Stakeholder Engagement – Definitions

(see also “Glossary of Terms” at the end of the chapter)

What is a “stake” and who are its “holders”? Why do we use this term?

In this context, a stake is an interest in community arts activity. That interest can be:

• Personal – the theme or topic is relevant to a participant/learner; for example, maybe their kid is involved;

• Professional – the project may address some of a partner’s key workplace values: for example, the United Way or a funder may have goals which are met through the project;

• Financial – a local business might stand to gain customers or clients or improve its community profile and standing through association with the project; or

• Altruistic – a volunteer could seek meaningful social interaction, or maybe is retired and wants to make a contribution to the greater good now that they have the capacity.

Through an alternative lens, we can think of the kinds of stakeholders we can expect to consider as follows:

• Creative stakeholders – arts workers, facilitators, artists, community participants;

• Financial stakeholders – funders (governmental, corporate, local Business Improvement Area organisations, donors); or

• Collaborative/partner stakeholders – other organizations or agencies with community participants, arts-based, health-based, or otherwise.

The stakes can be high, medium or low in their ability to affect the outcome of the project, and in their capacity to affect stakeholders positively or negatively.

From a risk management perspective, we encourage you to consider what can go awry in a stakeholder relationship. Misunderstandings, changing priorities, expectations of the experience, unintended giving of offense, and other factors are always possibilities. Conflict management must be a factor when thinking about working in community-engaged arts. No one expects things to go badly, but any politician will tell you that once you engage with the public, all manner of random factors enter the picture! It’s important to have strategies for dealing with conflict at all levels of the engagement and a proactive stance on managing your message. Conflict management (not necessarily resolution, as that may not be possible) resources may be available elsewhere in an arts management program, potentially in an HR or planning course. One such resource has been created for the Media Arts Network of Ontario, MANO-RAMO (Wilmot, 2015) and is listed in our references.

Things that can be at stake for the arts organisation, as well as local participants, include:

• Creative/professional reputations – this is important to safeguard. If you aren’t able to create work that meets your standards with available resources, pruning or deferring elements of the project may be better than falling short;

• Funding/corporate/donor support – if things go badly, for example if participants/learners feel slighted by a visiting artist and express dissent in local media, funders may never support programs again, or community partners who work with the participants may never collaborate again; and

• Collateral damage – the impact of failed programming on the trust and confidence of participants/learners is also at stake. Consider all participants/learners as vulnerable and that they can be adversely affected by inept programming, sometimes gravely.

Not-for-profit endeavours prefer the term stakeholder over shareholder, but what is the difference? The term stakeholder is related to but differs from the standard corporate language of shareholder. A share, in the term shareholder, is financial ownership of part of a company. Shares are bought by folk willing to invest in the company’s operations with the prospect of sharing in profits through dividends that the company pays its shareholders when it is successful. Shares can also be sold by a shareholder to someone else, like any other property. This relationship may seem purely cold and commercial – “buy low, sell high” – but shareholders can also use their financial clout to influence a company to, for example, be more environmentally sustainable or work toward goals of equity and diversity through voicing their will at shareholders’ Annual General Meetings. Companies’ corporate social responsibility goals may be formulated as policy in satisfaction of, or in response to, shareholder pushback. But, we digress!

In community arts, there may be some financial implications at stake for those involved in a project. For example, a realtor may want to demonstrate that their community has many desirable activities for young people, families and newcomers, so a community arts project may be part of their marketing messages to their clientele, and the realtor may make a financial contribution to the project as a sponsor to verify their interest. For the most part, though, a stake is non-monetary. Rather, it’s related to belonging, quality of life, social cohesion and formation of social capital and bonds with peers (or strangers whom you want to meet in a low-risk environment, maybe ideally over food!) in your own community. A stake is often a qualitative measure, not a quantitative one.

Once you have begun thinking laterally about local partners, other ideas may spring to mind. For example: is there a Downtown or Business Improvement Area organisation or a chamber of commerce in the community? What about service clubs such as Kiwanis, Rotary Clubs, Knights of Columbus, or Lions? These are comprised of well-meaning, altruistic (which can sometimes mean enlightened yet self-interested) and well-connected local thought leaders such as business owners, landlords, public servants, police, teachers, bankers, insurance brokers, faith leaders, health workers, and philanthropists. All these may be candidates as potential stakeholders of your project.

Alternative terms to describe stakeholders may include participant/learner (as in this chapter), beneficiary, community member, user, funder, local partner—all these are ways to describe folk who may form a valuable part of your community arts activity.

