 I thought my Italian heritage was going to make my loud voice carry over all of this space. Well, I want to say welcome and thank you for joining us this morning. My name is Karen Katie. I am the director of the Georgia Council for the Arts. We are thrilled to have all of you in the audience with us today, and thrilled to be here with the chairman of the National Endowment of the Arts, Rocco Landison. I'm going to tell you a bit about the conversation and what's going to take place, and then introduce you to some of our partners for the day, for the morning. We are going to engage in a community dialogue with Chairman Landisman. It'll be facilitated by a call from Turner of Alternate Roots. We'll bring them up in just a minute. I want to ask that you please turn your cell phones off right now, not just on silent, but we are live streaming this event, and so there is a potential that your cell phones can interfere. So please do turn them off. Following a brief conversation between Carlton and Chairman Landisman, we will open the session to questions. Ask that you please keep your questions and your comments brief. There are a large number of you in this room, and we want to create the opportunity for as many people as possible to have their questions answered and kind of engage in the conversation. So if you would, please join me right now in welcoming Alan Vela to the stage. She is the general manager of the FOX. They are our venue partner for this event, and we are thrilled to be in this beautiful space and to bring him up. Thank you all for coming. It's good to see all of our friends in the arts here in Georgia and Atlanta. So on behalf of the FOX Theater and the FOX Theater Institute and all of our partner FOX Institute facilities around the state, we really appreciate you coming today. We're looking forward to a very exciting dynamic conversation. So without further ado, we'll turn it back over. Thank you. I was in Macon yesterday where Chairman Landisman gave the keynote address of the Georgia Arts Network Conference, and a reporter asked me what was the significance of having him in Georgia on this trip in Macon and in Atlanta today. And I said to him, well, we here in Georgia have long known about the incredible artistic and cultural heritage of our state and the incredible arts community that keeps our economy vibrant, that helps define our communities, give them a sense of identity, give us all a collective sense of place, and having the chairman here helps us to shine this national spotlight on that and let us tell our story to the rest of the country. So in that vein, I am so grateful to have you to view in the room today to, again, continue that conversation and bring it to the national level. I'm going to have to use my cheat sheets now if you'll excuse me. The conversation today will be facilitated, as I mentioned, by Carlton Turner. Carlton is the executive director of Alternate Groups and has been a member since 2001. He served in the organization's board of both the regional representative and as an officer. Alternate Groups hired Carlton in 2004 as a regional development director and he held this position for four and a half years before transitioning to the role of executive director. His experience within the arts community is extensive, locally, nationally, and abroad. He has been a panelist and facilitator with the Center for Civic Participation, Arts and Democracy Project, and Arts Educator with the MIME Mississippi Eye Program for student empowerment and has served in the executive board of the network of ensemble theaters, where he's a dedicated member of numerous organizations that bring awareness of various issues, including the arts. In 2009, Carlton visited the White House twice to meet with members of President Obama's administration on issues of cultural policy. Today, he uses these extensive skills and his experience to facilitate this community conversation. He will be joined today by Chairman Rocco Lamisman. Rocco Lamisman was confirmed by the United States Senate on August 7, 2009 as the 10th chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts. He pursued his undergraduate education at Colby College at M.D. University of Wisconsin-Madison and earned a doctorate in dramatic literature at the Yale School of Drama. His ensuing career has been a hybrid of commercial and artistic enterprises, including a private investment fund which he ran until his appointment in 1987 as President of Jujamsen, a company that owns and operates five prominent Broadway theaters. Before and after joining Jujamsen, Mr. Lamisman produced Broadway shows, including Tony Award-winning productions of Big River, Angels in America, and The Producers. In 2005, he purchased Jujamsen and operated it until President Obama announced his intention to nominate him to the NEA chairmanship. Mr. Lamisman has been active on numerous boards and has vigorously engaged the ongoing debate about arts policy, particularly the relationship between the commercial and non-profit sectors of the American theater. He joins us today as the foremost arts administrator in the country and to engage in a community dialogue while offering his insights and perspective on the arts. Please join me in a warm welcome for Carlton and Raqqa. The microphone too? Yeah. Great. So I've got this and this and this. All right. This should be all set. Okay. Well, first of all, it's just great. I'm a theater producer. It's great to see a good box office. I'm glad so many people are here. That's a great way to start. And Alan, I don't know where he is, but this is an amazing room. This is an incredibly beautiful space. And I'd come here to do any activity. It's fantastic. Well, I'm going to speak hopefully briefly and Carlton will then we'll get into a back and forth, which