I already think there's like a lot of reviews of them. We're at Arden. I've gotten to know a lot of people there. We're at Arden. They're like, I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. Did you find it out there? Mm-hmm. Simply. Where? Arden Theater. Arden Theater. And so. We're at Drinksense and Sitat Louvre. What's that? That is interesting. So, in between, and I'm really glad that everybody's having a chance to chat. Chat up, chat up the locals so that you can get a better sense of what is going on in Arizona and take advantage of their stories and their knowledge. I think one of the things that sort of I reflected upon this recently about this last panel, that in a funny kind of way, it's also a story about small monies. What can a community do that doesn't have a whole lot of deep pockets? And what can you produce? And what does that mean for the producer and presenter who works inside the sphere of small monies? I remember years ago in Houston, taking a cab, going to a diverse works of presenter, and just quietness, downtown was very quiet. I said, what's going on?  Small monies keeps downtowns alive. So, in a funny kind of way, small monies keep our locales alive. I used to share that story to sort of create an entrance into this discussion today among producers and presenters. We have a group of panelists that come from very diverse backgrounds. Allie Haynes Hemlin, did I say that right? This is from the Scottsdale Center. Gabrielle Munoz is from the Arizona Division of the Arts. And Tim Wilson is from the Western Arts Alliance. I'm going to let them talk a little bit and introduce themselves a little bit about the work. These are the questions. You can take as long as you want or as little as you want. Around the notion of what are the access points that you are engaged in for artists in new work development and what are the challenges associated with them? So, who wants to go first? Tim, I'm going to give it to you. I'll just say a little bit about Western Arts Alliance. Is that working? Hello? It's about power. Go here, take this one. So, Western Arts Alliance is a regional performing arts organization, a market that serves the western states in Canada. We were established in 1967 and we serve about 400 organizations, principally in the western United States. We operate essentially as a market. So, we have an annual conference where we convene artists, individual artists, producing companies, artist managers that represent other artists and performing arts in this from around the west. And, while was established in 1967 by a group of universities. So, universities are kind of the backbone, those big universities are sort of the backbone of our network. So, I'm going to be speaking from that perspective. I've never lived in Arizona or in Tucson, although I once was diagnosed with dysentery at the University Hospital and spent some time there. But, I'm really going to speak from a regional perspective. And, first of all, I want to say, I should give a shout out to Keita and the National Theatre Project and New England Foundation for the Arts for facilitating this conversation. It's really a privilege just to be in the room with you to listen to the conversation. It's really been an amazing conversation to hear. I think speaking directly to Roberto's question about access, it's really, really difficult on a regional level. And to say nothing of the sort of the local level. And, we're working on a couple of points right now that are, I think, of relevance. Actually, three points. One, we're working with cultivating new young arts leaders. We used to have a program called, I'm really annoyed by this microphone. Can I speak without it? Can you hear me without it? Okay, sorry. So, that's the feedback bothering me. So, we have a program called 35 Below. And we used to have a program called Next Gen for the next generation of arts leaders. And we didn't find that that was actually specific enough. So, it's now 35 Below. Well, we're cultivating sort of a new concrete of arts professionals, artists, artists managers, people in the presenting field who are young and bringing new ideas to the field. Because to me, there's nothing more exciting than that leadership. Because the field that I myself included was really dominated in leadership positions by baby boomers. And those baby boomers are on the verge of retirement and there's about to be a sea change in leadership. And so, we're working to cultivate that. So, young leaders and artists, and they have a network and some of it's social, some of it's just getting to know one another, some of it's sharing experience with one another, some of it's learning, some of it's introducing them to other leaders where they can sort of start to get to know other senior leaders in the field. And so, that's been going in, been very successful. Another point of access that we are working on, and I can speak about the challenges of that after I get done introducing them all. Another point of access that we're working on is around Latino artists and audiences. So, we're working, we have a sort of a mason program now that's about two years old and we're trying to cultivate Latino artists, arts professionals around sort of how to work in this performing arts. We sort of make them players the bigger players in the university presenters that we serve and represent. And then the third thing is, this is a new project that we've undertaken just in the last year or so. We're working with colleagues in Australia, New Zealand, Canada and the United States to work on how we work collectively in our networks to advance Indigenous performance. And because there is just, I mean, it's hardly out there at all. And so, we did an obsession in the back, Uber Keeta was there and it was a first step for us. And largely, it was almost a meeting like this where the most important thing for us was to have people in the room to begin a conversation, to sort of get to know one another, to learn about protocols and just to have some initial conversations. And we had a capacity for like 95 and we sold it out and it was kind of astonishing to me that there was that much interest in this topic. But there was. 40% of the participants were from Indigenous communities so it wasn't just sort of white people getting together to talk about how can we advance Indigenous performance. But we worked really closely with Full Circle which is an Indigenous producer in Vancouver, with IPA, with other IPA is the Indigenous Performing Arts Alliance which is a really amazing organization. The candidate, we both know it. And then with the Aboriginal programs at the Canada Council and the Australian Council and Great Museum to put this program together. It was a really rich conversation for us and so successful for our steering committee that we actually continued to convene the group that put this program together. And I will have to say just to make it clear, I did not put this program together. We hosted it essentially and we grew on 13 arts professionals. Indigenous arts professionals. Some of them were performers. Some of them were producers. Some of them were presenters. Some of them were arts administrators in public programs. We convened this group of 13. They met and targeted by conference call and put the full program together. They set the agenda. They set the programs. They set the speakers. They put it all together. And this was really, I started like, of course that's how you do this. But it was really a game changer for long because typically what we do is we identify a topic and then we look for the authorities within our community and then sort of an arms reach of our community and then we put them together and put a panel together. This was the backwards, the reverse of that where we started from with folks that we, essentially most of whom we had no relationship with whatsoever. But we relied on elders or tradition bearers to sort of point us in the right direction to propose this group. So that has been a huge, it's a small effort. We don't have a big budget. It's very modest as with most of the things we do at Western resilience. But it's been a big step forward for us and we continue the challenges. Well, let's see. Money, colonial, colonization, racism, ignorance. Ignorance I think for presenters is one of the biggest obstacles because there's even, and I think you sort of touched on it and some of the points that have been made is that even when they're well-intentioned, they really feel that this is something that's important, that they need to do their help back by their own lack of understanding. So the fear of making a mistake or saying something that's insulting or inappropriate holds many presenters, artists and managers back from taking even the first step. So conversations like this where you can begin to build understanding I think are really important. The last, I think those are the three things I wanted to say and I don't want to go online, but I'm going to come back to funding and other points of access and how you gain access to this but I'm going to go share them with you. Hi, I'm Keith Hamlin. I'm the director at Castle Center for Performing Arts. I'm also honored to be the president of the board of directors for the Arizona presenters' alliance. So I'm going to try to speak to some access points at both my Performing Arts Center and some others in the greater Phoenix area. Sorry, because some people are not as well-versed in Tucson as they are in Phoenix obviously. But I will say as far as access points at the Castle Center for Performing Arts, over the past two years we've worked really hard to create programs that engage local artists in performing on our stage. We do a lot of festival programming, a lot of free programming out on our outdoor stages throughout the spring season and what we found more often than not was a lot of the bands and artists and swim board artists that we worked with didn't have a lot of experience in a hard-to-get venue just like we didn't know what our team had been to see the venue, but not just at a bar or at a festival atmosphere. These bands wanted experience in an actual venue with selling tickets and being more of that realm where they can start to build that experience and start touring. So we created a summertime program called Live and Local where we engaged a lot of the bands that we have for our festival programming and for our free outdoor events and we booked them on the stage every Friday of the summertime. We had a very low ticket price, 10 bucks, and we split the ticket with the artist we bought from ticket number one. So they didn't have to worry about our expenses. We didn't have to worry about their needs. It was very much a very mutual relationship and it has taken off. We're just about to launch our third season with that and we're really excited about it. We're talking about expanding the program into a holiday version to continue this program throughout the holidays and we're also now starting to investigate doing a much smaller scale program in our small theater, which speeds 137. That's more of a cabaret style. That's really geared towards more towards experimental artists and folks that maybe don't have a wide reach of followers already that can try out new work and have a small