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scheherazadesghost

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Everything posted by scheherazadesghost

  1. Can you elaborate on this? I hadn't connected paying tuition to safeguarding prior to reading your comment, but I'm open to learning more.
  2. Yeah, apologies Terri. I didn't mean for that to read as confrontational as it does. I 100% agree, it did used to serve youth as its primary directive. I think that's still there, but it's buried under a bunch of buzz word goo and mission creep.
  3. Love hearing these ideas. They won't start cookin' til corps collect the data to back them up. If the hard data is not being collected and/or integrated across the industry, no one will accept the need for change. This sort of data work usually falls under the grant writer or advancement officer's responsibilities bc reliable donors and grants require it. In academia, it's the institutional researchers. I'm stuck in this very pickle. No one wants to take drastic action to improve safeguarding? Fine, I'll continue to collect data until it's so vast it can't be ignored.
  4. Congrats on completing your degree. My young life and beyond were also negatively affected by putting drum corps first. And boy, do I have too many reports that validate both of our experiences. To answer OP's first question, I'd say an alumni and member experience audit conducted yearly is in order. It doesn't even have to turn up negative experiences to be fruitful. If all feedback comes back 100% positive, great, you have more fodder for marketing. In case it doesn't, the org can directly address and integrate that feedback while also doing damage control among their internal and external stakeholders. The leaders in this activity should no longer be allowed to assume that their member experience is perfect. Show your stakeholders the data to back it up.
  5. Point of fact: neither DCI's nor VMAPA's missions mention youth. Sure it's intended or implied, but technically neither are obligated by their missions to serve youth directly. This is why mission statements are important.
  6. We're using vagaries here when it may not be helpful to do so. Those of us that have publicly and privately highlighted our concerns about Vanguard are not young, innocent cherubs, we aren't junior, and we aren't working within the hierarchy of the institution. We are external stakeholders and qualified professionals who earned our stripes outside of the insular drum corps world, and who are trained in the professional niches in which we bring up our concerns. For some reason, this has mostly been treated like a threat instead of an asset. The actual young or "junior" people in our scenario are now alumni who either (1) already tried to speak up and were dismissed/shamed/bullied by their own fellow alum or (2) were too scared to speak up at all and still choked up when they were reporting to me, often insistent that I keep everything confidential for fear of retaliation. I can't abide my fellow younger alum in this state. It's unacceptable to me. Because I know firsthand that a bad member experience can upend a young person's life for a long time. I would honestly sleep better at night if my report had been an outlier. Some of our current board members have been there since before I marched, and there has been no real accountability for this darker side of our member experience this whole time. I've listed, on this forum, how many reports of violations have made their way to my ears from fellow alum who marched anytime between 2004 and now. Sometimes earlier. In case you're still playing at home, the tally is 38, not updated to include last week's new reporters. I've been in dialogue with VMAPA, DCI, MAASIN, other corps who will remain unnamed for now, and even reached out to Tricia Nadolny. My last post that included which corps I had talked to (and heard little back from) and the names of my abusers was censored. 🤷🏽‍♀️ Lordy if anyone here has a better way to act on this information, I'm all ears. Edit to add another alumni-external stakeholder resource: https://www.nonprofitpro.com/post/building-engagement-most-important-stakeholder-individuals-we-serve/
  7. 👀 Boston values their watchers, huh? Weird. What's that like? I'm still being metaphorically patched up from the last time I was dismissed by my peers. Just in time to discover another alum-survivor just last week. 😬
  8. A nuanced, researched take on overhead and donor expectations in the arts np sector: https://www.philanthropy.com/article/nonprofits-may-need-to-spend-a-third-of-their-budget-on-overhead-to-thrive-contradicting-a-donor-rule-of-thumb?utm_content=buffer73641&utm_medium=social&utm_source=linkedin.com&utm_campaign=buffer
  9. I wouldn't normally recommend such a large board but it appears to be working and I'm under the impression that Boston underwent an arduous process to arrive there. But again, if y'all have offered help and it falls on deaf ears, more power to you in-competition. Naw, I was still ducking the industry back then. I am, however, glad they were able to put the fire out. 💦
  10. Also it's not like Boston discovered fire here. They're following the conventional np playbook and succeeding accordingly. There are professionals, books, workshops, educational institutions, grants, fellowships, etc dedicated to teaching others how to fund a np following the conventions. This info isn't buried, in the case that a np doesn't want any help and to do it entirely on their own.