is always for me the most engaging and stimulating and fun thing for me to do. But our agenda at the NAA the last three or so years has been something we call and we didn't name it, but we use the term creative place making. And it's really about what happens when you bring art and artists into a place, into a town and how it transforms that place, how arts can create a completely different ethos and vitality and vibrancy in a city or place. I don't think there's a better example of that happening than here in Atlanta. But what we've been trying to do is go around the country and highlight great examples of this and to do what we can to foster it ourselves. In a sense, we've been looking at what Carlton and alternate roots and organizations like that have been doing across the country and saying, boy, this really works. This kind of work really does revitalize communities. And we've made that our agenda. The first thing we did was we had a program called the Mayor's Institute of City Design. The mayors are our natural allies in this process. They really get how arts can transform places. The Mayor's Institute of City Design was already at the NEA. We invested in that and beefed up its resources and started making what we called MICD grants. And then we started a program at the NEA that we call Our Town. It's called Our Town because I'm a theater guy and that's a play and I get to name things. That's one of the things. One of my few privileges given the size of our budget at the NEA. But Our Town is really about the intersection of the arts with places, with real people, with the real world, as I'd like to call it, with people's actual lives. And we've had a tremendous amount of success with this to the point that in the most recent budget, believe it or not, the NEA is marked for an increase and the money is allocated to the Our Town budget, which really doubles the size of that budget. I think last year we gave away about $6.65 million in Our Town grants. The program has been enormously popular. We have so many applications for it. I was in Jackson, Mississippi the other day and visited their public art garden. And that's a typical type of project. Places where arts and organization artists can intersect with the community. When you deal with design and public art, you're affecting people who will never think of buying a ticket to a museum or to a ballet or an opera or a theater. They're intersecting every day with the design and the aesthetics of a city, of a community. So our emphasis has really been on this aspect of art as an element for the changing of an ethos and a place for economic development. We don't just have anecdotal support for this. There's a lot of research, a lot of evidence that this works. Before I got to the NEA, there was a long 10-year study by researchers at the University of Pennsylvania who looked at the cities of Mark Stern and Susan Seifert were the researchers. They looked at the cities of Baltimore and Philadelphia, examined neighborhoods that had art and arts presence and one that didn't. What they found is where there was an arts presence, you had a much greater level of civic engagement, provided tremendous impetus toward cohesion in the social fabric. People who were involved in the arts were much more likely to vote, much more likely to join other organizations besides artistic ones. It was found to be a powerful impetus for child welfare. You had demonstrably lower levels of truancy and juvenile delinquency. We were just at the Drew School, which was a shining, incredible example of how that works. And finally, the arts as an economic driver, as a poverty fighter and as a job creator. And we've highlighted all that. We had a light paper published written by Ann Markison at the University of Pennsylvania about the relationship between arts and economic development. There are a number of other studies about this. There's all the work of Richard Florida and others. And we've really fastened our boat to this theme and it's one that gets traction in the administration, in Congress, in the private sector. If I go around the government and around town saying that the New York City opera is going to go under by Thanksgiving, if they don't get $40 million, everyone's going to say, well, that's a shame, that's terrible. We love the opera, but we have bigger issues on our plate right now than that. On the other hand, if I'm talking about art as being part of the social and economic fabric of a place and something that can be a catalyst for real positive change in a place, it's a completely different narrative and a completely different story. And we get a completely different hearing for that on the Hill and in the administration and everywhere. And I think that's something that's happening increasingly across the country. Karen, who's been in her post a very short time, has already embraced this with a vengeance. And I note that the Arts Council in Georgia is now part of the Economic Development Group, which I think is a big acknowledgement of this theme that we're talking about. So this is what we're about in broad general headline terms. A lot of what we can do is use our platform to highlight that and to bring attention to it, as Karen said earlier. But we're here to provide a spotlight and a validation for the kind of work that Carlton and a lot of you in this room are doing every day. You do the real work, we're here to sort of acknowledge it and point to it. So with that, let me turn it over to Carlton and take it from there. Thank you so much. I want to start by thanking Karen and the Georgia Council for the Arts for reaching out to its ultimate roots to partner in hosting this conversation. Also to the Fox Theater for making this space available. Definitely to the chairman for making this visit and coming