Provocations
Thoughts on power, equity, and the future of cultural leadership. Check back often for new entries!
August 21, 2025
Breaking New Ground: Arts Leadership Meets Venture Innovation
By Emil J. Kang
I'm thrilled to announce my appointment as an Entrepreneur-in-Residence with the Yale Ventures Cultural Innovation Lab at Yale University, one of the first arts leaders to be appointed. This role places me at the intersection of two worlds that have traditionally operated in separate spheres—arts innovation and venture development.
Working alongside Jim Boyle and Frances Pollock through the Cultural Innovation Lab, I look forward to exploring how we can create enterprise infrastructure specifically designed for artists—moving beyond the traditional nonprofit model to develop new pathways for sustainable creative practice. This isn't about turning artists into conventional entrepreneurs—it's about creating conditions where creative innovation can develop with appropriate support, community engagement, and risk tolerance.
The timing couldn't be more urgent. As traditional cultural institutions face unprecedented pressures and communities desperately need creative solutions to complex challenges, we must build new models that support artistic innovation with the same rigor and resources we apply to other forms of entrepreneurship.
My work at Yale Ventures is designed to address what I see as a fundamental infrastructure gap that has long constrained artistic innovation. The goal is to break the cycle of scarcity and institutional dependence that has trapped too many talented creators and instead build ecosystems where artistic vision can translate into sustainable, community-serving enterprises.
This appointment represents a recognition that cultural innovation deserves the same serious investment and developmental framework that we provide to biotech, fintech, and other emerging sectors. But as I've been explaining to colleagues in the venture world, the challenge isn't what most business leaders assume it to be.
The Innovation Gap: Why Artists Don't Get Startup Treatment
The question that haunts every conversation about artists and entrepreneurship is the wrong one entirely. Business leaders, investors, and even well-meaning arts administrators consistently ask: "How can artists better monetize their creative work?" But this assumes the problem lies in the final transaction—the moment when art meets market.
The real crisis happens much earlier, in the vast creative wilderness that precedes any sellable product.
The Infrastructure Gap
When a biotech entrepreneur has a breakthrough idea, they don't immediately worry about how to price their eventual drug. They know there's an entire ecosystem designed to support the journey from concept to market: incubators, accelerators, angel investors, venture capital, research partnerships, regulatory guidance, and communities of fellow innovators who understand the unique challenges of their field.
When a tech founder envisions a new platform, they can access co-working spaces, mentorship networks, prototyping resources, user testing frameworks, and multiple rounds of funding specifically designed for different stages of development. The infrastructure assumes that innovation requires time, experimentation, failure, iteration, and community—long before any revenue appears.
But when an artist has a transformative vision—whether for a new kind of performance, a community-engaged installation, or an entirely novel art form—they face a landscape built around two primary options: secure institutional validation (through galleries, theaters, or nonprofit organizations) or figure it out alone.
This infrastructure gap isn't just an inconvenience. It's the root cause of the "starving artist" mythology and the scarcity mindset that keeps creative innovation trapped in cycles of desperation and dependence.
The Institutional Validation Trap
Most artists who achieve any level of stability do so by learning to navigate existing cultural institutions. They develop grant-writing skills, cultivate relationships with curators and artistic directors, and gradually internalize the aesthetic and political preferences of funding bodies. This process often works—it provides resources, community, and validation.
But it comes with a cost. Artists begin to imagine their work through the lens of what institutions will support rather than what communities need or what their own vision demands. They develop what we might call an "institutional validation reflex"—an unconscious tendency to seek permission from established systems rather than building new ones.
This reflex is understandable. In a landscape where independent artistic practice often means isolation and financial precarity, institutional affiliation offers both material support and social legitimacy. But it also constrains imagination. Artists begin to self-edit before they even create, anticipating the preferences of grant panels and selection committees.
The Scarcity Mindset Spiral
Without infrastructure that supports experimentation and risk-taking, artists operate from a position of chronic scarcity. Every project must succeed. Every grant must be won. Every opportunity must be maximized. This creates a conservative approach to creative risk that's antithetical to innovation.
Contrast this with how tech entrepreneurs approach failure. In Silicon Valley, failure is not just tolerated but celebrated as a learning experience. "Fail fast, fail often" isn't just a slogan—it's built into the funding model. Investors expect that most ventures will fail, and they structure their portfolios accordingly.
But artists are expected to succeed consistently from the beginning. Grant applications require detailed outcomes and impact measures. Residency programs demand finished works. Even artist-entrepreneur programs often focus on helping creators monetize existing work rather than supporting the messy, uncertain process of developing new artistic practices.
What Artist Enterprise Infrastructure Could Look Like
Imagine if artists had access to the same kind of developmental ecosystem that supports other forms of innovation:
Creative R&D Labs where artists could experiment with new forms, technologies, and community engagement models without the pressure to produce marketable outcomes. These wouldn't be traditional residencies with predetermined timelines, but open-ended research environments.
Artistic Venture Studios that provide not just funding but the operational support artists need to build sustainable practices: business development, legal guidance, technology resources, and access to diverse revenue models beyond traditional arts sales.
Community-Centered Incubators designed around the reality that many of the most innovative artistic practices are inherently collaborative and community-engaged. These would support artists in building the social infrastructure their work requires.
Creative Capital Networks that operate like angel investor groups but understand that artistic innovation often requires different timelines, success metrics, and forms of return than purely commercial ventures.
Artistic Accelerator Programs that help artists develop both their creative practice and their capacity to build sustainable enterprises around that practice—not by compromising their vision, but by creating infrastructure that supports it.
Beyond Monetization
The goal isn't to turn every artist into a entrepreneur in the conventional sense. It's to create conditions where artists can develop their work with the same kind of sustained support, community engagement, and risk tolerance that we provide to other forms of innovation.
This means recognizing that artistic innovation often generates value that can't be captured through traditional market mechanisms. The social impact of community-engaged art, the cultural knowledge preserved through traditional practices, the healing potential of creative expression—these outcomes require investment models that understand return beyond financial profit.
The Urgency of Now
The current moment demands this infrastructure more than ever. As traditional cultural institutions face funding cuts and political attacks, as communities grapple with isolation and disconnection, as we confront challenges that require creative solutions—we need artists who can build new forms of cultural infrastructure.
But we can't expect them to do so while operating from scarcity, isolation, and institutional dependence. We need to build the scaffolding that allows creative innovation to flourish.
The starving artist trope isn't a romantic reality—it's a policy failure. It's the predictable result of an economic system that supports innovation in every sector except the one most essential to human meaning-making and social cohesion.
It's time to build something different. Not because artists deserve charity, but because communities deserve the full potential of creative innovation. And that innovation requires infrastructure, investment, and the same kind of serious commitment to experimental development that we provide to every other form of human problem-solving.
The question isn't how to monetize art. The question is how to build an ecosystem where artistic innovation can thrive, experiment, fail, iterate, and ultimately create the cultural solutions our communities desperately need.
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August 25, 2025
What If the Arts Were the Point?
Reclaiming the Transformational Purpose of Higher Education through the Arts
By Emil J. Kang
Higher education is in a moment of reckoning. Public trust is eroding. Budgets are tightening. Political scrutiny is intensifying. The liberal arts have long been the foundation of American higher education, but they are increasingly seen as expendable. Within this context, the arts often find themselves on the margins: praised rhetorically, but rarely prioritized.
When institutions do support the arts, it is often through integration. Students encounter creativity through general education, or in service to other disciplines. The arts are used to foster innovation, wellness, communication, or "soft skills." These efforts are valuable, but they are not sufficient. We need to stop treating the arts as enrichment and start recognizing them as infrastructure.
