 Welcome in to Theodic Institutions, Arts, Advocates, and Agents of Change. I'm so excited to see a packed room here. Thanks for joining us here in person and on the live stream. So, the origin story of this panel began last summer as I was writing an article about four arts organizations who had decided to come polling places for the 2016 elections. So they were welcoming their community members into their spaces to do their civic duty. YECA, Euromauna Center for the Arts, and Cornerstone Theater were both theaters that were featured in that story. And they mentioned partners like Arts for LA, Alliance for Justice, and TCG as great resources. So I'm really thankful for TCG for bringing all those folks together here today for the panel. Although Megan Wallace from Cornerstone will be coming late to see her enter through the door at any point throughout our session and rush to the front of the stage. So much has changed in the year since that article was written about the civic landscape. But the thing that I've been most excited to see develop is arts leaders stepping up as civic leaders. And that's what we're here to talk about today. So what do we mean by civic leaders? I think that looks like a lot of different things. Civic leaders are leveraging artistic resources, skills, or assets to make a difference in the civic life of their community. So the civic life of their community, they're making a substantive difference to making communities that are empowered and safe and healthy, environmentally responsible, economically empowered as well. It means engaging in the political process. That looks like they're coming to polling places, getting out the vote, encouraging others to vote, who's in candidate form. It's like they're directly engaging in the political process. And it looks like advocating for issues that might be direct funding of the arts, but it might also be immigration reform or housing issues or living wage that impacts our communities and the people who work at our institutions. So the next 90 minutes, we want the session to be informative, interactive, and inspiring. We're gonna ask you for your questions and your insights at several points. We want this to be a two-way dialogue. And we want you to walk away from the session having learned something, but in the best examples of civic organizing, we also want you to do something when you go home, either within your organization or within your community. So we have a lot to cover. We'll introduce the panel first. So I'm Devin. I'm the co-founder of Measure, we're a consulting firm here in Portland and working with arts organizations and other nonprofits on communication strategy. I'm Sarah Matlin. I'm by Legal Council at Alliance for Justice. We help nonprofits figure out their advocacy rights, including you. You'll hear a lot more about what we do and how we can help you when it's my turn on the panel. I'm John Musconi and I'm the Chief of Civic Engagement at the Uruguayna Center for the Arts in San Francisco. I'm Jennifer Fuku-Tommy-Jones, Director of Programs at Arts Furlain. We're the regional arts and arts advocacy organization further than Los Angeles County. Lori Baskin, Director of Research, Policy and Collective Action at Theater Communications Group. And then Megan Wallace will be here from Cornerstone Theater. Absolutely. So let's get to know you. This is gonna be a quick fire. I'm gonna be a shoot your hands up real high, real quick, gut reaction. Is your organization leveraging artistic resources, skills or assets to make a difference in the civic life of your community? Awesome. Let's get them down. Who isn't doing that yet but wants to be? Who's engaging in the political process already? Oh, that's the same. All right, come down. And who isn't yet but wants to be? All right, a few more there. And who's advocating for issues in their community? Lots of folks, awesome. Get them down. And who isn't doing that yet but would like to be? All right. Thanks for helping us get to know you a little bit more. Now we wanna start getting questions early and frame our conversation with some of your questions in mind. We'll pause for several times throughout the session to get more questions and make this more of a dialogue. But for right now, we wanna spend about five minutes and I'm gonna grab, yeah, do you wanna write them down? That'd be awesome. Thank you, John. So, questions about today. What is it you're gonna get answered? What are you trying to learn from this session today? Shout them out quick. Yeah. When you're talking about going as far as being a polling station, can you actually talk about the legality of keeping your nonprofits at it? We sure will. We have an awesome lawyer in the house with us that will share that information with you. Yes. Skills for navigating boards who might be a little terrified. Awesome. Board engagement, yes. They're telling us that when we're partnering with large institutions, like we're part of the university setting, sort of how those structures influence what we're doing. Legally. Right. Yeah, more strategically. Awesome. Who else? Yes. So, best practices for messaging about how you talk to your audience, community, about why you're doing all of this stuff in addition to, aren't you just listening to me? What is? Yeah. Aren't you just an arts organization? Why are you doing civic engagement? Yeah. Yes. So, tell me a little bit more about that. Again, in purple area. Yeah. Concerning issues. Yeah, that being that we engage is not being a liberal leaders. Does civic engagement only happen in the urban board? Does it only happen for progressive issues? Yeah. Other? All right. We've got to put, yep. I want someone to talk about agency and creativity. Those are some of the articles I read about, and divorcing creativity from money. All right. So, tell me a little bit more. What do you mean by that? Just, it seems like if we're engaging in civic action, like, you know, ways to do it yourself, sort of, and maybe in the theme of radical partnerships that you were talking about. Yeah, I'm throwing out every single thing I read in that article. So, I'm very sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. Partitions. Yeah. I think we've got that. Well, that's a good layer. So, one more, and then we'll start, and then I'll come back to our people. Yes. That's, no? Okay. We'll just start. And we'll just make John Pace back in there. Okay, great. So, our first question was around legal. Let's go to legal first. All right. Is that you? Yes. Okay. All right. I forgot you all started there. Thank you. All righty. Showcans again, how many of you are scared right now about what's happening in your community or what could happen to you? I'm just saying that's just brave. Raise your hands. Brave. Brave. You are bold. You are brave. Okay. How many of you hope to use your organization as a tool to fight back and make change? Okay. So, how many of you are afraid that you might do something wrong because you're a 501c3 organization? Raise your hands. Okay. So, myth busting. That's what I do. I go around the 501c3 organizations and I help them understand their advocacy rights. That is what we do for a living and we are here to make your life easier. We are at Cliff Notes for the 501c3 Advocacy Rules. We will help you figure it out so you can get back to the really good stuff. So, Alliance Justice National Organization won't go into the big spiel because we don't have a shine. Notice in blue, advocacy at amj.org and 866.675.6229. Another way to say it is 866.nplobby. Non-profit lobby. That is free. You have questions about your rights of your 501c3 organization to make community change. You contact us. And I'll tell you about what you're doing. You'll get a sense of what we can help you with as we move along here. But, the big deal is that it's free. Each workday, there's a attorney, sometimes it's me, who will answer your questions. We can't give you legal advice. We can't give you legal information. We can give you best practices. We can tell you an organization that does X is all set and you'll know what it's about. But, also online, the last of these verses, that's important because when you're at two o'clock and I'm already trying to figure out if you've just done something illegal, you may wanna look up on our website. Because we're not gonna answer the phone at that hour. Sorry guys. But also, if your organization wants training from us, we are all across the country and we can probably come visit you. All right, what are you gonna talk about? I'm gonna remind you of 501c3 organizations, their rights, responsibilities, and how they're different from other types of organizations. I'm gonna talk to you about the basic rights of organizations that are 501c3s to lobby. We'll talk about what lobby really means. And the introduction to the nonpartisan civic engagement. We use the word civic engagement to mean specifically elections related stuff. But, in this workshop, they're using it to mean everything that is changing your community in a big way. So, that's what we're gonna talk about. Not-profit organizations can and should advocate and lobby for policy change. You are already doing really good work in your community. And some of you are already doing this, but you can do more. Lobby, don't memorize this definition. Don't tell your friends about it. You'll think this is it. This is a crutch for now. Lobby, more or less, is influencing legislation. That is gonna help. I mean, just waiting for people to come on up. And there are six, there's no one here, okay. So, now we know, lobbying is not just making changes in the community. It's not just talking to somebody about a loss. It's actually working to change the law. All right, little reminder here. 501c3 public charities. That's us, Atlantic Justice. That is Oregon Shakespeare