through to have this conversation with us. And most especially, I want to thank the board members and members of all the groups who have been up here in this work for many years. Especially my officers who are sitting here in the front row and my board chair, Sage Cromby, board director and Dan Brawley and Trevor, who have come here this morning to share in this conversation. I'm just going to speak really briefly just to talk about the history of ultimate roots and the work that we do. Alternate Roots was founded in 1976 at the Highlander Center in New Market, Tennessee. And for those of you that don't know about the Highlander Center, the Highlander Center is a place that was founded in 1932. And it has been a pillar in the South in Appalachia and being a beacon of grassroots organizing and movement building. And that is the place where in 1976 a number of theater companies gathered to form this organization. Of those theater companies you had organizations like the Carpeback Theater in Knoxville, Tennessee. The Free Southern Theater in New Orleans, Louisiana. The Rogue Company in Eastern Tennessee and even Atlanta's own Academy Theater was one of those organizations. And they got together to really bring together what now is about 375 community-based artists across the country that make up this organization. This organization is artist-led and artist-run. And these artists were really interested in how to continue to explore how art can be used to look at the complex human issues and use these arts as a tool for social justice. In 2011, it was turned 35 years young. And as a celebration of this milestone, we went to the city of Baltimore, Maryland, West Baltimore to be more specific. And we organized a national festival. It was a five-day event that had more than 250 artists, culture workers, educators and students put together five days of conversations and performances in an outdoor festival that attracted 11,000 people. It was an event that started with an invitation from an artist in that community to explore creative solutions to the everyday struggles that they were experiencing. The process was three years in the making. There were many conversations over food and community centers and church basements, craft shacks and street corners. But this is the place where transformation actually happens. This is where art is most powerful. And this is the heart of creative placemaking. Creative placemaking is more than the creation of an art mural or an art park. At its core, it's partnership and the placement of creative minds in the center of community effort. Not the end is entertainment, but at the beginning as a partner in the development of ideas. This work is not always about a product, but it's always about fostering change and the perception of who can be an artist and what creativity means when employed as a real-time strategy to everyday issues. It is in this process that we forge meaningful relationships and we all know that relationships are at the heart of any community. This work is not always glamorous and often difficult. It requires a level of transparency that is often lacking in institutions. It requires us to understand power dynamics, especially when working in communities that have been historically under-resourced and therefore lack sustainable economic infrastructure. It also requires an honest and open dialogue. But when this work is done with a listening in and an open heart, it can lead to long-lasting personal and social transformation. One person, one community at a time. This is the work at Ultimate Roots. Ultimate Roots was created to support you. This is our challenge. This is the charge for all of us. All of us that are dedicated to using the arts to unlock human potential. It is for each of us, organizations and individuals alike, to find ways to collaborate, partner and develop deep relationships that lead to sustainable change. This is our charge. On behalf of Ultimate Roots, our members, their partners in the communities they serve, the communities of artists and organizations in and around Metro Atlanta area and the state of Georgia, I would like to say thank you to the National Endowment for the Arts and this efforts to continue to support creative community transformation. One of our own little stories is really quickly as we have Captain Navarra in the audience, and she's really taking this creative place and making it to another level. This past year being elected the mayor of Pine Lake, Georgia. I was really looking at how art can be used to transform her own community. And this is the work that we do. It's really important that you all look here today to engage in this conversation. And we really look forward to finding new ways to partner. And I charge each and every one of you to think about the partnerships that you're creating in the community and what is the long lasting sustainable change that you're trying to create. So at this point we'll open it up to the floor. For questions? Alright, there are no questions. We've accomplished everything we need to do and there's no issues. Doctor, what is your favorite example of projects funded by Artown? Well, there are so many of them, but there's a project in Wilson, North Carolina that I believe is funded by both Artown which is the NEA initiative and a sister initiative which I'll get into as we go along called Art Place which is a private sector funding initiative that's being funded by the major arts funding foundations in the country. I can talk about that in a minute. But there's a sculptor named Wallace Simpson. He must be 80 years old now or something. He does these incredible weird idiosyncratic whirligigs that are real works of art expressions of his completely wacky sensibility and he's been doing them all his career and they pile up on