The Arts as Infrastructure
In higher education, infrastructure typically means buildings, networks, systems. These are the things that allow the rest of the institution to function. But what if we understood infrastructure more broadly? What if the arts were understood as essential to the university's intellectual, emotional, and civic architecture, just like libraries, laboratories, and learning management systems?
The arts are not simply things we do in addition to learning. They are ways of knowing, ways of being, and ways of building community. They enable students to make sense of complexity, to express the inexpressible, and to imagine alternative futures. They train people to listen, to interpret, to hold contradiction, and to pursue meaning. These are not soft capacities. They are structural. Just as campuses invest in physical infrastructure to support research, teaching, and student life, they must also invest in the cultural infrastructure that enables creative, ethical, and collaborative thought.
This means creating robust academic departments that support deep study and artistic production, hiring artist-scholars with full institutional support where artistic practice is valued equally with traditional scholarship, including advancement and promotional structures that recognize creative work as research, and providing dedicated spaces for making, performing, and reflecting rather than just showcasing. It means ensuring campus-wide access to artistic methods for all students, regardless of major, and pursuing integration that doesn't dilute the disciplines, but amplifies their reach.
Crucially, this infrastructure must prioritize relational rather than transactional arts experiences. Too often, universities treat the arts as content to be consumed. Students attend performances, view exhibitions, or take classes for credit. But the transformative power of arts infrastructure lies in sustained relationship: students working alongside practicing artists over time, communities of makers learning from each other, and creative processes that unfold through ongoing collaboration rather than discrete events.
There is also a risk in treating the arts as a cash machine, where success is measured primarily by ticket sales, enrollment numbers, or revenue generation. While financial sustainability matters, reducing arts programming to profit centers undermines the very infrastructure we need to build. When institutions focus primarily on what sells rather than what transforms, they create programming that may be popular but lacks the depth and risk-taking that make arts education transformational. True arts infrastructure requires investment in work that may not immediately generate revenue but builds the cultural and intellectual capacity that serves the institution's broader mission.
This relational approach means artist residencies measured in years, not weeks. It means students engaging in multi-semester creative projects that build deep skills and lasting mentorships. It means community partnerships that evolve over decades, creating genuine cultural exchange rather than superficial outreach. These relationships cannot be purchased or programmed. They must be cultivated through sustained investment in people, processes, and patient development of trust.
We Need Both Depth and Breadth
Some institutions have invested in campus-wide engagement at the expense of supporting arts majors and faculty. Others defend academic arts departments without making space for cross-campus collaboration. But we cannot choose one over the other. If we neglect arts disciplines, we lose the depth and excellence that make integration meaningful. If we silo the arts, we deny their potential to shape how every student learns.
We need both. Scholar-artists and video game designers. Studio art majors and curious engineers. Musicians and policymakers. Choreographers and climate scientists. Each one enriches the other. Together, they form a truly educated public.
The Strategic Opportunity
There is a leadership opportunity here. The institutions that will thrive in the next decade are those that reimagine infrastructure not only in terms of technology or buildings, but in terms of human capacity, cultural relevance, and imaginative reach. In a time of artificial intelligence, climate anxiety, and civic fragmentation, our students don't just need credentials. They need to develop the ability to think metaphorically, act empathetically, and adapt creatively.
This is not an argument for sentiment or nostalgia. It is a case for relevance, strategy, and public value.
For university leaders navigating political scrutiny and budget pressures, arts infrastructure offers concrete advantages that skeptics can understand. Institutions with robust arts programs consistently demonstrate higher alumni giving rates, stronger community partnerships, and more effective crisis response capabilities. When Brown University launched its Arts Institute, alumni donations to the university increased by 23% within three years. When Arizona State University invested heavily in arts integration across disciplines, their retention rates improved and they attracted national attention for innovative programming that differentiated them in an increasingly competitive market.
Arts programs also provide measurable workforce preparation that addresses economic criticism directly. A 2023 study by the National Association of Colleges and Employers found that graduates with significant arts training scored highest on creative problem-solving, communication, and adaptability. These are the skills most in demand from employers across all sectors. These aren't "soft skills" but core competencies for an economy increasingly defined by rapid change and complex challenges.
Perhaps most importantly for institutions under political attack, arts programming creates visible community value that generates goodwill across ideological divides. When universities present community theater, host local artists, or engage students in public art projects, they demonstrate their commitment to place-based service in ways that transcend partisan politics. Town halls may debate diversity initiatives, but they celebrate student orchestras and community art exhibitions.
A Final Word
The arts are not peripheral. They are foundational. They are not a bonus. They are a necessity. And like any true infrastructure, they require investment, upkeep, and integration not for their own sake, but for what they make possible.
So let's stop asking how to "fit" the arts into a constrained system. Let's ask what the university could become if we designed the system around the arts in the first place. What if the arts weren't just part of the story? What if they were the point?
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August 31, 2025
The Excellence Question: Who Gets to Define It?
By Emil J. Kang
Excellence has always been a loaded word in the arts. Its often wielded as a marker of value, a justification for exclusion, or a shorthand for taste. Some invoke it to argue that high standards require narrow access, that broadening participation risks mediocrity. Others reject the term altogether, viewing it as a coded defense of elitism and oppression. But both positions, in their own ways, miss the point.
Excellence is not a neutral concept. Its not a fixed standard hovering above culture, waiting to be discovered. Its a construct, defined by people, shaped by tradition, and measured against values that are far from universal. When we pretend otherwise, when we speak of excellence as if it were objective and settled, we obscure the real question: whose definition are we using, and why should it be the only one that counts?
Throughout my career in the arts, from leading Carolina Performing Arts to overseeing grantmaking at the Mellon Foundation, I have seen how expanding our understanding of excellence does not diminish artistic rigor. It strengthens it. In every instance where we invited new voices, new traditions, and new ways of making and evaluating work, the results deepened, not diluted, our standard of quality.
The Illusion of Universal Standards
The problem is that legacy institutions have long operated under the illusion that excellence has a singular, universal definition. Conservatories taught generations of students that mastery meant refining European classical technique. Galleries prioritized work that aligned with the Western art historical canon. Orchestras constructed seasons as though the canon itself were both immutable and complete. They applied quality metrics that often had more to do with pedigree and polish than with vision or originality.
We see, again and again, how these frameworks fail to account for innovation. When Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring premiered in 1913, it was met with outrage. Audiences rioted. Critics labeled it barbaric. It did not meet the standards of excellence at the time, yet it became one of the most influential musical works of the century. What we now recognize as groundbreaking was initially rejected because it did not conform to prevailing standards.
This reveals a fundamental challenge: our evaluative frameworks are often incapable of recognizing excellence when it arrives in unfamiliar form. We default to what we know. We reward what we understand. And we do so in ways that exclude perspectives, practices, and communities whose contributions do not fit institutional norms.
The Joy of Discovery
True excellence often begins with not knowing, with the joy of discovery and the vulnerability of encountering something unfamiliar. But most arts institutions have structured themselves to validate recognition, not curiosity. They serve audiences who want to feel affirmed in their knowledge, who want to hum along with melodies they recognize, who find comfort in identifying techniques they were taught to admire. Institutions become less about cultivating wonder and more about confirming taste.
The most excellent artistic experiences I have witnessed have not catered to that impulse. They have created space for surprise. They have demanded attention. They have made audiences, and funders and curators, do the work of discovery. Excellence, in that sense, is not about settling debates. It is about opening them.