audience of 100 people so that they can really nurture what they're doing but still have that opportunity to work with our professional crew our professional staff our marketing team all of the resources that we can bring to that table they will benefit from that and of course we benefit from that as well because a lot of these artists we know because artists in Arizona are pretty amazing are going to move on into a larger realm and they're going to tour all over the country and they're going to be known throughout the region and throughout the country and so we're excited to be part of the ground for that. So those are some of the access points that we have at the center. I can also talk about the Mesa Art Center has a really robust relationship with jazz at Lincoln Center. They have been part of jazz at Lincoln Center for the past six or seven years I would say they are fully incorporating jazz into their curriculum throughout the Mesa Public Art Schools and I'm sorry Public Art, I'm sorry it's got some public art it's one of my sister provisions I don't have a little I didn't tend to go to that, sorry throughout the Mesa Public School District that's what I'm trying to say so they have incorporated jazz throughout the Mesa Public School District curriculum and now they're working with jazz at Lincoln Center program where they actually have an arts leadership training program that's centered on jazz principles to train the new generation of arts leaders so I know they're getting ready to launch them and they're looking to engage folks who are interested in illustration artists, artists managers that sort of thing so that is another big access point that I know the Mesa Art Center is really working hard to foster and the last one that I want to talk about was at the Delaware Performing Arts Center in Wickenburg, Arizona which is another really small community northwest of the greater Phoenix area and they have a dance residency program that they have been running for the past three or four years where they'll engage a dance company to come in the dance company doesn't have to pay anything to be there they provide a week, two weeks sometimes of housing, tech support facility use, staff, everything and the only thing that they ask of this dance company is that they allow some of their rehearsals to be open so that the audience can just come and watch them rehearse they don't participate they're not allowed to speak to the dancers they're not allowed to intrude they just aren't able to watch and then at the end of the residency the company will perform a free performance at the Delaware Performing Arts Center of whatever they created during that residency so half an hour of work 45 minutes of work some dance companies have been used to refine a full-length work that they want to get ready to put out into the world's tour and so it'll be a full-length program that's likely to be free to the residents with the work to come check out so these are just a few examples of some of the assets points that I know some of the bigger performing arts centers in the greater Phoenix area are making available to artists and I know kind of the challenges one of the biggest challenges is getting a word out about these programs and letting artists know that these programs exist and finding ways to make that communication known and finding ways to engage with artists that we may not realize we don't have access to and so communication is definitely a huge challenge for us another challenge that we have with a lot of these programs is staff capacity just like Mesa and Wipenburg we're really robust performing arts center we've got a huge rental program in addition to our own presenting program so summertime is usually a quiet time when the staff enter their maintenance take their vacations well now we've blown that out because we have this summer series that runs all summer long so we do face an issue with staff capacity especially when we're talking about creative programs so that's something on our mind that we're working on figuring out how we can access more funding to pay for that or engage with some of our local artists that might not be the performing artists on stage but working behind the scenes so that they can also have that opportunity to work with the crew and at the same time kind of help offset some of those vacation times that we have to face another big challenge of forces with our marketing and our promotions department just same thing as staff capacity we can only market so much we can only promote so much so that's a big part of how we've designed our program with the live and local and engaging with local artists we do a door deal so we split better to get that sold from $1 to really help engage the artists and promoting themselves as well and for this third year that we're launching it one of the biggest changes that we've done is to really create sort of marketing and promotions tutorial for some of the artists that don't have a lot of experience doing that now that we have two years of this program we've seen a lot of artists come through and some that have been wildly successful sold all the number of seats and some that have been really not successful 150 seats so we've tried to lean to those best practices so that we can pass that along and kind of help teach artists the artists of the motion because that's a necessary people of course in this business and I think that's one more go Okay, hello my name is Gabriela Munoz I'm the newest addition to the Arizona Commission of the Arts and I'm very thankful to be invited to the conversation but also just to really listen and learn the tremendous amount so the commission is we're a grant maker and we're a convener and we offer professional development to all artists in the state of Arizona which is a big task our funding is rather limited I would say but we do really try to work smarter because of that and I would say that in terms of at this point so I am the artist programs manager I'm supposed to be directing funding and support towards artists who are Arizona individual artists so we offer professional development grants three times a year and we offer artists research and development grants we're also really fortunate we receive my colleague who is now over at HALA we see funding through the main foundation so we have a program called ADR Worker and I would say that the biggest resource we have is actually you being able to partner with different working artists working groups collective we're doing tremendous work in Arizona it's what allowed us to then go to a funder and say look at everything that's happening don't you want to help us support them and really that's the reason why this funding came right so I would say that even though we have deficit in terms of money the work that you are all doing in your community is invaluable challenges money a couple of years ago we were looking at funding too from a regional perspective so I'm a geek enough and I know enough the right people around I did this big project where I went to the National Assembly of State Arts Agency which is the association of all the state arts agencies in the United States and I asked for grant data on state grants state arts grants that were tagged for categorized for presenting for performing arts for all 50 states then I got the same data that NASA does collects data on grant making of the NEA itself from the NEA direct grants and I got that same data for all the NEA grants that were categorized under presenting for performing arts and then I went to each of the regionals or I got the same data from the regionals and I compiled all of this service state by state and region against region and guess which region comes in dead last and by not just a little the West the West is absolutely at the bottom of the heap in terms of public support at the state the regional and federal level we did this way at the bottom and I heard people talk about sort of the the coast and everything being better on the coast public funding in the Midwest is far far better than it is on the West far better there's no comparison the only region that comes even close to is the South and it's even better than the West but for every other region in the country public support is much much stronger than what we have out here so that is a huge I mean you can write all the grants in the world Marcelino and you can write all the grants in the world but there's just isn't as much in terms of public sector funding out here as there is in other parts of the country so I think that's a really big issue I also want to come back to a few things on access and Ali and I were talking about on the break and that is that one of the I think this we all tend to work in kind of our own little silos our own little our own particular niche our discipline interests our community with our people of our own age or you know ethnicity or economic we're all in these kind of silos together and the silos really sort of keep us apart and I think it's only by conversations like that where you can start to break down across region across discipline across economic status all of these things to sort of begin to have some sort of sharing of information because the sharing of information is a really a key part of access and I have other things there's a couple of things going back to what's going on in terms of some positive notes some positive ideas and I think there's some models out there there's really interesting things starting to happen and they're changing the way that we make work and show work in this country right now our next conference is in Los Angeles in this audience so I'm paying a lot of attention to what's going on in Los Angeles and in LA right now there's a really interesting phenomenon of individuals arts professionals I'm not going to call them artists but they're individuals who are breaking down traditional roles so that you have these people who are hybrid creator producer and presenters that they're breaking these things used to be separate functions and now they're all happening in the same organization and by the same people they're not relying on law or some other form or some presenter UCLA the Center for the Art of Performance they are finding their own way and playing these three roles all by themselves and with really modest budgets there's a collective in Los Angeles called eco-society and they're a collective of designers they do like set design and visual design and spatial design and composers and musicians and they are working and they're doing site specific work and they are turning over empty warehouses derelict buildings into performance spaces on really modest budgets and they are packing these venues with young hipsters to I swear to God they're chamber music it's contemporary chamber music but it's chamber music and it's really amazing kind of work and I think there are models in New York there's a community of composers talking about somebody making a point of we need to support one another and I couldn't agree more there's a community of composers there who are composers and musicians it formed around a fellow named Jet Riedstein at New Amsterdam and these are young artists who compose and then they play on each other's performances they play on each other's