It’s My Job to Make Our Theatre Matter to More People in San Diego
How We’re Building an Arts Engagement Team at The Old Globe.
Every arts organization is (or should be) trying to figure out how to matter more, to more people. At The Old Globe, we’ve started an engagement program to institutionalize that process of “figuring out.” We’ve built a team that can focus on deepening the connection between our institution and the people of our community, so that we can understand and be more responsive to their needs. This is the story of how that team came to be, how I came to lead it, and how we’re still evolving in structure and in practice as we learn what works and what doesn’t.
There’s more than one way to skin a cat; this is how we did it. We may have the logistics mostly worked out, but we’re still wrestling with some bigger philosophical questions. If you’re also in the process of building an engagement team, I want to hear what approaches have worked well for you.
The first conversation, in which we learned that labels matter.
The truth is, “community engagement” might be a relatively new buzzword in the field, but it’s a set of activities that have been pretty common across at least some theatres for quite some time. Before I joined The Old Globe, I had been doing “engagement work” for more than a decade in New York City. When our Erna Finci Viterbi Artistic Director, Barry Edelstein, and I connected during New York Stage and Film’s Powerhouse Festival at Vassar and started chatting about a new “engagement lead” they were trying to hire, I was initially skeptical.
But when Barry and I sat down to talk more about the position, the program, and what role he wanted The Old Globe to play in the San Diego community, I realized the job was so much more than the written description made it sound.
The parameters of the job became clear when it was framed another way: my role would be to help make the organization and theatre matter to more people.
My advice: when you’re drafting the job description for a new hire to lead an engagement team or program, focus on the outcomes you want them to achieve, less on the process by which that person will achieve the outcomes.
That was two years ago, and while we’ve made tons of progress mattering more to more people in our community, there’s so much more we still need to do and learn.
The first year, in which we learned to open ourselves to new possibilities.
The Old Globe was already undergoing quite a bit of change when I joined the organization, driven by our Artistic Director’s vision for the role we can and should play in our community. As I began to evolve our education department into an engagement team, there were three major logistical challenges to solve.
1. What new skills did we need on the team?
Most of all, I thought we needed two sets of skills on the team: community organizing and project management. We wanted people with a comfort level in their language talking with communities about what “engagement” really meant. Someone sensitive to the labels that would send positive or negative signals to communities and partners; who already knew that phrases like “underserved populations” and “the homeless” wouldn’t be productive contributions to conversations with people outside of our organization. I was hoping to find someone with ties to local community groups (especially those groups who don’t traditionally attend a theatre like ours), who brought their own rolodex with them, particularly since I was coming to San Diego as an outsider. I knew we needed people who were “go-getters” that could pound the pavement, talk to a lot of people, and not be scared of having a door slammed in their face, but also stay organized enough to keep up with the many initiatives we have running.
We made a strategic decision not to look for people with a deep theatre background. If potential team members came to us with that experience, it would be a plus; but demanding an arts background and a community organizing background felt like too much of a unicorn to realistically find. And in conversations with new potential team members, we began finding that people without a theatre background brought a fresh mindset to how we might engage with communities, and how we could message who we are and what we do.
2. Where could we find people with those skills?
Given how new the (formal) community engagement field is for the theatre, there really aren’t any traditional resources we could find to recruit new people — no specific online job boards, or conferences, or school programs, or peer organizations. Instead, we were lucky to find some people already working at The Old Globe in a variety of permanent and temporary positions, who were great fits to transition their focus to community engagement.
And we were fortunate to have a great group of community partners that helped us put the word out about these new positions on the engagement team — from labor union leaders to military service organizations and the outreach staffs of local government offices. I would describe the position to them and what we were trying to do, and ask if they knew of anyone. When you start breaking down the skills you’re really looking for and open your mind to new kinds of people that might fit the role, you really open yourself up to a large pool of potential team members.
3. How could we make this role attractive to them?
We spent a lot of time drafting the job descriptions for new team members — removing as many barriers as possible that would turn off or turn away potential staff: no formal education requirements, no certain number of years of arts experience, and made sure we were reaching beyond the “arts crowd” when we did post the job. And in my conversations with new potential team members, I would always emphasize how much they would be “building” this program right alongside me and the rest of The Old Globe team. It was important to recruiting teaching artists, our community organizers, that we would in fact be organizing communities toward some higher purpose and greater good. The specific job description mattered less than the feeling they had of joining a growing team and the sense of impact we wanted to achieve.
