Broadway Marketer and Arts Educator Donna Walker-Kuhne Talks Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion in the Age of COVID
“Historically, pandemics have forced humans to break with the past and imagine their world anew. This one is no different. It is a portal, a gateway between one world and the next. We can choose to walk through it, dragging the carcasses of our prejudice and hatred, our avarice, our data banks and dead ideas, our dead rivers and smoky skies behind us. Or we can walk through lightly, with little luggage, ready to imagine another world. And ready to fight for it.” Arundhati Roy, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness
A global leader in audience development and community engagement, Donna Walker-Kuhne is the founder and President of Walker International Communications Group, a boutique multicultural marketing and consulting firm located in Brooklyn, New York. Best known for her work on Broadway, New York Theater, and the arts, Walker-Kuhne has raised more than $23 million in earned income promoting the arts to multicultural communities across the country and is recognized as the nation’s foremost expert in audience development by the Arts & Business Council of New York.
Walker International Communications Group has partnered with numerous award-winning Broadway and Off-Broadway productions, including The Lion King, Once On This Island, Aladdin, Smokey’s Joe’s Café, A Raisin in the Sun, A Streetcar Named Desire, The Gershwins’ Porgy and Bess, and Bring in ‘da Noise, Bring in ‘da Funk, just to name a few. The firm represents art institutions in the U.S. including its longtime clients the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theatre and the August Wilson African American Cultural Center and consults with international non-profit organizations.
While most people from the theater and arts community are out of work, Walker-Kuhne has been putting in overtime for such clients as the New Jersey Performing Arts Center (NJPAC) and Harlem Week. As the Senior Advisor of Community Engagement for the former and a Senior Board Member for the latter, Walker-Kuhne is charged with producing existing programming content to a free virtual experience in the NJPAC’s online series “In Your Living Room” and Harlem Week’s upcoming events scheduled from August 9 to August 16.
A former criminal attorney, Walker-Kuhne is a native of Chicago’s Southside and a graduate of Howard University Law School. An arts educator, she teaches “Cultural Tourism” and “Audience and Community Engagement in Community Arts Organizations” at NYU’s Steinhardt School of Education and “Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion for the Arts” at NYU’s School of Continuing and Professional Studies; at Columbia University, she teaches a combined course, “Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion as a Foundation for Community Engagement,” for graduate students in the theater department. Her public speaking and educational platforms have taken her around the globe to Australia, Germany, Russia, South Africa, Scotland, and Croatia.
A recipient of more than 50 awards and honors, Walker-Kuhne is the author of Invitation to the Party: Building Bridges to the Arts, Culture and Community. Her forthcoming book, Champions for the Arts, will be published by Theater Communications Group in spring 2021. Her weekly blog, “Arts and Culture Connections,” is a widely read resource throughout the arts and non-profit communities and beyond.
As we enter the fourth month of this global pandemic, the careers of many in the entertainment and the arts communities as well as the industries themselves continue to hang in the balance. Amid the current climate of insurmountable loss and suffering, Donna Walker-Kuhne shares her process and goals during the COVID-19 crisis.
Gwendolyn Quinn: Donna, thank you for taking the time to interview for our relaunch issue of Global Communicator. Can you explain the difference between audience development and community engagement? What is your role as an expert working with Broadway and New York Theater productions, and the arts?
Donna Walker-Kuhne: Audience development is the process of developing promotional opportunities to target audiences to purchase tickets for a particular event. We develop the interest and the awareness with a community with the goal that there is a financial deliverable. Community engagement is to create access to the arts that we produce, and we bring it to your neighborhood. For example, we will bring a dance workshop to your church, or a jazz jam at the club in your neighborhood or a literary event in your library. With community engagement, there’s no financial transaction. Audience development is a transactional experience.
GQ: Before the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, were you working on any Broadway or Off-Broadway productions?
DWK: We were preparing to work on the Lincoln Center production of Blue, which is a different production from the one at the Apollo Theater. The Lincoln Center play was scheduled to open in August [2020], and now it’s on hold.
GQ: How is COVID-19 changing the way you do business?
DWK: I would say that COVID-19 changed the way I have seen my role as an arts administrator and an arts marketer. I believe, more than ever, the way that we’re going to build sustainable audiences is through community engagement. But before we get to community engagement, there has to be equity, diversity, and inclusion. When we have that, then we’ve got something to build upon. Without it, it’s just a transactional experience and people will come and go. I’m only interested in sustainable audiences. I’m not doing anything that’s just one time; there’s no value there.
GQ: COVID-19 has financially devastated Broadway and New York Theater and the arts. How are you preparing for the relaunch process?
DWK: My primary focus is in the nonprofit sector, and I’m most concerned about our smaller theaters that may not be able to get the PPP [Paycheck Protected Program] loans and all of the other financial resources, and some of the [black] theaters will close permanently. I’m interested in supporting those efforts to help [black theater companies] think strategically.
In Harlem, we have monthly town-hall discussions with the Manhattan Borough President Gale Brewer, the Harlem Arts Alliance, and Northern Manhattan Arts Alliance. Collectively, we are hosting Zoom conference calls for small arts organizations and artists to share resources. On these calls, we have funders from different foundations and from the city and state. We have elected officials, so they can see how they have to allocate resources for the arts community. And then we have arts organizations [personnel] who are talking about what they’ve done to restructure and redirect their grants. I’m aggressively involved in that movement.