albums they work I mean it's this growing community and it's really doing some fascinating work and it's beautiful work and it's getting more and more recognition and it's a community of players and composers who make these things happen so I think there are models out there where we can see new hybrids and new ways of working the other thing that I'll say too and I don't know if this is as relevant to Arizona but in particular this is happening elsewhere there's also a disillusion of the commercial and the not-for-profit not-for-profit performance in that way you start to see choreographers and composers who work mostly in film and television crossing over and doing performance-based work and these are these are choreographers who generally work with rock stars or movies or television shows they're going over and creating these performance-based works and the line is dissolving between the commercial and the not-for-profit in really interesting ways so I think that there are opportunities out there and there are some good points certainly access remains to be a very challenging issue in conversation and you want to piggyback on it right? well yes I could just add you know my own history I moved to Arizona 12 years ago specifically to work at the Center for Performing Arts and for the woman who was director of that talk Kathy Aschner some of you may know Kathy but prior to that I lived in more to New York for a commercial theater producer and we had sit-downs in all the major markets across the US as well as touring nationally and internationally so I've been on a roll in lots of different markets producing this commercial project that I was loved at a theater degree so I came into it with a very wary eye because I was not doing high art I was doing commercial art that frustrated me but then coming here to Scottsdale my initial role was really to be a producer for a presenting organization which was really really challenging and that was the main reason that Kathy brought me out to Arizona to Scottsdale Center because she said we're leasing this theater we're producing this show we're presenters we don't really have a grasp on what it is that we're trying to do and so she brought me to kind of help them to get the show up off the ground but I learned really quickly that to produce shows and present shows at the same time in one presenting organization that is a huge challenge I actually was fortunate to get some funding from California presenters a few years ago to do an entire year studying with the growth stage of Santa Monica who is a performing art center that has very much that model they want to produce work as well as present work and they have been working on this model and trying to study out how they could do both and this I think goes back to the challenges and that's really where we kind of collectively came to the realization that staff capacity was tapped out and you almost need two sets of parallel staff in order to do the producing end of things and presenting end of things so it's still very much a work in progress but as we're doing at the center and as I know they're doing at the growth stage they continue to produce we continue to produce but really and as somebody touched earlier about the presenting arts organizations and the damages of the world who do these big flashy shows and make a lot of money and we really do filter that money into the outreach programs and into the local arts programs that we do because without it we wouldn't without being able to present these big artists and the flashy commercial projects we wouldn't be able to do these other programs that really are feeding our soul as an arts presenting organization and so that was just the one I wanted to add on to Tim's comment about accessibility Yeah I mean I think for us you know we are tasked with really trying to make a healthier, robust ecosystem and I think that means like for me specifically diversity and variety in terms of the size of organizations that we're supporting the you know the support that we give to artists you know at multiple stages in their careers is a real challenge we just did a professional development two-day training in Tucson and that was like we partnered with Ticac and that was like I think our biggest challenge was you know how do you because it's not one fight it's all and the work that we do you know in Tucson it's going to be very different than the work we're about to do in Southwest because the community is entirely different and you know when we sit down with these partners that are doing the work on the ground and we ask them you know what it is that they are looking for right what is it that you want what is it that we think we're able to help with and how do we then like we'll make that happen it looks really different in every little corner of you know Wickenburg is totally different than Douglas than Nogales then I mean it's sort of it's a real challenge and I think it's so important to listen to those partners like that is that is a big challenge I think because it does require time and our staff you know staff is limited okay here's the quick question the trick question not the quick question in this role of presenter and producer which you talked about I guess the question is how do you feed how do you feed the curiosities the artists you work with and the audiences that are out there that you're serving so it's a question about curiosities and how they enter into the training of your work I'll start quickly so I'll come back a little bit to easier worker it's a program that we're privately in three cities the Phoenix, Tucson and Douglas and what we're doing is we're bringing in artists to work within these three communities artists and arts professionals I should say and the hope is that we get them to partner with with our with our local counterparts right and that they the dream is that they become co-producers of co-producers and it's it's really tough like it's really really tough to do it right and it's sort of a process because what is the tendency is that the visiting artist comes in right and then takes over and that's exactly what we are always vigilant of time right and it can be really hard and I think like every different ancient has its own challenges we just partnered with Nia for a program things that we've started and we brought in a sento right so we only need to do a workshop and we have 25 people signed up beyond performers we have 35 people show up to the workshop and so what that tells me is that there is a need and there is a desire right and we need to find ways to like foster that and I think when for us for me the way in which we foster that curiosity is by sort of connecting these people and then seeing what happens because the different in the different regions depending on who it is that's engaging who it is that's working together like something something new happened well I would say you know in my role I'm probably been the director for nine months but it's still very new for me and I'm throwing a lot of spaghetti against the wall to see what sticks but one of the big things that I have enjoyed the most especially with my connection with the Arizona presenters alliance is reaching out to my counterparts throughout the region in the presenting field you know my colleagues at the art center at the channel center at Williamburg at the University of UA presents in Tucson and talking about how we can work together with artists that are emerging artists whether they're local or regional and really working as a team almost all of us as presenters to nurture that artist and develop them within our market Musical Instrument Museum is another great example although there are just instructors who live here so you kind of got a question that's just running past you but we kind of have started with theater and we were talking about artists that were all interested that were all excited about but we've all taken notice of and talking about making a several year wrong plan with this artist where we all come together in collaboration and co-present them in all of our venues over the course of several years and all of these engagements with the artists would include education so that at the same time we're not competing and competing against each other and getting into each other and spending more money than we should in our competitions but we're also working together to identify artists because I'm a huge believer that two, three, four, five, twelve heads are better than one I've learned about new artists from my counter parts all the time and so this is something we're still experimenting with we have kind of our first experiment with a co-promotion between performing art centers next season so hopefully it goes beautifully and we can continue to move forward but this is kind of our ultimate plan to kind of work together as almost a cooperative to nurture artists and maybe some of the multiple artists at a time to grow from a 300-seat venue to a 600-seat venue to an 800-seat venue up to a 1,800-seat venue and then maybe unleash into the promoters or even to arenas and football fields and whatever else they do at that level just like you're on my head I'm going to echo what Daniel said earlier in a previous panel about this idea of social capital and how you use social capital to build these and strengthen these relationships I think the same principle works kind of building relationship between artists and presenters and venues that sort of getting to know one another I think and I'm going to speak to how presenters sometimes approach audiences there has been kind of the principle of sort of like Captain Kirk coming down to the sky and saying indeed, she's going to settle and plan I think that's happened all too often where they really they started to sort of exercise something where they really don't have the relationships and as many time presenters are now more and more invested they have to just looking around them they have no alternative but then they reach out and start building relationships in the community and if they're not they're going to be the West is changing really really quickly we're all experiencing that and the country is experiencing that look at our political situation and I think that you have something to offer and they have something that they need from you so I think there's opportunities there to exchange social capital build relationships and really sort of find a path through those relationships because it really starts fundamentally kind of with relationships both between the presenter and the audience and between the artist and the presenter that's a nice segue relationships to you guys so it's a question questions from any one of you Stephanie please about the audience engagement the comment that I just made to my colleagues body over here just as you mentioned we're like these organizations have to they're in a place now that they have to do that and I said to her accept that they want to do that on their terms is the challenge with that or on the backs of other people instead of doing the work we'll hire the person who has the relationship in the community and break them off a little bit of something but we want it to fit in our box of doing things so we can talk a little bit about