Appendix D: Public Value
The Ohio Arts Council (OAC) seeks to make a positive difference in the lives of individuals and in communities through the arts. The degree to which we fulfill that goal will be the ultimate measure of our success. We create value for the citizens of Ohio in partnership with the arts, education and cultural communities. Together we sustain Ohio's artistic and cultural assets, protect and preserve cultural traditions, build the economy and cultivate the imaginations of learners throughout their lives.
The purpose of this background paper is to: 1) review the OAC's involvement in a national initiative to increase wide-spread arts and cultural participation; 2) introduce "public value" as a concept and strategy; 3) highlight the importance of the intrinsic benefits of the arts and how individual artistic experiences can accrue over time and contribute to larger social aims such as health, education, economic development, quality of life, and civic engagement and action; and 4) consider the ways in which all value is co-constructed.
State Arts Partnership for Cultural Participation (START)
To create the highest level of value for our constituents, citizens and the state, in 2004, the OAC undertook a major restructuring of our grant programs and application processes. This restructuring, in part, was in response to our agency's participation in the State Arts Partnership for Cultural Participation (START), an initiative that was funded through a significant grant from the Wallace Foundation. Thirteen state arts agencies (SAAs) were selected for multi-year grants with the ultimate aim of encouraging wide-spread arts and cultural participation.
The START initiative had a three-fold purpose to: 1) recognize SAAs as an important point of leverage for increasing cultural participation across the country; 2) invest in SAAs that were poised to make a significant contribution to increasing cultural participation with innovative approaches; and 3) learn as much as possible from the experience through positive and negative lessons for the benefit of the SAA field as a whole.
During that restructuring process, we explored the topic of identifying and creating public value with our board, staff, constituents and other authorizers and as a result designed new or reoriented existing grant programs. One major shift was that the agency discontinued reviewing organizations in programs grouped by arts discipline. The purpose of grant programs shifted away from solely recognizing arts and cultural organizations by the events or products they created to emphasizing a broader range of factors including the unique contexts of Ohio's communities, and the ways in which arts organizations, events and experiences respond to participants needs and aspirations and advance the public's interests. We also reconfigured staffing to better align with the purpose of grant programs and streamlined the grant application process through the creation of our OnLine Grant Application (OLGA) system.
The Basics of Public Value
Mark Moore, Professor of Government at Harvard University, illuminated the term "public value" in his 1995 book Creating Public Value: Strategic Management in Government. Moore contended that while a corporate sector manager's purpose is to generate profits for shareholders, the value yielded to citizens by a public manager's efforts are not so simply identified and defined and must serve important collective purposes such as health and safety, education, cultural preservation, economic development, civic engagement, etc. Just as many corporations offer a variety of products and services in hopes of maximizing profit, many public agencies offer a variety of products and services to fulfill their legislative mandates and reach as many citizens as possible in positive ways. As a result, Moore distinguishes between the strategies for serving an agency's constituencies and how those efforts are perceived and judged by the ultimate beneficiaries: the public, and the ultimate arbiters of public sector organizations' elected officials, including legislators who make decisions on behalf of citizens and taxpayers.
Moore later introduced the Public Value Framework including its signature concept the strategic triangle (see below) to demonstrate a few key points. The strategic triangle shows how government entities and non-profit organizations must clearly articulate the public value they seek to produce, the sources of support they can rely on, and the attributes of their operational capacity that allow them to deliver on the promises they make. Moore emphasized that it is only through attending to the entire strategic triangle that organizations can ensure that their work is relevant and beneficial to citizens and decision-makers, and thus receive the resources they need to continue good work. On a practical level, when conditions aren't ideal or the environment in which the organization exists changes, the strategic triangle can help organizations diagnose what areas need attention and improvement.
The Benefits of the Arts
In an effort to balance the arguments that arts advocates were making about the instrumental benefits (the collective benefits described above) of the arts, The Rand Corporation published the Gifts of the Muse: Reframing the Debate About the Benefits of the Arts in 2005. This publication comprehensively explores a variety of claims made about the benefits the arts can provide that span from the intrinsic (good, in and of itself) to the instrumental. While the authors convincingly argue that more and better research must be conducted to prove or disprove these claims, the publication stands as a testament to the multiple ways that people participate, experience and construct meaning through the arts. The publication also provides a framework for understanding the benefits of the arts, The Instrumental Intrinsic Value Grid, which is presented below.