Festival. That is Jeeva. I grew up on Jeeva. Who's here from Jeeva? Thank you very much, Genesee Valley. That is what taught me about theater. We've got Child's Play, Americans for the Arts. We've also got the Root Mechanics. Now, all of these organizations, 501c3s. The cool thing about being 501c3, you get to keep your money. You get to help other people keep their money. You don't now have to pay taxes on your income. You get to tell your donors you will pay less in taxes. On your private foundation grants. Not saying it's easy, but it's relatively easy compared to other types of organizations. There's a trade-off. When you want to change legislation, you are allowed to do that. You are allowed to push to make new laws and keep good ones and stop bad ones. But you can't do it till the cows come home. You can't do it 100% of your time, because that's illegal. It is limited, your right to lobby. We'll talk about what that means and your choices for that. Another trade-off. You can never be involved in partisan political activity. Partisan political activity. We'll talk a little bit more about that later. But basically, you can't support or oppose the candidates for public office. You can support balancers, because those are people. So, that is 501c3s in a nutshell. By the way, everything I'm saying here, if you have questions later, we are there for you. Next column though, 501c4s. I think of 501c4s as 501c3s on steroids, okay? They get to do everything that 501c3s can do, and more, except a few things. We'll talk about that. We have our own affiliated 501c4. Americans for the Arts Action Fund is a 501c4. And so, now you'll notice, there's some things in there that aren't 501c4s. We've got a 501c5, which is after Act of Deputy. We have a 501c6. So, 501c5s are unions. 501c6s, like Drums to Skills of America, they are professional associations. Chamber of Commerce, American Medical Association, American Bar Association. So, Drums to Skills is like the Bar Association and Chamber of Commerce. They also don't have to pay taxes on the income they receive. However, they cannot tell their donors, give us money, you'll pay less in your taxes. That's illegal, they don't have that right. And it's really hard for them to get products on machine grants. It's doable, but it's not easy. The difference is though, that means they don't have to trade off. They can lobby, they can influence legislation as much as they want to without them. They can do that until the cows come home. They can do that 100% of their time. They can also do other stuff, but that's what they can do. Now, they also are allowed to say, to support or oppose a candidate. Let them choose not to, but they can. And if they do, they have to follow election law. Looking at the last column here, political organizations. So, we've got an evidence list, a Democratic Party, and Americans for the Arts Action Fund PAC, which exists to support or oppose candidates to get people to win or lose elections. That's what they're there for. That's why they exist. They also do not have to be taxed on the able speech when they receive. But they cannot tell their donors, give money to us to help someone win the election, and you'll pay less in your taxes. It just doesn't exist. They can't do that. And also, they're really not supposed to help. So, they're not supposed to influence legislation. Why is that? They get someone elected in the office, and they say, hi, pass this law. That's a real conflict of interest, doesn't mean it doesn't happen, but it's not supposed to happen, okay? And so, the reason for existing is to get people elected. So, we can have a whole other conversation about how you do or don't collaborate with those folks, but we show this to make it really clear. You are allowed to influence legislation. Not only are you allowed to, we want you to. We want you to. We want you to. And you can. We'll talk about what limited lobbying means that's completely legal. It's also illegal to influence the outcome of candidate election. We'll talk more about that. And I'm not gonna take questions on this page until we finish with the section, but I do be writing down a question you make, any questions that you have. All right, keep saying that lobbying is limited, limited is lobbying, lobbying is limited, limited is lobbying. Okay, what does that actually mean? And of course, like a good lawyer, I'm gonna say, it depends. So, what does that really look like? All right, when you're born as a 5-1-C3 organization, you start out with one way to get, with the IRS entity, one way to measure how much you're allowed to influence legislation, how much you're allowed to lobby. And the automatic test for all 5-1-C3s that they're born with is called the insubstantial part test. Now, the IRS is really good about being vague. And so, no, what are you saying? Well, you're supposed to dedicate insubstantial amount of your efforts to lobbying. What does insubstantial mean? No clue. No clue. Well, if you have a clue, actually, we've figured out over time that it means you can dedicate about 3% to 5% of your efforts to lobbying. 3% to 5%, that's kind of small. You can actually easily go over it, not really know what to say. And part of the problem is the definition for lobbying is so vague, it's really hard to know. If you have organized a rally, if you have organized a flash mob, dance scene, if you count square, whether you're lobbying or not. So, it's not a really good version of how to measure the lobbying. Also, how many of you have a volunteer board? Raise your hands. How many of your volunteer board have ever tried to influence public policy? Raise your hands. Okay, if they try to influence legislation, their efforts at influencing legislation count toward your annual lobbying limit. Yes, it's hard to measure that because you don't always know what they're doing. So, that's really hard to know how they've been lobbying, how you measure this. It's a bad system. It is a terrible system. The only type of type of policy that has to stick with this system is churches and other houses in workshop. How many of you in this room are that? Right. That means you have a choice. So, you have a choice of a different way to measure your lobbying. You tell the owner that with a half-page form, we are smart, we know how to do it better. You can make the 501H election. You can say, we are going to measure our lobbying, but how much money we spend on it. And the way you calculate it is based on what you spend every year on your mission and everything you do that's related to the real reason your 501C3 exists. So, all the money you spend on your productions, on your marketing, on your capital campaign, all the money that you spend is something that is used to calculate how much lobbying you're allowed to do. And most organizations can do between 15 to 20% spending 15 to 20% of their money on influencing legislation. Most of you probably don't need to go that high because you're like, you know what? We've got all kinds of other things we're already doing. And we want to help a little bit with this whole new lobbying thing, but we don't need to dedicate that much. That's fine, but here's the thing. You probably will be doing something to influence public policy, right? You want to be doing that, that's why you're here. But everybody has to measure how much they're lobbying and everybody has to report it every year, no matter which system you use. You have to tell the IRS and the community how much your influencing legislation by law on your 4990, that's the law. It's really hard to measure using that first system. It's a ton easier using the second system, 501H. You continue to be a 51C3 after you've made the 501H election, that does not change. After you spend three minutes going out that IRS page and sending it to IRS saying we're smart, we're going to measure our lobbying according to how much money we spend on it, you get a clear definition of lobbying with tons of exceptions. And you also get over to calculate exactly how much lobbying you're allowed to do every year. And it's going to be almost certainly a ton more than you would use under the earlier system. And I think you who have volunteers who may be lobbying, their time doesn't count towards your annual lobbying limit. So you don't have to worry about tracking it. It's really easy to track once you figure out how to do it and we're in there to help you. You want to know, we'll help you out. So you are allowed to influence legislation and if you do, you always have to tell the government and the public how much you're doing. And it's a lot easier to measure how much you're doing if you use the smarter system where all you have to do is, hey, here's how much money we spent. It may seem a little complicated, but we'll be there to help, to walk you through it should you have questions. And the only types of organizations that may not want to use the second system of 501H are the organizations that spend 17 million or more per year and are reaching their lobbying limit of $1 million. Now, if all y'all are meeting $1 million in a few days, you don't need the second version, but most of you aren't. And so we can't recommend anything in general. We can recommend this as a good system to use. So you have no questions, ask me. You are allowed to lobby and you're allowed to do it. Now, here's an example, $15 million budget. You can spend $900,000 on lobbying should you choose. Let's talk about what lobbying means for real. Under 501H, now look at that second system. It's a really narrow definition. You can pretty much tell when you're lobbying and when you aren't and how and to know when to mark it down. We got folks here from LHB Arts and folks from some TCG. And in both of these cases, they were doing direct lobbying. They were communicating with a legislator expressing