any of these experiences with that I agree I've seen it too from our side and I think that's a variation on the whole thing that's sort of kind of forming it in kind of audience engagement but I think it's changing I think that frankly I think that grant makers like Melon Foundation and others at Burvine and Paul Allen the last extent Paul Allen Foundation but certainly Burvine some of the grant makers are actually putting out carrots that are really kind of fostering hope so substance and change and how we do this work but I think it's absolutely the case that they want on their terms and I think that everybody just needs to be really clear with each other about expectations and if you're not seeing your expectations are fulfilled but I think these people are they're landed in these positions it's not by accident they've sort of they've grown up to they've sort of earned their way in at least in their sort of own eyes they've found their way in these positions they're smart people and they either adapt or they move away or they're you know I mean I think that there is a situation now where we're at a point for crisis I think it has to start accelerating and I think that that artists need to start engaging and if the processes are not satisfactory then then you need to be prepared and invested enough to be able to walk away or at least to be able to first to say this isn't working for me and if you don't it's really scary it's really really scary I mean this year at Guad we actually we turned over a day long program that was very expensive to produce to really like 13 people but we didn't really know that well but it was it was a really important move for us to give that power to these 13 individuals who knew far more about this work than any of us and so it was it was a in hindsight it was a it was a risk worth taking by certain and I think that's what we need to sort of let visitors know that Richard Mazza and Sandra I don't know if anybody knows Richard Mazza or the jury which is one of the leading Aboriginal companies in Australia she talks about this idea of coming at this from a deficit you know like for indigenous artists Aboriginal artists that were coming we're coming at this we're entering this field from a deficit position that we that there's a deficit that needs to be made up for them when in fact sort of advancing indigenous artists and work in our networks and our communities and our performing arts center enriches their work and riches their community and what can fundamentally change the way they do work so it can inspire presenters to do work in new ways this question is for Gabriela about the Arizona commission of the arts are you appropriate to the agency the state agency the state agency and how large is your budget how large is your budget so I that's my thing I joined the commission about three months ago so I know my own budget but I I will actually be attending our very first board meeting on Thursday which the so we are overseen by awarded commissioners that are appointed by the governor so that should be the answer I think we're a number of 49 out of 50 in terms of what the arts council receives from the state and then lastly what are the advocacy efforts in the underway grassroots to empower or strengthen your particular agency yeah well we have an organization they're called Arizona the arts they they actually our house right across from us I would say that we are desperate for your advocacy it's really sort of we're in a in a moment of real need where we really kind of need you all to advocate and we actually so we utilize your success stories right we actually utilize those to really highlight the way which are the art that is being produced is transforming communities and it is sort of in many ways what allows us to continue doing some of the work but we do need your advocacy I mean I would say even at the very like local level right so just to follow up on that and to build on an idea that Roberta put out there in terms of the connection of ideas right so I'm in Texas I've been there two years and we have an advocacy organization we go to the state on an annual basis and specifically on Dallas and we also have a local advocacy group we've been able to use language that's friendly to the state legislature to you know promote both aisles to preserve our commissions resources and find other avenues to increase those resources specifically to the designation of more arts districts right across the state and locally in Dallas over the last couple of years you know when I arrived there was zero resources for individual artists at the office of cultural affairs in two years that budget has increased to $500,000 and the local OCA just announced a cultural equity initiative to fund under-resourced communities in Dallas and when I arrived those conversations were already happening but they're also accelerating across multiple sectors of disciplines both on grassroots level across data companies individual artists major institutions even human rights groups so it's like a really interesting so I just want to put that out there you know because I don't think Texas and Arizona are that different just having been here for 12 years and having been through a lot of the arts congress days with our local commission we do a similar thing with the Arizona Commission on the Arts they do an annual advocacy day where the entire day is focused on the arts they bring in arts leaders and arts professionals from around the state and they will specifically I guess Arizona citizens for the arts there's a lot of coordinating where we specifically set up face-to-face meetings with our legislators both the representatives and the state senators to talk to them about the importance of the arts and you know sometimes those meetings go sideways because those politicians have decided they don't care about arts funding and they just want a free lunch that's all but at the same time I just wanted to also grow up for anybody who's not from Arizona the state of Arizona's arts meeting is a really gross history over the past five years five or ten years maybe of the decline in arts funding I think that the current general appropriation from the state budget to the arts commission is even a thousand dollars and every year we educate for one time a million dollars for grant programs this year we didn't get it last year we got it next year we don't know so there's a lot of that going forward as far as public funding through the commission and then additionally I think I want to say this six years ago our state legislators made a decision to sweep a closet endowment that hadn't set up for the Arizona commission that had 23 million dollars in it and they took public funding so the state funding issue in Arizona as far as public funding I'm sorry I know you're from Arizona you know all this but for anybody who's not here what kind of a state of what we're facing as far as public funding for the state agency I don't have the exact numbers but this is from my survey that I mentioned a few minutes ago the average for western states state funding for western states is 42 cents per capita in the western states and the average grant in the western states is 6,500 dollars the next closest is south arts which serves the southern states which is 76 cents per capita and then average if you go NEPA in England $3 this is 2012 data $3 is 20 cents per capita and the average grant is about $12,000 from the states in the northern area so thank you for mentioning NEPA and I actually gonna applaud you guys for the fact that you take on the national charge because we're so NEPA and we're going back to the west east coast I feel like I'll continue but some of that but the fact that a regional service organization has taken under their mission to actually move beyond their geographic call to do a disparate call that allows us to actually have access to them but I think this discussion about public funding and private funding I just need to underscore that Arizona is very poor building property well, public and property the arts council has lost close to 60% of their budget since the recession so small money so it's trafficking and small money again but I want to kind of move over here because I like moving over here and I like how advances happen in the field and I want you guys to come with this as funders and presenters how we pay attention to what's happening over here and I truly believe that revances happen obliquely so what does your antenna say about that how does your antenna work yeah, I mean for me I think I mean I so I'm actually so I'm trained as an artist I'm hosting as a arts administrator um I'm actually so I've engaged actually with Chico um Christina Christina's like tell them that your print is hanging here and that's how that's how I stay connected right that's how I listen like I listen to my colleagues I listen to you know I show up right so I think it's really important to show up for one another and I think like Tucson's particularly strong about that. I think that's why the work that you will do was really, really strong. And we see it here in Phoenix in different pockets and maybe it's because we're so spread out, but showing up for one another, listening to the work that's being produced, asking one another, right? Like I'll ask my theme, you know, if you'll give me like my first key job. I'll be like, hey, like what are you working on?  That somebody else is making. Because as artists, like we're always talking with one another. We're always talking about our work, we're workshopping, you know, our work. Like it's important to stay involved in the community through which we move and in which we work.  So, you know, from the moment I moved here, I went out into the community and saw work at all different theaters and lots of clubs. And now that I'm in this role that I'm in, obviously my time is not as free as it was by then, sadly, but I have engaged a team, a programming team, where we've really changed our model to center about programming. It's not really just one person curating the entire series any longer. It's really a team of six people who work together with their teams as well. So, we sit down on a monthly basis and go over a calendar of the entire region and everything that's happening. What is this festival happening in Mesa? What is this performing art piece that's coming out at the powder gallery? What's going on? What's Rachel Vodic's latest thing? We love her work. And we kind of sit down and we assign to each other.  