Excellence as Expansion
This view of excellence as expansive rather than exclusive is not theoretical. When we celebrated The Rite of Spring at 100 at Carolina Performing Arts, commissioning twelve new works from artists around the world, it succeeded not because it adhered to a singular standard but because it welcomed multiple interpretations of what innovation could look like. Each artist brought their own culture, technique, and definition of mastery. The excellence was not uniform. It was plural.
At Mellon, we saw this same pattern emerge. Centering equity did not lower our standards. It raised them. By expanding the grantee pool to include community-based organizations, Indigenous artists, and experimental artist-run spaces, we surfaced forms of excellence that had long gone unrecognized. These were not fringe practices. They were simply outside the field of view of institutions that had never learned how to see them.
Building New Infrastructure
This does not mean abandoning rigor. It means building the institutional capacity to recognize rigor across a wider range of traditions and practices. At UNC, we created residency programs like DiSTIL and Creative Futures with this in mind. These were structured to recognize excellence in community engagement as much as in traditional artistic craft. They made room for artists to define their own standards of mastery while participating in broader artistic conversations.
At Yale Ventures, where I now serve as Entrepreneur-in-Residence, the challenge is creating systems that enable artists to pursue excellence on their own terms. The goal is not just helping artists monetize their work, but building infrastructure that enables imagination, rewards risk, and sustains innovation. Other sectors provide this kind of developmental support. The arts deserve the same.
The Real Standard
The most important question is not whether we believe in excellence. It is whether we believe excellence can be defined in more than one way, and whether we are willing to build institutions capable of supporting that multiplicity. Excellence is not threatened by difference. It is enriched by it.
The real standard is this: can we recognize outstanding work across difference? Can we hold rigor and relevance in the same frame? Can we develop new vocabularies of value, shaped in collaboration with the communities we aim to serve?
Excellence to whom? The answer must be, to all of us. It must be defined not behind closed doors, but out in the open, where artistic power meets cultural imagination and where the highest standards are set not only by history, but by the futures we dare to build.
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August 14, 2025
The Sophistication Trap: Why High Art's “Audience Problem” Isn't About Audiences
By Emil J. Kang
What I'm about to argue will likely seem obvious to most performing arts leaders, artists, and thoughtful observers of the arts landscape. Yet somehow, despite this apparent obviousness, our major cultural institutions continue operating as if the opposite were true.
For decades, symphony orchestras, opera companies, and ballet companies have wrung their hands over the same existential question: How do we attract more diverse and younger audiences? Board meetings have been consumed by this puzzle. Consultants have been hired. Marketing campaigns have been launched promising that classical music is "not stuffy" and opera is "more accessible than you think."
Everyone involved seems to understand, on some level, that the disconnect runs deeper than marketing or pricing. And yet, season after season, we continue programming as if the solution lies in better messaging rather than fundamental reimagining.
So what if we've been asking the wrong question entirely?
What if the problem isn't that people lack the sophistication to appreciate Puccini or the resources to afford orchestra tickets? What if the problem is that we refuse to acknowledge that these art forms were designed by and for a very specific population—and when they fail to resonate beyond that population, we blame the audience rather than examining the art itself?
This will be a difficult conversation for many reasons, not least because there are talented young musicians and musicians of color who have devoted their lives to mastering these traditions and who understandably hope that their artistry can attract their contemporaries and communities. Their investment in these forms is real, their skill undeniable, and their desire to share this music with people who look like them is both moving and valid. But perhaps the question isn't whether they can make classical music relevant to their communities—perhaps it's whether our institutions should be asking them to carry that burden in the first place.
The Architecture of Exclusion
Ballet, opera, and symphony orchestras emerged from the cultural and economic contexts of European aristocracy and American Gilded Age wealth. They were not created as universal languages but as markers of refinement, education, and class distinction. The ritual of attendance—the dress codes, the behavioral expectations, the venues themselves—was as much about social signaling as artistic experience.
When we program a season of Beethoven, Verdi, and Tchaikovsky and then wonder why it doesn't draw significant Latino or Black audiences, we're being willfully naive about cultural specificity. These composers wrote for courts and concert halls where people who looked like those audiences were servants, not patrons. The music carries that history in its very DNA.
This doesn't mean the music is without value or beauty. But it does mean that its failure to speak to everyone isn't a failure of sophistication on the part of those who remain unmoved. It's evidence that cultural expression is rooted in particular experiences, worldviews, and social contexts.
The Sophistication Defense
Perhaps the most insidious response to declining and demographically narrow audiences has been the sophistication defense: the suggestion that these art forms represent the pinnacle of human artistic achievement, and that those who don't connect with them simply haven't developed adequate cultural literacy or refined taste.
This argument positions European classical traditions as objectively superior to other musical forms—jazz, gospel, hip-hop, mariachi, Indian classical music, or any number of other sophisticated musical traditions. It suggests that there's a hierarchy of culture, with Western classical music at the apex, and that proper education will inevitably lead people to recognize and embrace this hierarchy.
But sophistication isn't about climbing a ladder toward European aesthetic ideals. A master of Hindustani classical music, a bebop innovator, or a master drummer in a West African tradition possesses sophistication that rivals any conservatory-trained violinist. The difference is that we've institutionalized one tradition's definition of excellence while treating others as interesting but ultimately lesser forms.
The Accessibility Illusion
The other common response has been to make high art forms more "accessible"—shorter programs, casual dress codes, pre-concert talks, crossover programming. While well-intentioned, these efforts often miss the deeper issue. They assume that the barrier is logistical rather than cultural, that if we just remove enough friction, universal appreciation will follow.
But accessibility isn't just about making something easier to consume. It's about relevance, representation, and resonance. When the stories being told, the aesthetic values being celebrated, and the cultural references being made consistently exclude your experience and worldview, no amount of casual Friday programming will bridge that gap.
Moreover, these accessibility efforts often feel patronizing to the very communities they're trying to reach. The implication is that the art form is inherently valuable and universal, and if people would just give it a chance (with proper hand-holding), they'd discover its worth. This maintains the hierarchy while offering the appearance of inclusion.
Beyond Diversification
The real question isn't how to diversify audiences for European classical traditions. It's whether cultural institutions should be investing the majority of their resources in maintaining and promoting art forms that serve an increasingly narrow slice of the population.
What if, instead of spending millions trying to convince 25-year-olds that Wagner is relevant to their lives, we invested that same energy and funding in developing, presenting, and institutionalizing the musical traditions that actually emerge from and speak to diverse communities?
What if our major cultural institutions became laboratories for contemporary artistic expression rather than museums for 18th and 19th-century European culture?
This isn't about abandoning excellence or "dumbing down" programming. It's about expanding our definition of what constitutes artistic excellence and recognizing that cultural relevance isn't a character flaw—it's how art has always worked.
The Path Forward
Cultural institutions have a choice. They can continue the decades-long project of trying to make 200-year-old European art forms relevant to 21st-century diverse audiences. Or they can acknowledge that these forms serve a particular constituency and design institutions that serve the full spectrum of artistic expression and cultural community.
This might mean programming seasons that are 70% contemporary and community-rooted rather than 70% classical repertoire. It might mean hiring artistic directors from hip-hop, electronic, or world music backgrounds. It might mean fundamentally rethinking what a "symphony orchestra" or "opera company" could be if it weren't tethered to historical European models.
The sophistication trap keeps us stuck in a cycle of lamentation and forced relevance. Breaking free requires admitting that not all art is for all people—and that this isn't a failure of the people. It's simply how culture works. The failure is in building institutions that assume otherwise and then blame audiences when reality proves stubborn.
