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.

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.