his farm and people in the know know that there's these incredible structures there. Well, we've provided the grant for a park to be created in downtown Wilson, small town 4,000 people or something. They're going to create a park to exhibit these crazy whirligigs and it's going to be a tourist attraction. Most certainly people are going to be excited about it and be coming to see it and it's going to be an economic driver. It's going to be part of the economic revitalization of Wilson, North Carolina. That's a typical kind of thing. It's public art. It's accessible to the population at large and it's really at the intersection of art and the community. So that's one of my favorites. Although I have a long list of different times I'll mention different ones but that I think is pretty typical. Do I have an hour and a half? You just hit one of the buttons. We were just this morning at the Drew Charter School which is amazing. If you see what they've done in a lower socioeconomic area what they've done with these kids and how these kids are performing on other subjects. The arts are a huge part of it. It's not an art school but it's arts infused education. We're just talking about that this morning. We're talking about in the drive over here. I think we're seeing the beginnings of a real national movement about using the arts as part of the whole education process. We just published a white paper by a researcher named James Caterill at UCLA where he took a lot of data from the Department of Labor Department of Education and drew some amazing conclusions. Hard actually to believe I didn't see it in black and white which is that kids from low socioeconomic backgrounds who are exposed to the arts perform on a level or above of all kids of all socioeconomic backgrounds which is an amazing thing that never happens but when the arts are part of their education they come way up on test performance where they go to college the amount of time they stay in school performance in other subjects, math, science, etc. This is a very dramatic and striking body of research that's getting bigger all the time. What's happening at Drew is starting to happen now in different states across the country. It started in North Carolina with something, to my knowledge, something called the A-plus schools where they do professional development of teachers in the arts and it's not so much that they teach the arts it's what I would refer to as kind of arts infused education where artistic techniques are used to tremendous success and that was started to be used in Oklahoma and now A-plus schools are all through the state of Oklahoma and now it's coming into Arkansas, now into Louisiana. Mississippi has the whole schools program. There are a bunch of Drew type initiatives around the country. We don't have the size of budget even the Department of Education doesn't have a sufficient budget to just wave a wand and make this happen everywhere but we're trying to use our platform and our bully pulpit to try to make people aware of how when you have arts in schools the performance of these schools goes up dramatically and of course it's always the first thing dropped out of the curriculum when there's a budget crisis it should be the last. Karen and I were having conversations just this morning about other ways to have the example of Drew be carried across the state and we need to have it engage nationally. There's no more important work than this. I know it's a long answer but it's an important question. The whole educational system in this country cannot be to train teachers, to train students to perform on standardized tests in two subjects. A system that I've started to refer to as no tests left behind. And there's a lot more to these kids' futures than performing those standardized tests in those subjects and we're going to do everything we can to make that happen. In terms of talking about partnerships and the creative place making which the strategy is about bringing together various sectors to work on an issue. What is the strategy of the NAA in terms of building partnerships not just the public sector but also in the federal government across other organizational parts of the government? This has been a signature part of our work. The administration, the Office of Management and Budget never likes it when I refer at least publicly to our budget as pathetic but so I didn't say that. But it's certainly limited and there's so much more money in the other federal agencies and what we've tried to do is marshal those resources and so I've made a point of developing close relationships with the cabinet secretaries in the other federal agencies so that now when HUD brings out a $100 million NOFA notice of funding availability for its choice neighborhoods initiative that money is now accessible to arts organizations and arts organizations are encouraged to apply for that and we sit at the table with HUD and help evaluate those proposals. So we're working together with HUD and its resources, their budget is $40 billion. Same thing with the Department of Transportation, the Department of Education, Department of Education's promise neighborhoods program, another $100 million now has a metric for the arts. So if there's an arts aspect to your application you get bonus points for this. You get a preference and that's having a tremendous impact on the applications that are getting written and on what's happening in the schools that are applying for these grants. We did a joint white paper with Kathleen Sebelius and HHS, Department of Health and Human Services. Kathleen came over to the NEA, we kicked off essentially a working group, a study group and we produced a white paper that lays out a research agenda for our agencies to work mutually together because if you look at the whole range