I’m excited that we will be presenting art in expanded platforms. We [marketers] used to think if we get people from the neighborhood or if we get New Yorkers, then the project is a success. Now we have the world and audiences have become global because so much content is transferred online.
I’m impressed with what Alvin Ailey [American Dance Theater] is doing with their All Ailey Access program. The company is making dance free and available to the world by presenting archival footage and solo performances by the company dancers from their own homes. I believe this is what the arts will look like in the next 50 to 100 years. It won’t be reserved just for the elite, but a platform where accessibility is for everyone. We still have to monetize it, and we will have to dig deeper into our funding sources so that funders can see the value. And we, people of color, we have to be in the room. We cannot let any discussion about the arts happen while we’re not there. We have to be there and speak up.
GQ: Speaking as a marketer, how do you think the Broadway and New York Theater establishment can build a new business model to engage and re-engage new audiences beyond the traditional theatergoers?
DWK: It’s doable and several multicultural arts marketers are working on a variety of Broadway shows. The question becomes [how] not to marginalize them, but to give them the freedom to build a campaign for a sustainable audience, which means we have to have a budget. Oftentimes when I work on a Broadway show, we’re given the smallest budget and expected to bring the largest return. We have to flip that scenario. We need the same budget that you give to our white counterparts, and the same amount of advertising dollars that are given for a New York Times ad. When that shifts, then you can build a sustainable audience. But if people of color are hired just to say, “We’ve got somebody working on our multicultural marketing,” then that’s tokenism, and it’s insulting. It also creates no value. We’re at the point where we all have to put on our big-girl pants and say, “This is the kind of respect that my community deserves. If you want us in your theater, this is what it will cost and this is what it will take.”
GQ: Moving forward, what opportunities do you see in your business that have resulted from COVID-19? How has COVID-19 changed your perspective?
DWK: Deeper collaborations. [This subject] has been topical before, but on every platform of the arts, there is now room and the need to collaborate. For Broadway, every show functions like its own universe, there is no collaboration with sharing resources, marketing strategies, audiences, groups, any of that. We stay in that lane until the show closes, we pack up everything, and we move on to the next show.
The model has to change. It’s time to create a landscape where there is a culture that wants to support diversity on every level, not just audiences. Who’s producing the show? Who’s doing the lighting? Who’s managing the show? For me, this is where this has to move. This is what COVID-19 is teaching us. So many lessons, if we pay attention. The way we were living, the quality of our lives, we couldn’t sustain that. It was frantic, hectic, and not creating the value that human beings deserve.
What’s happening now are these collaborative dialogues. Every day, the major arts organizations, including the Cultural Institutions Groups of New York, they’re on a daily call sharing strategy. Every two weeks, the Performing Arts Centers are on a call. I’m on that call. We have the Harlem Cultural Collaborative call with twelve major Harlem cultural institutions. For the first time, there’s a movement of collaboration, sharing of resources freely without the threat of competition, because that’s what was holding things back: competition and, of course, racism. Now we have to cross those bridges because everyone is now trying to figure out how do we survive?
I’m receiving more calls than usual from arts organizations around the country who are realizing that we have neglected the population in front of us. How do we change that? My response is you have to change yourself. You don’t change the community. And that will be a foundation for building new audiences.
GQ: Tell me about your volunteerism and community work.
DWK: I’m involved in my Buddhist organization, the Soka Gakkai International, or SGI-USA. We are a world peace organization that is focused on creating a positive environment by polishing our own lives. And we chant “Nam Myōhō Renge Kyō;” this is our religion as well as our philosophy.
I’ve been a Buddhist since 1981. It is the core of my being so that everything I do is rooted in humanism. Everything I do is rooted in the dignity of life and taking full responsibility for my life. I never expect anyone to do anything for me or to change. I change. When I change, my environment changes. And now we’re involved in this COVID era, and taking care of all of our members in New York State or the New York City area. We have several thousand active members, and I’m part of the leadership team. One by one, we take care of our members by calling them, making sure they’re getting the support they need, checking in to make sure that everyone is practicing, and chanting to overcome their problems. We are deepening our study to understand why we have this situation [Coronavirus] right now, and how we can transform it and make this the best time in our life. I’m on Zoom calls, at least three to four times every day.
I recently joined the board of the Signature Theatre, and I will be conducting Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion training as well as engaging African-American philanthropy. Most arts organizations have left money on the table because they don’t believe that black people have wealth. And we do, but we’re not asked, and we’re not giving it to do the same old, tired, white plays. Fortunately, the Signature Theater has been doing that for a while and the way the organization has nurtured its black playwrights, I want to be a part of keeping our stories alive. I’m putting my effort where that energy is, and that’s one of the places that’s doing it and that’s why I’m on the board there.
I also volunteer with the League of Professional Theater Women, and recently finished an equity, diversity, and inclusion workshop, and will be leading a series of workshops for that organization.
Gwendolyn Quinn is an award-winning communications strategist and consultant with a career spanning more than 25 years. She is the Chief Content Officer of the Global Communicator. As a contributor, she has penned stories for NBCNews.com, Black Enterprise, Essence.com, Huff Post, and EURWEB.com.
