Laboring in the arts

Christopher Duggan photo courtesy of Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival

 

By KATE ABBOTT
Contributing writer

 

Imagine the people who make creative work happen in an arts or cultural institution all having a stake and a voice in the organization’s operations and mission.

Or imagine creative organizations clearly recognizing and valuing the work of staff members who handle programming, education and communications – along with those on the design crew and the people caring for the theater, the garden and the land.

Nearly two years ago, leaders from several arts organizations in Berkshire and Columbia counties came together to look into the experiences of people working in creative places — theaters, music venues, art spaces and museums. They wanted to gain a deep understanding of arts workers’ lives, challenges and passions — and to collect data and new perspectives from employers.

 

The consultant Aron Goldman speaks last year as the Berkshire/Columbia Counties Pay Equity Project announces the findings of an extensive survey of area arts organziations and employees. (On the cover: The Dance Theatre of Harlem performs last month at Jacob’s Pillow, which has been working to implement the equity project’s goals for improving employees’ pay and working conditions.) Courtesy photo

The result was the Berkshire/Columbia Counties Pay Equity Project. It started with a yearlong effort, originally led by a half-dozen arts organizations on both sides of the state line, that surveyed about 200 entry- and mid-level employees at 43 local arts and cultural venues — and collected data on pay and benefits from 38 area arts employers with nearly 1,000 workers.
What began as a study now has grown into a movement, consultant Aron Goldman said in an interview last month.

The findings of the coalition’s initial round of work, presented in a report and community forum in June 2023, told a clear story: Many entry- and mid-level arts and culture workers in the region, even some with advanced degrees and years of experience, have struggled with low pay and long hours, unable to afford decent housing and access to basic health care – and sometimes even to put gas in their cars and feed their families.

“Passion,” Goldman explained, “doesn’t pay the rent.”
As a result, the coalition found, employees with long experience in the local arts scene were leaving. Some have been moving to jobs in other parts of the country — and some are opting to pursue new careers after realizing they couldn’t afford to keep working in the arts.

Losing the energy and perspective of these workers, Goldman warns in a new report he plans to release fully on Sept. 25, “has a destabilizing effect on institutions, diminishes artistic expression, and threatens the creative economy for which this region is internationally known.”

 

Embracing a new vision
Across the region and beyond, people are listening. The pay-equity coalition now has grown from six to 18 arts and cultural institutions on both sides of the state line — from Ancram Center for the Arts, The Hudson Eye and Art Omi to Barrington Stage Company, Jacob’s Pillow, Hancock Shaker Village, Mahaiwe Performing Arts Center, The Mount and Williamstown Theatre Festival, among others.

The project’s organizers are holding conversations at the local, state and national levels, Goldman said, and working with individual organizations that are pursuing concrete changes. At a summit on Sept. 25, they will detail and explore the results and momentum they’ve achieved over the past year.

The organizations involved, he said, have found that better understanding and focusing on the needs of their employees can help them grow relationships and resources — and expand their ability to support the creative work and community at the heart of their missions.

Employees who have less stress and more satisfaction can work more actively and with greater confidence, he explained.

By focusing on questions of equity, the project has challenged some outdated assumptions about the arts, such as the notion that low pay or limited benefits are somehow offset by the privilege of working for a creative or cultural organization. In reality, Goldman and others point out, if a job does not pay enough to live on, only someone with an outside source of income can afford to apply, thereby limiting the pool of talent available to arts employers.

“These challenges are more pronounced for people of color and other identity groups who have historically experienced oppression,” Goldman explains in the report.

“We are precluding a whole world of creativity by requiring entry- and mid-level workers to come to us already with extraordinary privilege,” he added in an interview. “And if we have an arts and culture sector that is undergirded by people with privilege, and there’s no way in for other people, how is that going to affect the quality and content of our arts and culture institutions and the future of this world?”

 

A ‘road show’ for equity
In the year since the pay-equity project presented its first in-depth report, the coalition has been sharing its findings locally and nationally and working with organizations that want to bring about change.

“We were excited about it,” Goldman said. “But I don’t think we even anticipated how resonant it would be to tell the story and add rigor and provide a roadmap for doing something about this issue.”

In January, Kristen van Ginhoven, formerly the artistic director at WAM Theatre, joined Goldman as co-leader of the project, and they set out on what she calls a “board road show” to present their findings and offer guidance and support — both in person and virtually — to the trustees and other leaders of the region’s cultural organizations.

Often they have found a broad gap in knowledge in the boards’ understanding of the workers’ daily lives and experiences, she said. And in every conversation, she added, she has seen board members paying attention and showing support.

“We were thrilled how moved people were,” Goldman said. “You know, it wasn’t just an analytic exercise. Telling the story and centering workers themselves made a really big difference. And I think for that reason, in a matter of weeks, we had gone from six to 18 coalition members and are growing still. … It has become a real regional movement, which was always the vision, but I don’t think we ourselves even knew if that was plausible. Turns out it was.”

