Commentary

Earlier  this spring Surdna staff and a Board member spent two days in New Orleans as part of our ongoing learning about our work there.  The trip coincided with the end of the Foundation's fourth year of a 5-year commitment to the New Orleans Fund.  Established in 2008, the Fund seeks to advance long-term rebuilding and resiliency efforts in New Orleans by supporting civic engagement in multiple issue areas, including economic development, education, arts and culture, coastal restoration, and worker's rights.

While our staff members  visit the city several times a year, this trip had a different flavor than most; our 3 programs jointly designed the trip to meet with current grantees and explore the possible cross-programmatic linkages in New Orleans that unite our programs' interests.  Over the course of the two days, our meetings with grantees, city officials, and thought partners provided the group with a deeper understanding of the evolving cultural and political dynamics in the city, and magnified the opportunities and challenges at this moment in New Orleans' rebuilding.

Through our meetings with grantees such as Committee for a Better New Orleans, Neighborhood Partnerships Network, the Power of a Million Minds Youth Organizing Coalition, and the Neighborhood Engagement Office, it became clear to us that work to develop a formal mechanism and process for resident engagement has made great strides in New Orleans, and continues to evolve.  For example, we view the establishment of the Neighborhood Engagement Office by the city as a sign of progress that demonstrates the value  the city places on connecting residents to City Hall.  Yet, it was also clear that this formal mechanism for citizen participation will not necessarily lead to robust two-way engagement unless the culture of resident engagement is nurtured in an ongoing manner.    Our visit with the Center for Sustainable Environmental Development in the Lower 9th Ward was a good example of that kind of ongoing sustained work, and a meeting with The Lens highlighted ways that open access to information about happenings in the city contribute to this culture.

We were also struck by a desire for collaboration among organizations in the city, local philanthropic partners, and national funders. This feeling was captured at a funder reception hosted by Surdna for representatives from the Greater New Orleans Foundation, The Foundation for Louisiana, and the JP Morgan Chase Foundation. Over the course of the conversation, there was enthusiasm from all foundations in the room to connect our grantees and figure out how national and local funders can work together in the region to ensure greater impact.

Later in the trip we were privileged to experience impressive examples of collaborative thinking and sharing during two thought provoking meetings with sets of groups concerned with economic development concerns, and infrastructure development initiatives.  And, in our most touch-and-feel experience of the trip, we visited Grow 'Dat, a collaborative project of the Tulane City Center, the New Orleans Food and Farm Network, and City Park, through which New Orleans youth are engaged in transforming a corner of City Park into an urban farm to support public health, local economies, and a sustainable food system in South Louisiana.

New Orleans is a place where Surdna Foundation sees remarkable opportunities given our sustainable communities mission, and this trip served to further illustrate the natural overlaps that exist among the Foundation's programs' interests.   We are fortunate to have such strong partners in the city, and are eager to move into the last year of our five-year commitment to the New Orleans Fund, while looking ahead for future opportunities that intersect with Surdna's mission in the city.

 

By Kelly Nowlin, Surdna Board of Directors

October 2011

Surdna's New Orleans Fund seeks to advance New Orleans long-term rebuilding and resiliency efforts by supporting civic engagement in multiple issue areas, including economic development, education, arts and culture, coastal restoration, and worker's rights.  The fund is overseen by staff from across our program areas in partnership with a liaison from our board of directors.  From time to time board liaisons travel with staff to New Orleans to meet with grantees, thought partners, and colleagues in the city.  Kelly Nowlin recently completed her first year as liaison to the New Orleans Fund and traveled to the city last spring for her first taste of its irrepressible spirit.  Kelly reflects on her time in New Orleans in the commentary that follows.

