Criss
Henderson

The partnership is the culmination of a Chicago Community Trust initiative that began in 2000 when each of their five grant focus groups, including Arts and Culture, underwent a process of needs reassessment.

“One of the needs identified was the whole idea of the baby boomers who had founded the many, many arts organizations, who would be retiring in five to ten years, and who would be coming up behind them,” says cultural programming director Kassie Davis. “The idea of leadership succession or transition became one of three priorities, with excellence in dance and arts education being the others.”

The Chicago Community Trust granted the Illinois Arts Alliance $200,000 for the implementation of a leadership succession project, which included a survey of executive directors and emerging leaders conducted by the Cultural Policy Center at the University of Chicago. The study, which was sent mainly to small and midsize Chicago and suburban arts organizations, found that 70 percent of executive directors plan a change in the next five years, with 50 percent going back into the pool, 24 percent retiring and 24 percent becoming consultants.

Alene
Valkanas

“We’re coming to the end of the first generation of arts professionals as a field,” says Alene Valkanas, executive director of the Illinois Arts Alliance. “Overall, the single most important issue raised by the emerging leaders was that of adequate professional training, whether it be a university experience, on-the-job training or mentorship. It’s obviously a growing profession and with that comes the need for better training.”

For many executive directors and general managers, formal training has meant a workshop here, a summer institute there, and the sharing of knowledge from journals, among colleagues and with their boards, adds Valkanas. Such is the case for CST executive director Criss Henderson, who, although he is a Theatre School grad, has a degree in production management, not arts leadership.

“I didn’t have a lot of business training,” he says. “I knew how to put on shows and I refined and honed that.” For him, the IAA study supported his own concerns that began soon after CST’s exponential growth and subsequent move to Navy Pier. “We started becoming really aware, with 80 employees and a large board and large audience, that we had to address the two-fold succession issue. The study completely gelled what we knew was necessary,” says Henderson.

Alan
Salzenstein

So in 2002, CST applied for funds from the Chicago Community Trust for “planning and research to support a university accredited arts leadership program,” says Davis. With $90,000 at his disposal, Henderson called respected arts administrator Alan Salzenstein and put him to work creating an appropriate model for the potential CST/Theatre School collaboration. (After initially consulting for CST, Salzenstein has since been hired by DePaul and is now leading their component of the program.)

Salzenstein started by looking at what the field was like across the country, including what was available at other universities, from admissions through to graduation. While it became obvious to him that arts administration legitimized as a field around 15 years ago when university programs began popping up, he also found that the effectiveness of the programs still varied greatly.

“I proceeded to conduct a series of interviews with professionals in arts management, the leaders in education and recent graduates to find out what their perspectives were,” says Salzenstein. “These were the most telling.”

What he found was a complete hodge-podge of responses. “Some said their programs had absolutely no value, others said the programs prepared them for their career life. It was a complete mix. But the strain that kept coming up over and over was the debate on whether it’s a good idea to keep [education] in the classroom or take it out to the arts-making community.”

The MFA/Arts Leadership Program that developed will meld course work from the Kellstadt Graduate School of Business in DePaul’s College of Commerce and the Masters of Public Services Graduate Program, with a full-time job in CST’s executive office.

“In a sense this program is doing on the job training and coupling it with a formal program. This program is a fast track to professional development. It gives students experience to enable those graduates to hit the ground running,” says Valkanas.

For their part, the Theatre School had already been looking to take advantage of its location in the theatre-rich city of Chicago and create formal connections with the professional community. “It meshed very well with our strategic plans,” says John Culbert, dean of the Theatre School. “It was a good fit with what we were looking to do.” Culbert says he will be more personally involved with the program, not necessarily teaching, but in evaluating the new and unusual format. “It’s unusual in that the courses we teach will take advantage of other schools across campus. All of our programs involve the hands-on work, but it is usually at the school, in our productions. With this partnership, a good portion of the experience is outside at Chicago Shakespeare.”

The course work will cover graduate courses in public policy and service, leadership, finance, marketing, not-for-profit boards and law and human resources. And, although the bulk is business related, a philosophical decision was made to assign the degree to the fine arts. “Clearly it’s arts leadership, as that’s where these people will land,” says Culbert.

Bridging DePaul and CST is the synthesis seminar that will ensure the two are working in tandem. Henderson, who is on DePaul’s staff, as well as their board, will teach the synthesis seminar, as well as a course in graduate management. “The DePaul curriculum will give the students a language which they will then take into the laboratory, which in this case is Chicago Shakespeare,” he says.

While at CST, the fellows will shadow Henderson and artistic director Barbara Gaines, as well as Michael Wood, the director of planning and program development. In part they will be responsible for the management of the Short Shakespeare Tour, CST’s gala, as well as having access to their board. “We would like to create tracks for the fellows to explore the strands that interest them,” adds Henderson. In the last six months, CST will leverage their contacts to help get the fellows placed with as many good mid-to-high level positions as possible.

The Chicago Community Trust likes the idea of letting the fellows explore their individual interests, as they would like to see a group of graduates that can work in many different fields, says Davis, not just visual or performing arts and not just as executive directors. They renewed CST’s grant in 2004, with $70,000 going toward final planning and implementation of the program and are currently considering an application for continued funding.

CST and the Theatre School are now in the process of choosing their first two fellows from a field of several dozen. “It’s been an extremely wide, very diverse group of applicants. Because of the dual nature, we need an ideal student and an ideal employee,” says Salzenstein. In addition to the application process and phone interviews, a small group has also been invited for in-person interviews.

“The screening process is pretty intense,” says Henderson. “They’ll have to come to Chicago for boot camp—48 hours, a wide range of discussion, personality tests—so that we get the right first two candidates.”

Following the first year, there will be a constant stream of four candidates in the program, two per graduating class. “The program as a whole is limited to a small group of people,” says Salzenstein “Other faculty have asked if it will expand beyond Chicago Shakespeare and I won’t say we wouldn’t explore it. But it would be very difficult since so much of what we’ve developed in dependent on them.”

For more information on the program, visit http://theatreschool.depaul.edu.