When Craig Watson took the helm of the California Arts Council back in 2011, the Arts Council for Long Beach appointed John Glaza to shepherd the organization through the selection of a new Executive Director. Filling that job on an interim basis, Glaza has drawn on a wealth of experience and expertise to support the board with its various efforts. The nation-wide search for a new Executive Director led to three candidates, but none ended up taking the job.
Today, the Arts Council for Long Beach announced that Glaza has been appointed as the official Executive Director. I had the opportunity to speak with Glaza in mid-November and learned a bit about why the Executive Committee would give him the position.
You’ve been working as the interim for quite some time now, and you have a slightly different background from the arts and culture thing. How did you come to be here?
I’m a social worker by trade. I went to graduate school to be a social worker and went through a year of doing social work treatment working with clients, and that comes in handy every day. Anyone you talk to that’s an old social worker like me uses his or her clinical skills on a daily basis to work with staff or constituents or other stake holders in the community. The communication skills, and those sorts of things, come in handy and, to this day, even though I’ve had my social work graduate degree for almost forty years, I would go back and get a social work degree again, even though I’ve had jobs in the private sector and public sector and public health.
I come to this job as an arts enthusiast, but not as an arts administrator or professional. I come to this job as a person who thrives on creating the best organization possible, and I see this organization as a service organization. The Arts Council, which is a staff and a board, is primarily in service to the community. Not just in service to the arts and cultural community, but service to the broader community. So I’m very enthusiastic about running the best organization possible, applying the best practices to board work and staff work and fund raising. We have plenty of areas to improve on at the Arts Council.
I used to be at the Long Beach Non-Profit Partnership. The Non-Profit Partnership is an organization that exists to support non-profits. My job there was as Director of Consulting Services. My job was to identify with clients, meaning other non-profits, individually, identifying what areas of their performance they wanted to improve on, and then find the talent in the consulting community to deliver on what they needed. Sometimes, the talent or expertise was expertise that I had. Most times it wasn’t. But I’ve been around long enough to be a generalist; I know a little about a lot of things, which made me good at that job.
So I did some work for the Arts Council, plenty of pro bono work early on, primarily as a sounding board, for the board at times and for staff at times, in an informal way. And then the Partnership got hired to facilitate the panel processes during the time when Craig Watson was here. So, for two years in a row, I facilitated the independent review panels that the Arts Council uses to review applications from community based organizations, performing arts groups, professional artists, through the fellowship. So, that’s how I got more familiar with the Arts Council.
Quite honestly, the way it happened was, I was in a meeting—I was asked to attend a meeting—by the president of the board who had just told me that Craig Watson, the Executive Director of the Arts Council, had been appointed the Executive Director of the California Arts Council. I said, “Of course, I’d be happy to help. What’s the purpose of the meeting?” He said, “Well, we want to talk about our transition from Craig to whatever we’re going to do next. We’d like to talk to you about the search.” It was Kamran Assadi, at the time.
And I said, “Kamran, we’re happy to help. I’m happy to lay out for you what I think your choices are as far as process, whether you use a consultant to help with your search, whether you hire a search firm, whether you do it all internally or whether you do a hybrid of that, I’m happy to do that.”
So, I went to that meeting on a Friday morning and we proceeded to have a conversation that I facilitated in identifying what the priorities were, what needed to be done, and this was with the Executive Committee. And it was during that meeting that someone said, “Well, what would you recommend as our process for identifying an interim? Because the way I understand what you’re saying, no matter how we do this search, it’s going to take several months.” And I said, “Yeah, to do it well it’s going to take several months. There’s no doubt about it. There no way to rush it. And the more orderly and disciplined you are you might shave off a few weeks. But it’s really important that there’s a set process.”
Because that’s how you produce a good result.
That’s totally how you produce a good result. And I don’t have any problem sharing my bias. My bias was that the Arts Council didn’t need to spend $50,000 to hire a new Executive Director. That wasn’t on the table, but we both know of organizations that have overspent for a search with a firm. Not to say the firms aren’t worth it, but I do have a bias to say there are other ways to address that.