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I had never been to New Orleans before.  As the current board liaison to Surdna's New Orleans Fund, I had the great opportunity to make this trek last April with a group of program staff.  After meeting with over thirty people from ten different organizations in just two days, I was left with a mix of sadness, hope and true admiration.  Sadness for those families that never returned or who still struggle to rebuild their lives.  Sadness for the hundreds of lost cypress trees in the bayou.  Sadness for the disappearance of coastal wildlife and for the distressed environment.  At the same time, a strong feeling of hope lingered.  Why?  Because of the neighborhoods.  There is a bond like no other that exists in these communities that is palpable.  Organizations such as the Lower 9th Ward Center for Sustainable Engagement and Development (CSED) put the power of those bonds to work by engaging local residents in processes that, with critical work by other Coalition members, reach up to the state legislature and seek to protect and restore the neighborhood and coastline.  Because of the youth.  There are groups like the Juvenile Justice Project of Louisiana, Vietnamese American Young Leaders Association (VAYLA), Rethink New Orleans, and the Fyre Youth Squad, all members of the Power of a Million Minds (POMM) youth organizing collaborative, who are developing relationships with city officials to ensure they have a voice in rebuilding their future.  Because of the leaders.  There are community and nonprofit leaders across the city who continue to persevere with limited resources, their unyielding commitment stemming simply from passion and strength of will.  The people of New Orleans are special.

 

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Anchor institutions are entities or facilities that, when established, typically do not relocate because they cannot easily pack up and leave. The most well-known anchors are universities and hospitals (the "eds and meds"), but they may take on different forms such as museums, sports arenas, municipal governments, and in certain instances, major corporations. Typically anchors are the largest employers in a metropolitan area and represent significant economic influence through their procurement of goods and services.

According to Community-Wealth.org, universities spend $350 billion annually and have a total endowment of over $300 billion. Nonprofit hospitals have assets over $600 billion and collect annual revenues greater than $500 billion.[1] If resources of anchors such as these were leveraged effectively, they could produce a multitude of economic multipliers that positively impact the places in which they reside and the city/region as a whole. As a foundation continually seeking innovative ways to strengthen local economies, Surdna sees anchors and the unlocking of their economic power as an important theme worth exploring.

Given the current economic outlook and continued loss of jobs, we are finding more cities and regions looking internally to uncover untapped resources. The question city and state leaders are asking is, "How do we keep more money in our local economy?" Procurement and hiring policies are essential in maximizing the potential in local businesses and, if anchors' policies and resources are aligned correctly, regions could take great advantage of the economic impact. To do this would require a measure of systems and behavioral change on the part of anchors to adopt practices committed to the procurement of goods and services from local businesses, and to the direct employment of residents from nearby communities. An anchor strategy of positioning their buying and hiring practices at this level can help create and sustain home-grown economies, and may be particularly significant for vulnerable regions confronting capital flight and disinvestment.

The Evergreen Cooperatives in Cleveland, made up of small, employee-owned for-profit companies that are based in the communities in which their employees live, attempt to level the city's economic playing field by aligning their services with local universities and hospitals' procurement practices to effectively capture a sustainable percentage of the local market share. They are also pushing for the development of "local first" procurement policies to ensure that local businesses have access to the purchasing power of anchors. Small businesses such as Evergreen have the ability to expose the level of economic resources that continue to flow out of a city while highlighting adaptable strategies for anchor institutions in other cities seeking to support and sustain their own local small enterprises.

Local production, hiring and material sourcing are at the center of Surdna's Strong Local Economies Program's  thinking around how cities and regions can create or revive local economies. As a foundation that seeks to foster just and sustainable communities, we believe that finding ways for anchor institutions to promote and sustain local economies will be an important step in achieving this mission.

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[1] http://www.community-wealth.org/strategies/panel/anchors/index.html

Guest Commentary by Aaron Dworkin
Founder & President
The Sphinx Organization*

"The deepest defeat suffered by human beings is constituted by the difference between what one was capable of becoming and what one has in fact become." - Ashley Montagu

I have a bit of an unusual history.  My start might have made it challenging for anyone to determine what I might be capable of becoming. By any statistical norms, being born a bi-racial baby on September 11, 1970 to an un-wed white Irish Catholic mother and African-American Jehovah's Witness father in a small village of Monticello, NY, and being immediately given up for adoption did not necessarily set the stage for the highest expectations for my future capabilities. I was adopted, however, at the age of two weeks by a white Jewish couple, professors in neural and behavioral science at Rockefeller University, and given the too-rare gift of a fine education.

People ask me why I care so much about diversity and why I have dedicated my life to pursuits that further that end.  My response is: I am a Black, white Jewish, Irish Catholic Jehovah's Witness who plays the violin.  I am the definition of diversity.  I don't have a choice but to do what I do.

