Entering Cultural Communities: Diversity and Change in the Nonprofit Arts

Chapter 4: Partnering with Purpose

91 4 Partnering with Purpose david karraker and diane grams Like most businesses large and small operating in today’s global economy, arts organizations are increasingly seeking to engage in arrangements that include alliances and joint ventures, formal partnerships, and informal collaborations. This chapter focuses specifically on relationship building among organizations—in particular, investigating how organizations share resources or engage the resources of others in efforts to build arts participation. External relationships among organizations provide a range of direct benefits in the process of building participation, including increasing organizational capacity, increasing the credibility and legitimacy of participating organizations, and providing access to skills, technology, space, or other desirable goods. Organizational collaboration may also be a good in itself—that is, it is one way to achieve a broader distribution of public goods, a task that is fundamental to the nonprofit, tax-exempt status of all cultural organizations. We found that the most important structural aspects of working partnerships were those rooted in an ethos of equivalency: partnerships that involved trust, sustained give-and-take, shared purposes, and lots of communication geared toward the mutual benefit of those involved. Such relationships are distinct from those in which one organization seeks opportunistically to acquire and dominate interorganizational arrangements and/or resources. In an overview of lessons learned, we present a range of organizational examples to show that the process of maintaining strong working relationships with partners in order to achieve a participation building goal is no easy task. This section is followed by four more detailed case studies of partnership arrangements: Guild Complex and Young Chicago Authors, two Chicagobased cultural organizations that work together to leverage their resources and build a larger pool of participants; the Louisiana Philharmonic Orchestra , which has developed both local and statewide partnerships with cultural and social service agencies; the Arab Community Center for Economic and Social Services and the University Musical Society, which 92 david karraker and diane grams have worked together in the Detroit area to create new audiences for Arab American art and new avenues for understanding Arab culture in a time of little tolerance; and, finally, a partnership between the city of Pasadena and the Armory Center for the Arts, a collaboration between a municipality and an art organization, which has been an incubator for developing a network of smaller arts organizations in this Los Angeles suburb. As we will show, the objectives of these arrangements are primarily relational—that is, they involve organizations seeking to build interactions among their organizations and with individuals from target communities or groups. The specific goals of their activities vary widely, in some cases focusing on the expansion of audiences in general, in others targeting specific groups, such as young people, members of underserved ethnic or racial groups, and residents of neighboring communities. lessons learned An Ethos of Equivalency As Francie Ostrower (2004) highlights in her study of partnerships between large and small cultural organizations, many such arrangements don’t work because the disparity of money and size often leads to a disparity in the exchange. The organizational staff we interviewed seemed to have learned how to negotiate such differences. Among the variety of program aims expressed by our interviewees, several key features distinguished interorganizational relationships that worked well: Authority is not located within a single organization, but rather is located externally among organizations. No one organization held decision-making authority over the group. Rather, the relationship brought together two or more organizations in an exchange relationship , each with a shared and enduring expectation that other participants will advance their shared interests of the whole in building participation more forcefully and successfully in concert than it would be able to do on its own. They negotiate the terms of their interactions as equals, however disparate the ultimate scope of their contributions may be once the partnership gets underway. The lasting orientation toward equivalency and renegotiation between organizational participants is what sets working relationships apart from those that did not work. This commitment to sustained give-and-take, or reciprocity, is key. Achieving and maintaining an ethos of equivalency is not an easy task. However, equivalency does not suggest that each organization must mir- ➛ ➛ ➛ 93 partnering with purpose ror the other’s functions. Inevitably, organizations that choose to partner have disparate strengths that make the partnering arrangement desirable. The sense of equivalency that emerges in the most successful partnerships is not always possible to achieve among two...