Analyzing the NEA 'Our Town' Grants (Part 2)

When I published my post "Analyzing the NEA 'Our Town' Grants," several people wanted to know about whether the awards reflected the applicant pool, and I said I didn't know. Last week, I was contacted by Jamie Bennett, the Chief of Staff and Director of Public Affairs for the NEA, who provided me with the data. (Ian, have at it!)

Let's go inside the numbers a bit using my particular lens. The NEA provides us with breakdowns according to county population and city population. The reason I focus on county population is that there are many places that officially have small populations, but are really bedroom communities for a much larger nearby metropolis. From my perspective, these are not small or rural communities, but extensions of the larger population center, and the arts options available to them are mostly to be found in the city. My focus is on small and rural communities that are in counties that are also small or rural. Nevertheless, let's examine both sets of numbers.

The data focused on the proposals that made the final cut, of which there were 103, 51 of which received grants, or about 49.5%. Here is a list of the county populations, how many proposals were submitted, how many awarded, and what percentage that represents:

COUNTIES

• Under 100,000: Submitted 15, awarded 6 (40%)
• 100,000 to 500,000: Submitted 33, awarded 17 (51.5%)
• 500,000 - 2,500,000: Submitted 48, awarded 23 (47.9%)
• >2,500,000: Submitted 7, awarded 5 (71.4%)

CITIES

• Under 100,000: Submitted 48, awarded 19 (39.5%)
• 100,000 - 500,000: Submitted 35, awarded 18 (51.4%)
• 500,000 - 2,500,000: Submitted 17, awarded 11 (64.7%)
• >2,500,000: Submitted 3, awarded 3 (100%) [interesting note: 100% proposals over 1M pop received awards)

Analysis: Whether examined according to cities or counties, the data suggest that if you were in an area with a large population you were more likely to be awarded an Our Town grant. There is a considerably higher success rate for the largest counties (71.4%) and cities (100%). Does this indicate a bias on the part of the peer review panel? Judging just from this data, I think there is enough evidence to lean yes. Is it conscious? Hard to say.

The other analysis I did in my original post looked at those states that didn't receive an Our Town grant at all. Did they submit a proposal?

AL: Submitted 0, awarded 0
DE: Submitted 0, awarded 0
DC: Submitted 1, awarded 0
GA: Submitted 2, awarded 0
IN: Submitted 1, awarded 0
KS: Submitted 1, awarded 0
KY: Submitted 1, awarded 0
MT: Submitted 1, awarded 0
NH: : Submitted 1, awarded 0
NJ: : Submitted 1, awarded 0
NM: Submitted 0, awarded 0
NV: Submitted 0, awarded 0
OK: Submitted 0, awarded 0
OR: : Submitted 2, awarded 0
SD: Submitted 0, awarded 0
UT: Submitted 0, awarded 0
VA: Submitted 0, awarded 0

Analysis: Of the 17 states (including DC) who received no Our Town funding, 8 (47%) did not submit a proposal, and of those who did, 7 submitted only 1 proposal. .


You will see on page 1 of the document the organizations that the NEA contacted in an attempt to increase the number of applicants from small and rural communities. It is an extensive list that indicates a legitimate attempt was made to increase the number of submissions, and I enthusiastically applaud their efforts and concern, and wonder aloud whether their efforts were matched by representatives of those organizations. As Mr. Bennett notes, "We made a concerted effort to reach out to communities of every size, working with the organizations on the attached list -- including yours -- asking them to forward information about the Our Town grant opportunity. We would truly welcome your - and your readers' - ideas about other networks to activate and other ways to do outreach." And I urge readers to contribute their ideas in the comments.

Nevertheless, given what percentage of proposals from small and rural counties were tossed out in the final round by the peer reviewers (and it might be interesting to know how many of those reviewers were themselves from small or rural counties), one might fairly wonder whether the interest in non-metropolitan communities was shared by the panel. The fact that 100% of the proposals that came from cities with populations over a million suggests otherwise.