So, when the interim piece came up, I felt a responsibility—remember this is on a Friday—I felt a strong sense of responsibility, particularly since I used to work with these folks in this capacity—to say, “Excuse me, it just so happens I resigned from the Partnership last night,” because I resigned on a Thursday, “and it’s effective in two weeks, so if you’re going to have a conversation about interim, I would be interested in supporting you in some way.”
And you know, I think, that I never campaigned for the job at any point. And I said, “So, this seems like the time for me to leave the room.” And everyone said, “Yeah, you need to leave the room.” About ten minutes later, they invited me in and said, “We’re all in. Now let’s get the business-side part of this done.” And that’s how it happened. And I’m glad it did.
I committed to two things; one, being the interim Executive Director but in particular, shepherding the search process. In some ways, they joked about it, they were sort of getting a twofer. They were getting an interim ED—and I have strong credentials as a non-profit administrator, and I feel comfortable in this environment—and secondly, I was going to shepherd the process for the search. That’s what I set out to do. The search committee did a great job. Unfortunately, it didn’t result in a new director.
How did that play out?
I don’t remember the exact dates, but I’m just going to rough it out. We [created a Request For Qualifications], and we posted it just about everywhere. There are a lot of free sites that people in this community look to, not just the Long Beach community but the cultural community, and we used a great tool that allowed us to accept everything electronically. The search committee reviewed them electronically. So, I’d say that the search was open for about six weeks.
We set out to do interviews. We had 68 applicants and got that down to 12. We did Skype interviews with all 12. By the way, this might sound a little crazy, but we did Skype interviews for even the local people in the first round because we wanted it to be a level playing field. We interviewed people on the East Coast, we interviewed people in the central part of the country, and we interviewed people right down the street, but we used the same methodology and that was important.
We went from 12 to 5. And when I say we, it’s important to know, like every non-profit in Long Beach, we’re owned by the community. And the Arts Council isn’t any different in that regard. Of course, the City believes they own us, too, because they helped create us and birth us, and there’s some truth to that in many ways. The search committee was made up of six people. I was the facilitator, and we had one board member, one staff member, and four community members. That was really important to the board, and it was really important to me.
We got to our three finalists. They all had decades of arts management credentials. I mean, any one of them could have done an exceptional job as the new Executive Director. We reached consensus on the first candidate. When I say ‘the first candidate,’ we reached consensus on a candidate who was fairly local, within a couple hours of here. He said yes on a Friday and no on Monday. We don’t really know why he said yes on Friday, although he was exited, enthusiastic, capable, and we don’t know why he withdrew on Monday afternoon.
I characterize it as his excitement was overrun by his apprehension. He did ask some questions about the budget, and about solid funding from the City. Also, at the time, the RDA dissolution was pending in the Supreme Court. There was a lot of uncertainty, and he had a job. So, uncertainty sometimes impacts people.
The second candidate had an offer already from an institution in Texas, and he accepted that. We weren’t able to reach consensus on the third candidate. [At that point,] the Executive Committee made a prudent decision to wait and see how this city budget is going to go.
At the time, the City was wringing its hands about a budget shortfall, and people in the arts and cultural community were thinking, “Are we going to get $354,300, which we’ve gotten the last two years,” which is far less than they used to get years ago. Far, far less. “Should we be making a decision about an Executive Director right now when we’re two months away from knowing what’s going to happen with the City?”
Fortunately, the City Council voted 9 to 0, and we got level funding. In this environment, I’m fine with level funding. We could always use more funding in the arts and cultural community, no doubt about it, but we need to find that funding somewhere else right now. It’s part of the conversation, internally, now as to whether I am going to stick around and we’re going to take the “interim” off. And we’re not going to call me permanent, which everyone keeps asking me. “Are you the permanent Executive Director?” I’ve learned in my work with non-profits, particularly with HR people, to never say permanent.