  11. Maybe. But there's also a whole professional field dedicated to raising funds for non profits (off the golf course.) Some call it Advancement, others Development. Others Donor Cultivation. And they don't just get the money rolling cause the flood gates stay open naturally forever. It's a profession for a reason. Because donor cultivation requires constant attention and care. Constant communication and synchrony with other departments in the non profit. Constant pats on the backs of donors who want them and constant, painstaking hoops to jump through for big corporate donors who will easily take their demands to the next non profit who can meet them better than you. The work is constant.
  12. Vanguard has more of an alumni cultivation problem than a talented/knowledgeable alum problem. Many of us have been trying to help... enough of us have given up after being intensely burned by our own people. For years. DCI can promote this knowledge all they want, but if corps are possibly not receptive bc bingo is king-o, then it don't matter.
  13. I'm impressed that it appears as though your volunteer board manages this relationships without a paid staffer overseeing it all. Unless they brought them all in themselves I suppose. Still, keeping names like Chase happy take a lot of work. Kudos to Boston. I peeped their board a while back. Formidable. Especially sans bingo.
  14. Naming rights is just one kind of corporate sponsorship. They can take any form really so long as the parties involved find the agreement mutually beneficial. Sky's the limit for the experienced and well supported development pro. I think SoA was getting somewhere with Arby's honestly... just don't think the mission alignment was quite there. Unless SoA has some snarky thing going on idk. SCV's fleet is an excellent asset that thousands of people drive by daily. Quantify that then market corporate sponsorship space to partners who are the most mission aligned. Same thing as program ads for the local ballet recital. This is straight from the np playbook.
  15. Many of the alum I'm still close to worked jobs to pay for drum corps fees instead of going to college or the military. They had no familial financial support, worked more bingos than were required by a lot, and had tour jobs like loading busses or painting fields. They were the best of us. And the rest of us with more means were lucky we got to spend a summer with them. The whole corps and org was better for including them. I hate that money is now keeping people out more. My partner wanted to march BITD but couldn't afford it. He would've gone to Bluecoats if only because they were the sole corps holding Texas auditions then. He ended up with a BA in music ed and advanced degree in sonic arts. I also saved money (and my health) by not marching my final two years and eventually earned an advanced degree in dance which allows me to teach the subject (and others) in higher education. I would have loved not having to choose one over the other.
  16. I appreciate your post overall but I want to lean into this part. I agree that funders are looking for hyper-locality, services for underserved communities, and arts experiences (extraordinary is in the eye of the beholder.) I firmly believe that drum corps absolutely provides extraordinary arts experiences, it's just a weird initial sell for most prospective donors who are unfamiliar. If corps could clean up their compliance and safeguarding, they could be viable contenders for major funding due to their focus on legacy artmaking and youth education. But that would require a sea change in approach. A singular $50,000 grant does not justify a grant writer's labor in the context of the world class corps budgets anyway, especially if the upkeep for such a grant requires year-round reporting. Many do. But to your point, yeah, drum corps (as it is currently packaged) is not competitive. Grants also often require NPs to report out internal info like demographics of employees and populations served, as well as how many hours each employee works on each project-type category. I don't think most drum corps have the people power for even smaller grants at this time. My biggest concern is the interest I've seen in several parts of our community in special needs/underserved ensembles as an incentive for grants. First, funds for such community-oriented programming would be restricted and such programs are very unlikely to ween themselves off external funding. Meaning such programs rarely turn into revenue generators, unless the organization shifts focus entirely to getting good at serving that population and dropping drum corps. Because the funding is likely restricted, it can't be used on anything else, let alone to fund a conventional drum corps tour. I've seen countless nonprofits and other bad actors exploit underserved and marginalized populations in this way before so I just wanted to clarify. There are serious penalties for using restricted funds on areas outside of their stated purpose. Most importantly, if your mission doesn't directly necessitate services for marginalized communities, suddenly supporting them and getting grants for it looks weird. The org likely doesn't have the expertise built up to support these populations because the mission has been focused on other, better-served populations prior to its interest in grants designated for serving marginalized populations. Unless, of course, your mission was too broad to begin with and you're unaware of the mission creep going on. If serving these communities is of genuine interest to orgs who don't already specialize in doing so, an appropriate approach would be to build partnerships with nearby orgs who are actually good at doing so, not applying for grants to do it themselves. Not enough to read? Here's a supportive resource for anyone interested: https://www.501c3.org/misappropriating-nonprofit-funds/