That the NEA is concerned about this is reflected in another sentence from Mr. Bennett's email to me: "This analysis leads me to believe that if we want to change how the NEA grantee pool looks, we need to change the applicant pool." I will be having a conversation with him to discuss my ideas later in the week, so if you have any ideas for accomplishing this, I'd love to hear it.

Finally, I was told about another conversation of this issue, in which someone wondered why we should be surprised about this tendency to slight small and rural areas -- after all, the NEA doesn't have addressing this issue as part of their mandate. For this person, and for those who think that this issue is somehow irrelevant, I would quote the 1965 act of Congress that mandated that the NEA dedicate itself "to supporting excellence in the arts, both new and established; bringing the arts to all Americans; and providing leadership in arts education."

Wendell Berry: 10 Hopes (Commencement Address)

In 1989, Wendell Berry delivered a Commencement Address at the College of the Atlantic in Bar Harbor, Maine that included not Ten Commandments but ten hopes. They are as follows (I highlight the ones that I feel are particularly applicable to the arts):

1. Beware the justice of Nature.
2. Understand that there can be no successful human economy apart from Nature or in defiance of Nature.
3. Understand that no amount of education can overcome the innate limits of human intelligence and responsibility. We are not smart enough or conscious enough or alert enough to work responsibly on a gigantic scale.
4. In making things always bigger and more centralized, we make them both more vulnerable in themselves and more dangerous to everything else. Learn, therefore, to prefer small-scale elegance and generosity to large-scale greed, crudity, and glamour.
5. Make a home. Help to make a community. Be loyal to what you have made.
6. Put the interest of the community first.
7. Love your neighbors–not the neighbors you pick out, but the ones you have.
8. Love this miraculous world that we did not make, that is a gift to us.
9. As far as you are able make your lives dependent upon your local place, neighborhood, and household–which thrive by care and generosity–and independent of the industrial economy, which thrives by damage.
10. Find work, if you can, that does no damage. Enjoy your work. Work well.

Vindicated -- Proof Positive

[For those of you coming from the Parbasis site and who are humor impaired, this is a joke. The map was forwarded to me by Mac Rogers, who obviously knows that I have a sense of humor about the issues I address. Sheesh.]

Analyzing the NEA "Our Town" Grants

So yesterday, the NEA announced the recipients of the "Our Town" grants. As you may or may not know, the "Our Town" grants were created to support "creative placemaking projects that contribute toward the livability of communities and help transform them into lively, beautiful, and sustainable places with the arts at their core....A key to the success of creative placemaking involves the arts in partnership with a committed governmental leadership and the philanthropic sector. All Our Town applications must reflect a partnership that will provide leadership for the project. These partnerships must involve at least two organizations: one a nonprofit design or cultural organization, and one a government entity."

Given the name chosen by Rocco Landesman and the NEA staff, which references Thornton Wilder's Pulitzer Prize winning play about fictional small town Grovers Corner, let's analyze the grants that were distributed in terms of geography and population. (Full disclosure: I was part of the applicant pool for the "Our Town" grant for a project in Bakersville, NC [pop 357], and was not funded.)

WHICH STATES WERE IGNORED?

Let's start with which states received no funding at all -- the number in parenthesis next to the state's name is the number of the 156 "Access to Excellence" grants for theatre in the most recent round (for details, see my post here):

• Alabama (0)
• Delaware (0)
• Georgia (4)
• Indiana (1)
• Kansas (1)
• Kentucky (3)
• Montana (2)
• Nevada (0)
• New Hampshire (0)
• New Jersey (0)
• New Mexico (2)
• Oklahoma (1)
• Oregon (2)
• South Dakota (0)
• Utah (0)
• Virginia (2)

In summary, these 17 states which received no "Our Town" funding received only 11.5% of the "Access to Excellence" grants for theatre. Seven of them received no funding in either round.