Building on and reinterpreting Rand's ground-breaking work, Alan Brown, a leading researcher and management consultant, explored the value and benefits of the arts in his 2006 article, "An Architecture of Value" that was published in the Grantmakers for the Arts Reader. In this article he makes an explicit link between benefits a participant may garner from an arts experience, and how its value can accrue and transform over time. Brown's schematic, which is presented below, also reinforces the notion that participants may value the same experiences for different reasons, as well as underscores the importance of always attending to the quality of the arts experience, from which benefits and value are derived. See the OAC Cultural Participation Policy for more information about encouraging different types of participant engagement and overcoming participation barriers.
Partners in Constructing Value
In 2006 Andrew Taylor, Director of Bolz Center for Arts Administration, who is also an author, researcher and lecturer, introduced the idea that "all value is co-constructed" through his Web blog, The Artful Manager. Taylor reminds arts advocates and the arts community that while we often "speak the language of production and consumption, or we focus on the demand side," there is much more to our work than supplying arts programs and services.
He asked the arts community to consider, "any powerful, transformative moment you've had with an act or artifact of creative expression. That moment required at least TWO lifetimes to form its value - your lifetime to that moment and the artist's. There was a resonance between your experiences or emotions and the expressive voice. The moment required them both. The value was co-constructed."
While identifying and creating public value remains a collective effort, it depends upon the shared experiences of artists, organizations and citizens. As the strategic triangle shows, strong ties between institutions, citizens and decision-makers lead to identifying and creating public value. And, as we know from experience, public good is often deeply connected to personal good.
Ohio Arts Council is Your Partner
With each grant the OAC awards, we enter into partnership with our grantees to support the cultural health and vitality of the recipient's community and to enrich the lives of that community's citizens. By accepting an OAC grant there is a stated agreement to be accountable for how public funds will be used. Grantees are asked to measure the results of their work through quantitative measures such as numbers of participants and budgets and through qualitative measures that convey the impact of activities on citizens and communities. The OAC also asks for "public value stories" so that richness of the human experience and the transformative power of the arts can be revealed to decision-makers, citizens and those working in the arts, education and cultural sectors.
Since we are a steward of public dollars, we take our partnerships seriously. It is through your work that we can report that the arts and arts education contribute to economic competitiveness and the overall health and vitality of the state; and cultivate the imaginative thinking, problem-solving skills and innovation needed to prepare our children for the 21st century global workforce. And, most importantly let us never forget that at the heart of an artistic experience is a powerful connection to humanity and creativity, the touchstone to what we know to be possible in our lives. At a time of great challenge, let the arts give hope to and nurture the human spirit.
Resources
As a partner, we offer multiple resources that can help artists, educators, administrators, and volunteers develop or refine their programs, evaluate their effectiveness and better advocate about how their work contributes to creating public value. Many of these resources can be found through our Making the Case Web page, which is designed to provide citizens and other decision-makers with resources they need to effectively demonstrate to community leaders and elected officials that support for the arts and cultural sector is a sound investment of public dollars and that the arts are part of the solution to many societal needs. In addition to the resources on the Making the Case page the OAC offers grantees other ways to discover stories of public value and share their own, including:
References
Creating Public Value: Strategic Management in Government. Mark H. Moore. 1995. For more information go to http://www.amazon.com/Creating-Public-Value-Management-Government
Creating Public Value Through State Arts Agencies. Mark H. Moore and Gaylen Williams Moore. 2005. For more information, see book at http://www.nasaa-arts.org/nasaanews/moore_keynote.pdf
Gifts of the Muse: Reframing the Debate About the Benefits of the Arts. The RAND Corporation. 2005. See the full study at http://www.rand.org/pubs/monographs/MG218/
"An Architecture of Value," Grantmakers in the Arts Reader, Spring, 2006. Alan Brown. For more information, see the article at www.giarts.org/usr_doc/brown.pdf.
Three (short) detours back to public value, Keynote Address National Assembly of State Arts Agencies Leadership Institute. Andrew Taylor. 2006. See keynote at http://www.artsjournal.com/artfulmanager/thoughtbucket/nasaa_keynote.pdf
Focusing the Light: The Art and Practice of Planning. Mary Campbell-Zopf, Michael Sikes, Deborah Vrabel. 2008. A series of seven booklets that present a fundamental management strategy for advocacy, program planning and evaluation. Available from the Ohio Arts Council at http://FocusingTheLight.org.
"Revealing the Public Value of the Arts." Christy Farnbauch, Mollie Lakin-Hayes, Jerry Yoshitomi. For more information, see article.
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