True sophistication might be recognizing when it's time to let new forms flourish rather than demanding that old forms find new life in contexts where they were never meant to grow.
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August 11, 2025
You Don’t Need a Nonprofit to Make Your Work Matter
Too many artists think they need a nonprofit to make their work legitimate — and too many end up giving away their ownership, time, and focus in the process. Fiscal sponsorship can be a smarter alternative, but the sponsorship world itself is in dire need of greater transparency, accountability, and purpose. This provocation asks a hard question: are we building structures to protect the art, or just more systems that consume it?
By Emil J. Kang
Somewhere along the way, artists were sold the idea that to be taken seriously, they need a nonprofit. File the paperwork, form a board, write a mission statement — and suddenly, the work has “legitimacy.” Funders will take your calls. You can apply for certain grants. You have a tax-exempt number that signals permanence and purpose.
What they don’t tell you is what it costs.
When you turn your art into a nonprofit, you give away more than you think. You give up sole ownership of your intellectual property — your work now belongs to the organization, which is legally its own entity, with a board of directors that has ultimate authority. You give away your time — hours once spent creating are now spent fundraising, filling out compliance reports, managing board politics, and attending endless meetings. You give away your attention — shifting from the practice of making to the business of sustaining an institution. And, perhaps most dangerously, you give away your ability to make decisions solely in service of your vision, because the institution’s survival quickly becomes its own priority.
This isn’t to say that nonprofits are bad, or that they can’t serve artists well. But too often, the assumption is automatic: if you’re an artist with an idea, you “need” to start a nonprofit. That assumption is not only wrong — it’s harmful. The reality is that a nonprofit is a legal and governance structure with obligations, limitations, and consequences that can swallow the very work it was meant to serve.
The good news? You have options.
Fiscal sponsorship allows you to receive grants and tax-deductible donations through an existing nonprofit, without creating your own. You retain your identity, your ownership, and your focus on making — while leaning on an existing infrastructure for compliance and administration. That said, the fiscal sponsorship community itself is overdue for a refresh. Too many sponsors operate with little transparency, uneven service quality, or unclear accountability. Artists often find themselves in relationships where the sponsor benefits more from the administrative fee than the artist benefits from the partnership. The promise of fiscal sponsorship — to reduce administrative burden and provide genuine institutional support — will only be realized if sponsors hold themselves to higher standards of service, clarity, and responsibility.
Cooperative models let you share resources with other artists — space, equipment, marketing, staff — without giving up ownership or creative control. They allow for collective decision-making without imposing the rigid hierarchy of a nonprofit board.
Social enterprises or LLCs let you generate income from your work, pay yourself fairly, and partner with nonprofits when it benefits your mission. You can still apply for certain grants as a for-profit entity (especially through fiscal sponsors), while retaining flexibility to shift or adapt without board approval.
A nonprofit is not a badge of honor. It’s a tool — one of many — and like any tool, it’s only worth using if it fits the job. If your goal is to protect your creative vision, you may need fewer bylaws and more boundaries. The question isn’t whether you can create a nonprofit — it’s whether you can keep making your art once you do.
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August 7, 2025
When the Institution Becomes the Art
What Happens When We Prioritize Structure Over Substance
By Emil J. Kang
In the nonprofit arts world, we talk about the power of creativity, the centrality of artists, and the importance of cultural access. We claim to value risk, experimentation, and vision. We champion new voices and bold work.
But behind the curtain, much of our energy—our time, our funding, our staffing—goes not toward the art itself, but toward preserving the institution that houses it.
We spend months refining strategic plans, polishing board presentations, and reworking org charts. We pour energy into development language, capital campaigns, and brand refreshes. We optimize operations. We fine-tune messaging. We chase relevance. We protect reputation.
None of this is inherently wrong. Institutions need structure, clarity, and sustainability to function.
But there’s a moment—often quiet, often unspoken—when the institution stops existing for the art, and begins existing as the art. When the real creative labor becomes navigating bureaucracy, managing appearances, and sustaining a legacy that may no longer reflect the world outside its walls.
We mistake performance for purpose.
We substitute the container for the contents.
We become stewards of an architecture instead of champions of a mission.
When the Institution Becomes the Product
We see this everywhere:
Artists are underpaid or under-supported while executive teams grow in size and scope.
Programming decisions are driven by donor priorities rather than curatorial ones.
Risk is avoided, not because the work isn’t worth doing, but because the optics aren’t worth managing.
Community partnerships are announced with fanfare but resourced like middling side projects.
The grant report takes more effort than the work it describes.
We build narratives about inclusion, innovation, and transformation—but spend our days defending a model built for a different time.
Eventually, artists notice. So do audiences. And so do the people inside the institution who quietly begin to wonder: Was this what we signed up for?
The Real Cost of Institutional Preservation
When the institution becomes the art, several things happen:
The work becomes thinner, safer, more polished—less urgent.
Staff burn out navigating internal politics instead of building shared purpose.
Boards see success as endurance rather than impact.
Funders begin to reward stability over imagination.
And the public sees through it all and stops showing up.
The paradox is painful: the more we try to preserve the institution, the less alive it becomes. And the less alive it becomes, the more energy it demands just to keep going.
At some point, we stop asking what the institution is for and only ask how to keep it running.
A Way Back to Purpose
We don’t need to destroy institutions. But we do need to remember what they were built to hold.
Arts institutions are not ends in themselves. They are vessels—temporary, evolving, imperfect—meant to support people, practices, and possibilities that transcend their walls.
So the question isn’t how to save the organization. The question is:
What is it still in service to?
Who is it accountable to now?
What could it become if we stopped protecting it and started reimagining it?
This is the creative work that matters—not just on stage or in galleries, but inside leadership, strategy, and governance. Institutions should be among the most dynamic spaces in cultural life—not the most fragile.
A Final Word
We are not here to curate the illusion of progress.
We are here to make space for what matters.
So let’s stop preserving institutions as artifacts.
Let’s start treating them as creative tools.
Let them be malleable. Let them be temporary. Let them breathe.
Because when the institution becomes the art, the art—and the people who make it—begin to disappear.
Let’s not let that happen.
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August 4, 2025
Why the Executive Director–Board Chair Dynamic Deserves Immediate Attention
The Most Overlooked—and Overloaded—Partnership in Organizational Life
By Emil J. Kang
In every nonprofit, there’s a relationship that quietly shapes everything—but rarely gets the attention it deserves. It doesn’t show up in strategy decks, on meeting agendas, or grant reports. It’s not evaluated regularly and it’s almost never resourced. But it holds more power than most people realize. It’s the relationship between the Executive Director and the Board Chair.
This one dynamic often determines whether an organization hums or stalls. Whether a leader thrives or burns out. Whether the board functions as a supportive body or becomes a second job the ED has to manage. And yet, for all its influence, we continue to treat this relationship as something that should simply work on its own—without coaching, without feedback, without reflection.
Too often, the expectations placed on this pairing are both enormous and unspoken. The ED is expected to be visionary and tactical, externally facing and internally grounded, accountable to the board and responsible for staff. Meanwhile, the Chair is expected to be a thought partner, a supervisor, a translator, and a guardian of institutional values—all while serving in a volunteer capacity, often without any training in nonprofit leadership.
The result is a dynamic that’s overloaded with pressure but under-supported in practice. When it’s strong, it can anchor an organization through change, challenge, and uncertainty. When it’s strained or misaligned, it can quietly erode trust, create confusion, and destabilize the leadership from within.