When I was five, my adoptive mother, who was an amateur violinist, inspired me to begin studying violin.  I remember sitting in Carnegie Hall at age 8, listening to Isaac Stern, and the impact that experience had on me.  However, I do not recollect seeing Sanford Allen around the same time.  Who, you might ask, is Sanford Allen?  In 1961, he was the first Black member of the New York Philharmonic in the orchestra's history.

As I continued to develop on my instrument, as the concertmaster of the Harrisburg Youth Symphony, student at the Interlochen Arts Academy, or concertmaster of the Penn State Philharmonic, I was either the only or one of less than a handful of minorities.

It was not until I was working on my degrees at the University of Michigan that I first learned that there were any Black composers.  I literally went into a lesson one day and my teacher asked if I had any interest in playing music by Black composers.  Completely shocked by his suggestion, I was to discover a rich plethora of works by William Grant Still, Coleridge-Taylor Perkinson and David N. Baker.  And it led me to question, why had no one told me of Joseph Boulogne St. George (an Afro-French contemporary of Mozart's) or George Polgreen Bridgetower, a well-known Black violin virtuoso, a friend of Beethoven's, who premiered his famous Kreutzer Sonata with him in 1803, and for whom Beethoven actually wrote the work?   Within the context of these questions and immersion in this newly discovered incredible music, combined with the lack of minorities that I would see in the audiences or on stage, I was led to found the Sphinx Organization.  Specifically, I envisioned an organization that would serve as an avenue through which one might bring attention and exposure to musicians and composers of color, both aspiring and established.  I saw Sphinx as a creative way to give voice to something that already existed, yet, remained unheard: decades of achievement in this field by those who had paved the path before my generation, like Sanford Allen, Dominique Rene De Lerma (one of the foremost musicologists and experts on composers of color), and Willis Patterson (acclaimed African-American vocalist and founder of the Symposia on African-Americans in Arts and Education).  I saw myself as one whose responsibility it was to make a difference.

In 1996, I found that the state of diversity in the field was alarming: Blacks and Latinos comprised less than three percent of American orchestras.  In launching Sphinx, I began to formulate its ethos and define what it would stand for: advancing diversity in all phases of classical music, and providing unprecedented opportunities for talented young people of color in the field.

Today, Blacks and Latinos comprise only slightly above 4% of our orchestras combined.  To give a further sense of the current scene, one must also look deeper, beyond the musicians: minority representation in the administrations of our orchestras boast a depressing statistical zero  The same statistic is true for works by composers of color performed today by American orchestras.  Our music schools and youth orchestras are faced with similar statistics, and our audiences are dwindling rapidly.  This lack of opportunity sits within a paltry level of public support for the arts: in a comparative survey, Germany's per capita spending on the arts is 2%, France's is 1%, the UK spends .8%, while the US allocates a woeful .5%.

Despite minimal public support, music has played a pivotal role in the lives of leaders of social movements throughout history.  During the Civil Rights Movement, there were marchers with "battle" hymns.  Frederick Douglass, the great statesman and freedom fighter leading the abolitionist movement, played the violin, as did his son; and his grandson, Joseph Douglass, was the first Black violinist to tour nationally and internationally.  Classical composers were encouraged to write revolutionary songs, such as La Marseillaise, composed by Claude Rouget de Lisle, inspired by Mozart's Piano Concerto No 25.

Recently, we have been able to bring about the beginnings of change: young musicians of color have been appearing as soloists in front of major orchestras 20 times each year for the past decade; the number of Blacks in top tier orchestras has doubled in the last decade; over two million annually are able to hear the Sphinx musicians through television and radio broadcasts.  However, this impact must merely be the beginning.  We have a long road ahead of us.

Borrowing ideas from the great Martin Luther King, Jr., "Change does not roll in on the wheels of inevitability, but comes through continuous struggle.... History will have to record that the greatest tragedy of this period was not the strident clamor of the bad people, but the appalling silence of the good people... Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter."  Together, these words depict the very essence of responsibility that we hope to instill upon our young artists and all those who believe in advancing the mission of Sphinx.  I submit to you: this work we do matters!

 

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*The mission of the Sphinx Organization is to increase the participation of Blacks and Latinos in music schools, as professional musicians, as classical music audiences and to enhance K-12 music education.