of human development arts has a huge role to play. For example, the role of music in very early cognition. There's a lot of evidence, anthropological evidence that mothers were using music and song to relate to their children before there was spoken speech, before there was language. The relationship of arts and mental health, substance abuse, geriatrics, the arts have a role all across human development. So we have a joint program to find out ways that we can work together with HHS because the arts intersect in their portfolio all the time. So it's tremendously important that we engage the other federal agencies and I think we need to do that on a state level and Karen and I were talking about this morning too. We've got to knock on the doors of the State Department of Transportation and all the rest of it to say how can we work together because the arts are a natural part of each one of these agencies and I think that's very important. Question here. Good morning Karen. Good morning. Let's go to our study group. We tested the way that we could see in trying to get the world. We made a look back and see what we could say in terms of what art is playing in the world. As a girl knows the world, what role do you see in our playing in terms of trying to conflict with the human spirit? The human spirit as it resides in Bangladesh, Samaria, South Africa and other parts of the world because the reason why I'm asking this question is because art needs to be done in the artistic world. My personal opinion is that on time, at least 20 years later, we met in America, saying, oh, you need to do something else. But I'm just saying, what do you think art will be as we go forward in the global community? Thank you. Well, art has always been a tremendous part of the identity of a people. I think you're dealing with that every day in your work, Alton. And art is the way the culture is passed on. When I visited the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, I was really struck by how much of the identity of those people from generation to generation is preserved by the art that is passed on and the art that is also produced by successive generations. In Haiti, when the earthquake occurred, what happened? People congregated and sang. They did songs. They found a way to access their own historical culture. And I think art has a tremendous potential worldwide to inspire, to bring together generations to pass on the essential elements of a culture. And we have to make that point again and again, however forcefully we can. Art also has a role globally in terms of our own place in the United States, in terms of our global competitiveness. If you're talking about our economic role in the world, you're no longer talking really about our manufacturing imprint so much as all of the other aspects of our culture, our creativity, imagination, elements that we think of as associated with aesthetics and with art and with design. You see that with a company like Apple or with our cultural exports, movies and the like that are being done. Increasingly, our role worldwide is going to have an aesthetic and creative and imaginative component. It's interesting that you mentioned Apple because as I'm sure you know, there was news in the last couple of weeks about Apple dodging taxes that could be providing a lot of money to our government that in some way could maybe help to make art and the arts, you know, viable. The arts are not economically viable but our country has to get into the mindset that we need the corporate success to help fuel the arts, you know, and not distance themselves from it. So, down I'm going to leave to my friends at the IRS. I have an 11-foot pole rule at the NEA. For things you wouldn't touch with a 10-foot pole, you certainly shouldn't touch with an 11-foot pole. The comment that you made before, which was about your partnering with different organizations and the government and the town, there's been a very ample research indicating that the artistic mindset, if we take the performance out of the conversation for a moment, it is what the actor or the performer brings to the artistic performance that is very highly correlated with creativity and expression. Creativity is highly correlated with entrepreneurship and success in all fields. So, can you speak a little bit about what the NEA is doing in terms of direct partnerships with for-profit corporations around the country in terms of that relationship? Well, very little in terms of direct relationship with for-profit companies. I mean, we really are here in some ways to make sure that the... because we're a grant-making organization, to make sure that it's not just the marketplace that determines what art gets produced. One of the reasons you have an NEA is to subsidize forms of art and works of art that aren't going to be supported readily supported by the marketplace, per se. That being said, as we look at the ecology of a city or town, the economic ecology of it, it's apparent that, you know, there's not a terribly important distinction between the for-profit and not-for-profit arts as those help to revitalize a community. What's the difference really in Miami between all of the museums and not-for-profit arts organizations and Art Basel and the gallery scene? It's all part of one continuum, and I think it's our job to highlight that, and it's sometimes hard to make distinctions. But we do try to subsidize work that might not otherwise be provided for in the marketplace. We know that in Europe, well over 8% of arts and non-profits are supported and funded by the government, which is very foreign to a far-away operating of America. However, it has been a movement in the last decade, musicians like Quincy Jones to help establish some more visibility and support through the Catholic