I know this from experience. As a young Executive Director, I inherited board chairs I didn’t choose—well-meaning people, but not always the right partners for the moment. Sometimes they were placed in the role out of seniority, donor status, or internal politics. I was expected to “manage the relationship,” even if there was no alignment in approach, communication style, or vision. I learned early how much effort went into managing up before you could manage anything else—and how quickly misalignment at the top could spill across the organization.
And even as a more seasoned executive, I encountered Chairs who, despite good intentions, misunderstood their role. They saw themselves not as champions of strategy, but as authors of vision. They wanted to lead direction, not steward it. And in doing so, they subtly displaced the very leadership they were meant to support. Worse still, I’ve experienced Chairs who treated the board’s failings—its lack of engagement, internal dissonance, or unclear direction—as the Executive Director’s fault. In those cases, even a successful ED—someone leading boldly, navigating complex terrain, and delivering on mission—found their work diminished, their accomplishments unacknowledged. When the board faltered, blame flowed downhill. But when the organization thrived, credit mysteriously dispersed. That kind of dynamic is not just demoralizing—it’s corrosive.
Then there are Chairs who simply avoid the hard parts of the role altogether. They struggle to make decisions, delay action when clarity is needed, and fail to hold their fellow board members accountable. Dysfunctional dynamics are left to fester. Underperforming or disruptive trustees go unchecked. And rather than confronting governance issues directly, these Chairs quietly hand the burden to the Executive Director—expecting them to be the diplomat, the enforcer, and the adult in the room. But EDs are not responsible for managing the board. That’s the Chair’s role. When Chairs abdicate that responsibility, the ED is forced to absorb tension that isn’t theirs to carry. It’s a recipe for resentment and burnout, and it often leaves the board wondering why leadership feels misaligned—when the root issue is simply a Chair unwilling to lead.
What makes this relationship so tricky is the ambiguity built into it. The Board Chair is technically the ED’s supervisor—but can also be the ED’s closest confidant. They represent the board’s authority, but also serve as the ED’s ally in navigating board dynamics. That ambiguity can work beautifully in the hands of two emotionally intelligent, mission-aligned partners—but more often, it creates tension, especially when roles aren’t clear and communication isn’t intentional.
I’ve seen EDs withhold information from their Chairs for fear of being micromanaged. I’ve seen Chairs insert themselves into day-to-day operations because they quietly lack confidence in the staff or haven’t been given a clear scope. I’ve seen high-functioning organizations lose momentum, not because anyone was failing, but because this one relationship was misaligned and nobody knew how to talk about it.
It doesn’t have to be this way. We could treat the ED–Chair relationship as a central piece of organizational infrastructure—something to be built, maintained, and occasionally repaired. That would mean offering onboarding and coaching not just for EDs, but for Chairs, and even better, for both. It would mean carving out protected time for the two to align—not just on tasks and timelines, but on values, tone, and approach. It would mean creating mechanisms for feedback, not just from one to the other, but from staff and board members who feel the ripple effects of this relationship in their everyday work.
Too often, we choose Board Chairs based on tenure, influence, or wealth rather than their capacity to lead in partnership. But the best Chairs aren’t always the loudest voices or biggest donors. They’re the ones who understand that leadership is relational. They show up with humility, consistency, and the willingness to listen and evolve.
This work is especially important now, in a sector grappling with burnout, equity gaps, and trust deficits. Executive Directors—particularly BIPOC, women, and first-time leaders—are often navigating the pressure to transform institutions while still managing legacy structures and personalities that resist change. A misaligned Chair can become yet another layer of friction. But a well-aligned Chair can be a lifeline—someone who creates space, deflects unnecessary noise, and helps the board evolve alongside the staff.
While the burden of balance shouldn’t fall solely on the Executive Director, there are steps an ED can take to help build and sustain a strong Chair relationship. The first is to treat the relationship as something that requires intentional design—not just functional interaction. Schedule regular, candid one-on-ones—not just about decisions and deliverables, but about how the relationship is working. Be explicit about what kind of support you need and where you want your Chair to lead—particularly when it comes to board accountability. Share wins and challenges early, and invite feedback before there’s a problem. And perhaps most importantly, clarify the boundaries: What belongs to the board? What belongs to staff? And what belongs to this unique, high-trust partnership?
It’s not always easy, especially when the Chair isn’t aligned. But small, early interventions can prevent long-term dysfunction. Don’t assume your Chair understands how best to support you—help them learn, and invite them into that growth alongside you.
So if you’re a Board Chair, ask yourself: Am I leading in a way that empowers or constrains? If you’re an ED: Does my Chair know what I actually need from them, and have we ever talked about it explicitly? And if you’re part of a board: When was the last time we checked in—not just on what our ED is doing, but if our ED and Chair are showing up well in this relationship?
Too many great leaders have left roles not because they weren’t effective, but because this single relationship failed them. Too many organizations have stalled not because of strategy or money, but because of confusion at the top.
It’s time to stop treating the ED–Chair relationship as incidental. It’s not. It’s structural. It’s cultural. And it’s worth getting right.
# # #
July 29, 2025
When "Lack of Funding" Becomes the Answer to Everything
Why We Can’t Let Scarcity Thinking Replace Vision
By Emil J. Kang
As a former funder, I’ve often asked leaders what’s getting in the way:
Why hasn’t this project launched?
Why isn’t the strategy evolving?
Why did the community partnership stall?
Why is the team burned out?
And nearly every time, I get the same response:
“We don’t have the funding.”
Let me be clear: funding does matter. Many organizations are navigating real precarity, stretched staff, and historic underinvestment. The structural barriers are real.
But something else is happening, too.
“Lack of funding” has become the reflexive answer to everything.
A kind of shield. A placeholder. A wall between aspiration and action.
The Risk of Believing It Too Fully
When every challenge is attributed to money, we risk losing the very thing funding was meant to support: vision.
Vision becomes deferred.
Boldness becomes conditional.
Imagination becomes indulgent.
And leadership becomes risk management.
We stop dreaming out loud because we’re afraid of being unrealistic.
We stop naming what we really want because we’re afraid no one will fund it.
We stop doing the thing that drew us to the work in the first place—imagining a different future.
What We Don’t Mean
This is not about telling under-resourced leaders to bootstrap harder.
This is not a call for magical thinking or martyrdom.
This is not about ignoring injustice or pretending money doesn’t matter.
It’s about asking an honest question:
Have we let the idea of scarcity become more powerful than the actual constraints?
When Scarcity Becomes the Operating System
The danger isn’t just in budget cuts.
It’s in how scarcity reshapes behavior:
We scale back before we’ve even tested the idea.
We write proposals based on what we think funders will say yes to—not what communities need.
We decline opportunities for fear of not being able to sustain them.
We maintain programs we don’t believe in—because they’re funded.
We stop asking for what’s needed—because hearing “no” has worn us down.
At some point, the lack of funding doesn’t just limit the work—it becomes the work.
A Different Invitation
What if the question wasn’t, “What can you do with what you have?”
But: “What do you want to do, regardless?”
What if we asked:
What would this look like if money weren’t the first constraint?
What vision are you holding back because you assume it won’t be funded?
What would be worth doing even if it’s hard to pay for at first?
How might imagination itself attract the support you haven’t yet found?
As Funders, We Have a Role Too
We must take responsibility for the habits we’ve helped create:
Rewarding incrementalism over transformation
Making sustainability a precondition for support, instead of a goal
Asking for clarity without making space for uncertainty
Claiming to want boldness while quietly incentivizing safety
We don’t get to ask for vision if we only fund feasibility.