Still, it has been fourteen months, and we are talking about the future. But I can tell you this—and I think you know this as you’ve experienced me—certainly, in the most prudent way, there were tasks that needed to be attended to that any director would attend to, whether he or she was an interim or not. I just naturally knew what those were.
Because we’re reworking the job description for the Executive Director, I told the board the other day, “Well, I have to tell you, honestly, I only looked at it once because I inherently know what to do.” It’s not about looking at the job description and saying, “What’s my job today?” There’s a reason we don’t call this ‘acting.’ It’s interim, between the old and the new, because I haven’t been acting at all. I’ve known what to do, but there are certain things I haven’t been able to do that went on what I call the “park list” because the organization is better served for the new director to do those.
We thought the new director would be here last March. There was some consternation for me deciding what, on that park list, I need to accomplish during whatever set of months I’m going to be here as interim. There’s no formula for that. Some of it’s intuitive.
Larry Rice has been a great President, by the way, because he’s been so available and so supportive. I said to him, “In the Fall, I know we want to get after doing some board recruitment and some board development, but I would recommend we not do that yet because I don’t think we want to do that a month before we hire a new director.”
Shortly after March, I said to Larry, “I think we need to do this because we can’t put it off any longer.” Boards are meant to rotate. People are not meant to serve forever. We have a lot of integrity in our by-laws; with three-year terms, max. And so, we did an open call for board members. We’ll be ready to appoint those board members in the next couple weeks. We had 18 applicants, 18 people, super stars, in my opinion. We thought to select six to eight, and we’ve got seven. But that means that there are 11 that I would love to put to work in a constructive, thoughtful, important way. And there are ways to do that. [We have] about 20 now, and it’ll be about 27, and the by-laws allow for up to 31.
Now that you’re moving things from the park list to the more active list, other than the board, what are some of those other things that you’ve been tackling?
I think the biggest opportunity for us right now is financial stability, nurturing the current relationships with funders that we already have, and making sure that they’re comfortable with where we’re headed. Those funders include the LA County Arts Commission, the Miller Foundation, which is a strong supporter, and two NEA grants. We can never forget that our biggest funder is the City, so we need to always maintain a good relationship with Pat West and his staff, and the Council offices.
Our greatest opportunity now, that I and the board are focused on, is planning for the NEA grant that we received. We received a two-year grant from the NEA. There were 80 grants awarded, nationwide. And there were, I think, five or six that were in the $150,000 range, and we were one of that small group that got that. So, this is a two-year grant and it’s to do performance-based art, and we’re going to pursue this in a multi- disciplinary way, in non-traditional venues and locations throughout the city. It’s a great opportunity.
The [Request for Qualifications we’ve issued] is meant to identify artists, artist groups, organizations, and other performers in the greater Long Beach area that are interested in programming for the NEA grant. We’ve done some of that work in the past. It’s called ALOT. We’ve done some A LOT work and we revised the approach to A LOT and submitted that to NEA, and they said yes. It’s a huge deal. We’re up to it. We’re very capable of it.
What we’re looking for is qualified people, as opposed to requesting a proposal, because we think that, once we look at the qualified people, we’ll be able to create together the programming that will work. The broader it is, the more multi-disciplinary it is, the more spread out into the community it is, I think the better it will be for everybody. So, that’s one of our biggest.
I parked, and then moved off the “park list,” a closer look at our grants allocation program. We have a few things we need to fix. So, we did a fairly significant overhaul in our application so it would be easier to complete. One of our primary responsibilities is to allocate the City dollars to arts and cultural organizations, and professional artists, throughout the city. Before I was with the Arts Council we sought and got feedback about the application. We improved the quality of the application; made it easier to complete. We’ll need to revise the application again, and I think that’s fine to do every year, actually.