Now representatives of the project’s 18 participating organizations are meeting quarterly as a coalition to talk about broad challenges that affect many of their workers — housing, transportation, health care.

At the same time, van Ginhoven and Goldman said, cultural organizations are supporting each other as they engage with the findings and recommendations from last year’s survey and begin to take concrete action.

“Which is not a small thing,” Goldman said, “because I think there’s a fair amount of cynicism out there. Most people can relate to the goals and the objectives and the values, but a lot of people feel like, ‘Sure, that would be great, but how do you pay for it?’ And it’s easy to imagine that doing the right thing is just beyond our means.”

In the new report, they are gathering evidence of the ways organizations are making changes —and working to challenge assumptions and motivate more people. The coalition will discuss its new findings at a public forum from 5 to 7 p.m. Wednesday, Sept. 25, at the Mahaiwe Performing Arts Center in Great Barrington, Mass. Admission is free, but reservations are required and may be made online at mahaiwe.org.

“We want to get folks excited, not just about the employer-based changes, which are real, but even more inspiring opportunities for collective action around some major structural barriers,” Goldman said.

He and van Ginhoven said they have seen practical conversations evolve with more transparency around salaries and more open conversations about making changes, paying interns, increasing hourly wages and provisions for vacation time, benefits and paid time off.
For some organizations this may mean a reallocation of resources, van Ginhoven said, but often an organization can accomplish a good deal by reallocating attention — by listening with respect and responding with care.

The effort is only beginning to achieve results, van Ginhoven said. A year is a short time to show measure how a change may have an influence on people’s well-being, but in the conversations she is having, people working at the region’s arts organizations tell her they are seeing change and feeling seen and heard — and that they are beginning to see the results in their pocketbooks.

 

Putting ideals into action
In some places, making tangible changes can reach into an organization’s structure and patterns of thought.

A.J. Pietrantone, the deputy director of Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival, walked through his own organization’s perspective. Jacob’s Pillow has been the fiscal agent for the Pay Equity Project from the beginning, he said, and has taken steps to follow the guidelines they have helped to create.

“I think for us,” he said, “the most important element of understanding the ability to make changes is that we think of it as a long-term and ongoing process. That allows you to celebrate incremental change in a way that builds trust among the employees and shows them and our peers what else can happen.”

They have set long-term goals and ways to chart progress, he said.
The process began with conversations on organizational focus, he said, when the Pillow’s current artistic director, Pamela Tatge, came on board in 2016.

Pietrantone said they began to explore the notion “that we could not be successful as an organization, even though we consider ourselves an international global center, if we did not participate in our community.”

Through the Pay Equity Project, he added, they have begun to regard employees within the Jacob’s Pillow organization not merely as a support staff for creative work but in fact as creative people involved in the work.

Pietrantone said he has held conversations with the Pillow staff about resources, goals and values, and has set a goal for himself to make them part of the conversation.

“What makes a difference for workers, what we’ve been told, is both doing things now and then being transparent about committing to getting to an even more ambitious place at a certain point in time,” he explained. “You’re charting a path, formalizing that goal and being transparent about the progress or lack of progress.”

 

Giving employees a stake
One of the messages of the Pay Equity Project’s findings, Goldman said, is that “we have to treat employees like adults, which means they get to know how the organization works.”
That means being transparent about the opportunities as well as the constraints an organization faces, he explained.

“When people are given the opportunity to understand some of those dynamics, the attitude or feeling within which those discussions happen changes,” he said.

In the case of Jacob’s Pillow, Pietrantone said he has asked the staff to understand that the organization will only be able to increase everyone’s pay with time to plan and grow the resources. And then the organization’s leaders have set a plan across three years to raise and build in the funds to sustain those increases.

“What we’ve done is made it part of our strategic plan,” he said. We’ve always been a people-centered, artist-centered organization but made a very conscious effort that when we discussed people in our strategic plan, it was audiences, artists and staff. … So we set a three-year timeframe of being able to get from where we were to everyone being at a certain point in salary ranges.

“And we focused on those making less than $60,000 first, and that those at the higher end would take longer for us to get there. So 2025 will be our third year, and we will have made those adjustments throughout the organization.”

Pietrantone said he wants to make sure people feel seen — and that they have ways to give responses, whether anonymously or face to face.

“Quite frankly,” he said, “when we put our compensation policy in place and established salary grades for every position, I had a one-on-one meeting with every staff person to discuss what it meant.”

In that approach, Goldman said he sees a fundamental commitment to the concept of equity. Every employee needs different kinds of resources, he explained, rather than a blanket policy, and the leadership at Jacob’s Pillow is making the effort to figure out what each person needs.
“That to me is a beautiful expression of that fundamental value,” Goldman said. “And it takes work. It takes time, and it takes appreciation for that concept. And it’s much easier to just apply something just across the board. So I’m really appreciating that.”

 

Boosting recruitment, retention
To make changes in its structure, culture and communication, Pietrantone said, Jacob’s Pillow has had to invest in support — and focus resources that had been scattered through other operational elements of the organization.