a view about specific legislation. We don't need to go deeply into what those means. Basically, you're talking to a lawmaker and you're saying this bill is bad and this bill is good. And I want to talk a little bit about what bills mean, but let's also go into the second version. The second version has a different audience and it's extra special added ingredient. Actually, you know what, I'll get to that in just a moment. But the big deal is you are responding to a legislator. You're talking to a lawmaker. You're saying this thing needs to be different and you're going to vote on this thing. So vote the right way. All right, let's talk about ballot measures because a few of you have been engaging that. This is from here, we're going to serve the arts and we collaborated with them. I'm helping them understand their rights to go to the voters and say, don't you want to make sure that your dollars go to arts and homelessness efforts? And they did a dango job and it was really impressive to see how much progress they made. So here's the scoop. When you're talking to, when you're working on ballot measures, who's the lawmaker? The voter. The voter? The general public, you're not supposed to talk to him. Shh. That was for other people. The lawmaker in this case is the general public. So when you're talking to the lawmaker, the general public, about ballot measure, you are doing direct lobbying. You are talking to the lawmaker and saying, pass this good law. Don't pass this bad law. Let's talk about the second type of lobbying. Got grassroots lobbying that is communication with a different audience. It's the general public, it's the voters, it's the regular people out in the world. And you're trusting me about specific legislation. And by the way, specific legislation is essentially, it's a bill with a name or whatever, it's also not confirming a nomination of someone and it's maybe the lawmakers have to confirm it. Think of Betsy DeVos. Think of Rorsuch, those have had, it's a hard word in the world to help you be there. But it's talking to the general public, expressly giving up specific legislation and asking the public to get in touch with the lawmaker. So in this case, there's a few ways to do that. There's four ways to do it. One of them is say, contact your lawmaker. Another is to give the contact information. So this has two of those. Call the main legislature and it gives the contact information. Those are two calls to action. And this one, same ad, no call to action. So I'm gonna go back. Call to action. This is helping the public contact their legislator. And that's lobby, because it's communication with the general public expressing the of us with legislation and it's call to action. Call to action is call your legislator for the contact communication number. But look at this one. It's the same thing except that it doesn't say call and it doesn't have a phone number. This is not lobbying. Also, not very effective. So, that's a little reminder. Do your lobbying guys, be proud of it. It's not, there we go, not good. Hear the main points about IRS lobbying. You can and should have the impact. Let's jump up what that is. Actually, we didn't go deeply into it. We got a little bit of that from the government. But if you are against deportations, what are you working with? Do you work primarily with president and ICE and the like, you're against deportations. That's not lobbying, because those aren't laws that you're working with. You're working with enforcement. But what if you're working with your city or your county or your state to be a sanctuary or a safe community. You are asking a lawmaker to pass a law. That is lobbying and that's good. You're allowed to do that. If you're changing the law, you're allowed to work on that. Just measure how much you're doing. You can do that. And just watch out for your lobbying limit. My most popular one, C3 organizations can use a better way to track their lobbying. It may seem a little daunting, but actually once you're there, it's really easy to do. It's much easier than what you should be doing if you're not already tracking the lobbying you're already doing. And also a ton of stuff that you do isn't actually lobbying. It is advocacy. So the speaker, plenty of your speaker this morning was saying all kinds of things about policy. He did not once mention a law that needs to or does they or should not be passed. He was not lobbying. He was doing advocacy. That's awesome. But he wasn't lobbying. Contact us for help. Now, all of you are also working in a world where partisanship does exist. So when the speaker was talking about Trump, he was talking about Trump's policies. He was talking about what Trump does. He wasn't saying, let's make sure he doesn't get reelected. He wasn't saying, look, we were able to get good people elected in California. He wasn't influencing the outcome of a candidate election. He wasn't trying to help someone get elected or keep from getting elected. So don't support or oppose candidates with public office. You can absolutely, move and criticize policies. Contact us if you're not sure where your message falls along the line. All right, you can continue to fight for your policies during election season. You have to make it sure it's about the policy and you're not criticizing the candidate in order to make sure they don't win. And you can do what the, this actually, this came from American for the Arts Action Fund, but it could have come from American for the Arts. Your organization can sign on to a letter saying we need more funding. Your organization can continue to ask for more funding from your local authorities. That is completely legal. It often will be lobbying and you often will need to note that. We'll help you figure that out. And you are allowed to educate voters. This is a candidate forum for Arts Fellow for LA. They did, together, I believe with the League of Women Voters, put together a candidate forum. Say, so that people who have voters could know who they were voting for. They could also, and so there's some rules around that. You have to make sure it's neutral. Make sure that the moderator is the brother-in-law of one of the candidates, right? And if one of them's a union leader, don't hold the dang thing in a union hall, okay? But you can help your voters understand who the candidates are. You also can register people to vote. It is completely legal for you to do that. There, just make sure that you're not doing it in order to get someone to win or to lose. You're doing it to make sure your community's voices are heard. You can help you figure out what the very clear guidelines are about whether or not you're allowed to work on voter registration. My most important question you'd be asking yourself is why are we doing this and why now? Why are we wanting to people have people register? Are we doing this in order to get the local city council candidate to win? No? Good, you're probably okay. Let's check and make sure. Rules I'm talking about here apply to social media. These are my social media pages. I'm just bearing all here. The top one is my professional one. That's my Twitter account. And the bottom one is my personal one. Scroll down, you'll see a ton of political speech there. I'm not showing that here because that's not appropriate. But the idea of you can in your personal life be active. You still have a voice as a human being and you don't leave your constitutional rights at the door. You continue to be a person who has free of speech, completely legal. The only thing is that you need to make sure it's really clear when you're speaking for your organization and when you're not. So make sure you never use your organization's assets or resources to support or oppose a candidate for public office or a party. Make sure that when you're in a forum that you are making it really clear you speak for you. So when people know me and I walk into a room they know that I'm associated with Alliance for Justice. I say, hi, my name is Sarah Mellon. I'm here on my own behalf. I'm not representing a 501c pure organization or I'm not representing my big job. I just say it when I can't. There are times you can't say it. How can you walk up into the grocery store and tell everyone when you eat that you are not there on behalf of your organization? No, but make sure people have the best chance knowing which hat you're wearing when you are giving political speech. Civic engagement, big points. So you can continue to advocate for your issues. In fact, you can grow your advocacy for your issues. Despite these partisan times who are completely allowed to do it, just make sure that you're not doing it to help somebody lose or win elections. Also, you are allowed to educate voters or register voters and get out the vote. You just need to make sure that you're doing it in a population at a timing and with the message that it's not to help any single candidate or any group of candidates. And you're allowed to have your own views. You're allowed to be a human being with rights and you're allowed to be completely, politically active. Just don't wear your 501c3 hat when you're doing it and make sure there are people that you're not wearing your 51c3 hat. We have a ton of resources for you online. Call us if you're having trouble finding what you need and we will be happy to help you with government English and Spanish and a few other languages as well. Anyone who needs help in Spanish on your guide, okay, so we have a ton of resources. We'll be happy to help you find those. For more information, please contact us. We are here to lighten your load. We are here to make you bolder advocates and to help you eliminate any concern or fear. We don't want to eliminate your anger because that is useful anger. Keep being risk takers, not just in the artistic field but