I'm also extremely lucky to have a programming manager who is a visual artist and is very well-affected throughout the Phoenix, Gray-Nabu line of visual artists. And she's constantly coming to me and telling me about from a studio may or the things that are happening first Friday something done for in Nabu. And so that's kind of, I feel like that might be a lame answer, but that's really how we stay connected at the center. And then of course, the conversations I was talking about earlier with my counterparts of the Arizona presenters alliance, I learned a tremendous amount from them and what they're seeing and thinking about and getting excited about. But certainly throughout the community, from day one, I've been astonished. Like as I mentioned, I was recruited and moved to Scottsdale from New York for this job. So I knew nothing about Arizona when I came here. I didn't even have a car, which in Arizona, as you know, it was like a shine on everybody's homes. And I was completely blown away by the quality of the performing arts work that was happening here that I had no idea about even having toured across the country and being through Arizona on tour. I had no idea and it was incredibly, it still impresses me. And at the same time it infuriates me that the whole country doesn't look at Phoenix and say that's the most amazing work with Phoenix. So that's not what I have this position. I'm hoping to help change that, but not just one person, it's a lot of us. In the planning of the conference, we get a much better conference. That's the result of it. Sit down. And Vancouver, because we've never met in Vancouver, we're almost 50 years old. We've had Canadian members in our organization for more than 30 years, but we've never met in Canada. And so we have to engage people beyond our own membership in planning the Vancouver conference. And we had a much better conference. So getting out of our own circle, and so now we have a similar group in Los Angeles, it's not just members. We're reaching out to people, state holders, like ACTA and others in the community to help create the conference program in Los Angeles. ACTA is the association of the Alliance for Confidential Arts. So we're reaching beyond our own circle to create a bio-conference program. Not again, it seems kind of self-evident, but it really, it's made all the difference for our work. I have a question. I'm thinking about the conversation we were having just a little while ago around funding and that statistic around the West. And it surprises me, but then I think about it and it's like, oh, okay, it doesn't. But I actually wonder if we're having this conversation and I think about local context. And here, the whole point of this convening is to think about how work happens locally and just to filter in. And I think about the West and I think about it's libertarian. I mean, it just is. And so of course we're not gonna have that kind of government funding because that's just not the context that we live in. It's not. And so trying to compare state funding is like trying to say, well, New England has no cactuses. Like how many cactuses do you have? And they don't, but no, it's like, it's trying to make New England something that's not. But then the question comes up to me kind of that comes into my brain is given the local context, given the regional context, what, how, like work is done, but we're trying to look at it through this realm that it feels like we're trying to apply this prism that doesn't really work. And of course we're gonna fall short of it because it's not, it's not what we do. It's not what we are. It's not. But what I don't know is what, what is it? And it's not that. And comparing ourselves to that doesn't seem helpful. Well, what is the local prism? What is the local context? What is the local practice? I don't think we can make ourselves New England out here in the West Side. I'm not saying that. But I think that grant makers, funding agencies, the National Endowment certainly is looking at these things and they're looking at data in the aggregate. They're looking at impact. They're looking at results. And they're simply, this is the volume. I mean, I think it's more about a reality check. There isn't nearly the volume of producing activity or presenting activity in the West as we see in other parts of the country. I mean, not only in funding, but if you look at the infrastructure of presenting organizations, it's, first of all, in the New England, it's a concentrated population area, population center. So that's an exception. But even in the Midwest, on a sort of density basis, there's far more activity, grant activity, in each congressional district than there is in the West. So as understanding that, I think it's important that we understand where we fit. And so then that gives us direction about how to produce, how to present, how to make work. I think it's really just understanding sort of the infrastructure that we're swimming in different pools.  Yes, yes. We're totally doing that. And within that, how do we start to better explain the pool that we built? Like, I feel like that's where we're failing is that we haven't been able to actually say, it looks like this. And I think about it, we're going to talk about park life. Like here, if people go to parks and arts happen in a park and they're not presented, they emerge. But it's- But it's just as in Virginia, this valuable is happening at the Scottsville Center, yeah. Exactly. So does that mean that the parks budget can increase? Yes. So, you know, my thing is, despite, I agree with you, yes, there are literally values across this particular region, but there doesn't, those values don't come to play when a for-profit entity needs tax subsidies to facilitate the development of a new commercial real estate product, right? Right, yes. And we're talking about economic development and we're talking about the creative communities that give life to this. I'm not letting, I'm not letting the public official off the hook. You know, when it comes to supporting arts and culture. You, Klai, you opened such a door, especially with public, because we've talked about a lot about it. I think that my colleagues, and Imanin, and Maribel would understand that we're under the pressure in Tucson of what our municipal, our leadership, they want bankable culture. They want something that generates sales dollars and that fills the city coffers. They don't really care about their work. They don't really care that much about the individual artist. I don't really think they care about me. Yeah, yeah. I mean, it's lip service. I mean, they have other, whatever they care about, it's a different concern. I mean, so I wouldn't say that, like, I wouldn't steer over the other direction of feeling like you should, you know, be this like, you know, economic engine for the city because we already are an economic engine for the city and all I get is lip service. Right, right, right. But so I'm getting, when I was getting lip service, I want like a 10,000 festivals and whatever, whatever. We all have our headaches, really significant headaches. But this idea of sort of kind of the DIY spirit of presenting and self-producing that is, you know, kind of in the landscape. It goes back to the metaphor of the scarcity and how much of that is dental. Well, Martin, quieted. You've cracked up with Pandora's box and I've set up rips a little. I mean, really, so far, when we talk about these arts institutions, simply by saying institution, we're talking about a structure of organization that is pretty, you know, specific and has been inherited from the East and further East across the pond. And those structures don't really work in an environment where there are other cultures that are in the majority because you're posing a structure on something that already has a structure. And so there's this disconnect. And so, like Jane and I were talking earlier about since we're on live casting, I don't know, name, name. So we were talking about organizations in my home city, current home city, that really function the same way that they would in New York or function the same way that they were in Berlin. And they do, yeah, well, they do. And so I think really, what I'm interested in is how do we create new structures of organizing people and creativity in a way that is more harmonious with, go back to my co-panelist's notion of the landscape, right, that actually uses images from the landscape here and the culture sphere, which are rooted to the landscape. You know, I was recently invited to be part of a conversation with one of those big organizations in my home city. And they were mourning the fact that they had been trying to get certain people to the table for a long time that those people weren't at the table. Well, it was great that they were asking who's not at the table because that's actually the first step because a lot of people don't even ask that question. But the answer to me seems fairly simple, move the table. The people that they wanted to have at the table were miles away, could not take a lunch to drive half an hour to be someplace for an hour, meaning drive back and lose two hours of work. You move the table, you change the structure of the organization, you relocate, you swap. I actually suggested the chair of the board was in the room, I said, I know it's gonna be crazy, but what would happen if you actually moved your operations to one of the warehouses in the south side and gave the artist in the south side a monitor built in for six months or a year?   So, I don't know, let's use the rest of the time to talk, reinvent the notion of the institution and what does that look like and where do we even start? But that's clearly what has to happen because everybody's acknowledged that audiences are changing, demographics are changing. I mentioned before that the theater of the capital team has not reached some cultural diversity because it seems to not be part of that culture when the most performance is, but going up to the top being sitting in the last room seems to not. So, that's a comment and then a question for these guys. Perfect, here. Here's, thank you. No, I got it. Who's next? Who got next? Who got next? In this advocacy world, there was an effort about three, four years ago to create a tax initiative led by two significant funders in Phoenix who only funded Maricopa County. So, they did a study of Latino audiences and so, and when they found out from the study of the audiences that the Latino community self-described that the number one cultural activity is going to the park. I wasn't going to the theater, I wasn't going to the concert, it was going to the park. So, then the next day I got a report from somebody that says, there's no Latinos in my theater. And I'm saying, well, you're not looking, we're in a city, you know what I mean?  