When thinking of stakeholders, one should think inclusively of all involved in the practice. Let’s further consider what it means to be a stakeholder through what Anchor Group Corporation CEO Kevin Howell proposed to one of the chapter’s authors: “Do you see yourself as a stakeholder? If you do, consider what is involved, while also understanding who and what is at stake.” This insight, though from a business executive context, is important in terms of nurturing and developing relationships with stakeholders from a community-engaged arts perspective.

Historically, a stakeholder tended to have had an external relationship to the execution of programming. Now it is considered optimal to include stakeholders in program execution, beyond external relationships. Here are some questions to consider in the evolved potential relationship.

1. Who benefits from the arts? What are their direct or indirect benefits?
2. Who supports the development of the artistic contents?
3. Who supports the program execution?
4. Who participates in the programming?

In creating and executing community-engaged programming, high-functioning organisations/artists think about a broader range of what else may be at stake. We invite you to consider community-engaged arts projects you may know of, or are studying, and to consider whether the lead arts organisation(s) did, in fact, include all potential stakeholders. In understanding what is at stake, you begin to work optimally in community-engaged practices. There are many elements of your relationship to stakeholders that could complicate your community-engaged programming.

What does it mean to be a “holder?”

Beyond stakes, what about the second half of the term—what does it mean to “hold” other elements of a community-engaged arts practice? In the arts, embodying the community-engaged practice is both a physical and mental activity which should evolve to fit the programming and the group in which it is undertaken. Physically, practitioners must understand what it means to hold space from an inclusive, equitable and diverse framework in the places where programming is developed and in the spaces where programming occurs (communities, schools, studios, community centres). It is helpful to map those spaces, investigate and make inventories of them, visit them and think of them as tools for and aspects of the work. Consider how you can make the space conducive to participant learning and experiences. In Kevin’s work as dancer/community facilitator with the Dance Exchange, he took on the mantra of the Critical Response Process creator Liz Lerman: “everyone should leave with a meaningful experience” (Lerman, 2020). In the spaces where community-engaged practices occur, facilitators of the activities need to be in constant navigation of the physical spaces they hold. It’s part of our responsibility when engaging in community-engaged arts practices. Beyond what you envision, be sensitive to the needs of the learners/participants. When facilitating, explore more than one option for how programming can be executed. Challenge yourself to do a preparatory “run-through” before being joined by participants. This can reveal challenges when working with other partners/facilitators in executing programming.

Now, what is engagement, and why are we speaking now of engagement and not outreach, as used to be more the case? Outreach has a social services mindset, and the term is derived from that realm. It also implies a colonial and paternalistic way of thinking, along the lines of “we have a thing that’s good for you, and that you need, but don’t yet know you do, and we are here in a helping role to provide access to this desirable thing through our interaction with you.” In other words, we are the visiting experts here to offer something that you may not already have, and will do so in a top-down way.

Instead, engagement should imply a two-way relationship. It encourages reciprocity and mutual exchange. Community arts practitioners bring expertise, creative concepts, perhaps education and training, for example, performance, set, prop and costume construction, materials handling, but “parachuting into” a community with the idea that we, the visiting artists, are the only experts, or at least are providing expertise to those who lack it, is unhelpful. Community arts projects will only generate meaningful relationships, interactions or results if they fully incorporate all the assets – including expertise, albeit perhaps from different realms – that already reside in a given community.

What kind of assets can we consider here? Local champions, thought-leaders, activists and vocational artists who have “day jobs” are all vital to the organic and sustained benefit of a community arts project, and our relationship with them is as equal and reciprocal partners in community arts activities. They know more about their own social environment than we do, and it’s only through their input that we learn what we didn’t know we were missing about the community creating the project. Local funders and supporters can offer cash, their time, and their in-kind resources (a meeting room for community focus groups, access to photocopying for scripts if needed, discounted or free refreshments, promotional partnerships), adding value to the work that we aim to do with and for them. Our role only provides some, not all, of the traction and momentum that a community arts project needs to succeed. That said, if you’re applying for a job titled Outreach Coordinator, by all means get the job before making these observations to your employer! You are part of the change that this evolution of nomenclature represents, and you can influence the way the work is done.

Digging back to the roots of many community arts organisations, you can usually find a relationship of stakeholder engagement to the mission, vision, and mandate of the organisation and its project. As you formulate the project description and budget you’ll need to provide to a potential funder, supporter, or sponsor to garner their involvement, it’s helpful to include the words and phrases that may appear in your organisation or collective’s founding statements to ensure that the project is embedded in your organisation’s stated purpose. Do you profess to “address issues of social cohesion and belonging through the arts”? Is your mission to create “arts in the community” or “inspire vocational and professional artists to reach their full potential”? For example, Augusto Boal, founder of the Theatre of the Oppressed, famously insisted that “everyone is, or can be, creative” (personal conversation with author Anne Frost, 1997). Alternatively, many arts organisations seek to break down barriers between professional and amateur creative workers, which are generally less pervasive in Indigenous communities than in settler groups. Examples aside, robust stakeholder engagement plans are often directly key to an organization’s mandate.