in the way that you are changing your community. Thank you. Quick question that we'll move on, yeah? Can you really quickly talk about is there a difference when a play is talking about a candidate? So, when a play is talking about a candidate, is it talking about the candidate getting elected or is it talking about the policies of a candidate? If it's talking about the policies, no problem. If you are doing it in order to change the policies that's a primary reason for putting on a play, a piece, in order to change a policy, you need to ask yourself, you can do that. Is it to change a law or start a new law? If it's about a law that might be lobbying, and we can talk further about whether or not we need to talk about it, we have to do an annual on anyway. I have a slightly different view on that. We'll come back to it. Okay. I have a different understanding too from our lawyers but we should talk about that. I think it's very clearly not a fully defined. And it's a really good question. Yeah, but we should talk about other points of view on that so we can all figure out together. So, one of the questions that I, we'll get back to that in a moment but I wanna pivot a little bit. One of the questions we heard early on this morning was around board engagement and that boards can be champions of this work. They can be barriers to this work. They can just be scared or uninformed about this work. John, can you talk a little bit about your engagement with the YPCA board, how it's gone, what you've learned? Sure, when I, we started, when I became, I was the proponent of the ballot measure, Prop S, which was to restore hotel tax, allocations to the arts and we partnered with homeless families, services and advocacy community. It's a way to co-proponent who was from that community as well. When we started, the board had not adopted this as a policy. The board had in its bylaws because we're a city-owned building, we're a state-owned building, becoming city-owned building. Bylaw that said we could not lobby. So I was a citizen, a private citizen. But we at one point couldn't do that anymore. We had to sign on as an organization because we had to raise money as part of our coalition, right? We had to carry our weight. And so Deborah Cullen and the CEO and I got together and built a CE task force which was a board, sort of task force being like had a completed project which was by the board retreat was to adopt a policy of civic engagement. The first step we had to do was get the board to unanimously take that lobbying thing out of the bylaws. So we got that taken care of which was political and took time. But the second thing is we had to really educate them. I had, we had a, not Sarah couldn't come but her colleague in LA came because they all were freaking out. They didn't know the difference between, they had no clue. It's the amazing treat of working with board members that are really brilliant in business and then they come and work for you and they're not. It's like, okay, that is totally captured. That is totally captured. Wow, I forget now everything is there. And Jeff Chang is on our board. Jeff Chang's on our board and so he knows, he knows. So we had to go through that. And then we had to like, I provided sort of the kind of central fall guy. I was fine to take the fall on all of this, right? So that they had protection. But they are also smart enough to know that we, that it's in our mission we're gonna do that we had to do that. So we signed on and then over the course of four months this task force created us like we became educated. Everyone became educated within this committee of a board and they then presented at the board retreat the proposal with the recommendations that was written by partly you. Thank you, Richel. And the board unanimously adopted our role as an advocacy organization with our center. And so it is now in our policy to do that. And we have now a standing committee of civic engagement and we have rules in which we would take a certain thing to them which would be a city wide initiative or any kind of initiative that really puts your organization out in public. Not necessarily signing on to anything or our advocacy that's straight up, but stuff beyond arts where we really are putting ourselves in the civic realm. So it can be done. There is the culture you have to shift and then there's just, and that is an education point. Once you educate people, you relieve them of the fear. The other fear is you possibly lose people who might give money to, but that's the fear you take at any turn when you make a change. So you have to just trust that you're gonna get people who are gonna give you more money. You just have to know that, right? And every shift revolves around that. There are people who said to us, I don't wanna get emails from you, you guys are an art organization. Why is your art political? Our answer is all art is political, right? Even if you're at the MoMA, when you see Matisse, that's political because you're not taking a stand or you're taking stand to keep paradigm in place. So once you do that, you make more enemies and you also clear the room and then you get people who are saying, oh, I agree with you. So you have to think about the trade-offs constantly. That's what you do in engagement politics, right? Which is really kind of exciting. So that was my... Yeah. Who has an advocacy policy with their board? Any documentation out there? John, is y'all as in public? I could send it to y'all. I'll figure out the way to do that. No, there's a way to post it on this session. That's just 2.0, you create post documents. Yeah, and I earned it. That's great. We'll get that to you guys so you can look at that, what the recommendations are on what we do. That does remind me that I did post the slideshow that I gave you on the site for this session and I posted two fact sheets, one saying 5-1, see free organizations, are allowed to lobby, another that's an election checklist to make sure you're doing well and you're saying safe. And they have an actual thing on their site that's specifically 4-4 members. Yes. Yeah, which is very helpful. Awesome. Another question I heard was on partners. And Jennifer, I want to see if you can talk a little bit about how you develop those partnerships with the folks that you're doing to the engagement with, either from your experience at Arts for LA or from Ford's Theater. Sure, absolutely. So we partner with the United Way in Los Angeles to get out the votes. One of our main initiatives as part of our Art to Vote campaign is to get out the vote and make sure that voters are registered. So just to give you quick demographics and statistics in LA County, LA County has 10 million people. Of those 10 million people, six million people are eligible to be registered to vote. Out of that six million, 4.8 million are actually registered to vote. And when it comes to Election Day, less than 25% of those people come out to vote. So one of our big campaigns is the Get Out the Vote campaign, which is where there's two goals. The first goal is to make sure that that 75% of people are informed and engaged and know what's happening in their community and that they make sure to get out on Election Day, make their voice heard and known in their community. And the second part is to make sure that that rest of that 2.2 million people in LA County are registered to vote. And if you're over 18 and are a citizen of the United States, that you're able to have the power to vote and make a difference in your community. So we've partnered with the League of Women Voters in the United Way, and youth speaks in different partners to make sure that, especially our high school youths, know that they are empowered to make a difference in their community and vote as well. And John, how do you guys, do you find partners? Do partners find you? When you're working with YDCA and bringing on partners for a particular project when it comes to civic engagement, what does that relationship look like? Oh, that's basically everything we do is essentially, in the civic engagement realm, is talking with partners in neighborhoods that have received very little to no support to, and so we teach them civic engagement practices and we only can do that in partnership, sometimes with government agencies. In fact, almost always with government agencies, or departments within your city, which are kind of what we call the kick-ass bureaucrats, where we really get shit done and you find them, right? And they may not have really much play in the city writ large, but they get stuff done with you and then non-arts organizations. There are so many partners out there, Janet did a whole session about this yesterday, correct? Yeah. Who are doing this work and so you have to think of it as a collective impact to move. That's the only way to do it, it's not just you should, you can't not, right? And I think anybody bends running a campaign in Seattle, right? Yes. And there's no way you can do this with just your arts people. You can't, you can't get that, you can't get there on your own. The number of people you have to get to sign on to your belief has to include their belief. So you're constantly talking about why would somebody, why would the unions, why would the hotels, why would all these people care? What does it benefit them? So you're constantly making cases. It's basically a fundraising campaign for a capital campaign and the capital campaign is about changing the policy. That's how I made this accident. And the one thing I wanted to add about partnerships is that a lot of times, especially with organizations and board members, when you make a partner, it's like I need that immediate quick response or as quick deliverable. But with partnerships, especially with civic engagement and community engagement, it's long-term, you're