But in some ways, this notion of what Daniel is trying to say, that, there is this moment of re-imagining what we need to envision the role of this potential producer moment in time. So, I'll just guess prompt all of you guys, who's got the vision? This isn't really on the vision, it's another question. But I have been thinking a lot about who sets the terms for building a career, a life in art that's successful. And I think there's an old model that's still on the table, and actually, I was curious to hear Ale talk about it a little bit, because at its best, I hope there's going to be life in all models. But, you know, this idea that presenters could help build a career for artists. And certainly when I came into the field, that was a major operating assumption that presenters would get together and decide, you know, who showed a lot of promise, who they were interested in, commissioned them, moved them around their venues. And a lot of our operating systems, as funders, are also kind of predicated on that model. And as a former presenter, I've been part of initiatives like that. I think it's been successful, but Roberta's talking about what we kind of sort of see over here. And one of the things that I do feel we've been seeing a lot of is that artists are really starting to build their own economic model when it comes to working with communities and working with presenters. And I'm not sure whether that's because presenters, you know, are under some infrastructure attrition themselves and just can't invest in commissioning and research and resourcing artists as well as they used to. Or whether it's a legitimate kind of re-understanding of the artists in the ecosystem and the fact that artists have real visions for where they want to go and be and the audiences and the communities they want to engage with, that don't always align with presenters in the way of work. And even Tim, you made an interesting comment. You said, I guess relationships are so important, which they are, but artists and presenters need to have relationships and presenters have relationships with audiences. But I am thinking about that third part of the triangle, which is that artists often know who they want their audiences to be. And I think you were getting a little bit at that too, that one of, you know, presenter kind of tries to outsource that pure and simple to artists that really doesn't work. But at NIFI with the National Theater Project, we're thinking structurally about how to, you know, really incentivize the development of sustainable ways of working and engagement with audiences for artists. And then sometimes I think that happens with presenters as a critical lynchpin, and other times I'm not as sure anymore. So it's, I guess, a question. But there are several things that come to mind. I think that the presenters are more and more rely on people. They're looking for artists that have established relationships with audiences. And so social media is playing a bigger and bigger factor. Artists that have established relationships with, you know, through social media, then that really becomes an asset of the artist to the presenter. So that's something that I think is changing. And I think in terms of your earlier kind of dichotomy, which is it, I think it's both. I think that both of those kind of factors are in play. And I think that more and more of the venues that most of our members own and operate are kind of like that outlet trust. You know, it's their assets and their obstacles. Their obstacles for entry, their obstacles for budgets, for maintenance. They're weighing them down so they simply don't have the capacity that they did once, you know, 20, you know, 30 years ago. And so that, you know, building an infrastructure and obligations, I mean, Ally was talking about, I mean, I think it's, I'm sure it's true at ASU at Cannamage is, you know, all the responsibilities presenters are not simply programmers.  They have obligations to faculty and students. You know, they have public events that they're doing. There's all these different demands that sort of pull away from what was, I think, one kind of core mission as a presenting organization and as a way of building a relationship between the institution of higher learning and a community around them. And that is more and more difficult in this day and age of economics and accountability and obligations for the university, you know, to fulfill, to do more with less. That was a satisfying answer. I mean, I think also we see, you know, like, pricing you a theater, for example, who's operating out of new box, but they're in residence there. But then they did this, like, incredible performance along the light rail, okay, like, all over. So I think when those relationships, right, which sort of goes back, I think, to another question of like, how do we make sure that all parties are being treated with equal respect and agency? I think when, like, when artists don't find that, then they fault the whole system. And they, you know, they sort of, they do it their own way, like, on their own kind of DIY, right, if that structure is in there, that will support them and treat them with respect. That they will simply, like, go their way. I mean, how does all souls procession, like, do it, right? All souls can know their kind of thing. So. I can say that I did APAP in Guad for 10 years. Spent $75,000 when I had money in 10 years and never got one single gig from any of them. But yeah, I can get booked for, you know, a foreign country in a heartbeat by a city government or a developer that sees the value of what I do. When I turn in paperwork that says, like, the event makes $30 million a year. People in the city don't get it, but other people do. But yeah, I stopped, I gave up on presenters last year. We stopped doing all the conferences. I said, no more money to the presenters and their coordinate organizations. And I feel so much better about it. I feel like I'm back in my game now. I don't have to deal with, like, all the stuff, going to water, going to AAPAP, buying a booth, doing all the games, doing the showcase, paying for the showcase. Oh, didn't get a single gig. And it's happened for 10 years. I gave it 10 years of presenter land. And I'm so much happier now, I have to say. Because, yeah, you kind of said it, that, like, presenter free is changing and dying out and the new school is coming in. And hopefully, the institutions that hold the purse strings will allow people to give their audience a little more credit. Not everyone wants to see the electric light orchestra version of Hunchback and Entertainment. Like, it's really, I know it's sold like in Detroit or it's sold in Chicago, but it is such a horrible thing. It's not art. It is simply a commodity-based product, not based on the creative movement. There's something vital going on that presenters and most city people don't see. They don't see what people are really wanting. At least to those souls, there's 150,000 people and more are going to come out this year. And I have nothing to do with it. All I do is fall under the reins and buy insurance and support bodies. OK, and we're good, right? So it's a strange thing to be in a conversation now. And it's like, I don't know. I just don't, there's a lot more work that has to get done on if there's a side, on the presenter's civic body side. The artists are doing the work and we always continue to do the work, you know? I mean, I spend 200 hours a year writing $40,000 worth of grants. I do pretty good for Tucson, for Arizona. I feel like I'm on the top tier. I feel like, wow, I'm up there. So I don't know, it's a really good conversation. I wanted to just speak on, I think what you're touching on is, what many think about is knowing what artists' strengths are, whether we're a presenter or an artist, and for Junba, we happen to be both a presenter and the artist, and we're really interested in, I think the three of them are saying, talking about people who are playing multiple roles within companies. And I think we've only been able to present artists for over 30 years without a venue, not our own space, because of really strong partnerships, one being, one with the Contemporary Arts Center. And in order to have a strong relationship, we really need to know what our strength is and the audience that we bring. So, we bring something to the table that maybe the CDC didn't bring to the table, but we each bring our own strengths and that's the only way we're able to really survive. So, we bring African-American audience that is really important to the CAC, for example, and the CAC brings resources that we don't have and it's the only way we're able to survive. Another thing I just wanted to talk about, this is not as exciting, but with the state funding, I feel like it just needs to be said, and I know we've probably talked about a lot, that these grant applications, I mean, I just feel like these state agencies are kind of shooting themselves in the front a little bit at times, because like you said, you need those strong artists and that helps the agency, but when you make the process so difficult, I mean, a lot of people just decide it's not worth the process. And I'm not saying they're all like that, but there's gotta be a way to make some of this universal. Even if it was just following the NEA budget, if we could just have that budget formed for all of them, then that would even make it a little bit easier. For $1,000, $2,000, we just don't apply anymore. It's not worth it to us. The thing amount of time it takes to do that is like, could cost that much to do the application and apply the report. So, I mean, I feel like sometimes I don't wanna be like, we just need to boycott this process so that we can change the social system. As grateful as we are for funding, it's just, it's huge, it's taxing on small positions, women of the class. Hi, I'm Matthew Michael Reed from ASU Gammage. Colleen was here earlier, correct? Artificate of Director. I just wanted to touch base a little bit on what I heard Tim talking about and Kathy touching on. In regard to what is the evolving identity of college and university presenters, and you're right, Tim, there's many, many things that are asked of us of the university now that have nothing to do with presenting the arts. But I also, I've been doing work there for 20 years and work with community for 20 years and in every kind of capacity you could think of as community members on the stage at Gammage and professional productions and productions produced all around the valley, the either river, reservation and other places. And one of the things that I've been working with there at Heinzman, who was here earlier, soon with us about four years, we came clear several years ago as you know that you don't know. So if you're starting to work with a community you haven't worked with before, as a designer who's part of a big organization, go ask all the questions, go find out as much as you can and go find out what it is that would serve a particular organization's mission you're talking with. This week we had Martin and Valis here from Ketzal, the music group in L.A. And I think we're gonna work together next year as far as I can, which isn't the artist. And we had two days of full meetings with pretty much most of the community organizations and ASU people who are also have several identities as far as community artists and ASU professors. And I learned more in those past, in those two days, Tuesday and Wednesday about several different community organizations I knew in the valley for 20 years and then I had known in 20 years. So that just reiterated for me that there is a place for university presenters or college presenters or presenters to do this work really well with artists but really was Martin driving the meetings. Who do you wanna meet with? Here's some people I think might be good to meet with. What do you think who do you wanna meet with? And then we also changed our model a lot over the years in that we present less artists now than we did 20 years ago or 15 years ago. But we have much closer people connections with different community organizations and even the ASU community, which is a small city, there's 85,000 students now. So that's much more impactful.  