We’ve now discussed the nouns, now for the verb: How do we engage stakeholders? We find success in different tactics and activities for each of the different categories of community stakeholders that we’ve defined above.

Firstly, let’s discuss how to engage the first category of stakeholder mentioned in our initial definitions above. A stakeholder is a person who has an interest in the subject matter of the project, be it to celebrate a former local major employer or some other environmental or local priority. For example, Sheatre’s production of “The Ballad of Kennedy’s” in Owen Sound, Ontario commemorates a major foundry that made propellers for ships in the World Wars but fell on hard times and closed after the war efforts were over. Those connected to the foundry are stakeholders in the production, even if they are not directly involved, and engaging them in the work was transformative and situationally integral, which will be discussed in more detail later.

The involvement of young people in a community in the project also demonstrates productive engagement: Once you reach young people through their schools, extracurriculars or other “third places” (Wikipedia, 2022a), their family may also gravitate toward your project as participants, supporters or funders. This tends to happen more with younger participants than with high-school age folk, as teenagers may be participating in your project as a way to get out of the home and separate themselves from their family, rehearsing for their independent lives. Don’t assume that Grade 9s will necessarily invite their entire family to attend your culminating event!

The folk we seek to engage in community-engaged arts projects aren’t any different from you or me or the people we know. Put yourself in the place of someone like you, living and working or studying in a place where a community-engaged arts project is seeking to engage local participants. What would attract you? The Five Ps of Marketing – price, product, place(ment), promotion, and people (word-of-mouth) – play a part here.

For instance, folk rarely act on a marketing message that they encounter once or twice unless it addresses something that they are already predisposed to want or to be interested in. Multiple repetitions create a feeling of familiarity and normalcy in the recipient so that they may begin to think that this is “something that people do,” changing their behaviour by seeking more information.

As arts managers, it’s up to us to make sure that folk see, hear and perceive our coherent, recognisable marketing message multiple times through different channels to prompt this change in behaviour. This goes beyond “getting the word out” informally and must include a coherent, planned approach that includes, for example, social media, local press coverage and interviews, flash mob events of pop-up performances or interactions, or engaging with local spokespeople.

Beyond reading about our project, though, or seeing it go by on a TV screen in a clinic waiting room, it’s often effective to engage as many of the other senses (beyond seeing and hearing) as you can in your engagement plan. “If you feed them, they will come!” (Caveat here: Local food-handling policies come into play. Don’t invite the public to a potluck if the food doesn’t originate in a certified kitchen, for instance). Some learner activities provided later in this chapter can bring this home in ways that may spark new ideas about engagement. Consider the time when the engagement occurs, who the participants are, and how they may potentially interact with your project.

A sensory approach, involving experiences that appeal to the senses, is part of a successful stakeholder engagement strategy that also includes more formal elements such as:

• Researching local community hubs, networks and organisations, and seeking to present at or participate in gatherings such as monthly member meetings or Annual General Meetings to involve folk in your project. You can research these online via the municipality’s website by using the search term “service organisations” in the community you’re researching.
  • Examples include: Kinsmen, Lions, Kiwanis, Rotary Clubs, Knights of Columbus, Business or Downtown Improvement Areas, Chambers of Commerce.
• Forming more-than-business relationships with local suppliers of goods and services you may need to carry out your project. You can find these online or via the community’s business directory that may be published by the municipality.
  • As you research potential local suppliers, see if they support community activities or have musicians or athletes in their family or firm. This may give you an idea whether they may be happy to have their company be part of your project. Do they post this kind of kudos on their website or at their location?
  • Examples: Printing companies if you need posters, flyers, handbills, or hard tickets; car rental options if you need a van to move materials; building supply companies if you need to build sets and props; coffee shops (of course!); local clothing stores if you need to costume your actors; wineries or craft breweries; caterers, dance or music studios.
• Approach elected and appointed government representatives and officials with the idea that your community-engaged arts project brings value to the folk who elected or appointed them, and that your work may make great photo-ops for their newsletters. Reach out to:
  • As many as four federal (MPs), provincial (MLAs, MPPs or MNAs), and/or upper or lower tier municipal (Councillors, Wardens or Reeves) representatives for any given location.
  • Their local offices and clerical support workers (scheduling their time, dealing with correspondence) may turn out to be your solid allies. They can let you know when the elected official may be available, set you up with meetings and introductions to other community leaders, and alert you to potential funding sources or new granting streams.