If we’re really paying attention to our constituents, and if there’s a disconnect somewhere, or if there’s a guideline that’s incongruent with our direction, then we ought to look at that. We have a fixed amount of dollars in our operating grant program, for example. If you were to guess who gets operating grants, you would be right. The symphony, the opera, Musical Theatre West, and ICT all get operating grants. This year, the pot of money was the same size as last year, but we had two additional applicants that were eligible.
Which ones?
Arts and Services for the Disabled, who has been receiving a community grant but the operating grant is based on size of budget and they reached a new threshold on size of budget because of their success in growth, and so they were now eligible for an operating grant. Actually, it was a stroke of brilliance, I think, in some ways, for them to say, “Well, let’s apply for this because there’s more money available over here.” Very smart.
The second—and this is a story in itself, is the Long Beach Museum of Art, who hadn’t applied in the past and who applied because they hit a threshold. There used to be a threshold where, if you received this much in City dollars, you couldn’t apply for the Arts Council. But [their municipal funding has] dipped, and they became eligible for Arts Council funding.
The operating grant has a formula for how the allocation gets determined, and that’s based on merit. So, the higher you score during the independent review translates into a higher multiple for the dollars. It’s an excellent process. It’s modeled after some of the best practices around the country but, like I said earlier, you can always improve it. So, some people got less and some people got more. I don’t think we’ve actually officially released that yet, but the grantees have received their letters.
I did what I think is my job, which is to write a letter, explain how this all came about. Here’s how the independent review panel works. Here’s what your score was. Here’s how you ranked with your score. And by the way, a personal note that says if you want to talk about this, call me, which they have. Because if I got less money I’d want to have a conversation with the Executive Director, or the interim Executive Director of the Arts Council of Long Beach. I happen to believe we can be more transparent — nothing we do should be a mystery.
That’s the nice thing about the way it’s structured. It’s very formulaic. It’s not arbitrary. It’s very balanced. I was involved as a panelist in the grant review process for the Professional Artists Fellowship Grant, and it was an amazing experience for me to go through that process. I was pleased and proud to see how well it had been structured. I know you guys take great pride in that, and rightfully so.
I’m glad you mentioned the Professional Artists Fellow. We had nine applicants this year and, although it’s an unrealistic expectation, we feel like we should know who every artist in our community is. But after all, we are the 36th largest city in America, with more than 460,000 people, so how can we know every artist in the community?
We have quite a well-respected group of panelists. It is a different group every year. They know the community, and they know a lot of artists in the community. Still, five of the nine artists were not known by anyone in the room, which I think is great because we uncovered five new artists that are doing fabulous work in Long Beach and have chosen, deliberately chosen, to make their home in Long Beach. So, we got nine, we selected five, meaning five ended up in the first tier and received a professional artist fellowship.
One of great things about the Professional Artist Fellowship is the cash reward. They can stop being an artist when they can get the check, if they want. They probably don’t, but they could because the panel is recognizing them for their body of work.
The other four, who also submitted applications, we wanted to reinforce their efforts. Some would classify them as emerging artists, so we made a commitment to them to support professional development activity for them this year. I sent a note to them that said, “Although you weren’t selected, this time, to get a professional artist fellowship, we want to encourage you to continue to do great work. And you have until September 30, 2013 to tell me what professional development you’d like us to support and we’ll support it up to $250.” They might want to go to a workshop, or some training, or go to a conference. So, $250 will help.
One last point about this. We have this gallery called The Collaborative down on Broadway. We have four exhibits there each year, typically, in ten-week cycles. One of the other acknowledgments we could offer to the professional artist fellows is to show their work at The Collaborative. I’d love to see that happen. Just make it a matter of routine that, if you’re selected as a professional artist fellow, then we’ll exhibit your work for a period of time in the following year at The Collective. Why not? Especially if one of our goals, which I think it is, is to continue to encourage solid work in the community and to encourage local artists.