position, as it's been in the 80s elevated to Catholic position of the Catholic community. What is your viewpoint now on that? Would it be to the advantage of the country in terms of development? Would it not be necessary, and what is the status of that? My view is that that would probably be a positive thing. I don't think it's going to happen in this budgetary climate anytime soon. I think probably the last thing that Congress is going to do is to create another cabinet ministry of any kind, let alone the arts. I just don't think that's the mood in the country at the moment. Do I wish that we had a chance to talk about national cultural policy the way other countries can? Yes, I think that would be a nice thing. I just don't think it's going to happen. There is continues to be a lack of understanding of the economic growth and the arts. And the story of the country, how important, for example, software development teams and public development is related to all the things that develop the arts. That story is beginning to be told. It's beginning to get traction. The mayors get it totally. We're increasingly seeing it in states. I think we're seeing it with Governor Diehl here in Georgia. There's a recognition of the real economic power that the arts have. I think that story is unfolding, but it's a process and it's going to take some time. But I think it is happening. And I think even the levels of Congress, there's recognition of it. Congressmen have arts activity in their districts and they can see the impact of it. There's a question over here. We've seen in other communities where creative placemaking, bringing an artist into a community that on the downstream economically has led to an upturn, but it's also led to gentrification and people who live in that community not being able to stay there. What are some of the, how is this challenge being addressed by some of the NEA out of our town grants or some of the work that's being done with the white papers and some of the studies? Gentrification is an interesting issue. Some of it is not such a bad thing. I remember when I was in Baltimore with Sean Donovan, the Secretary of HUD, and HUD was financing an artist housing project in, I'm telling you, a tough, tough neighborhood in Baltimore. Nothing there. I just looked like something bombed out and cratered in a tough, tough district. And they're creating some artist housing because artists love to go into places where you can buy a house for $8,000 or moving to some subsidized apartments and start doing your work. And I said to the mayor of Baltimore, I said, well, so this starts to take hold and starts to happen, what about gentrification? And she said, please God. To have some tax base, to have some increase in economic development, I think is a positive thing. What happens when it becomes so-ho and artists are priced out of the area, that's another issue. And there are ways to approach this. One is, I think, if artists are helping to revitalize a neighborhood or community, maybe there's a way to give them some equity in what they're achieving. Rather than subsidize rental, some equity in their residences. So they have an investment to stay there and in effect subsidize to continue to be there. So you don't have a continual cycle where artists come into a community, revitalize it, and then get priced out because they can't afford to live there anymore. They're dealing with this in New York City with strategies to help the artists participate in what they create. But that's an important challenge. Absolutely. Another part of that is looking at the artists that already live in that community and how can they begin to have a stake in a community that is being shown some interest from people who have some of the more investment capabilities to help to bring about some of the change in those communities. We saw some of the things in Baltimore when we were working there that when people would talk about the creative place-making, it often seemed like they were talking about bringing artists from somewhere else and ignoring the fact that culture exists in every community and how can we use these opportunities to elevate the culture that exists naturally and create space for those community members to have a platform to elevate their own voice. So I appreciate the work that's being done. That's exactly what I was going to ask for, actually. In creative place-making and so forth, looking at individual artists, maybe it doesn't give any money to individual artists anymore, I believe I was wondering which areas we'd hope for that. Then my second question is, often a group is born and how it's a little bit of an initiative for the federal government and how a lot of it generates spirit organizations that don't look at them like they're trying to pull out things like possibly social change that the entity is interested in lifting up in the morning or if you think I'm supposed to be suppressive, I guess that's it. We're back to the 11-foot poll. I won't speak to the merits of any particular organizations. That comes through a panel process and Carlton's been on those panels and certainly knows how that works. With regard to individual artists, I would like to see individual artists supported, of course. We're the National Endowment for the Arts. We should be supporting artists directly. Right now, that's not what's mandated by Congress. It hasn't been on the top of my agenda because there's so many things we have to do in such a short time. If we're up to me personally, we would have direct support for artists. And we do in some areas. In literature, we give direct grants, literature grants. We do it with our heritage fellowships, with our Jazz Masters awards. We do a fair amount of it, but we're limited by Congress in terms of what we can do, actually. There's