And I try and set it out of the way and I try and take those resources we would use to have three or four or five other artists come in in the season on the corner seasons and put them towards supporting that work, that infrastructure work or community, whether it's gonna be community performances and informal performance or whatever it may turn out to be what's given by the artists working with us together. This will be the last question because we're gonna have a show. So going back to the artist presenter, I'm at CAC where I got to work with Juma for soundtrack and my question is, when does everyone just apologize for what they don't know? The reason we are tight, the reason we're together, the reason we can go to stuff together and even share rooms at times is because what I didn't know I asked. But I think that it's very difficult sometimes for an artist to understand that when they're dealing with a presenter they could be dealing with 35 other people who didn't spend two years developing the work with them. So the head of marketing thinks it's about black people but I'm not black and I don't go to church so I guess I'll just pull it out, right? And so it's hard for the presenter who sent to the artist to keep the same relationship. So how do we develop a better sense of understanding not just the ecosystem but like the one person who loves your work that's in the organization isn't necessarily the usher or the PD or the head of marketing or a diva, right? It's the curator or that presenter who's a program director, that's my question. How do we galvanize our organizations to actually understand what our mission is? That's a great last question. Well, yeah, I mean that's a great question. Now, you know, I would say the best thing is I would say the best thing is that, you know, the more, I don't know, I wanna say some of the most successful engagements that we have had with artists that we know most of our staff just doesn't get that they're not clueing into what the real work is about is when the artist is able to take time to come and meet all of us as a group, because we all meet as a group already and so we talk through every programming decision and why we wanna hope this artist and why we're in love with this project so that everybody kind of gets that sense in the beginning of, you know, this is why I'm telling you guys we're gonna do this artist, you know, it's not just passed down from on high, but we also, so we have those face-to-face meetings with the artists whenever we can, but when it's not possible, you know, if your artist is from out of town or if they're just too busy, we also work to kind of put together almost an EPK for internal use where we can kind of pass this around so that the marketing team can all look at this document to glean what they need from it. Our development team can glean what they need from it. Even our front house manager can make sure that, you know, the ushers and the house manager know what to talk about and kind of respond to questions that they get, questions from our patrons that I've been seeing that tomorrow night what's really going on. So it's labor-intensive to do that and it takes time, but I've found that it's been really helpful for us this year to get that communication flowing and it's a process, it's not been perfect, but what we're starting and we're taking big steps and we're pushing to expand that as much as we can. I don't know if that's directly answering your question because there's not a push, I could give you more information for like how the artist can really be involved in that, but I mean, frankly, from my perspective, the more information I can get in the artist as far as samples of the work or background about the artist or background about how the piece came to be or even coming in advance and having that meeting with the staff or even coming in advance and doing a special presentation for the audience. We do that a lot, a lot of lectures in advance of the show, whether it's with the artist or if it's with a local expert on the subject matter, that's been really beneficial for us as well. Tim, you have a question. I think it's a really good question and I think that organizations need to sort of take those big steps and to try new things and to fail at it and they need to start engaging and answering and confessing that they don't know when they know. I think that presenting at it's worst is a really transactional business, it's a transaction. It's a series of transactions and we need going back to Daniel's kind of demand that we find that we can be ambitious of a few ways of working. I think the further we can get away from presenting is a transactional kind of event. The healthier it is going to be for every single person. I think that's really sort of the nature of the work. On that note, let's thank our panelists to take a break. In a few minutes, we'll gather to see a few more of us. Thank you. May I add to that? Close, can I request that all of us fold our chairs and actually take a look at them?


Welcome back, everyone. We are in day two of theCUBE's live coverage of UI Path Forward 6 here in Sin City. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight. I'm your host and analyst, Dave Vellante. We are having really fascinating conversations and we're going to get to all of it, but one of the biggest issues we're going to be talking about is labor. And we've got two experts here. We have Amy Boak. She is the Chief People Officer at Kelly Services. Welcome, Amy. And Bridget McGinnis Day, the Chief People Officer at UI Path. Welcome to both of you. Thanks for having us. So, we're in a labor shortage. We know this. There is a skills gap, the talent gap. We're having an aging workforce. There's so many workforce challenges. I have a few statistics. A new report from Corn Fairy finds that by 2030, there'll be an 8.5 trillion in annual revenue loss due to the talent shortage. Another report from Accenture, nearly half of executives say they see generative AI tools playing multiple rules in their hiring process, including onboarding and training programs for new hires. So, Bridget, I want to start with you. This is the context of the problem, but automation and AI might be part of the solution. So, just riff on that for a little bit. Yeah, sure. So, I definitely think it has to be part of the solution. I think that the other things that have been working in the past are the traditional ways of finding talent, hiring talent, retaining talent aren't really working, right? We see that people have choice and they want what they need for their own careers, right? So, I would say one of the things around hiring or attracting people, I would just definitely say from an automation perspective, this type of work is what people want. If they want to come to a company that they know that the company wants to make sure that they think about removing the mundane work and work on the more value-added work, that's where they want to go. And they want to be with cutting-edge technology that really is the hottest thing in the market right now. Automation and AI, and that's what UiPath has to offer. So, I think that's one of the things companies need to think about is what product and what inspiration do they have to really attract your retain? The other thing I would say, if you look internally for us as an organization, is that we need to be role models in the HR space for automation. We have to drink our own champagne, I think they say, right? A better, yeah. A dog food guy, that's what I'm saying. Yeah, we're in Sin City, we don't have champagne. So, I think it's also about thinking about not only how can we transform an HR automation and HR space, but think about just the entire Canada experience, all the way from sourcing all the way to onboarding and what we're doing is leveraging our automation AI platform to do that. And it really has transformed the experience and we can do things like all the interview sketch scheduling, the onboarding, all the prompts all the way through and it's personalized and they feel that someone's there connecting with them all via automation, but also too, thinking about resume sourcing. All that has to be moved away and really allows the recruiters to have 40% more time to really think about building relationships, finding talent in new places, and to your point, this labor shortage, we have to do it a different way. So, they've got 40% more time here in our own team and it's actually reduced their overall time to other things for 30%. And I'm pretty proud to say this year we looked it up. We have a 95% offer acceptance rate at UiPath. That's a pretty big deal in terms of how we're driving it. So, again, your question was there's a lot of issues coming at us and we have to come at it in a very different way and why not free up the work you're doing that's not going to find a talent and bring them in and actually attract them. I cover future of work and I talk to a lot of job seekers over the course of my reporting. And they find it to be a pain point, the AI sourcing of resumes, they find that they're being filtered out. And there's also been questions about are you filtering out maybe the non-traditional candidates who might not have the resume, maybe a stay-at-home parent who's coming back into the workforce or an underrepresented, someone from an underrepresented group, how do you think about AI and making sure that while you're using these technologies, there is still a human in the loop because HR is about humans. So much of what I heard Bridget say and I think what's core to Kelly is it isn't about the sourcing activity itself. That's where the human is reviewing those candidates and really thinking about the profile that's needed. And one of the things I'm most proud about and where I think Bridget was going with her answer is that idea that the candidate and the employee see the purpose of what they're doing. And what Kelly's known for is the equity barrier breaking. And so all of those candidates are exactly who we're looking for and trying to help, so them transform their lives by the meaning of work. And so I would say we can do all of what Bridget's doing plus she's just talking about getting somebody to start. We have all of this automation opportunity in our ongoing everyday transactions, whether that's compensation, moves, benefit administration, there's so much to be done that allows people to work into their full potential. So I reject the idea that candidates might just not realize that, but most of us aren't using AI to help with the screening. And would you agree with that? We do a bit sourcing as well on the sourcing side on the screening side. Another thing that just happened this past week, my daughter's a sophomore at university looking for an internship next year and I was helping her on the weekend and she applied for a job and then asked her, would you say yes to having AI as part of your sourcing and selection? Wow. And I thought, huh, what is the answer, right? So I said, what do you think? She's the 19 year old in the space, right? I said, what do you think? And she said no. And so she wants a human in the loop and then it gives the candidate the option which I thought was pretty fascinating. Really, okay, so it wasn't just a little survey to see what people were thinking. It was actually took action. She applied for a job and she got a call already and she's already had her first interview with it in less than a week. Oh, congratulations, congrats. I