in it for the marathon. So don't expect easy, quick things to happen. Invest in those relationships and deepen those partnerships and have that long-term relationship because it'll go so far in the future to establish new partnerships and collectives in the future. Cap, the one thing that makes politics different than art and community engagement is that sometimes you have to work really quickly in politics, so sometimes you have to get them to sign on in 15 minutes that you're not developing a long-term relationship. And people who understand politics know that. So it's a combination of things. There's the getting to the ballot move, which sometimes is faster, and there's the long-term advocacy, which is about building coalition, which really works in this direction. So they both exist. So I'm really interested in how we use the creative process to inform policymaking, how we as artists have some skills, have some resources. Can you talk a little bit about the market street prototyping? Yes. Yeah, I mean, Megan would be talking about this if she were here. I mean, I think we all are extremely passionate people and anytime we make anything, make theater, we want as many people to gather around this idea as possible. We're intrinsically built to make great cases across the aisle. That's what we do creatively. It's just about taking your creativity and your art making and turning them into assets. They're assets, they are tools for greater change. You really have to kind of think, you know what Jeff was talking about? Generosity, right? And I think nonprofits in this realm have to move outside of fear and scarcity into wants of generosity and accumulative power when you actually generously get back to your community and support your community's efforts to make their lives better. This is not, this is actually an obvious point about engagement, but it's a rarely practiced point, right? We always think that ultimately this is, how is this going to affect our bottom line? How are we going to get to turn these people into more audiences? How do we sustain this? How do we sustain this? And sometimes those questions come a little too early and they kind of kill the whole generative process, right? So it just ends up nothing and it becomes a really siloed program. Your do good corner of your do good organization, right? So what we do is we turn our assets into something that is generated out in the community. So it's basically partly a mindset, right? And you have to think about what you can do to help others and know that that is part of, it becomes your narrative. You have now an increased narrative for fundraising. You can now have things that you can write that you've never written before because you can write grants that talk about the amount of work you do for your community in advocacy, right? Even though you can't necessarily write sometimes, you can't get money directly from most foundations in certain, like up to certain point, right? Tell me about that. So that's a really complex topic but the short version is private foundations are not allowed to say hi, please take this money and go lobby with it. That is illegal. However, they can say hi, please take this money and do good things, which can include lobbying. But most private foundations don't know that. If you're working with a private funder and you want us to talk to them, we are there for you. If you want us to talk to your board, we're there for you too. But the also- And your development team might not know this, right? And they think that that's a terrifying thing when in fact putting that into your narrative actually within this context highly supports your case. So there is huge amounts of stuff that comes back. And also just people are there for you. It's always considered like if you were about to go under, who in your community would save you? Well, it's only those who you've invested in. Not served, invested it. And so it's a real shift of our paradigm and it makes us so much stronger. So that's how I think about it, right? And everyone does it differently. At YBC, we're like constantly outside doing this stuff. At other theaters, it's much more rigorous sort of in the box, literally in the box mood, but you can still do it, right? It just happens. You all know how to transit this. And I'm gonna add one more thing to the part. I talked to you about private foundations. A lot of foundations are public foundations and they don't have that same role. They are allowed to say here, please take this money and go love you with it. Most of the time they say here, take this money and do good things with it. Or here's this project you wanna do, part of it's loving, part of it's not. Here's money for your project. So if you have questions about funders and who can fund what, talk to me, talk to us. Most of the time the funders don't even know what's going on and we can help you educate them. So I know we have some questions we still haven't gotten to from the very beginning, but because this has been so many big topics that we've covered just in the past hour, I'm gonna check in questions about what you've been hearing for the past hour. New topics, yes. I have a couple of H-Election questions. Yes. Because if you wanna dip your toe into all this, like with voter registration and you want to be a polling place, I mean, does that fit in the three to five? Or do you just go ahead and do the H-Election and then the second part of that is, does that scare foundations? Does that send a red flag to the IRS? Your boards freak out, you know? I can answer your second question first. The H-Election actually makes the IRS say, oh, they probably know what's going on. They probably know what ends up. And we heard from the IRS directly that they are not more likely to audit you if you have made that, it's either one H-Election. In fact, what we've figured out is they're probably less likely to audit you if you have made the H-Election. And so it's also easier to keep your books and present them to the IRS and say, look, here, we have clean books and that's ways you're to do with 5-1-H-Election. Having your spot become a polling place or doing get-out-the-voter-voter registration does not involve changing laws. It involves getting people to vote. And that is not a type of lobbying. And so it doesn't fall within your either three to 5% under the old bad insubstantial part test, nor does it fall under your 17 to 20% of what you can do for lobbying. That's not lobbying. And one thing I didn't mention as far as the polling places, the biggest thing is if you have your location, your venue as a polling place, the biggest rule to be thinking about is making sure there is nothing there that supports or opposes a candidate. So in blocks of that building and they think that your 5-1-C-3 is supporting opposing candidates and that's for two reasons. One, IRS says you can't support or oppose candidates. Two, polling places cannot have a lectionary within 100 here. So there's lots of reasons to do it right, but it's relatively easy. If there's a poster in there that looks like it's damning some candidate, take down the poster. If it is a statute which has happened where it's somebody who's, it was, cover the statute. It is doable. And we can help you with that. And I think just to, maybe Lori can speak to this because our slightly differing understanding of art making in relationship to this because we're a gallery space as much as we're a performance space. What I understand is that if it's part of the generative act of the art, it doesn't actually. That's how TCG is. No, no, no, I'm just telling you what I know. I didn't cringe when we used to do it. That's an equal and fair representation, but that is not our interpretation at TCG either. Artists reflect the times that we're in that has always been the case. The art itself is, we are sort of keeping our advocacy world and arms length from including that as, we're not considering that lobbying or advocacy. It's the art. It will affect what audiences come up and attend your theater, but we're not considering it lobbying. I think I know where the difference is. Okay, so the basic thing is, there's on the two side, we'll talk about lobbying, we'll talk about elections. Under lobbying, if you are creating the art in order to change a law, that is your primary objective that is what you want to get done and you want to change a law and you are presenting to the general public and then they're just sitting there at the end like, wow, that law would be bad or wow, that law would be good. Nothing has happened with regard to lobbying. Zero has happened because you have not said, tell your lawmaker that this needs to change. You have not said, here's the contact information for your lawmaker. You have not said, here's a postcard, a petition, a website to go on and send a letter to your lawmaker. You've also not named the lawmaker. If you name the lawmaker, who is the person who's gonna be voting on this and they're your lawmaker in your region, that probably is lobbying, but there's an extra special added ingredient. If you don't give, say, contact, if you don't give the contact information, if you don't give them a mechanism to contact, you don't name the lawmaker, you have not lobbied. So I'm gonna bounce the question to you. So art that reflects our precedent and all of the climate, the policies, and so forth. I mean, it's just critical. Critical can be fine and legal. So remember, is it saying, do not let this person be reelected? Is it saying this person will be a bad candidate? Is it saying, in some cases in the past, this good candidate or bad candidate didn't happen because we influenced it. If you are basically trying to influence the outcome of a candidate election, that is illegal. If you are trying to influence a public policy, that is