The Art of Board Leadership

New efforts train trustees to serve cultural institutions

When Michael Zahler moved with his wife, Cindy, and their family to Colorado Springs six years ago, they were excited about their new city. Following stints in San Francisco, Seattle, and California’s Silicon Valley, the couple hoped to find a vibrant arts scene like the ones they had previously enjoyed.

But two years after the move, the local symphony filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection, recalls Mr. Zahler, a senior vice president at Wachovia Securities. There was “a lot of money there, but it wasn’t supporting the arts and culture. We were frustrated.”

Mr. Zahler says the city’s arts organizations lacked coordination and communication skills. He would often hear about an interesting cultural event, but only after it was over. For a time, he and his wife considered moving: “Our feeling was either be part of the solution, or leave.”

The couple decided to stay. Mr. Zahler joined the board of a local economic-development group and became a member of a state organization that promotes arts organizations. And this year he completed an innovative training course aimed at business executives who want to help lead nonprofit arts and cultural groups but who need guidance about how best to do so.

Mr. Zahler and 19 other participants became the first Colorado Springs graduates of the Colorado Business Committee for the Arts’ Leadership Arts program. The group’s second session starts next month.

The eight-month course, which has an enrollment fee and meets monthly, was modeled after a similar program operating in Denver for the past decade. The idea originated in Dallas 17 years ago, and business associations in Florida and New Hampshire have also started arts-leadership programs.

Following his graduation, Mr. Zahler joined the board of the Cultural Office of the Pikes Peak Region, a new nonprofit group that seeks to bring continuity to Colorado Springs’ arts and culture scene. Among its first goals, says Mr. Zahler, is to establish an online calendar of local arts events so small groups can promote their programs.

By approaching several foundations, Mr. Zahler and others have garnered $50,000 to get the cultural office off the ground.

‘They Are Bonded’

Leadership Arts is just one of several efforts that are gaining momentum in training board members. As government officials and the news media have put trustees under more scrutiny, many organizations are stepping up their efforts to train board members at charities of all kinds.

“We’ve reached a point where we want to maximize the value that board members bring,” says Vernetta Walker, governance consultant at BoardSource, a nonprofit group in Washington that helps charities strengthen their boards.

That’s what the Leadership Arts program had in mind when the first classes began 17 years ago in Dallas, according to Pat Porter, chief executive officer of the North Texas Business Committee for the Arts.

In 1988, executives at 300 corporations in the northern part of the state came together and realized their region could not attract international business unless it also had a vibrant cultural life, she says.

But, she adds, “it was clear to me that we had a question of confidence in the ability of these agencies to use the money in an accountable way.” The business committee developed the Leadership Arts program to teach business executives how to help arts groups bring about results, she says.

A year later, when the leadership program got off the ground, a study Ms. Porter commissioned determined that $4.2-million in business contributions supported local arts groups. In 2005, she says, that amount had increased to $26.5-million.

She credits the training program with helping to drive that rise in giving. To date, she says, about 830 business leaders in North Texas have graduated from the program, and about two-thirds still live in the region.

Participants learn about the legal and financial responsibilities of board membership at nonprofit organizations, and leave filled with a passion to follow a mission, Ms. Porter says: “It has stabilized the management of the arts agencies in Dallas to an incredible level.”

Getting business executives involved in Dallas’s cultural groups has freed artists to focus more on high-quality programs than on fund raising and administrative issues, she adds.

The Dallas program trains 50 business executives and five arts administrators as a group each year, which creates an interesting dynamic, Ms. Porter notes. Corporate leaders, she says, arrive with the opinion that if nonprofit groups simply ran their organizations like a business, they would be fine.

Meanwhile, “the arts groups think they’re all capitalist pigs,” she says, laughing. “What can I tell you? But they love each other when they leave. They are bonded.”

Benefits for Charities

The Colorado Business Committee for the Arts began its own version of the Leadership Arts program in Denver in the mid-1990s. It has trained 350 business leaders in that city, and is financially supported by the Bailey Company, an Arby’s Restaurant franchise owner.

After last year’s expansion of the program to Colorado Springs, organizers are eyeing Fort Collins as a future site.

Deborah Jordy, executive director of the business committee, says her organization seeks to demonstrate the link between cultural vitality and business prosperity.

The Leadership Arts effort recruits midlevel managers and others who show signs that they could one day become high-level business officials. “We don’t pitch this for top-level CEO’s,” says Ms. Jordy. “Our goals are to build new leadership, younger leadership, diversifying the leadership in the community.”

Elaine Mariner, executive director of the Colorado Council on the Arts, says graduates are excited when they are appointed to serve on the boards of cultural organizations, while nonprofit executives rest easy knowing they recruited a board member who completed a reputable program. “It’s been an important source of new board members, especially for smaller and emerging arts organizations,” she says.

