Some Personal Reflections on Continuity Planning

I've wanted to write to you since I left our very intense continuity-planning meeting in Atlanta, but shortly thereafter I left for vacation.

Despite my efforts to try not to think about professional concerns while on vacation, as I relaxed on our beautiful beach (while fearing once again the prospect of two hurricanes coming our way which- thankfully this time - veered out to sea), I couldn't help but think about our discussions and what we in our field must do to prepare ourselves and our loved ones as well as our staffs, artists, boards and donors and audiences - our individual organizations and our field as a whole - for what we-hope-may-never-happen to us and/or our community.

Sometimes in different speeches and remarks I've given over the years, I've said "I don't mind being crazy and lonely as long as I know there are people out there who are feeling crazy and lonely too!" As we talked in Atlanta and discussed the range of unexpected disasters so many of us have faced already, the craziness and sometime loneliness and exhaustion of trying to keep going - despite the odds and the gods - seemed all-too-real and painful - and extraordinarily heroic.
Indeed, it is this very collective experience - our struggles and triumphs of coming through fire, flood, theft, death - that will inform and shape this important ArtsREADY dialogue and process. ArtsREADY is going to be an invaluable tool to help us through too many difficult times.

As I've thought about the planning process for continuity and the eventual tool that will be developed for our use, I've realized that - if you're at all like me - there are personal barriers that may need to be overcome as well in order to make this tool as effective as I believe it will be.

Nobody wants to think about unforeseen catastrophes and disasters. It's easier to bury our brains in the sand. We don't want to face ourselves and our fears; it's too hard to think about such things as wills, escape routes, preventative medicine, and safety precautions for ourselves and our families - let alone, how to face what that means to our organizations when we might not be able to locate our colleagues, our artists, our data bases.

"It's not going to happen to me! It's not going to happen here!"

But it does, Life happens!

It happens to us as individuals, and it happens to the communities, the people, and the organizations we care about and work tirelessly to keep thriving.

The term "Continuity Planning" sounds very institutional (which of course it is), but it is, to me, at the same time a personal journey, making sure that we take responsibility to put in place what needs to be there for the organizations we all work so hard to keep strong and relevant and for the people and the art we so desperately love.

Shreveport Tragedy

The Shreveport Regional Arts Council and ED Pam Atchison are very well known and long respected as a model for community development, programming, and leadership in the arts. I have already offered the support of the Southern Arts Federation in any way that we can be helpful. I know they are just trying to get their bearings at the moment.

At a future time, we will want to learn from Pam anything that could inform our development of ArtsReady. It will be interesting to know if they had a plan in place, and, if so, did it serve them well in their response and recovery efforts. As the Shreveport story unfolds, we will try to share it with our ArtsReady community.

In the meantime, if any of you Bloggers have specific questions that I could direct to Pam, feel free to post.

Make it Work!

If we had all the $ in the world, this is what ArtsReady would do for us... we give you the WISH LIST (please download the full list - the picture to your right is only a quarter of it). Software developers and programmers beware!

If you would like to see more wishes added to the list, leave us a comment or start your own post -- the sky is the limit.

OR, just add a comment and tell us what your top three items on the list are...we're taking your comments into consideration.

If We Knew Then What We Know Now

Many thanks to Killis Almond and Maureen Patton for their presentation available for download (PDF, 5MB). It shows some devastating pictures of hurricane damage done to the The Grand 1894 Opera House in Galveston Island, Texas and shares some insights that are right in line with our topic for this post: lessons learned.

We've compiled a list of "what to do before the next time."

Let us know if we've left out anything, if these lessons make sense, or (if you are a funder) how actionable you find the recommendations listed in last section of this document...

Fire at Shreveport Regional Arts Council

Just wanted to share the news with all of you working on the ArtsReady plan. Shreveport Regional Arts Council may not have had a backup plan in place. The building was a total loss. Ex. Dir. Pam Atchison can be reached via cell: 318-426-6486.

For the entire story click on the link below:
http://www.shreveporttimes.com/article/20090826/NEWS03/908260321/Shreveport-Regional-Arts-Council-building-destroyed-by-fire

Regards,
Mary Len Costa
Arts Council of New Orleans

What’s All the Fuss About?

There are plenty of risks associated with the presenting and touring field. They range from natural disasters to people emergencies, IT failure, financial crisis, facilities/environmental emergencies, performance catastrophes, and finally, organization emergencies. We attempt to list the most devastating and prevalent risks here.

After you're done pulling your hair out, let us know if we left anything out of our list. Are any of these risks unclear? Are there some risks that should not be on this list?

The Method to Our Madness

In May of 2009, Southern Arts Federation deployed a survey to the performing arts community to ascertain their understanding of continuity planning. One hundred percent of surveyed organizations had been through an emergency situation -- 68% still do not have a continuity plan. The top reasons for not having a plan were, 1) Not a priority for the organization's leadership and 2) Lack of expertise in continuity planning. See full survey results.

Many people confuse the terms emergency management and continuity planning - the latter of the two being a key component of ArtsReady. Paul Dimond, Director of the Office of Continuity Planning at the University of California Berkeley, defined the goal of continuity planning as "No matter what happens today, we want to be able to do tomorrow what we were doing yesterday." It is with this goal and with shared expertise, that ArtsReady can address the obstacles for continuity planning in the performing arts community.

View Paul's entire presentation on planning.

Helping the Project to Focus on the Essential

One of the great things about the community design process is that you get to tell the project exactly what it needs to do in order to serve you best. One thing I heard clearly at the workshop is that it will be particularly important for ArtsReady to understand clearly what its various stakeholders need, and provide for those needs effectively.

There was a consensus that the ArtsReady services needed to be "nearly free" to individual arts organizations, where "nearly free" means, not just low or no cost, but absolutely minimal effort to create a readiness plan and keep it current. To do that, other organizations, such as arts service organizations, must be prepared to help defray costs. For such organizations to be willing, it will be necessary for ArtsReady to serve their needs as well.

Providing essential, well-crafted services for such a diverse group of stakeholders is a real challenge, but not an impossible one: every other community design project has faced the same challenges, and so far all of them have found effective paths.

In order to find such a path for ArtsReady, it is imperative that the project understand deeply the needs of all of the stakeholders. To that end, I want to ask participants (and anyone else in the arts community who reads this and has a point of view they'd like to share) to write a comment to this post that will help the project team to see the world from your point of view. What is it that your organization would need from ArtsReady, in order to make it worthwhile for you to support it financially on an ongoing basis? What do you think that other organizations like yours would need? If you are a service organization, what client needs should the project serve, and what needs does it need to serve for your service org?

This is how it begins...

The vision for ArtsReady began to take root during our first Community Design Meeting held August 5-6 2009 in Atlanta, GA. Southern Arts Federation compiled a briefing document to prepare attendees. The brief includes: a short description of the project, needs assessment, meeting agenda, bios for the leadership team, as well as a list of attendees and attendee bios.

Doesn't this look like fun? Too bad we didn't get a video of the role-playing segment, BUT we did catch Malcolm in the act via photo. See the entire photo album.

Mellon Grant Makes ArtsReady Possible

“Because of our experiences with Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, we realized how vulnerable cultural resources are,” said Gerri Combs, SAF executive director. “Through this project, we identified a regional role that we could play in improving emergency readiness, response and recovery for arts organizations. We are very grateful to the Mellon Foundation for making this much needed project possible on a national level.” Read full press release.