  17. The way drum corps fund their endeavors is an outlier in my experience working for other nationally and regionally known NPs that focus on youth arts education. I only know how things are done in those more successful and stable contexts. I left the drum corps world after numerous preventable injuries and after working directly under Jeff Fiedler at SCV. I wasn't intending to focus too closely on other corps in my previous comments. I don't know (or want to know) about their inner workings at this time. I can't afford to volunteer that time right now. The money from performance fees is a small line item. Should open corps be getting more? Of course. But relatively speaking, this is fighting over peanuts when other, more stable sources are out there. You're delving into mission alignment stuff. If your core output/activity is fielding a competitive drum corps then it won't make money. That's the textbook definition of an NP: your mission isn't about making money, it's about providing a public good and not taking profits from doing so. But if your mission is not just fluff, and you have the workforce to make it happen, then you can expand programming beyond the niche of fielding a drum corps to generate revenue (as long as you stay within your scope. Ex: if your mission is to support youth underwater basket weaving, don't start a community program for senior tai chi classes as a revenue generator.) But that's only if you want your arts education services to generate income, which is really tricky for NPs anyway. You can also look to grantwriting, individual and institutional funder stewardship and yes, corporate sponsors, which traditionally make up the bulk of legit NP revenue. But that takes a lot of legwork, expertise, and organizational synchrony that bingo does not. Success on the field does not always equate to success in other areas. Yeah, well, angel investors are not sustainable. By design. Is it any wonder why someone with a successful for profit business would see a NP as a financial sinkhole? If that's how it's seen, then either (1) the NP is a sinkhole because of mismanagement or (2) there's a fundamental misunderstanding of how NPs function in collaboration with their communities (read: funders, in part) to produce public goods. In this way, NP and for-profit professionals tackle their work in entirely different ways for entirely different reasons. NP professionals KNOW that NPs can be sinkholes (worst case scenario;) work tirelessly to safeguard and earn public trust; and creatively engage the public so that rather than being seen as a sinkhole, the public understands that the work takes money the NP can't otherwise make on its own, and will enthusiastically give because they value the public good provided (whether they see direct benefit or not.) And the public can see the work is being done ethically because the NP is transparent and effectively communicative. Most for-profit pros lack the crucial combo of expertise and constitution to fine tune their skills to prevent their NPs from becoming sinkholes. It's not a knock; just a difference between the industries. Because it's a NP mindset and skill set. Trust, I worked in nonprofit contemporary dance education/performance/presentation from 2005-2020. Talk about undervalued. Talk about working my ### off to try and convince public stakeholders of the value of contemporary dance to the public good. Because I didn't have the luxury of a gambling revenue source. (I've broken down my previous employer, The American Dance Festival's donor/sponsorships relative to their 990s in previous comments in order to provide a reputable example outside of drum corps of how it's done.)
  18. Eep. But doesn't it red flag anyone else here for an organization to opt for gambling as a revenue source when they can't be self-sustaining from their core operations? So your org can't put together a solid financial or strategic plan to be self-sustaining, but here's a revenue source that requires rigorous oversight to ensure money goes where it's supposed to? Just seems silly and a bit lazy, honestly. It's why Vanguard and BD are getting labeled as bingo operations with a drum corps side gig. That feels great as an alumna. And don't get me wrong. The conventional revenue sources for NPs require a LOT of legwork year-round to sustain, and NP employee burnout is a industry-wide problem. But at least the work to achieve these conventions would be supported by a broader community of state and national NP leaders, respectable donors, and affinity organizations. Right now, Vanguard's out on it's own 'cause DCI and member corps don't have the same incentives or loyalty that Vanguard could find in the NP community. But I'm just pontificating. Bingo's not going anywhere. Only the side hustle is. I'm hesitant to speak to my attendance of alumni meetings as I've received requests to censor my thoughts on those I've posted in this very thread. But I will say that recent changes to the VAA bylaws may allow for more alumni representation in the future. Like with everything else, I'm cautiously optimistic.