Of the three states that received the most funding in the "Access to Excellence" theatre funding -- New York, California, and Illinois -- both New York and California exceeded the average and median grants for those states who received them, with California far outdistancing every other state, having received $900,000 (the next highest was Texas with $525,000 and Florida with $400,000); Illinois was near the bottom with $50,000.

WHAT ABOUT POPULATION?

According to Wikipedia, "16.7% of U.S. counties had more than 100,000 inhabitants."

• Of the 50 grants funded by the NEA, 45 of them, or 90%, were in counties over 100,000. 
• In fact, the average population of the counties funded was a bit more than 2.163 million people, and the median population was over 966,000. 

According to the US government, a rural county has a population under 50,000. How many of these grants went to rural counties?

• Of the 50 grants funded by the NEA, only two (Marfa, TX and Sitka, AK) went to a county that could be classified as rural.

For those of you who are reading this and composing the usual questions, the NEA does not release a list of the applicants overall. As a participant, I know that the number of applicants were substantial and competition was stiff, but I cannot say how many small communities submitted applications. I would, however, say that an agency interested in diversity might have recruited applicants, and perhaps made an effort to account for this in making their awards. A 4% award rate for rural areas, and  10% rate for small communities once again reinforces the idea that the arts are an urban pasttime, and that people from the South (Alabama, Georgia) or the non-coastal West (Indiana, Kansas, Kentucky, Montana, Nevada, New Mexico, Oklahoma, South Dakota, Utah) should not expect support from the NEA.

So when funding for the NEA comes around once again, remember this distribution when you are condemning those Southern and Western representatives and senators who vote against.

Now let the rationalizing begin.

Headwaters at the Sautee Nacoochee Center

[cross-posted at the CRADLE blog]

Over the weekend, I had my very first Moonpie thanks to Lisa Mount, the producer and director of  Headwaters: A Goodly Portion of Our Songs & Stories, and the wonderful people at the Sautee Nacoochee Center in Sautee Nacoochee, GA. I hear that I really needed an RC Cola to make the experience complete, but I think the excellent performance more than made up for the missing drink.

I had been invited down to Georgia (music cue: Charlie Daniels Band The Devil Went Down to Georgia) by Lisa Mount, and it just so happened that my wife needed to attend a meeting just down the road in Cleveland that same weekend, so I was thrilled to make the 2-1/2 hr trip from Asheville.

Sautee Nacoochee is an unincorporated community in northern Georgia. The performance space is a 1930s'era gym that has been converted into a large, open stage surrounded on three sides by 100 seats. On the Center's campus is also the Center Gallery, devoted to the work of artists who live within 50 miles of Sautee Nacoochee, a conference room, a history musuem, dance and art studios, and an environmental education resource center. The newest addition is a museum devoted to the folk pottery of Northeast Georgia. According to the SNCA website, "Because of the extensive arts programming offered in recent years, Sautee was designated one of the "100 Best Small Art Towns in America" in a book by the same name written by John Villani." Deservedly so!

Lisa Mount, who was named "one of the 100 Most Influential Georgians" in 2008 by Georgia Trend Magazine, gave me the "nickel tour." In addition to her work with SNCA, she is very active nationally as a consultant with Artistic Logistics, for whom she has helped such non profit arts organizations as Childsplay, the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival Foundation, Liz Lerman Dance Exchange, Cornerstone Theater Company, the Neo Futurists, the Network of Ensemble Theaters, and the Maryland Ensemble Theatre. Her seemingly boundless positive energy made me and everyone else feel welcome.

This was the fifth summer for Headwaters. Every two years, there has been a new version written by well-known playwrights Jo Carson and Jerry Grillo, and this year was a compilation of what might be called the "greatest hits" of the first two productions. Next year there will be a new play called Didja Hear? about "what we can and can't (and will and won't) hear." (Carson's book Spider Speculations: A Physics and Biophysics of Storytelling [published by TCG Publications] is a must-read for anyone interested in this sort of community storytelling.)