probably legal. So does that fit with what you? Yeah, something that's generally critical of the times we're in and the policies and so forth. Awesome. But I just want to be really clear. Does that help the room? Are we, are we cool over this? So like, if you're doing a production of the like the resistible rise of archerovalry looks like Donald Trump, then what? Are you saying he shouldn't get elected? I mean, the play implicitly is doing that. What, is it talking about the policies? If it's talking about the policies. And the thing is, we don't think that there is an arts exception. If the main reason to create it is to create art, great. But if the main reason to create the art is to make sure that somebody doesn't win or lose an election, you're in trouble. The main reason is to create the art, great. Just make sure that they, what is the purpose of it is a big question. If you have more questions about your stuff, contact us. We can help over with that. That's really interesting. I love that this conversation because I think if someone were to go after us, they could try to make the other case. So we just have to make our case. And that's, we, I mean, I think it's, I think the fact that it's a great area makes it kind of exciting and dangerous. We should go, seriously, I think it should actually, it should have the opposite effect of scaring us. It should just like, right? If they paid attention at that level, we'd have something, we'd have, we'd have a game to play, right? And then we'd fight for that legislation. So I'd say we are very clearly in an area where it could get dangerous or maybe not. Let's go. And we talk about a spectrum of risk. We talk about, yay, we talk about a spectrum of risk. If you are risk averse, you will never see Trump's name on stage. You will never say the name of any of the people that you consider princes of darkness. It will not happen, okay? You are safe. You are in your corner and you've got your crunched new field position and you are gonna be just fine. But what about everybody else? And so, and what's your soul gonna feel like when you wake up in the morning, okay? So, then there's the other part where you're saying, wow, to hell with it. I'm gonna try to say in every single theater performance that Trump should die and never be re-elected. And that Trump should, is that we should do everything within our power to make sure he never gets re-elected. That, you're not in a field position anymore. You're standing out there like, hit me. Okay, you stopped my organization. You should, we don't want to exist anymore. And there's lots in the middle. So, talk to us about that. Yes, sorry, in the very back. The, yes. If we present a piece that maybe does not necessarily encourage disbursement as a very specific opinion on policy or politics. And following that piece, we make available resources for people to contact legislators, to contact policymakers, but never explicitly say, call your representative and advocate for this climate change bill. Even though we've just presented a play that has a clear opinion, and you're making resources available. You're allowed to do that. Is that vague enough to not be considered good? No, no, no. You are allowed to oppose or support a climate. That's a policy issue. So, if it's all right, I guess might be a good time. And I'll answer your question specifically later. Okay. I'm sorry. TCG is your national arts advocacy representative in Washington. I'm your person. And while all due respect to Americans for the Arts, which had a lot of play in that, the Performing Arts Alliance is your go-to FAAGA-1C for advocacy organization. TCG is one of the founding members of the Performing Arts Alliance. And we do a lot of coalition work with the League of American Orchestras and Opera America and Dance USA and arts presenters and then National Alliance for Musical Theatre and Chorus America. There are 14 organizations. And the idea is to advocate on behalf of the Performing Arts at the federal level and to have the widest possible reach among people who care about the Performing Arts. We encourage all theaters to actively participate. I think it's been made really clear that you can and should advocate for the arts. My job is to figure out at the federal level what are the issues that impact theaters. And then what is our position on those issues so that we can have a loud, collective voice advocating singularly unified, laser sharp focus on those issues and advocate for them. So we are advocating for funding for the National Endowment for the Arts. As you know, the president, I believe you all know, the president has proposed total elimination of the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Office of Museum Services, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, et cetera, et cetera. Anything that's arts related. How do we feel about that? Are you okay with that? We've gotta make a loud noise. That means you can and should send messages to your elected officials to, in fact, we're asking for $155 million for the National Endowment for the Arts in FY18. Now we thought in FY17, Congress and the president didn't finish that fiscal year's budget on time. We had a presidential election and they kicked the can down the line and so it was only resolved that FY17 budget, federal fiscal year is an October 1, September 30 fiscal year. It was resolved in May. The president had proposed a mid-year cut of $15 million which would have adversely affected organizations scheduled to come up in the latter part of the fiscal year. Indeed, instead of coming up with a cut, we ended up with a $2 million increase. This is because we have been doing this work for a long time and we have bipartisan support for Congress, so the president proposes, Congress disposes, we have our work cut out for us. We are certainly taking it very seriously that the president has proposed elimination of the agency but we know we have a great deal of support in Congress but we are counting on, TCG has about 500 member theaters. If every theater owned that they should send 10 messages to the hill in response to every action alert that I send, that would be 5,000 messages every time. That carries weight, they count how many messages come in. If your elected official supports the endowment, you need to write and thank them. If your elected official is never gonna support public funding for the arts, they still need to know your constituent in their district and you care about that and you have to be on record. They might never agree with you but they still need to hear from you. Then there's this huge swath of elected officials in the middle that can be swayed one way or the other, particularly freshman elected officials who are just elected to office. You wanna influence them to vote the way you want them to on any number of things and I'll just mention a couple of other issues. Preserving the tax deduction for terrible giving. This affects all nonprofits. So somebody brought up before the sort of strategic balance if you're a theater at a university. The question is some more over there. Boy, if you can align with your university advocate and advocate together on preserving the charitable deduction, that would be huge and more powerful than you're doing it alone. So those coalitions, it's very, very important to hold on. I don't know what kind of grants you're getting from the NEA or from your state arts council. Remember 40% of NEA funds are directed through state arts councils but I bet you on average across the field about 40% of your budget comes from individual donations. Give or take, right? So we wanna preserve the charitable deduction. You can and should be writing to your elected officials to preserve the charitable deduction and we're calling it the full value in scope and we now are asking for a big ask on the charitable deduction, universal access to it. The president's tax proposal moves many, many more Americans onto the standard deduction. If you do not itemize your taxes, you're not allowed to take the charitable deduction. So we want universal access to the charitable deduction. There are a host of issues, about half a dozen that directly affect arts organizations and performing arts organization. I love Americans for the arts but don't get me wrong, we collaborate together on many things including the federal arts advocacy day. We come together through this loose coalition called the cultural advocacy group to align on all of our issues. But the performing arts alliance looks with a performing arts lens. There are issues that are specific to our sector that other organizations aren't gonna take on like preserving and protecting wireless microphones used in the performing arts. That's one of our issues and protect visas for artists from abroad. So when there was an executive order that said we should have a travel ban, we, the performing arts alliance and the visa working group crafted a statement, we all signed onto it and we're circulating it in various meetings on the Hill and with other agencies. I'm gonna move into the nonpartisanship, bipartisanship, comfort. Sometimes board members are in a different place than staff. How many of you are from blue states? How many of you are from red states? How many of you are blueberries in tomato soup? It sounds yummy, huh? For those of you, it's really complicated and TCG is a national organization, we're a C3, we're not a C4 and we don't do the, sorry, but we don't do the, what's it called, H? H-Election. H-Election. H-Election. We need to talk. My salary and my associate's salary combined don't get us to the financial threshold and I'm doing way more advocacy than all of you so and I do direct lobbying and grassroots advocacy, I do both, I need your partnership but I do wanna help you out. This is TCG's and I'm going to post