Rob Bettmann

Bad relationships have a way of spreading, and no matter what the cause, having a bad relationship with funders is killing.

You could say that a single grant – say $10,000 dollars – doesn’t make a difference in a career. But I’ve seen how good business people turn that 10 into 30 and that 30 into 300. And without that ten, that thirty, it’s impossible to get off the ground.

Sitting here this evening working on the brochure for our FY 12 advocacy day I’m trying to revisit some key turning points for my own business. In the last administration I submitted 14 grants and got none. I know I make strong well crafted art. I work hard, and I’m a nice person. And I’m also a good writer. How did I not get any of those grants???? Not one? Many reasons, sure, but here’s one turning point I’m aware of:

The position of Executive Director at any government agency or foundation is one of tremendous influence. The Executive Director is like a Council-member; they may not have direct budget spending authority, but they carry massive influence on decision-making at all levels.

One way to influence granting is through the stacking of granting panels. Hypothetically, judging done by these independent expert panels is just that. In reality, DC is a very small community, and commission staff are directed to ask/pick the folks to be on the panels. And, being on a panel is a lot like jury duty: you don’t get paid for it, and you have to take off work, so it’s a self-selecting self-interested group that is even willing to serve. In a small city, then, these independent panels put together to judge grants are highly insular, and can either represent a thoughtfully independent cross-section of the arts community, or an insular cross-section of the arts community. It’s important not to be on the outs. Read more…

I had a funny experience today. While presenting at a meeting about arts advocacy in D.C., I was asked a question about leadership, collaboration, and coordination. I responded that I didn’t think anyone questioned my leadership, or the work that we’re doing, and that certainly our efforts to collaborate are welcomed at every turn. I said that while sort of gazing at the ceiling, and with what i thought was an ironic inflection. When I stopped batting my eyelids and looked around I realized that they assumed I was speaking seriously…. I almost stopped to say,  “just kidding!”,  but thought it might undermine my otherwise flawless presentation. : )

That the folks in the room didn’t assume my humor really does speak to the hyperbole that regularly occurs in these kinds of conversations. I am confident in my leadership of the DC Advocates for the Arts.  But I do still regularly question it, and have it questioned for me, and I don’t think that’s a weakness. I almost wish I was like a Luddite, or Randian protagonist, interested only in my own success, but in fact, I am not.  I hope that my leadership is a part of something larger than myself, and if it is, my leadership is replaceable. To me that is not in conflict with my confidence, professionalism, commitment, or leadership, but it does temper my self-promotion.

When I was a young puck – and I was more puck than buck – I was a research assistant in the Environment and Security Program at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. The Environment and Security Program looks at connections between Environmental degradation and devastation, and national and international security. There are centrally two connections: scarcity leading to wars, and environmental degradation and devastation adversely affecting national security (through inability to sustain physically, and/or fiscally.) A growing number of us continue to be concerned with those issues today.

I recently started following Geoff Dabelko, the current Director of the Environment and Security Program, on twitter (#geoffdabelko.) Yesterday, Geoff tweeted a blog post on The New Security Beat titled ‘Reading Radar: Population and Sustainability.’ The post opens considering a paper by Paul Ehrilch (The Population Bomb) about the Millenium Assesment of Human Behaviour (MAHB.) The post states that the MAHB was created “because societies understand the magnitude of environmental challenges, yet often still fail to act.” It goes on to quote Ehrlich, “The urgent need now is clearly not for more natural science… but rather for better understanding of human behaviors and how they can be altered to direct Homo sapiens onto a course toward sustainability.”

This coming summer an article I wrote extracting material from my book (Somatic Ecology) will be published in the journal Somatics. In the article I write,

“Science is a superior tool for understanding the world, but it cannot provide perspective on how to interpret or act on the data collected. The environmental crisis, which threatens the long-term health of our cultures and our economies, is not the result of incomplete science. It is the result of incomplete perspective.”

…Which is pretty similar to Ehrlich’s understanding.

Rational actors in the economic system balance the cost of invested debt with the benefit of current equity. If you’re not an economics person another way to say that is: you know if you spend everything you have at the beginning of the month on fancy dinners, you won’t have anything to eat at the end of the month, so you don’t. But what if the end of the month is a time period at an indistinguishable distance in the future? How would that affect your behaviour? AND, what if you the actor involved were responsible to an electorate over a far shorter time span than it will take for the benefits of savings to register? Well, then you get inaction.

I argue in my book that we have lost an immediate understanding of ourselves in the real world. Because we no longer have a strong, grounded, animal experience of the world, our own shadows are threatening to envelop us. As the Jewish theologian Abraham Joshua Heschel wrote, “Our concern is not how to worship in the catacombs, but how to remain human in the skyscrapers.”

We are not adequately seeing, and we are not adequately feeling. The thesis of Somatic Ecology is that by developing a healthier relationship to our personal ecologies, we will develop a healthier relationship to the global ecology. I’m encouraged by recent developments, and look forward to sharing more of my research. You can see a few things here and here.