One of the rolls of the Arts Council, which has been a bit nebulous, is this idea of building an audience, of finding creative and interesting ways to reach out to the larger community and help them to understand what it means to be a resident in Long Beach, from an arts and cultural perspective. When you talk to people about arts and culture, a lot of them have this idea that it’s somewhere else. Is there a vision for addressing this?
We need to be vigilant, I think, about making arts accessible. And when I say accessible I don’t mean necessarily, although I think this is good, loading kids in buses and bringing them to the symphony. That’s okay. But it might be the public art piece right outside their door. It might be two blocks from their house. And that’s why I think this NEA grant is such an opportunity for us. Because the closer we can deliver performance to people’s homes, the better. We can activate a vacant lot in any district in the city with these resources. You need not only talents and treasures and all that, you need money, and we’re going to get some of that money. It has to be matched, but we’re going to get that money from the NEA. We can deliver some great programming so people don’t necessarily have to come downtown. We have a big city.
Our goal at the Arts Council is to have a board meeting in every district in the city every year. We have nine districts. So our last board meeting was in District 9, and it took me 35 minutes to drive there. It took a lot of the board 20 or 30 minutes to drive there. It took some of them five minutes to drive there. It reminded me, and the board, that we have a big city to cover, and that arts and culture are represented throughout the city.
We can’t know everything that’s going on, but the more accessible we make it, the better. You know the Museum of Latin American Art has free admission one day a month, supported by Target, so there’s some accessibility there. So, to answer your question, it’s a high priority for me. It’s part of our vision, and I think it fits nicely into being in service to the community.
If residents in the city recognize the value they get from investing in arts and culture through their tax dollars, it becomes an opportunity to turn them from consumers into advocates. That’s a very delicate process. I know that the city is often resistant to that kind of thing because they really don’t want people wandering in and pounding on the table and saying, “We need to do this.”
Well, some would argue that’s one of the reasons they created the Arts Council, right? So the Arts Council could create the process and the infrastructure and the governing responsibilities for distributing the City’s dollars. A lot fewer knocks.
Rather than asking for more money by the organizations themselves, I think there’s an opportunity for people in the community to go to their elected leaders and say, “This is a priority for me. I care about this. And I want my passion to be reflected in the budget.”
Absolutely. I haven’t talked about this at all, but I’m an old lobbyist, and political wonk, in some ways. Not partisan. Social causes. I worked in at least three legislatures in the country. I loved that work. It’s exhausting, but I loved it. Some would say that the ultimate advocacy is money. A contribution is a demonstration of what you’re passionate about, and then that gets translated into some kind of action. For those people who are willing to spend money on something, then they generally are interested in the advocacy aspect of that. And I don’t think we can ever do enough. I really don’t think we can ever do enough on that front.
We’re dipping our toe in that a little bit. We’re going to be doing more around advocacy. We’ve partnered with Arts for L.A. If someone goes to our website, they’ll see there’s always some advocacy-related action on our website now. We’ll do another forum for the City Council, when the seats are open on the City Council.
Bringing it back to the NEA grant again, if we can do some quality events that not only highlight but also drive business economically in the areas of the city where people do events, I think that’s powerful. And the other thing you know is, and I know that you read a lot, there’s all this talk about the creative economy and the latest Otis Report. I was just at a fund raising meeting, actually, in the city, and we talked a lot about the Otis Report and what the next report’s going to look like.
In Southern California, I think the statistic is one in eight jobs can be tied to the creative economy. I don’t think most people get that. I think there are all kinds of opportunities with business. I mean, I had the opportunity to talk with the COBA Group in town. That’s the group of business improvement districts. They are so welcoming and so terrific and they saw a connection between their local neighborhood areas, business improvement districts and the arts. I was there to talk to them about Long Beach Arts Month. They get it. It’s just a matter of doing more and more and more of that, so people get it.
There’s also finding creative and interesting ways to utilize the resources that are available. One of the things that many neighborhoods, especially downtown and Bixby Knolls, are doing is taking empty store fronts and using them for programming; using them for exhibitions and performances.