this later or tomorrow on the session website. We have a statement, TCG 501 C3, non-partisanship and bipartisanship policy. Why this policy? We clearly have a huge commitment to equity, diversity, and inclusion. Part of the equity, diversity, and inclusion is the range of political views and making everybody feel comfortable. You know what the responsibilities are is the 501 C3. There are the legal requirements. There's our commitment to EDNI. Our bipartisan advocacy strategy is that when I'm in Washington and when I'm urging all of you to contact your elected officials is that you contact everybody on both sides of the aisle. Democrats oftentimes are more supportive of NEA funding. Republicans are often more supportive of the charitable deduction. You never know where your friends are gonna be and whose elected official has a daughter who dances or sings or whatever. Find those commonalities. Our non-partisanship community strategy is to avoid bias toward a particular political group. We're taking the legality and TCG is taking it a step further. We wanna respect the diversity of opinions of our members, staff, volunteers, and everyone we serve. The non-partisanship community strategy strengthens our ability to advocate across party lines and access diverse community leaders and funding sources. It does not mean that we're silent about issues that impact our mission and organizational values of equity, diversity, and inclusion, but we believe we can be more effective by addressing them without the bias of partisanship. There are perceived tensions sometimes between equity, diversity, and inclusion right now in this climate and our non-partisanship, bipartisanship strategies. It's not the same thing as neutrality. We recognize that politicians and political parties advocate for and implement policies that cause harm. In order to follow our C3 prohibitions against campaign intervention and strengthen our non-partisanship community strategy, we oppose the policies, but not the political parties or the specific politicians. That's the line for me. Absolutely, advocate for or against policies, laws, appropriations, don't lump it all together and talk about a person or a party. So I thought I would help with that. We urge everybody to advocate at the local level, and you've heard a lot of local issues come up, state level, and federal level. We're as far away here, apparently, on the continental US as we can be from Washington. Doesn't feel far away, does it? This stuff is impacting us all. We need to be involved. So on the TCG website, there is a tab, an advocacy tab, underneath it you'll find all the issue briefs, the issues that I've talked about, and more. We are sending action alerts from TCG now rather than from the Performing Arts Alliance. We want you to know it's coming from TCG. We want everybody to engage and be involved. If you're not, are you getting action alerts from TCG? If you're not getting them and you want to get hooked in, please come find me. I think I'll stop at that now. Thank you. Thanks, that's great. So as we start doing more and more of this work within our institutions, there's a role for staff to take on bigger roles. How do we think about staffing for civic engagement, and how do we train staff, hire staff? What does that look like? I was hired to do that. So you hire at a high level and you find out who's interested in this and your organization and you make it up. If it's priority for the board, it'll be a priority for the staff. If it's not a priority for the board, it will not be a priority for the organization, period. And individuals will get involved, but you have to start at the top and you have to go from below. You have to do both, right? You have to get them to buy into it and the authorities are like, this is what we do. Then you have to find all the people in your team who are really engaged in this as citizens or rather residents. And as residents, they are engaged in this and then you start to build the coalition of people there and then the people in the middle or their bosses will find time for them, right? That's the only way you can make the shift. You can't, in good conscience say, we have more work for you to do. But you can, in good conscience saying, our work will not be possible if we don't do this and we have to figure out our time management from a higher level so that our staff will get more engaged, right? And that sort of, does that make sense? And the best practice we've also heard from folks who've moved into the activism space as performing arts organizations is to have people on your board who are activists and getting those people on the board who have expertise in the field, in the trenches, who also understand performance. And Jennifer, for those staff who leave training, what are some of the kinds of training opportunities that organizations like Arts for LA might offer in people's local communities? Yeah, absolutely. So Arts for LA, one of our main programs that we have is called Activate, which is our arts advocacy leadership training program. And we serve, we have two cohorts. One is arts education and one is cultural policy. And it's an application-based program where cultural leaders and community leaders apply to be a part of the program. It's a nine-month free program and you deepen your leadership skills. So we're already cultivating the leaderships that are happening in the community. So the first part of it is assessing the cultural landscape of LA County, what's happening on the local level, deepening the leadership skills. And the second part of the program is to create an action project in your community. So we've had action projects that are as small as making sure that there is a public comment at the school board meeting to make sure that there is an advocate for a visual and performing arts coordinator in that school district. To as big as creating a coalition and collective in the community to talk about gentrification in the arts and what's happening in the actual neighborhoods. So these action projects range and it's a fantastic program to create advocacy and also the long-term goal of the program is we want these people to become elected officials. We want these people to be advocates because arts and culture, we want to be at the table of every conversation that's happening with our elected officials. We are training these people to become the leaders in their community who will be on the neighborhood councils, who will be in the city council districts to be able to make sure arts and culture at the center and focal point of funding conversations that are happening. The other thing that... I got to say, this is the model. These guys, this organization is a model. This is, you have to learn about them. What they are doing, this activate is fantastic. So just has to be amplified as many times as possible. The other thing that we do is part of our arts days. Once a year, we create an arts day where we invite 300 people to come down to city hall to show their support of the arts and culture and why it's important in Los Angeles. So we have about 300 people who come where there are shirts that was in the photo earlier and show their support in the city council meeting. We also train arts delegates about 80 of them who meet with city council leaders and their staff to advocate for why the arts are important, to make sure that it's part of the community landscape and it's part of the culture that's happening in the community. So that's our other arts delegate training. And quickly, just something I feel like we have to make clear and I think it gets clear as you get more local, but it is not untrue for federal that you can't just go to them at budget time. No, right. You can't do that. I know you know that, but the amount of time you have to spend being assets to their work, being the place that they call when they need creative thinking. The more you do that, when you advocate with them or against them, they, that is where you, it's like again, think of it as fundraising. Don't go to somebody just to ask them for money. You have to figure out how, it's a deep relationship and you have to continue to do that. You have to think of this all the time. Your win, there are specific date wins, November, June, but the win is long, right? And it's where you, where we have a place at the policy table as artists and arts are important. That's central. That is where we ultimately want to end up, right? Where they cannot make decisions without comments. Part of having the relationship is inviting elected officials to your theaters. What are the rules around giving free tickets and inviting elected officials? Those vary widely from state to state and city to city. So in some cases we can tell you what the laws are in your state. And in some cases we do not cover all 50 right now. We do have 29. So the light thing is that we'll have your states high. And at the very least we can connect you with an attorney in your region who can help you understand what the rules are. So when it comes to building those long term relationships with policy makers in our local communities, what are the people of questions about that process? How do we do that? How do we communicate with people? If not questions on that, questions on other things. What are the questions people still have yet? I'm gonna write down some of these questions so that we can gather some answers that weren't answered today. I have a question that I just had a comment. Tim. It was very validating, but I wanted to emphasize two things that have been brought up in this conversation. Tenacity and coalition voting. On August 1st in the county of King in Washington state, we will ask the voters to approve a measure that will increase cultural access for all the folks who live in King County. If it passes it