prisoners to talk about this and blah, blah blah." And he said, "No, no, no. We're actually going to perform it for the guards. Because if you're a prison guard, even if you do your job to the best of your abilities, the best that was conceived, the best that was designed, you're still showing up the next day and incarcerating a set of human beings."
So thinking about the sort of, at the moment, and this is a hugely controversial thing, at the moment, prisons are set up in our country to exist forever. So how do you build in the care and the support for someone whose job is to tend to a truly awful thing that is never going to go away? So I think that sort of workplace depression thing is really important, and something we don't spend enough time doing because I think it's also present for us who have much less emotionally draining jobs than prison guard or correction officer or whatever it is.
The other direction, go back to nonprofit policy wonk land. You and I have a colleague, Andrew Taylor, who blogs as the Artful Manager, who talks about organizations just being ways to organize people money and stuff to get something done. I mean, Andrew's talked a lot about this and it's a very common sense framework and yet it's one that lots of us don't think about.
But what was interesting when we were setting up ArtPlace for its final seven years, we went with a slightly different model of fiscal sponsorship than the one that you all tended to use at Fractured Atlas. We were actually a single member LLC. And the LLC, the Limited Liability Corporation, is the corporate structure that actually exists for partnerships. When a group of people come together to get a thing done, you often create an LLC around that thing. So every Broadway production, for instance, is an LLC because the director, the designer, everyone has shared work but only shared work around that project. Similarly for film production and other kinds of things as well.
So we were a partnership of 15 foundations who wanted a group of people to do some work with them and for them and on their behalf out in communities. So we actually used the single member LLC as a structure to come together and that allowed us to have these 15 foundations in partnership around this work, so they actually formally had a shared project, which was this LLC. The LLC allowed us to do things like amass assets, amass liabilities, enter into contracts, hold intellectual property, give copyright. It allowed us to hire people, it allowed us to pay them, it allowed us to do all the things that a typical organization does.
And because we were a single member LLC, the IRS treats the LLC as a disregarded entity, which essentially means you've got an LLC which is around the project if it has a single member. In this case, our single member was Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors. They're a 501(c)(3). When the IRS looks at an LLC that's owned by Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors, the LLC is disregarded and we're treated as a 501(c)(3), which means foundations could write us checks directly and not have to do additional expenditure justification, which means we sort of got all the benefits of being a 501(c)(3).
The other thing, which is the thing that's perhaps most relevant to this conversation, is that an LLC can also be set up and shut down with about an hour of a paralegal's time. It's not actually that heavy or that difficult to set up or take down an LLC. So when we decided to move forward, or we called up our outside counsel, said we want to do this, and I think they dispatched a paralegal to create a Delaware based LLC that existed as long as we needed it to.
So the other thing that particularly if you're talking with formal 501(c)(3) organizations in this sort of sunsetting conversation, it's actually difficult. It's technically difficult, bureaucratically difficult to shut down a 501(c)(3) because of all the requirements, because IRS law and Attorneys General have taken on this assumption of perpetuity. And so they've spent much more time thinking about the setting up and the creation of 501(c)(3)s and a lot less in thinking about the culmination, the completion, the standing down of 501(c)(3)s.
Tim Cynova:
A podcast episode that will never get recorded is the two of us talking about disregarded entities. Because we had conversations back in the day when Fractured Atlas was spinning up disregarded entities. There are other people who can have that conversation. It's like far more interesting.
Jamie Bennett:
Andrew Taylor actually titled his blog Harry Potter and The Disregarded Entity as a way to pull people in, and I still think it got about 12 hits on the blog series.
Tim Cynova:
And if Andrew Taylor can't do it, yeah, I'm not taking a pass at that. I'm curious, as someone who has helped an organization shut down, working with a lot of organizations who don't intend to, who are structured to operate in perpetuity that do have those legal complications that you just can't say tomorrow, yeah, let's just call it a good run. As you reflect on your experience, what might those organizations take away from that? What might be helpful to organizations who are structured in perpetuity that you learned, that you discovered throughout the process of running one that wasn't?
Jamie Bennett:
There's a fascinating friend and colleague called Sanjit Sethi, who's the president of the Minneapolis College of Art and Design. And Sanjit is very interested in sailing, in boating. And there's a concept in sailing called the righting arm, R-I-G-H-T-I-N-G. And it's essentially how much turbulence, how much back and forth can a vessel take on before it capsizes. And there's an actual physics definition of it, center of gravity over velocity, something... Yeah, I don't know all of it. But Sanjit has actually rewritten the physics formula to think about nonprofits and particularly nonprofits that need to change direction.
And so you can be very broad and very slow moving and you can take on a lot of turbulence and survive it, but it's also very difficult then to change direction. Think of a barge. A garbage barge is kind of that kind of thing. It will sail on, it won't be capsized by a storm and if it needs to change port, it'll take years before it's able to change direction forward. And you compare that with something like a kayak, which is fleet, which is swift, which can try lots of different directions, but can turn over instantly.