We don’t get to demand imagination if we punish risk.
But we do get to ask:
Are you letting the lack of funding become your reason for not dreaming?
A Closing Thought
The absence of money is a barrier.
But the absence of imagination is a crisis.
Vision is not the result of abundance.
It’s the reason we fight for it.
So the next time you start with, “We can’t because we don’t have…”
Try starting with:
“What if we tried anyway?”
And let’s see who’s ready to fund that.
# # #
July 31, 2025
The Virtues of the Drunken Walk: Why a Nonlinear Career Might Be the Most Honest One
by Emil J. Kang
I remember sitting in a darkened theater at TEDGlobal in Oxford back in 2009, listening to a speaker I was certain had introduced himself as a professor from Stanford’s d.school. He was talking about innovation, but what I remember most was a phrase he used to describe the creative process: “the drunken walk.” He meant it as a compliment—a metaphor for the circuitous, instinct-driven, unpredictable journey that ideas (and people) often take before they become fully legible to the world.
The moment he said it, something clicked. That was it. That was the story of my career. I underlined the phrase in my notebook and carried it with me, repeating it to colleagues, students, and even boards of directors when they asked how I ended up wherever I happened to be. I used it in speeches. I built it into lectures. I never forgot the phrase—but I did forget the man. Recently, I tried to find him. I Googled “drunken walk career Stanford TED” and got nothing. No speaker. No paper trail. No evidence that anyone officially coined it.
So, if you're out there, sir: thank you. Your phrase has become part of my story. And if no one else claims it, I’ll carry it forward—because if anyone has lived the drunken walk, it’s me.
My Career as the Quintessential Drunken Walk
By most conventional standards, my career defies logic.
I led a major American symphony orchestra at age 31.
I spent 15 years in higher education without a PhD or tenure.
I founded a performing arts program outside an urban center and built it to international prominence.
I directed one of the nation’s most influential arts and culture grantmaking portfolios without formal training in philanthropy.
Not one of these moves followed a master plan. They came from listening, responding, and leaning into the unknown—again and again. The drunken walk is not a detour. It’s a discipline of presence.
Certainty Is Overrated
The traditional career narrative is a linear fantasy: get the right degree, climb the ladder, earn the title, repeat, and cash in. But real life is rarely so symmetrical. People change. Institutions shift. Values evolve.
A nonlinear career—one that arcs and twists—is more than a survival strategy. It’s a refusal to reduce work to a résumé. It is an act of agency in a world that craves predictability.
The drunken walk teaches you to navigate uncertainty not with fear, but with fluency.
The Case for Cross-Pollination
We’re taught to pursue depth: to specialize, drill down, and master our lane. But sometimes it’s breadth—not depth—that makes innovation possible.
The most powerful ideas often emerge not from perfection, but from cross-pollination. When an orchestra executive thinks like an urban planner. When a grantmaker borrows from choreography. When a professor applies lessons from Bharatanatyam to board governance.
My career has unfolded through these collisions. Not because I chased disruption, but because I followed what sparked my curiosity, even when it didn’t "fit."
Each turn—whether into orchestras, universities, or philanthropy—gave me new tools and new perspectives. Not everything connected right away. But over time, the intersections became the edge.
A straight path might build expertise. But a crooked one? That builds imagination.
The World Isn’t Linear, So Why Should We Be?
Our culture fetishizes continuity. We’re told to specialize. To stay in our lane. To build tenure in one domain.
But the world we live in isn’t linear. It’s messy, adaptive, and relational. A drunken walk career mirrors that reality. It builds muscles for ambiguity, systems thinking, and pattern recognition.
In philanthropy, this helped me see that artists weren’t just grantees—they were economists, care workers, and civic agents. In education, it helped me bridge the divide between intellectual production and emotional impact. A nonlinear life fosters lateral wisdom—the ability to connect what others keep siloed.
Retrospective Logic
At the time, many of my choices raised eyebrows—or quiet questions. Why leave the orchestra world just as my profile was rising? Why consult after leading one of the largest arts portfolios in private philanthropy?
But none of these moves were accidents. They were recalibrations—toward people, toward values, toward the work that felt most alive at the time.
The drunken walk career doesn’t always make sense in the moment. It makes sense in retrospect. It rewards reflection over prediction.
Wisdom Through Wandering
Eventually, people stop hiring you for what you’ve done and start seeking you out for how you think. If you’ve walked many paths—with intention and humility—you bring more than experience. You bring perspective.
Those who’ve wandered tend to be more patient with complexity. More fluent in context. More attuned to contradiction. They know how to pivot, how to co-create, how to listen. They understand that leadership is less about control and more about capacity—the capacity to hold difference, tension, and uncertainty without collapsing.
That is wisdom. And it doesn’t come from staying on the rails.
Conclusion: Let the Walk Be Worth It
To be clear: the drunken walk is not about chaos or aimlessness. It’s about surrendering the fantasy of control in favor of authentic direction. It’s about trading prestige for purpose, certainty for curiosity.
If your career doesn’t look like a ladder, good. Maybe it’s conceptual art. Maybe it’s a poem. Maybe it’s a life.
Some people follow a plan. I followed questions. I followed people I trusted. I followed discomfort. And eventually, I followed myself.
# # #
July 28, 2025
What If Your Board Is the Problem?
Understanding How Board Dynamics Differ—and Why One Model Can’t Serve Us All
By Emil J. Kang
Reckoning with the Quiet Power That Shapes—and Sometimes Stalls—Institutional Change
A few weeks ago, I sat across from the executive director of a respected cultural institution. She looked exhausted—not from the daily grind alone, but from carrying something heavier: the unspoken weight of institutional inertia.
“We’ve tried everything,” she told me. “Strategic planning, community partnerships, new programs, new donors, consultants. We’ve reorganized staff roles. But still—nothing feels like it’s truly changing.”
Then came the hesitation. And the truth.
“I think the problem might be the board.”
She’s not the first leader who’s said this to me. And she won’t be the last.
In the nonprofit and cultural sectors, we speak openly about many structural challenges: underinvestment in leadership, unsustainable expectations of staff, public distrust, racial and economic inequity. But we rarely scrutinize one of the most powerful structures in the building:
The board.
The Most Unexamined Force in Institutional Life
Boards wield immense, often invisible influence. They hire and fire executive leadership. They approve or stall new strategies. They set priorities, define risk, and shape public positioning. And yet, board culture remains largely undiscussed—even sacrosanct.
In an industry that demands change from everyone else—artists, staff, audiences—boards often remain the least examined, least diverse, and most static structure of all.
It’s time to name the possibility that many are too cautious to say aloud:
What if your board is not just underperforming—but actively standing in the way of your mission?
Two Governance Realities
To tackle the problem, we must acknowledge that not all boards function the same way. Governance reform fails when it assumes a one-size-fits-all model, ignoring the deep contextual differences between types of institutions.
Legacy White Institutions
Museums, orchestras, foundations, and universities—often rooted in elite civic or philanthropic traditions—typically have boards that:
Recruit from homogenous, affluent networks
See themselves as stewards of reputation, tradition, and endowment
Prioritize control over collaboration
Expect innovation from staff, but preservation in the boardroom
Struggle with equity work when it threatens legacy or comfort
In these settings, the board is often the most powerful and least accountable entity in the institution.
Community-Based Organizations (CBOs)
CBOs emerge from different soil. Often born of grassroots efforts, mutual aid, or cultural resistance, their boards may:
Include those with deep ties to the community or movement
Be volunteer-run and under-resourced
Struggle with governance capacity or founder entrenchment
Share strong personal relationships with staff and constituents
Operate from relational trust more than formal policy
In these spaces, the challenge isn’t resisting change—it’s sustaining leadership and structure without being co-opted.