a guy back there who's had his hand up all day I was listening to you talk about how you tried operating in EC and I was wondering why you would like to see arts organizations being kind of at that same kind of lateral level. The micro example of our organization, you, generously, by the way, I'm glad you came to work with two of the Atlanta public high schools to do residence in, what all of the Shakespeare plays, a fantastic experience as well as the original that you talked about. And then we leverage your funding with a private foundation, well, just don't do that. Maybe you ought to be working with Atlanta public schools. Can one leverage it more? Can we extend it through the thoughts and the ways that individual organizations here could be thinking more broadly about it? I think the two obvious ways are other sources of public funding through other city, state, city and state agencies, we're doing on the national level with our agencies and in the private sector. We started Art Place as a way to, you know, gain resources and scale up resources for investment in the arts and Art Place is growing rapidly. We're adding more foundations all the time. Individuals, we now have a loan fund that's being sponsored by, invested by six banks. And I think the, you know, the private sectors, the organized private sector, particularly foundations, are a way to go for that. Morning. Hi. You mentioned partnerships with the different departments that mention education specifically. I wonder, I teach arts and prisons and consider arts and education to be the best way to reduce production of cynicism. And consider that to be the most marginalized population, one of the most marginalized populations in the United States. Have you worked at all or talked at all with the Department of Justice to try to increase funding for arts and within the person across the country? We haven't and I think that's a good idea. And there's some departments and the Department of Justice is one that we haven't reached yet. I mean, we are, you know, on this full throttle with the ones we've engaged. But I think the Department of Justice, Department of Commerce, Department of Labor, all of those are still on the table. And I think their natural, what you just described with the prison population would be a natural for the arts and we should be talking about that. Absolutely. There was a recent report from the National Council for Responsive Philanthropy which identified the disproportionate amount of philanthropic resources in the arts going to a small minority of organizations to the detriment of artists-led organizations, organizations from hopefully specific communities and organizations working for social justice and social change. Has that report had an impact on the thinking at the NEA about your distribution of resources? That probably is a better question for the people who actually, you know, decided on those grants. They're decided by specific panels by Joan Shigegawa, who's my deputy there. I don't think it's the purpose of an arts grant-making organization to be out promoting any particular social agenda, per se, any kind of social justice in and of itself. I think we're, you know, the excellence of the art, the quality of the art plays a huge role in how we make our grants, and it should. That said, I think there's been a tendency at the funders across the board, both in the private sector and at the NEA in the public sector to fund what we already know and have the relationships we already have, the people we've already funded, the organizations we know well, we know their work, and the easy thing is to keep funding them. We're trying to open up that process. We just came under a lot of criticism because our funding for PBS and PBS stations was cut back in this last cycle. Well, the reason that was cut back is because we opened up the category. It used to be a funding stream for radio and television. Now we've opened that up agnostic to a much wider media. There's so much work that's now produced on the internet, on YouTube. Independent films, something that's not just done by WNAT in New York or by PBS, so we now have a vastly bigger application pool to choose from, and we're trying to get out and around into other organizations rather than just the tried and true ones that we know already and have historically always funded. That's education. I'm a teacher. I'm a former fifth grade classroom, and I'm in my previous career. I have developed software and I'm doing business right now. I'm working in projects specifically in STEM, a science center on the engineering map, but I'm working in the technology map of science and the arts. I'm specifically dancing drama, and I'm interested from your perspective. I'm disappointed that maybe I just didn't found it yet. I expect to see on the line more of a pass or PBS videos where these type of collaborations will be done, given the understanding that STEM is a priority for this country. I mean, I'm not sure if we're doing it through my school, but I'm surprised and disappointed in the form of your perspective where this would be done. Who's doing it and how could it get more on support going on? Well, it was interesting. When we were just at Drew, we saw the intersection of art and science all the time. There was a... They were using magnets to create... use of magnets to create painting, so you learn about science and painting at the same time. We're having a lot of discussions now with the National Science Foundation and with our counterparts, science counterparts and the federal government to find out ways that we can start to work together. I think it's important to agenda and we're going to be on it more and more. We've had enough. That's fun. Just the part I like the most is when there's a real back and forth.