We were able to do some of that prior to the dissolution of the RDA. We were able to do that in North Long Beach, north of the Atlantic corridor. We had five or six sites. Those have all been closed since then. But I also happen to believe, if there is a commitment to do certain things, then we need to—and I don’t mean just the Arts Council, I mean the arts and cultural community, the advocates, need to find the money to get it done.
It’s not necessarily even an issue of money. Sometimes it’s an issue of thinking.
Or an issue of will.
Right. Because a property owner who owns a property that isn’t leased is focused on getting it leased. But when you put something in that empty space and people see it as a dynamic, exciting, interesting environment, all of a sudden, people who are looking for properties to lease look at it in a different way.
Part of making it happen, then, is having the will, sharing the desire to get it done, and then creating the plan to make it happen. I agree. Sometimes it doesn’t require that much money. Sometimes it just requires time, and expertise.
I wanted to come back to another point about the City Council. As of today, our goal is to stay in touch with the City Council members, and we have partnered with at least three offices in the last two months on arts related programming, which is terrific. Eventually, in fact, I’m confident that I will one day be able to say we regularly partner with all nine district offices. I think that’s great. We’ve tried to saturate the community, but this is a big community.
There’s a call for artists out right now for professionally drawn, painted, mostly painted, birds and other duck species for El Dorado Park that we’ve partnered with Gerrie Schipske on, in District 5. So, the intention is to put out the call to artists, get work from them, we’re getting it electronically, impaneling a group of professionals to review the work, selecting the work in partnership with Councilmember Schipske’s office, and then that work is going to get translated to a banner, and those banners are going to be raised up on light poles in the park with a little story bar about the bird. What a great thing to do. We’re acknowledging and recognizing and seeking artists, some of whom we may have never heard of, and giving them an opportunity to show their work. Sure, it would be nice to be able to provide a cash reward, but we’re not in that position right now. But sometimes recognition has value, too. It does, to me. Appreciation has value to me. I’m not sitting on a pile of money but I’d much rather you appreciated me than hand me a dollar.
In 2011, and the year before, when Craig Watson was doing his Global October Arts Month thing, he said (and I’m paraphrasing poorly), “We’re not here to produce, we’re here to promote and support,” but at the same time, the Arts Council wound up producing a number of exhibitions and other events. I’m wondering where are you on that balance?
I think less is more when it comes to producing and programming. I actually, deliberately, was focused on unwinding, even though we ended up doing some of the exhibition, supporting some of the exhibition stuff. I see our role not purely promotion but more promotion than producing. So, I hope, as long as I’m here anyway, to continue to unwind the desire on the part of our organization in the area of some board advocates as well as community advocates, I want to move us away from producing, because there’s a lot of great things going on here, and I see our role as promoting what’s happening. That doesn’t mean we can’t be a catalyst for certain things. We can certainly be a catalyst for things.
The Arts Council has a long history of supporting our larger institutions with grant funds. That is still true today. However, if one looks closely at our budget one would see that, in FY2013, we will expend more funds in artist fees then in our largest Operational Grant category. We haven’t reduced expenditures to larger institutions overall as a grant category. We’ve increased funding for artists through other sources.
We’ve contracted quite a bit as an organization over the last eighteen months, and some of that’s been driven by our financial condition. Those are all the right decisions to make, because the Arts Council needs to be healthy, financially. When you’re in the programming and producing business, it’s a huge drain on human resources. I’d rather put resources into promoting what already is being a catalyst on the producing side, and do less and less programming.
We have five primary roles—promote, support, fund, educate and advocate. Opportunities for us to make a difference exist in each of these areas. We’ve had to get really smart and efficient about how we spend our time. I’d rather we did a few things really well rather than several things in an average way. The lens, for me, is service.
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To find out more about the Arts Council for Long Beach, including grants and other initiatives, visit ArtsLB.org.
Thanks to Lee Adams for her expert transcription services.