Tag Archives: Social Innovation

Report Back: NY Grantmakers in the Arts “Creative Placemaking” Panel

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Funders, Speakers and your Man About Town walking to the Queens Museum from the Mets-Willets Point 7 Train – Man About Town / Tumblr

Your Man About Town’s middle name is Moderation, Dear Reader; and although it is a somewhat awkward locution when making a full introduction, it nonetheless conveys the important fact that your Man About Town’s middle name is not Tom, Dick or Harry.  I moderate.  I facilitate.  I have even been known, at times, to adjudicate.

So when the New York Chapter of the Grantmakers in the Arts asked if I wouldn’t mind moderating a panel on creative placemaking at the Queens Museum of Art earlier this month, I could no more deny them than I could my very nature.  Or at least, the very nature of my personal brand. Continue reading →

Man About Town – Newsletter #1

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I love my name tag. Thanks Federal Reserve Bank of NY!

Dear reader,

It’s been a year since I hung out a shingle and joined the independent workforce, and a very interesting year indeed.  Your Man About Town has been busy moving the needle on mission related investment, geeking out on data, pursuing my ongoing passion for the arts, and assembling public / private partnerships out of thin air.

Frequently my job as a consultant is simply to help my clients think things they haven’t thought, meet people they haven’t met, and do things they haven’t done.   In this inaugural newsletter, I’m pleased to share a bit about what I’ve been up to.

It’s a bird! It’s a plan! It’s a… What the hell is that?

Mission Related Investment

Mission related investment (MRI) can be a powerful tool, but as a sector we still have much to learn.  Man About Town has been fortunate to work with Contact Fund, expanding deal flow and advising on strategic development. Man About Town also stepped in to help the Altman Foundation underwrite a Program Related Investment to LISC.  And whenServices for the UnderServed asked Man About Town to help them train their board on innovation in MRI and the needs of complex nonprofits, it just seemed like the right thing to do.  Now, Man About Town and SUS have joined forces to convene a Social Impact Investment Conference in NYC.  Our Advisory Committee includes Antony Bugg-Levine, Deb De Santis, Alice Korngold, Terri Ludwig, Brandee McHale and Michael Rubinger.  Just getting warmed up folks!  Coming April 2013!

Related posts:

MAS NYC Arts Digest 2012

Arts & Economic Development

This past spring, the Municipal Art Society invited Man About Town to come on board as a research fellow, analyzing economic trends in the nonprofit cultural sector through the Cultural Data Project.  Data geek that I am, how could Man About Town say no?  The result is the Arts Digest 2012, including my section entitled “Who Pays for the Arts?”  And Man About Town has been busy applying all I’ve learned as a member of the Naturally Occurring Cultural Districts Working Group, including a new case study onadaptive re-use in creating new cultural facilities – due out this November!

Related posts:

Civic Consulting Alliance

Introducing Civic Consulting NYC

Last fall, Neil Kleiman introduced Man About Town to Chicago’s Civic Consulting Alliance. Civic Consulting aggregates high-level pro bono corporate capacity and provides it to the public sector – a national model for innovation in public/private partnerships.  I fell in love.  Man About Town has been building Civic Consulting’s NYC affiliate, and on September 13th we hosted a launch event with the Ford Foundation, Living Cities and special guest Deputy Mayor Linda Gibbs for the local philanthropic and corporate community.  It was a smashing good time, and you’ll be hearing a lot more about Civic Consulting NYC!

Related posts:

In short, life is good…  

…thanks to all of you and your brilliant thinking, passionate commitment, and energetic leadership.  I hope to see some of you at the Grantmakers in the Arts convening on November 15th at the Queens Museum, where Man About Town will moderate the morning’s panel discussion.  And stay tuned for a major article in Shelterforce Magazine on the evolving role of community development intermediaries in today’s complex environment.

Until then, I remain your most humble servant,

Your Man About Town

The Art$ – Part III (Some Easy Fixes)

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Art – it makes life more funner.

In my earlier posts on this subject, dear reader, I first endeavored to put a finer point on the more than thousand-fold revenue variation between the largest cultural organizations in NYC, and the median cultural organization. Holy stromboli you say? Yes! While the very largest nonprofit culturals have revenues of more than $300 million annually, more than half the groups in my most recent study had revenues of less than $250 thousand. What’s more, the top five very largest organizations received nearly half of all city funding (their share being a whopping $133 million).
Continue reading →

The Art$, Small Business, and Community Development

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Just testifying for the arts, people.

Dear Reader, below you will find testimony that I presented recently before a joint hearing of the New York City Council on the impact of the arts on small businesses and community economic vitality.  You may very well be interested in two previous posts on this subject:  The Art$ (wherein I discuss the economic realities of very small versus very large nonprofit culturals in NYC), and The Art$ – Part II (wherein I dig deeper into how very large nonprofit culturals make their money compared to how small nonprofit culturals do). Continue reading →

The Art$

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It was weird.