will raise $67 million for the full wide cultural sector, arts, heritage, science organizations, et cetera. It took 11 years to get to the point where we are now. And that kind of tenacity and the kind of coalition building that we've managed during the course of that more than a decade has brought us to this threshold. And if we can get this done, it is something that will actually travel across the state of Washington. And maybe it's an example that other folks that can follow in other states around the nation. Awesome. So tenacity, coalition voting, critical aspects. Thank you. Thanks for that. More questions, more insight, this one over here? Yes, goodbye. So this technical life, there's been a lot of talk with this administration about lifting restrictions on churches, being able to actually advocate and be involved in campaigns. If there was a shift for houses of worship, would that somehow filter into arts organizations? It depends which proposal. There are a number of them floating out there. One of them, and by the way, Trump's announcement about how things are gonna be different and his executive order, as far as being told, that has absolutely no legal effect. Right. Okay, so just know that. The other part of it depends how it's written. One says churches and houses of worship will be able to continue to do what they're doing and they can just speak, and when they would normally speak anyway, they just can't do anything extra. And then there's one that's basically saying, no restrictions at all, they can jump in full with both feet. From what we understand now, it's still very murky and cloudy, but as far as we can tell, those are unlikely to actually pass because so many houses of worship don't want that. And so what is possible, though, is something about the charitable deduction. That's unlikely to be of, that's unlikely to pass as well, but the point that Laura was making is well put, that there are changes that could happen that indirectly affect how successful 5-1 secretaries can be in getting the charitable deduction. So rather in the standard deduction versus. And so as far as we can tell, Johnson Amendment is not gonna go away anytime soon and we will try to let you know if we think anything changes. And by and large, the nonprofit sector, independent sector, TCG has signed on, I think there are more than 6,000 organizations that have signed a letter opposing the repeal of the Johnson Amendment. We actually think that it behooves us to keep an arms length away from the electoral process. This would not be a good thing and we've opposed it. We're on record, yeah, excellent. Other questions? Yes? I was just hoping, John, that you could talk a little bit about the process that you went through with your board and perhaps with the staff about how you select which issues you're going to chase after. We have a sort of bleeding heart problem in my organization where everybody wants to be like, let's make a statement about this and this and this. And it's hard to sort of corral that and say this is the real part of what theater stands for. That's one of the reasons why we engaged, why we have a committee now, why we actually have a process so we can identify the scope. And it's hard to know, we can't necessarily pre-name them and it's not just what the issues are but what we're gonna do around the issues that we care about, right? Because you can care about every issue but what are you focused on doing? So one of the things we do is we have constant conversations where we respond to staff desire to get engaged, who truly want to get engaged in everything. It's the most engaged staff, it's annoying. At times they're so engaged, right? And it's like, and engagement is over, right? It's okay. So what we do is we just remind them of their power as individuals to continue to work on those things and we give them resources. So we have a, we have, we have to need to update is sort of our civic engagement resource where things people want to connect on issues. We give them the resources to do that but it's not something we're gonna take on because we only have a certain amount of scope and energy to do the kind of work that we're doing. We don't focus solely on arts advocacy. That doesn't, that is not the center of our work. In fact, just to be clear, YBCA was not gonna benefit from any of the money that we raise, we're gonna raise by this hotel tax because we don't get funded by the grants for the arts but it was our job to do it. It's kind of freed us up in a way because we had skin in the game, we didn't necessarily have skin in this game so it made it really easy to continue to remind people to be their best selves and build a coalition as Ben referred to. But in terms of when it becomes a question, like right now we have an artist who's coming in from Cuba, Tanya Bruguera and her work is extraordinary political including immigration rights, which are immigrant rights. In fact, she has a thing called Immigrant Movement International and I have been on the phone with these folks endlessly around this particular issue because we want to have people sign a thing called the Francis Effect where they're sending things to the popes that keep grants citizenship to, in that city, to immigrants. Dicey, dicey for us. So we have to gather around that question. Now, would you think that an arts organization would be focused on immigrants? Well, if the artist you're interested in is working on that, you better be. This is one of our rules. If we hire artists who take a stand, we should take a stand. This is where I get a little bit, you know, what do you call it? Norma Reyesh around all that is because if we're gonna invest our work on stage with this politic, we better back it up. We can't do it and then go, not us. Not us, that's just the play. That part is not, that's not, that's not gonna ultimately where we end up. It's a tricky move because as we learned, it's great. There's no rule, right? Everyone has a different way of thinking about it and she's a different kind of strategist than she is and I'm a different kind of strategist, right? So we all have to kind of think about our most strategic selves in relationship to these moves. Not all the time should you be yelling and screaming at your city hall to get something done. Sometimes I have to say, shut up. So you have to listen to potentially hire a lobbyist who knows how, what the actual, so when I'm on the board of California Arts Advocates, we have a lobbyist who basically said when you fight for the, when you write that many letters or make that many phone calls, you are not gonna succeed with Jerry Brown. He does not respond to that. He actually has the opposite reaction. So we've had very few people contact me. The opposite of what I would have thought. I'm come from Lori School, like yell them down, right? But there is a lot of that. So it's not just the what but how. So I think what we do is you have to create a process where the shared leadership of the organization makes those strategic decisions, right? Because like you said, you can be fighting for everything. And sometimes the best answer is to educate your staff and give them agency and power and time off when they do things. Go do that. That's a way of empowering the staff to do that at giving them the space but not necessarily taking on a certain orientation. That's the way. And what aligns with your mission? So what are those core things that you really, really want to take on and what other things are you just tracking? There are issues like net neutrality. I'm tracking it but I'm not from the center on that one. There are a lot of people carrying the water on that. There were people on our staff who wanted to go on the women's march. TCG did not take that on as a TCG issue on behalf of the field. Certainly aligns but people took time off with TCG's blessing and marched. So it is, it's about that balance. What's really, you know, the organization's responsibility and aligns with the mission that you, you can't walk away from it and what are the things you're just sort of tracking? We're letting staff do it. So we have just a few minutes left. There are some resources that are listed on here. All these organizations have amazing websites. The ton of resources. In our last three minutes, I wanted to do two things. First, I want you to take one minute while you're sitting here and write down on your phone, on a piece of paper, whatever. One thing you learned, one thing you're gonna go home and do in your organization or in your community was one practical next step you're going to take at home in your organization, at home in your community. Either one, one minute, and then we're gonna collect any questions people still have and we're committed to answering them and then posting those answers on conference 2.0. So if you still have questions, do stay in the room because we're gonna take those questions after this one minute of silence. One minute silence and reflection. Yeah, I'll write them and you can take them. Okay, great. All right, it looks like most people remembered what they learned, what they're gonna do, written that down. So we're gonna take questions, shout them out, raise your hand. We're gonna document them and then remember we're gonna post the answers to those on conference 2.0. Or you can just write them down up here. But if you have them before you leave, you can just like, little bit to get to the next session. Shout them out. And also I am available during lunch. If you have questions, I will be around and I promise to remain in the red sweater so you can use pine needles. And Lori has the session at lunch. I have a lunch session on advocacy tomorrow. Today I'm doing a blue star lunch, but tomorrow I'm gonna do the best I can. All right, thank you all. Thank you all. Thank you. Thank you.