Each presents different governance dynamics—and each requires different strategies.
The Myth of the Universal Board
Many reform efforts still assume one dominant model of governance: the “high-performing” board composed of well-connected professionals who donate generously and offer expertise.
But what if you serve a community where the “wealthy gentry” don’t exist? What if your organization is rooted in cultural resilience, not capital accumulation? What if proximity to the work is more important than proximity to money?
This is not a shortcoming. It’s an opportunity.
We don’t need to replicate elite governance models. We need to reimagine power-sharing from the ground up.
Power Beyond Capital
Communities have always had forms of capital that are ignored in traditional boardrooms:
Moral authority from elders, educators, faith leaders
Cultural fluency from artists, language keepers, and tradition bearers
Organizing skill from mutual aid, tenant unions, and movement leaders
Operational wisdom from small business owners and service workers
Social trust earned through proximity and accountability
A board built from these forms of leadership may not be wealthy in dollars—but it is rich in vision, legitimacy, and relevance.
What We Can Do (Depending on Who We Are)
For Legacy Institutions:
Decenter wealth as the default qualification. Open seats to cultural workers, activists, artists, and organizers.
Build governance structures accountable to community, not just donors.
Compensate board members for their time, especially those historically excluded from wealth.
Educate boards on institutional history, systemic inequity, and the difference between control and accountability.
Embrace discomfort as a condition for transformation.
For Community-Based Organizations:
Define governance around your mission, not around compliance alone.
Create advisory or co-governance councils rooted in lived experience.
Clarify roles while honoring relational culture.
Invest in board support: facilitation, peer learning, and community-rooted leadership development.
Reject the pressure to emulate the elite—design from your values instead.
Emerging Models to Consider
Governance Councils: Bodies made up of staff, community members, and artists with real decision-making authority.
Distributed Boards: Strategic, financial, and program advisory groups that share power horizontally.
Community-Nominated Panels: Rotating collectives drawn from stakeholders and compensated for their insight.
Staff-Board Hybrids: Models where those doing the work have a seat at the table—not as guests, but as peers.
Mission-Led Models: Governance that centers proximity, purpose, and accountability to people—not just to funders or law firms.
The Cost of Doing Nothing
Without real change, the outcomes are predictable:
Leadership burnout, especially for BIPOC and first-generation leaders
Talent loss due to values misalignment
Community distrust
Performative equity
Strategic paralysis masked as stability
And beneath all of that: the erosion of public purpose in favor of private comfort.
A Closing Invitation
Governance is not a technical problem—it’s a moral one.
Boards are not neutral—they are expressions of what an institution values, who it trusts, and what it’s willing to change.
If your organization feels stuck, ask the deeper question:
Who really holds power here? And what would it look like to share it?
We can’t build equitable institutions using inequitable models of leadership.
We can’t fight exclusion while gatekeeping our own governance.
We can’t expect transformation if the board is unwilling to transform.
So ask it clearly, and ask it now:
What if your board is the problem? And what new future might be possible if you started the work of reimagining there?
# # #
July 23, 2025
Beyond the Product: Valuing the Artist’s Humanity
By Emil J. Kang
Much of the conversation in the arts world focuses on institutions: how nonprofits can be more equitable, more sustainable, more responsive. But we also need to widen the frame. Institutions don’t make culture—artists do. And if we’re serious about equity and sustainability, we must extend that same concern to the individuals at the heart of our field. That means not just analyzing systems, but honoring the lives of the people inside them.
In a culture obsessed with the new—new works, new premieres, new names—it’s all too easy to reduce artists to the value of their most recent output. Applause is abundant at opening nights. Critics rush to offer hot takes. Funders clamor for "innovation." But in our eagerness to consume what artists produce, we often overlook something essential: their humanity.
Artists are not vending machines of brilliance. They are people—complex, evolving, sometimes uncertain, often under pressure. The process of making art is not linear. It demands solitude, experimentation, failure, and recovery. And yet the systems we build around artists rarely account for this. Instead, they incentivize constant production and public performance, rewarding output over insight, deliverables over depth.
Too often, we fail to see artists in the full dimension of their lives—as caregivers, community organizers, neighbors, cultural stewards. Many artists hold multiple roles that sustain not just themselves, but the people around them. They raise children, care for elders, teach, show up for their communities. Their creativity is not just expressed in their work, but in how they contribute to the ecosystems they inhabit.
What if, instead of asking “What are you working on next?” we asked, “How are you holding up?” What if residencies were structured not just to extract a new piece, but to restore the artist? What if we viewed the artist’s being as just as vital as their doing?
This is not an argument against ambition or excellence. It’s a reminder that meaningful work often comes from well-being, from community, from the courage to pause. When we treat artists as whole people—with inner lives, histories, and needs—we make space for the kind of work that lasts. Work that isn’t driven by fear of irrelevance but by a deep engagement with the world.
Valuing an artist’s humanity means respecting their time and their rhythms. It means honoring their commitments beyond the stage or studio. It means not asking them to perform their identity for our comfort. It means seeing them not as a means to an institutional end, but as co-creators of culture, worthy of dignity whether or not they’re currently “producing.”
We cannot advocate for equity in the arts while commodifying the very people who animate it. We must build systems that don’t just present artists—but protect them. Not just spotlight their output—but sustain their lives.
Let’s shift the question from what’s next? to what’s needed?
That’s where true support—and true transformation—begins.
# # #
July 21, 2025
In Search of the Unicorn: Rethinking How We Recruit Board Members
By Emil J. Kang
Every nonprofit says they want a “diverse, engaged, and strategic” board. But what they usually mean is: someone wealthy, available, and agreeable.
Too often, board recruitment feels like a desperate game of compromise. We need someone with access, but not too opinionated. Someone with influence, but no ego. Someone with money, but no strings. In short: a unicorn. And when that unicorn never arrives, we settle. We tap our friends. We recycle names. We let our networks decide our future.
But here's the real danger: the people who most need to be on our boards are rarely in the rooms where board recruitment happens.
The process itself is broken. It’s informal, opaque, and often driven more by affinity than by alignment. Many boards still rely on “who do we know?” instead of “what do we need?” There’s rarely a matrix, rarely a skills gap analysis, rarely a serious conversation about governance as leadership — not oversight, not fundraising, but real generative thought partnership.
And when we ask current board members to name their successors, we double down on the problem. We reproduce the same class, race, and professional backgrounds, again and again. The board becomes an inner circle — self-selected, self-reinforcing, self-satisfied. Even when well-meaning, this approach assumes that proximity equals potential, and that social capital is the only kind that matters. It’s a system designed not to change.
We ask potential board members for their bios, but not their values. We invite them to galas before we invite them to listen. And when they don’t “fit,” we blame culture clash — when really, the culture hasn’t changed in decades.
Too many organizations recruit for comfort, not transformation.
And yet: the board holds enormous power. They shape who gets hired. What gets funded. What risks are taken. Who is heard. Who is protected. If we want our organizations to evolve, our boards have to evolve first.
So how do we widen the circle?
We start by changing the prompt. Instead of asking, “Who do we know?” we ask, “Who should we know?” We make board recruitment a public process — not a private handoff. We post openings. We partner with community leaders, not just consultants. We host listening sessions before we extend invitations. We name the values and lived experiences we seek, and we name the power we’re willing to share.