And I think that's to me a really interesting metaphor to think about organizations, the vessel that's meant to last forever, and have we reached a destination? Do we need to pick a new destination? Are we still there? How are we doing with taking on risk and experimentation on the way there? Are we able to do that? Do we need to just keep trying to do the thing that we're doing?
And I'm a little mad at myself for having used the metaphor of garbage barge because in other parts of nonprofit nonsense, there's actually the metaphor I think of the hedgehog and the hare, and the hedgehog does one thing, it does it perfectly. It does it nonstop, and it manages to burrow exactly as it needs to burrow because it is perfectly living out its purpose. And the hare similarly is perfectly living out its purpose, but does it in a very different way. So I don't mean to put a finger on the scale and say slow and steady is necessarily bad as long as you explicitly understand what it is you are doing.
So there's another colleague, Diane Ragsdale, who talks about frameworks needed for boards to understand their work. And she uses a much more of a pedestrian metaphor, the street. And she says, if you think of two curves that are sketched out by ethics, by our values and by aesthetics, by the artistic things we care about, then within those two curves you can make a set of economic decisions. But if you go outside your values, if you go outside the ethics curve, you're no longer social goods, you're no longer nonprofit. And if you go outside your aesthetics values, you've lost your cultural mission.
So I think that's a really, another really interesting framework for boards to use and say, okay, how do we hold our values? How do we hold our aesthetic sense? How do we hold our cultural traditions? And then how do we navigate between those two things to keep going on our journey? And in many ways, I don't think organizations' values have ever been more apparent than during the pandemic.
So for instance, the Museum of Modern Art where I worked for a decade, so that's family to me. When the pandemic started, they have an endowment that's larger than many private foundations. So I think their endowment's roughly the same size as the McKnight Foundation in Minnesota. And they chose to respond to the pandemic by laying off all of their education staff who were contract workers. Done and dusted.
And you compare that with someone like Theater of the Oppressed NYC, which has a budget that's not even a rounding error in the Museum of Modern Arts budget. And they launched a $50,000 relief fund for their own community to make sure that their actors, to make sure that their spec actors, all of the folks who make up the Theater of the Oppressed troupe. So I think that's a similar sort of case study in organizations making economic values and making economic decisions and it being really clear what the ethical boundaries of MoMA's decision were and what the ethical boundaries of Theater of the Oppressed NYC's were.
So I think asking ourselves where is it we're heading and what are the things that we want to keep checking in on? What are the instrument panels that are going to tell us, are we on the right track? Are we getting to where we're going, or do we need to change direction? Or are there things that we need to begin building in, particularly at the board level where we tend to only talk about economics because it's so easy to give a finance report, because they're a set of numbers, they add up, they don't add up, they're either red or they're black and folks sort of understand. But what would it look like if we started doing an ethical report and an aesthetic report at our board meetings in addition to the economic report?
Tim Cynova:
One of the things I've heard a lot from fellow CEOs over the past two years is an increasing disconnect with their boards or how their boards get it and they're like, just bet on it. Like understanding we're living in a moment in history, maybe once in a lifetime for us, where you could just bet big on your values and saying, yeah, why do we have all this money and endowment if now is the moment to do the thing that we're here to do? And then you flip over to the staff and CEOs who are like, I can't get my board to understand this.
In the wake of George Floyd's murder, they're not willing to engage in conversations about racism and oppression. We're an arts organization. So as someone who knows a lot of board members, sits on boards, works with boards, what's your advice for organizations who are like, this is what we need to be doing, and yet we're in a structure that is paternalistic, outdated, set up, steeped with white supremacy culture, created by and four old white guys and just perpetuated carries it forward. What's... I feel like six things that right at you...
Jamie Bennett:
No, that's fine because you're actually teeing up another perfect podcast episode that no one's going to listen to, which is Jamie Bennett's soapbox on nonprofit board structures. I think that one of the things that many nonprofits have forgotten is that nonprofit structures, the board in a nonprofit, is actually meant to be representative democracy. The nonprofit is set up and there are a set of governors of that organization whose job is to ensure that that organization is meeting its public good mandate.
But if you stop for a moment and think about your generic official at the State Department and think about a generic person coming to them from a different country and saying, "We've just established a form of representative democracy in our country." And the State Department says, "Oh, that's fabulous. What is the form?" And you say, "A founder of our country picks three of their favorite people to do it with them, and those people in perpetuity will pick their descendants."
That's not representative democracy. That's monarchy, that's oligarchy. So I think many of our boards have forgotten that they're meant to broadly represent our organization's publics. And we tend to think of them only as our nicest donors. We tend to put our nicest donors onto our boards, and then we don't give them job descriptions. We say, you're a highly intelligent, highly successful person who likes getting things done. Why don't you come and just generally give us money and do good?
And so I think that we need to fundamentally rethink how folks are selected and elected to nonprofit boards. And so that we're actually thinking about which publics are represented in the board structures. And I think we need to start giving job descriptions to our board members, because if it's not clear to the person why they're on the board, they're going to pick their own reason. They're going to pick their own kind of work they want to do. And shockingly, it's oftentimes not the thing that the CEO most wants that person to do.