The second year, in which we learned the most valuable resources are time and communication.
I should mention that for the past two years, we’ve been building this plane as we fly it, sometimes with a little too much gas in the tanks to take big risks, or occasionally uncertain if we have enough fuel to get us home. We’ve had a few missteps and a ton of learning. For any new engagement teams also learning on their feet, you might recognize some of our top five lessons learned as well.
1. If you can, wind down before you ramp up.
We had an existing education program that was going full steam when I came on board. It’s been a challenge to figure out how to incorporate the right bits from the education program, fold in new engagement strategies, and explain it all to our colleagues and partners as we go. Right now there are 4 full time staff focused on engagement, but we’re doing the work of about 10 people. It would have been great if we could have hired one person to focus on each major stream of work, both legacy and new. If you can wind down legacy programs before you ramp up engagement initiatives, it will definitely keep you more sane. But for us that just wasn’t realistic — the legacy programs have funding streams and partners and colleagues to whom we have made commitments.
2. Your first big task is almost certainly a needs assessment from the community.
I don’t believe there’s any one-size-fits-all plan for engagement. How we undertake engagement programming at The Old Globe in San Diego is very different than how my colleagues at Dell’Arte do engagement in Blue Lake, which is very different from the Public in New York City. Everyone needs to find their own right way to do it, but I think what we all share in common is an ethos to go out and listen to our communities, find out what the community has to offer, and what they need from us. My training has always taught me to get outside of our doors, into the community, and ask them what they’re looking for. Don’t bring partners finished programs because they’re probably not going to be what they’re interested in.
3. Communicating with the rest of your organization is critical (and hard!).
It’s easy to get siloed doing engagement work. It helps to have a whole department of people focused on engagement, but it also means we’re separated from other departments. I’m constantly working to let other colleagues within The Old Globe know what we’re up to, especially because we spend so much time out of the office. Sometimes we feel closer to the partners and communities we work with, because we spend so much more time with them than back home with colleagues in our own organization. We’ve started a “Breaking Bread” series each quarter, inviting our partners to The Old Globe along with the whole Old Globe staff of 150+ people, to gather and talk about what we’re working on, what they’re thinking about, what they’re excited by, and how we could be more relevant to the community.
4. You’re probably going to need to make room to fail.
For us, engagement programming acts a little like a “research and development” arm of the organization. We’re given the opportunity (and obligation) to take risk and try things that have never been done before. And we’ve learned that we need to make room — in the calendar, in the budget, and in our own evaluations — for failure or missteps. We’ve had a lot of success reaching out to the African American community here in San Diego, changing perceptions about what The Old Globe is, getting the Black Chamber of Commerce engaged with our work, and so on. But we’re still working to make inroads with the Mexican American community of San Diego; we have some new partnerships and programs planned this year that we believe will strengthen and grow that relationship. We’re constantly reminded that every community is different, has unique needs, perceptions, and barriers.
5. Community engagement teams can’t be the sole torch bearers for EDI.
Let me be real: community engagement programs aren’t likely to succeed at your organization without a parallel focus on equity, diversity, and inclusion. The same values and principles are infused throughout both. But I don’t think the “engagement team” can also be tasked with facilitating EDI conversations within your organization — there are too many other issues to tackle. EDI should certainly be a part of all your community engagement programs, but I don’t think it’s fair to put pressure on the engagement team to be the leaders of the EDI conversation — that leadership needs to be organization wide, and come from above. We’re fortunate to get that from our artistic and managing leadership.
What are we going to learn in year three?
We’re learning how much further and deeper we can go. Everyday we come to work wondering how can we make theatre matter to more people. How can we create programs that are vibrant and make The Old Globe truly accessible to our neighbors? How do these programs encourage direct participation in art making? This has been an adventure that we’ve leapt into and we’re running a hundred miles a minute trying to keep up with our ambitions and the needs of our community. I go to conferences, I sit on panels, I’m trying to learn a lot, but I’m so curious to hear from other engagement teams across the theatre field. How did you go about your first few years? What did you pick up along the way that helped you build a new team?
This story is part of a publication on Medium exploring how arts organizations are adapting to reflect the changing demographics of California, engaging with their communities, and becoming more resilient organizations as part of the New California Arts Fund at The James Irvine Foundation.