Dear reader, your Man About Town has been to the very precipice, where I stood and looked down.  It was weird.

You see, it all started when some of the lovely folks over at the Municipal Art Society (Hi Mary! Hi Anne!  Hello Vin!), invited me to come and do a research project for them called “Who Pays for the Arts.”  The job was to tool through data provided by the Cultural Data Project (CDP) and better understand how arts organizations in NYC make their money.  To whit:  in order to apply for public funding in NYC, you have to submit, like, a gajillion data points to CDP.

Exciting!  Data geek that I am my little heart just fluttered with glee.  Numbers!  Charts!  Oh yeah!  Uh huh!  That’s right!

So I started digging through the data and the very first question I asked was, you know, what does the distribution curve look like?  Given that I’m looking at total 2010 revenues for 723 organizations, and that the whole group all mushed together made $2.5 billion, how many groups are on the high end, how many in the middle, and how many on the low end?

And this is what I found: Continue reading →

It’s a Bird! It’s a Plane! It’s… What the Hell Is That?

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Also posted in my guest blog on Rooflines.

It’s a bird! It’s a plane! It’s… What the hell is that?

In my last blog post I spent a good chunk of time talking about the trend toward “complexification” in the nonprofit sector.  There are plenty of small, scrappy, neighborhood based nonprofits around (as a matter of fact, that number continues to grow), but we’ve also seen the emergence of nonprofits with $100 million plus in annual revenues, hundreds of staff, sophisticated operational structures, and highly complex financial instruments built to conduct their business.

I argued that we’re past due in borrowing some tools from our for-profit colleagues, including stronger staff development and retention regimens, the ability to access substantial capital for opportunistic growth, shaping board relationships that focus on organizational development and not just fiduciary oversight, and developing a nonprofit sector trade association to lobby on the collective needs and issues of our sector.

We’re clearly entering a new era that will continue to blur the lines between for-profit and nonprofit.  And let’s be honest:  it’s a little scary.  Why?  Because we’re all very worried that we might somehow become like, you know, them.

Continue reading →

The Complexification of the Nonprofit Sector

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This post also available on Rooflines.  

“Substrate” by Jared Tarbell

Intuitively, just from being around the nonprofit sector for a stretch, it’s easy to tell that things have gotten more, well, complicated.  Organizations are bigger, operations more tentacled, financial tools more wonky, budgets bigger and bigger.  And don’t just take my word for it.  Thanks to the lovely folks at the Standford Social Innovation Review you can enjoy this whole, provocative article: “Why More Nonprofits Are Getting Bigger.”  

The problem is, I don’t think we’ve really done a good job of keeping up with our own complexification.   Continue reading →

It Came from Chicago

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Reposted from by guest blog on Rooflines.

It Came from Chicago

Let’s just come right out and say it:  New York City is the best.  At everything.  We are the smartest, the hardest working, the most creative, and the best-looking.  If you trace every social innovation of the past century back to its roots, you’ll find some determined, no-nonsense, big-hearted denizen of the Big Apple looking up from their work with a twinkle in their eye.  The settlement house movement?  Yo!  The community development corporation?  Booyah!  The artisanal industry incubator?  Hoo hoo hoo!

Pro bono service provision to the public sector?  Oops, wait.

Chicago’s better at it.  And it’s coming to town. Continue reading →

In Praise of (Stinky, Noisy) Bars

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Reposted from Rooflines.

Nighthawks, Edward Hopper

The vaunted “third space” isn’t home, and isn’t work – it’s more like the living room of society at large.  It’s a place where you are neither family nor co-worker, and yet where the values, interests, gossip, complaints and inspirations of these two other spheres intersect.  It’s a place at least one step removed from the structures of work and home, more random, and yet familiar enough to breed a sense of identity and connection.  It’s a place of both possibility and comfort, where the unexpected and the mundane transcend and mingle.

And nine times out of ten, it’s a bar. Continue reading →

NY City Council Testimony on Naturally Occurring Cultural Districts

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This past Friday (May 11, 2012)  I had the pleasure of testifying before a joint hearing of the Committee on Small Business, and the Committee on Cultural Affairs, Libraries and International Intergroup Relations of the New York City Council.  The topic?  “New York City’s Cultural Sector and Derivative Small Businesses.”

Hello!  Mouthful!

But I was asked to offer framing comments to complement testimony by my colleagues  from the Naturally Occurring Cultural Districts Working Group.  I’ve skipped the preliminaries (you know, hello and thank you committee Chairperson for this opportunity to yadda yadda) and cut right to the meat and potatoes:   Continue reading →