  19. I think the corps has a history of this from time to time. In normal circumstances, it's probably not uncommon for board members/volunteers in a small NP to donate accounting labor sure. Without rigorous internal protocols though, it can go bonkers fast. (And I wouldn't personally trust the oversight of $15 MIL changing hands via gambling with volunteer hands, honestly. But that's just me.) With the amount of turnover at SCV, I've expressed more than once I'm concerned about the preservation of key institutional knowledge such as this. The current and previous CFOs' profiles (despite their histories with the corps) don't indicate that they've worked in NPs as accountants prior to their hiring. NP accounting is wildly different than for-profit accounting. You don't just know this stuff, it takes time to learn it all because NPs make up a unique industry. Being on a board doesn't mean you know how to be an NP administrator. Governance and administration are different too. '19/'20 saw a letter from the CA DOJ requesting an independent audit after they first went delinquent. That can't be done internally, from my understanding. (Or at least, I would highly un-recommend completing an required audit in-house.) Yeah, I'm reading that CPAs, who are in charge of the conducting audits for NPs, must be independent of their audit engagements. But before the CEO leadership shift, alumni were assured that independent audits happened yearly. So where did those audits go if not to the CA DOJ that requested them (who shows they weren't received?) If bureaucratic backlog is the problem, then is there a way to request a letter from the DOJ stating that VMAPA is in the clear and that the registry is out-of-date?
  20. Lightening in a bottle. The players and arrangers made it real easy to interpret visually. And the drumline/pit shoved the rest of us uphill both ways.
  21. TY. I've limited my scope to Vanguard. From a distant glance it appears that BD wins the diversification game with Boston showing real promise. SoA is coming back strong and totally winning the safeguarding game. Then there's groups like Colts and Stars who took transparency and accountability to the next level. There's good stuff happening and I don't mean to paint all corps with a broad brush. But I can smell mission creep a mile away. It's all over drum corps.
  22. Right, but if you've never been an admin for nonprofits, as I have, you don't understand how important it is to align mission with revenue sources. Moose Lodge folks are excellent because they can raise funds pretty freely for a variety of causes and nobody cares how they got it really so long as it's legal. That's a feature not a flaw. But I've worked for a youth arts ed nonprofit that was taking sponsorship dollars from a gun retailer the year before I started. By no action of my own, they chose to drop that sponsor the next year. Why? Mission alignment. They didn't think it looked good to have a gun retailer's logo in the middle of their youth Nutcracker program or projected on the walls of the theater. You don't have to agree with their decision to understand why it may have been made. This kind of thing happens all day every day in the decisionmaking processes of nps. Moose Lodge folks don't have the responsibility of safeguarding children and youth as VMAPA and other youth nps do. Gambling as a revenue source is fine because mission alignment is less of a problem. Sigh. Everyone's looking for these mythical new sources of revenue. If drum corps followed the established arts ed non profit model, they'd be able to compete with other nps for public funds. I've already shared this info in previous comments, but all of the successful nps I've worked for in the past rely on something wild like 60-80% of their revenue to come from grants, individual donors, institutional funders, and sponsorships. They put at least one person in charge of grants, and another in charge of donor stewardship... ideally a third person in charge of sponsorships but that was rare in the underfunded np world I worked in. Each of these orgs had comparable budges to VMAPA and most drum corps. NPs across the US work like this all day every day. It's because this revenue standard, without a gambling revenue source, enables most NPs to model transparency and interdependence with their communities. It's the way it supposed to work. Throw a fast and loose revenue source in there like gambling, and it can degrade public trust.... for the reasons I mentioned in my previous comment.
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