We also prepare the board to receive new members differently — not as guests, but as co-authors. We orient not just to bylaws and budgets, but to culture and history. We assign mentors. We design onramps. And we commit, in writing, to changing how decisions get made.
This means rethinking not just who we bring in, but how. It means moving beyond the idea that good board members are simply generous donors. It means looking for lived experience, community ties, operational insight, even creative intuition — not just business credentials. It means welcoming people who might ask hard questions, not just clap politely.
It also means we must stop recruiting for “representation” while refusing to change our norms. You cannot diversify a room without redistributing power inside it.
The strongest boards I’ve seen aren’t the ones with the most prestige — they’re the ones that understand their role as stewards, not saviors. Partners, not patrons.
So what if we stopped looking for unicorns?
What if we built boards like we build ensembles — with chemistry, rigor, friction, trust, and above all, purpose?
That wouldn’t just change who leads our organizations.
It would change what our organizations are capable of becoming.
# # #
July 18, 2025
Legacy Is Not a Succession Plan
Why the Hardest Part of Leadership Is Letting Go
By Emil J. Kang
We’ve all seen it: the beloved founder who stays too long. The board paralyzed by nostalgia. The institution caught in limbo—grateful for its past, but unable to imagine a future without it.
Succession planning is one of the most critical and neglected responsibilities in arts leadership. Especially when the leader being succeeded is also the founder, the architect, the visionary.
But let’s be clear: longevity is not a strategy. And legacy is not a plan.
In too many organizations, legacy is treated as something to preserve rather than something to redistribute. Successors are chosen to protect the institution’s image, not to evolve its identity. Boards prioritize continuity over relevance. And the departing leader is revered, while the incoming one is measured against an impossible standard: Be like them—but also fix what they left behind.
This is a trap—for the organization, the successor, and the field.
Founders often say they want to “leave it better than they found it.” But what they rarely say—what boards rarely ask—is: Better for whom? And who gets to decide what’s next?
Too often, boards treat succession like a ceremonial handoff. But succession is not ceremonial—it is structural. And that makes it the board’s responsibility.
When boards avoid the hard questions—when they refuse to interrogate whether the founder's values still serve the mission—they become complicit in stagnation. When they appoint a successor without redistributing authority, restructuring the organization, or preparing staff and stakeholders for change, they set that leader up to fail.
Worse, some boards see succession as a threat. They retain decision-making power but offload blame. They frame new leadership as "evolution," while quietly demanding replication. And they abandon their own accountability, using legacy as a shield.
Let’s be clear: boards must lead the succession conversation. Not as gatekeepers, but as stewards of future possibility.
That means:
Defining leadership not by familiarity, but by vision.
Structuring the transition to empower—not constrain—the next leader.
Letting go of expectations that reinforce comfort over relevance.
And honoring legacy not by preserving it, but by releasing its grip.
Because the greatest legacy a founder can leave is not their name on the building, but a structure that can evolve without them, a board that can confront its own fears, and a future that doesn’t look like the past—and doesn’t need to.
Legacy is not what you leave behind. Legacy is what you make possible when you step aside—and when the board lets you.
# # #
July 13, 2025
Evolving the Nonprofit
By Emil J. Kang
Leadership transitions in the arts are often framed as moments of renewal. A new person arrives, and with them, the suggestion of change. But too often, we focus on who is stepping in, without asking what they are stepping into—or whether the structure itself is still serving its purpose.
The nonprofit model—especially in the cultural sector—was built for a different era. It was constructed around philanthropy-as-patronage, governance by proximity, and the idea that stability equals success. For decades, these assumptions went unquestioned. But the world has changed. And our institutions, in many cases, have not.
Even the boldest leaders can only work within the constraints of the system they inherit. If that system is designed to protect the status quo, then no appointment—no matter how visionary—can fully deliver transformation. And yet, we continue to install leaders into legacy models as though the job is simply to maintain and polish, not to reimagine.
So instead of asking who leads next, maybe we should ask:
How do we evolve the nonprofit?
What if the next generation of cultural institutions weren’t organized around hierarchy, legacy, and inherited privilege—but around service, accountability, and civic impact?
What if we imagined structures that prioritized:
Shared power over elite proximity
Transparency over tradition
Public relevance over private recognition
Distributed leadership over singular authority
What if boards were designed to represent communities, not just endowments?
What if artistic programming responded to public need, not donor demand?
What if governance wasn’t the quietest room in the building, but the most generative?
These are not rhetorical questions. They are urgent ones.
Because every time we applaud a new appointment without examining the framework that person is stepping into, we risk reinforcing a system that no longer serves the moment.
I’m not interested in symbolic leadership. I’m interested in structural evolution.
In the coming weeks, I’ll be writing more about this—how we got here, what needs to change, and where bold institutional imagination might take us. One upcoming essay is called Culture Is Civic Infrastructure—a rethinking of the nonprofit’s role not as an elite outpost, but as a public good.
The future of our institutions depends on the questions we’re willing to ask now—not just about people, but about power. Not just about succession, but about design.
And if you’re asking the same questions—or building something new—I hope we’re in conversation.
# # #
July 10, 2025
Leadership vs. Stewardship: What the Arts Need Now
by Emil J. Kang
In the American cultural sector, we confuse management with vision. We reward stability over courage. We elevate stewards and call them leaders.
I write this not as a provocation for its own sake, but as a call to rethink how we define—and more importantly, recognize—leadership in the arts.
For too long, our major institutions have selected executives who preserve inherited structures rather than reimagine them. They maintain budgets, sustain relationships, and deliver season brochures on time. These are not insignificant tasks—but they are not, in themselves, leadership. They are stewardship.
Leadership, by contrast, is imaginative. It is willing to risk comfort for truth. It invites disruption when the systems in place no longer serve the people they claim to represent. It asks deeper questions: Whose stories are being told? Whose communities are being served? Whose future are we building?
The problem isn’t just individual. It’s systemic. We have built a field in which boards hire familiarity. Search firms propose only the known quantities. Donors reward the calm hand, not the bold voice. And so, we recycle the same names, celebrate the same résumés, and wonder why the public grows more distant from our institutions.
We live in a time of cultural reckoning—across race, economy, democracy, and history. And yet, much of our leadership continues to operate as if we are managing orchestras in 1995, museums in 1985, or foundations in 1975. We perform inclusion, but fund the same ideas. We announce equity, but protect legacy. We say we want change, but reward continuity.
I’ve spent the last 30 years working across philanthropy, higher education, performing arts institutions, and government. I’ve witnessed firsthand how impact is often sidelined in favor of optics. I’ve watched leaders who challenged the status quo be passed over for those who promised “stability.” And I’ve seen the slow erosion of public trust in cultural institutions that no longer speak to the urgency of people’s lives.
This is not cynicism. It’s clarity.
The next chapter of the arts will not be written by those who simply inherit buildings. It will be authored by those who are brave enough to tear down walls—metaphorical and literal—and build anew. The leaders we need now will not be afraid of ambiguity, discomfort, or dissent. They will embrace them as part of the creative process of institutional reinvention.
We must recognize and reward these leaders. We must fund them. Appoint them. Trust them. Because without them, the arts will continue to drift—safe, familiar, and increasingly irrelevant.
It’s time to stop mistaking stewardship for leadership.
The future demands more.
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What deserves provocation?
The most urgent questions in arts leadership are certainly not only mine to name. If you’ve been wrestling with a tension in the field - a stubborn contradiction, a structural hypocrisy, a silent truth - I want to hear it. I may feature your prompt (anonymously or credited) in a future provocation.
Please share a sentence, a scenario, or even a few words that deserves interrogation. Thank you!