So I think many... A colleague of mine runs the Museum Trustees Association, which I think I've mentioned to you, and she's a museum professional, and she sort of came up the ranks of museums as a curator and as a director. And she often talks about how odd she finds it, how many folks in the museum world are scared of their boards. Their goal is to talk to their board as little as possible. And then folks are dumbfounded by the fact that the board hasn't magically come along on the journey that the staff has taken over six months, when no one has talked to that board.
So I think there's a huge need to reengage boards, a huge need to involve them in our work in the way that we want them to. I think there are huge bright lines that are the difference between governance and management. I'm not suggesting that boards get involved in the management organizations, but that we're much more active and thoughtful how we bring them into their governance role and how we bring them along on those journeys that staff members are talking about all day every day. And that we tend to check in with the boards about once every four months.
Tim Cynova:
And speaking about journeys, what did the last few months, what were they like for you all as you supernovaed ArtPlace America? I mean tactically too, or practically, what was it like? Did people have sort of a stub period where they'd get paid afterwards or did you start losing people the year before, or what was that process like for all of you?
Jamie Bennett:
So we spent a lot of time about three years before our completion date talking about how do we care for folks over the last three years. And so I was really interested in figuring out, how do you set up a retention bonus that doesn't feel like golden handcuffs? And so what we ended up doing was saying that we would set aside a significant chunk of, an amount equal to a significant chunk of employee salary. I think it was 15%, 20%, for each of the last three years of ArtPlace's existence. So then at the end of ArtPlace, anyone who was employed with us on December 31st, 2020 would get the equivalent of about six months' salary.
And the reason we structured it that way and what we talked with our colleagues about was, if you want to leave sooner, awesome. You're a hundred percent, feel free to do that, but I'll probably need to job in a very expensive, highly specialized consultant to finish your work because we don't have the time to bring someone up to speed and manage them through it. So if you choose to make that decision, we the organization can tap that reserve fund and have the money needed to job in the team of highly expensive consultants to do it.
And if you don't do that, if you choose to stay to the end, then you've got about half a year's runway to figure out what's the next thing you want to do, right? You'll have that money sitting in your bank account and hopefully that'll give you a little cushion on top of unused vacation and all of the other things we did.
And so we actually didn't lose anyone that last year of ArtPlace, which is something you do see with political administrations, right? The last year, the eighth year of a two-term president is, I don't know what the metaphor is, somewhere between Ghost Town and B-Team running things because folks have left, they've gone on to their next thing.
So I felt good about that. That to me felt like a really good thing. Culturally, the other thing that was really interesting is there was none of the secrecy, anxiety kind of stuff around looking for a next job because it was very clear that we were all going to be on the market at the same time. So you were able to have much more comfortable conversations about, "Hey, I'd really love to connect with this headhunter. Can you introduce me?" Or, "Hey, I've heard this organization is going to be looking for something in the next little bit. Can we be in conversation with them?" So that was much more comfortable.
The one thing I'll say that that was hard emotionally is, when we'd originally conceived of our last year of work... I certainly don't want to be quoted talking about having thought about it as a victory lap, but in many ways it was, I guess much more like Cher at Elton John's Farewell tour where we thought that we had significantly ramped up our travel budget for that final year. Because we were a national organization, we wanted folks to be able to go all around the country, visit with the folks they've been working, say goodbye to places as well as people, and say how much we're looking forward to connecting with them in new roles, in new ways.
And because COVID happened, that didn't happen. And so I think that was hard because we didn't have the ability to be with people in space and congratulate each other on the work we had done so far and say how much we look forward to working together in new ways going forward. So that was a really difficult thing about not being able to travel during that last year of the pandemic. And like so many other people in the world, we settled for Zoom and we settled for other ways of connecting and checking in with folks and saying, see you in the next iteration.
Tim Cynova:
Jamie, as we're coming up on time and preparing to land the plane, where do you want to land it?
Jamie Bennett:
If anything, the last two years have given me a chance to take those ArtPlace lessons because everything in life feels a little bit temporary these days. Everything sort of feels like a decision you're making for now or for long as needed or until something changes. And so I think for the first time ever, my nonprofit management experience has helped inform my lived experience, which has been interesting. I don't even want to talk about it this way as sort of being displaced, but I ended up on the Canadian side of the US Canada border on March 13th, 2020, and have unexpectedly spent the last two years up here. And so there's something about, it's nice to be reminded that not everything has to last forever.
Tim Cynova:
On that note, Jamie it's always wonderful to be with you. Thank you so much for sharing your experience and your insights into this and many other things that I look forward to recording more podcasts about niche topics that will have both listeners very excited about that.
Jamie Bennett:
That's true. And I look forward to being your partner in helping drive those twos of people to all of your resources.
Tim Cynova:
Awesome. Thanks, Jamie.
Jamie Bennett:
Thanks, Tim.
Tim Cynova:
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