I loved the production, which was performed by local performers, including a wonderful band for the numerous songs. There also were shadow puppets and a whimsical framing device about two bears rescued by a local theatre producer from the bear park who have been conscripted to write scenes of the various stories they are provided. They are motivated by Moonpies...  The stories are a mixture of tall tales, local history, and personal remembrances, all very much connected to Sautee Nacoochee. As the Director's Note said, "Headwaters could only happen here, with these people -- it is theater of, by, for, with and about this community."

I was particularly struck by Nadir Mateen's powerful story entitled "Honor & Dignity" about an African-American educator with a doctorate in education who, when Georgia desegregated, found himself forced to fire all of his African-American teachers himself (after all, no white person would be willing to be taught by a black teacher) and as a reward remain employed in the system (he was 18 months from retirement), or have the white administrators do it and be out of work. He decided on the former, feeling that it was important for at least one black person to remain in the system, and after he had fired the teachers, he was given a job teaching math at the reform school, which he did for the 18 months until he was able to retire. Mateen, who has an MFA in acting from the University of Florida, delivered the story with understated power and emotional depth.

Other highlights included a hilarious story entitled "Foot," about a woman whose brother gave her an old prosthetic foot as a joke present, and she decided to put it sticking out from underneath the hood of her car as she drove around town, which lead to unexpected consequences and a wonderful statement about our legacy perhaps being those things that made other people laugh. Lisa Mount's song "Hold Fast to the Laughter" brought that point home.The ensemble delivered a simple and powerful rendition of Stephen Foster's haunting song Hard Times, and a Elsie Nelson told the story of a "woods colt" (and illegitimate child) and her travails through life.

The production was beautifully paced, and staged simply and evocatively with just enough spectacle to keep things interesting but not to overwhelm the stories. It wasn't slick, it was authentic, it felt rooted in place. It is a marvelous example of the kind of production that I hope to encourage people involved in CRADLE to create.

To everyone involved in Headwaters: A Goodly Portion of Our Songs & Stories, thanks you so much for an inspiring evening, and Lisa, thank you so much for the invitation, and for providing another example of how rural and small communities can be places of vibrant, authentic art.

Excellent Series at Createquity: Arts Policy Library

I would like to draw my readers' attention to an excellent series at the Createquity blog. It is called "Arts Policy Library," and the Createquity bloggers are summarizing and discussing a variety of books an reports:

• Crystal Wallis: Informal Arts: Finding Cohesion, Capacity and Other Cultural Benefits in Unexpected Places 
• Aaron Anderson: Arts, Inc.
• Jennifer Kessler: Critical Links:  Learning in the Arts and Student Academic and Social Development

I commend the bloggers for their work. There is so much valuable information available, and it is extremely helpful to have knowledgeable people gathering it into one place and giving us thorough, ye brief analyses so we can make a decision whether to read the entire report ourselves. 

Why Bringing the Arts Back Home Is So Important

"Theatre, like all other forms of cultural expression, used to be ordinary people singing, dancing, telling stories. This is the way a living community recorded and celebrated its victories, defeats, joys, fears. As the Cartesian or mechanistic model took root, and later as colonialism spread across the planet,. coinciding with the mechanization of capitalism, this primal activity of storytelling also evolved in a mechanistic way. Like many other  things we can think of, cultural activity became commodified. It transformed from something people did naturally, "in community", into a manufactured consumer product. Today a vast majority of people buy theatre, buy dance, buy paintings, buy books, buy movies; the list goes on and on. We now pay strangers to tell us stories about strangers. But when do we use the symbolic language of theatre, dance, etc., to tell our own stories about our collective selves?

What is the result of a living community's inability to use primal language to tell its own stories? Alienation, violence, self-destructive behaviour on a global level. Living communities have fallen into a stupor, hypnotized by a steady diet of manufactured culture."

David Diamond, Theatre for Living: The Art and Science of Community-Based Dialogue