Program participants pay a fee ($500 for business-committee members and $750 for nonmembers) to enroll in the course, which includes monthly sessions on board governance, arts advocacy, and other topics.

The Colorado Springs program has been financed by a three-year grant of $45,000 awarded by the Gill Foundation’s Gay & Lesbian Fund for Colorado, which supports arts and cultural causes along with civic leadership.

Mary Lou Makepeace, executive director of the Gay & Lesbian Fund, in Colorado Springs, says nonprofit groups often struggle to build boards that not only further the charity’s mission, but also are willing to raise money for it. And many business executives who wish to join arts groups feel intimidated because they are not artists, and thus may not feel they have anything to contribute.

The leadership program, she says, brings such people to a board and gives them the tools to lead — like a better understanding of the challenges facing such groups.

“Clearly, the expectation is not just this is an interesting thing to do, but this is an interesting thing to do and you will serve and you will be engaged in the nonprofit community,” Ms. Makepeace says.

Mr. Zahler, of Colorado Springs, says the Leadership Arts program taught him about issues like board governance, financial responsibility, and general management. Much discussion, he says, focused on smaller boards and their dynamics, like the reality that often one person is responsible for providing vision, leadership, fund-raising skills, and management abilities.

Each session of the program is held at a different arts or cultural organization in Colorado Springs, and includes speakers from the groups. At the last session, Mr. Zahler says, representatives of the city’s nonprofit organizations set up booths for the program graduates so that they could meet them, and in some cases recruited them to serve on their boards.

Beyond the Arts

The leadership program’s lessons are also being applied to groups that do not focus exclusively on the arts.

June Chan, administrative director at Colorado Springs Children’s Hospital at Memorial Hospital, saw enrolling in the Leadership Arts program as a way to meet key players in the arts. As a hospital administrator, she says, she looks to the arts as a tool in helping patients heal.

After graduating from the Leadership Arts program in April, Ms. Chan became the head of an arts advisory council of 15 volunteers — most of whom are artists — at the hospital. The council will, in part, advise on the interior designs and art at two new buildings. “One of my goals is to put a theater in the hospital,” she says.

She is also getting more involved outside the hospital.

This summer, Ms. Chan, whose parents immigrated from China in the late 1940s, became a board member at the Colorado Springs Chinese Cultural Institute. And she was named to the board of the Cultural Office of the Pikes Peak Region, the group one of her classmates, Mr. Zahler, also joined.

“If we can somehow, as a state, acknowledge the importance of arts, and the positive impact that arts can bring to local economies, I think that would be fabulous,” she says.

When program participants graduate, the Colorado Business Committee for the Arts monitors their progress at the nonprofit groups they join, Ms. Jordy says.

One alumnus from the 2003 class in Denver went from being a theater board member to board vice president to chairman. Steve Choquette, a trial lawyer, presides over the nonprofit Curious Theatre’s board, which counts half of its members as Leadership Arts program graduates.

With Mr. Choquette’s help and that of other trustees, Curious’s board grew from eight members when he first joined in 2003 to 21 today — and, he says, the board is likely to expand to about 25 trustees, which should increase the board’s ability to reach out to more corners of the city.

In three years, the organization has essentially tripled in size, with 1,000 current ticket subscribers (up from 300) and a budget of about $700,000 (up from $250,000). Foundation and corporate giving are up, and the organization is planning a capital campaign.

“We’ve been on this just wonderful curve toward growth and doing more of the things that we’ve wanted to do,” Mr. Choquette says.

In the Leadership Arts program, Mr. Choquette says, he gained invaluable information on fund raising, and learned to help advocate for the importance of arts within the city. He called fund raising a “learnable skill set that, if you’re willing to practice and take some risk, you can become good at.”

Testifying to Mr. Choquette’s newfound fund-raising prowess is Chip Walton, producing artistic director at Curious.

While Mr. Walton could not specify how much money Mr. Choquette has brought in, he says the group has added one full-time and one part-time staff position in the past three years largely as a result of Mr. Choquette’s help.

Mr. Walton says Mr. Choquette played a key role in helping to recruit Bonnie Metzgar, the former associate artistic director of the Public Theater, in New York, who had relocated to Colorado, and now holds the same position with Curious.

Mr. Choquette is confident that the program’s expansion into Colorado Springs will help that city’s arts groups reap the same benefits that their counterparts in Denver have experienced: “It’s just been tremendous for us.”

Mr. Walton says it is the intangible lessons — such as helping participants learn an area’s “cultural ecosystem,” as he calls it — that are often the most valuable gifts the program can offer to arts organizations.

In most cities, he says, midsize groups like Curious can find it difficult to attract board members, but this program serves as a feeder to connect people to nonprofit groups they might not have thought to join.

“I always feel when we get somebody out of Leadership Arts, we’re five steps ahead of someone who hasn’t completed that program,” Mr. Walton says. “I think it’s brilliant.”