“We’ve created a new role: our director of strategic initiatives, people in culture,” he said. “She has three people as part of her department, which took a couple of years to get it to where it is.”
The changes emphasize a commitment to open communication among employees and supervisors, he said. Toward that end, Jacob’s Pillow has begun a supervisor training program, so that the people trusted to guide the organization have grounding in its values and a sense of what being a leader should mean.

“We’ve revamped all of our meeting practices,” he said. “We’ve created a staff steering committee on diversity, equity and inclusion. … We’ve developed a culture statement that goes hand in hand with our values.”

Although these changes may seem abstract and theoretical, Pietrantone said he has seen tangible results. For one thing, more people are applying for open positions at Jacob’s Pillow, he said, and these applicants have done their research and ask about the company’s values and practices.

“We’ve had a real uptick in the number of applicants we have for every open job, which was not the case four or five years ago,” he said. “We really struggled to fill open positions. And not to say that it’s easy, because it’s still tough to be competitive with other markets and cities, but it has improved for us dramatically.

“And we’re seeing our retention rates increase as well,” he added.
Goldman said that kind of practical, positive result shows the benefit for cultural organizations to focus on the needs of their employees.

“When you’re talking affordability -- thinking about more effective recruiting, thinking about lower turnover -- these represent real savings for organizations,” he said.
It can be a challenge to measure or prove an immediate cause and effect, but he said there are “real and potentially substantial savings that offset any upfront investment. And I think part of our work is to capture that.”

Pietrantone said Jacob’s Pillow, as it focuses on its staff’s needs, has found it can provide creative flexibility even in areas like housing.

The Pillow has 130 seasonal staff and actually can house 110 on the property (its campus is on a former farm). Even so, staff members still face challenges in finding housing and transportation to this beautiful setting on a mountaintop 10 miles from Lee, the closest town large enough for cross streets and a stoplight.

“We’ve regularly been faced with the challenge of work-life balance,” Pietrantone said, “when work and life happen at the same place.”

But they have found new ways to share what they have.
“We’ve been more creative in terms of allowing for hybrid roles -- and breaking through the myth that everybody has to be on site all the time,” he said. “So maybe you’re here for three days out of week, and you can be home for three days and then someone else is here for three days. And that way we can actually accommodate more people with fewer housing resources.”

 

Cutting back but growing
Goldman said that in many of the conversations he has seen unfolding, cultural institutions are working to support employees’ needs while also discovering that thoughtful recalibration can give them ways to support their creative work more fully — in quality and in sustainability as well.
“It does also indirectly have the effect of showing what artistic expression really costs,” he said, while demonstrating “what is needed to fill that gap.”

Sometimes, he said, the solution is to pull back. Sometimes the solution is to make sure programming aligns with the available staff and the amount of work they can reasonably do.
And sometimes organizations find they can makes changes that grow their audience while also better supporting their work force.

As part of its rethinking of its operations, Pietrantone said, Jacob’s Pillow went from a 10-week festival to a nine-week festival. Although that meant fewer performances, it has also meant more time and attention for the rest.

“It helped us be prepared to handle increased audiences,” he said. “And we’ve actually seen more people coming through our nine-week festival than a 10-week festival.”

Goldman sees that shift in thinking as profound, not only within one organization but as a movement against long-held national assumptions.

“It’s not just the practical benefits that we’ve mentioned already,” he said, “but this really represents challenging some fundamental notions about how the world should work, at least in America — more, more, more, bigger, bigger, bigger, do more with less, exploit all of your resources to their fullest, short-term outcomes.”

It is a big deal, he said, to do things differently — to explain how and why, and to offer new ideas and show that they can work.

“And I think what we’ve done collectively,” he said, “by supporting each other and committing to some explicit values, is to challenge some of those traditional notions and help everybody understand.”

 

Charting a path forward
With their new report and the Sept. 25 summit, Goldman, van Ginhoven and the coalition’s members are winding up the second phase of the project. Van Ginhoven has just taken on a new role as executive director of Project Sage in Lakeville, Conn., and she sees the next steps in the hands of the coalition’s members.

A range of organizations, large and small, now are coming together at quarterly meetings, she said, exchanging ideas about the questions and challenges coming up for them and their staffs — anything from paid time off to retirement benefits. She said she finds it exciting that members are trying different ideas, and she also is in touch with organizations that have not yet joined the coalition but are following its guidelines.

“Last year we shared the why, and the beginnings of what,” she said. “Now we’re starting to share the how. This is a new world, and it gets messy when you’re trying to figure out what an equitable system looks like for your five or 10 or 20 or 200 employees. That people are committed to acting as a lab and working with their staff, that is hopeful.”

Goldman said these conversations are especially timely now, when so many creative nonprofits, like so many local businesses, have weathered the unpredictable turmoil of the pandemic. Many have seen turnover and change on many levels. And this work, at its core, involves rebuilding solidarity, rebuilding culture and community.

“We have a lot of rebuilding that needs to take place, and I think it’s difficult for us to sometimes appreciate how much there is to do,” he said. “And pay equity is many things, but one of them is rebuilding trust.”