know, right? So I was like, right in action. I don't want to tell my kids, say no. But I wonder if your question, I wonder if your question is part of the challenges that we're not caring for candidates through their recruiting process in such a way that AI could resolve it, right? Because candidates are applying to jobs and then the recruiter goes dark and they don't know and so much of what gets solved through AI is that warm connection of thanks for applying, we'll get back to you within whatever the window of time is. There's a nudge from the technology to the recruiter, respond or there's a check-in. So I believe part of what can get solved is the leverage of technology. Yeah, yeah. So what are some learnings in terms of how you actually operationalize AI and automation into these processes? Because they are, at least from the job seekers' perspective, cumbersome, clunky, hard, and it's emotional. You're looking for a job, you're looking for something that is your livelihood, you're stressed out. You want to go first? I'll try it first. I think the first thing for me is that we keep people at the center, right? So when we're talking to the recruiters and we're talking about changing the process, we're doing it with them. Not to them, not for them, we're doing it with them. And then the second thing, so flipping the lenses, we have to treat every candidate as a prospective customer. Whatever our product is, whatever our company is, whoever's applying to UiPath, the UiPath recruiter has to think about them as a future UiPath client or customer. And when you flip that lens to know that they could not only work for us, but actually talk about our brand. And I think that's where we miss is that. So that would be my two responses. I think the other thing too, you mentioned it, thinking about the overall talent acquisition team, think about how they do their job. And to your point, those nudges are keeping a candidate warm, making sure there's a response. You might get four to 500 applications for one job. And think about the process to go through that and you want to get back to every single person and give them that respect. And then so there is a huge asset in terms of what you were saying to make sure that nothing gets dropped across the board. And I think that's what we worry about most is anyone who would fall through the cracks, especially in a hot talent market or a tight talent market. Because that's the brand right there. COVID created this really bizarre supply and demand and balance unemployment went through the roof for a while and now there's no unemployment. We have this, we have this seesaw economy. You had quiet quitting. That seems to have- Well, the great resignation. You can't forget about that. The great resignation, let's put that in there. You've got, you know, strikes. Supposedly there's going to be a little, you know, tension tomorrow, I guess, or Thursday is tomorrow. Yeah. Tomorrow, yeah. We'll see. It's not really a strike. It's more a picketing. So it's okay. Hollywood saying no AI or we want some guardrails around how we're using AI. So where do you think this all goes? It seems like, well, your daughter saying no. On the other hand, a lot of employees are like, yes, bring on the AI. Get rid of these mundane tasks for me. Let me go do some more interesting things. And ultimately I'm an optimist in that regard. I think, you know, you and I have talked about this. It may be some near term, you know, friction. How do you guys think about the future of automation as it relates to employees embracing it? Do you want to go first? Sure. Thank you for that. I think it's back to the overall empowerment. So when we think about it from a UI path perspective, it really is about changing the roles, upskilling, being able to offer more opportunities. If any, we saw this earlier this morning here at our forward 60 event that with the increase in AI and automation, the jobs actually have increased. It's the shape of what they are and which jobs and how are those things changing. And that's what we need to get in front of. How do we look at the skills? And employees want their employer to do that for them. They're looking to them to ask for that help to say, what do I need to do next? And what technology do I need to have to understand? So for me, I think it's about having the skills, continue to talk about innovating, moving forward with automation, and it's going to really transform that mundane work. People feel they want to add much more value. The next generations are not going to put up with it. And I think that every generation can learn from it and use it, especially with some of the things we saw today that makes it so easy that you don't need to be technical. And that's one of the things we do is, from a citizen developer's perspective, it helps with the change management process. Our employees are learning how to do it themselves and then they're empowered to really change their own role and be part of it. So we have 30% of our age organization has already gone through citizen development. We've had just two hackathons in the last couple months to really have it be part of our overall automation strategy. I know you're doing it as well. Yeah, my journey's a little bit behind the UiPath journey, but on that same track of being clear to understand what's our service delivery model, how are we supporting, where does that work get done? And then once you get clear that this is work that should be touchless, direct access, the manager employee needs to do this because what we offer as a product to the business is being in a position to help consult, navigate workforce planning challenges. And we can't do that if we're mired in transactions and in manual work. And so the journey I've taken my team on is asking them to get grumpy about the work they're doing in editing because that's the only way to bring about the change. It's just say like, I need you to get grumpy with me. Complete more. Complete. Seriously. I'm serious about how mundane this is and how it's not worthy of you. Exactly, I'm like, I know all of us are working below our full potential. Let's lean into this. Let's look at process mapping. So taking some of the tools that you learn in like lean manufacturing and others which helps you look at a process map, like how many touches, how many approvals? Like, okay, now where do we have human interaction that we don't need it? And so my team, while not all certified to the level that Bridget's team is, they're fully engaged in embracing the opportunity. And we believe there is just this untapped potential within the function of HR or people in such a way that we can really be cutting edge, delivering value to the business and helping our businesses just absolutely succeed. And I think at the macro, when you listen to folks like Eric Brynjalsson, we survived the steam engine, we survived outsourcing and the world is flat and when you read his books, we'll survive this as well. But at the micro, it can be scary sometimes. And I get the Hollywood writer's concern. And so he's actually got some prescriptions. He really didn't go into it today, but it kind of comes back to education and creativity and mentoring and some of the things that we talked about earlier, Rebecca, is potentially losing that mentoring with remote work. I mean, that's a challenge. But AI can maybe help, as you're saying. Least responsiveness, the touch points, that's appreciated by individuals. So I don't know if there's a question in there. This is kind of rippin' with you guys. I've got two chief people officers on the stage with me and worked for diversity. This is still a problem that has dogged many industries, but especially technology. How are you thinking about bringing more women and underrepresented groups into this high-paying, high-profile field that really is changing the future of our lives and can AI and automation help that? So I've got a, there's a simple, the answer's yes, they can. The first thing you have to do is look at the barriers to entry. Start with credentialing. Where do you have degree requirements that you don't need degree requirements? Where can you look at other ways to assess capability that allows you to bridge those? The second thing we need to do is we need to be in our schools and we need to be offering the mentoring and the programs which lots of companies, UI Path, CalUnit, are doing to help ensure that young people see their potential and see the opportunity and are connected and excited about the opportunities. And so I think there's many ways, but I think barrier-breaking, credentialing and other requirements, and then showing, you know, showing what's possible by the modeling. Yeah, I think everything you said as well, Amy, there's another thing, I think, to the possibilities of what we can think about of all the data we have. You can imagine between our two companies that we, as an HR perspective, all that people data, linking it to financial data, linking it to predictive pieces, we have a lot of information, and I think that the art of the possible really is around. If you think about it, you could look up all the things you just said, you know, representation, promotion, exits, development, all the pieces that look at it, and we would actually get more insight to say, hey, you're actually not paying attention to certain parts of your population. Or, because when you're a leader, you can't, it's really hard sometimes to see all the detail on the equity or looking at promotion rates or looking at progression rates. You can't see it all with just the tools you have, and we have the ability to pull those things out and check it, and not at the mass level. That's what you always hear people talk about, oh, we looked at it at the top with a big, huge data set, well, peel it back. I want to know where the targeted issues are, and that's what's going to allow us to do that. And then you can actually build strong succession, not have a gap in leadership, and make sure you've got diverse candidates' leads. And then your recruiters, like I said, 40% more time to focus on building relationships with diverse candidates because it's going to be harder to take them, if they're in a good company and a good situation with a career path, it's hard to poach them out, and so you've got to come harder with something else as you go forward. So that's where I would say, we've got to build that out from a future perspective as well. One of citizen dev will affect diversity as well.  And so, it's true. I've talked to dozens on theCUBE, and they're like, yeah. We've heard it. Yeah, I'm sure you have, right? So, but if you put tools in folks' hands that can actually make an impact, and there's more of them, maybe that will affect diversity in a positive way. I don't know. It takes down the curtain in terms of that access points and individuals, I was on a panel yesterday, and the IT lead referred to people like me as end users. And I said, yeah, I'm an end user, but I'm also human in a person. And I know my process. And so, taking down the curtain and allowing that interaction and that experience in such a way that you're going to get a better product through citizen developers, you're just going to. Nothing, even worse, user. That's not a human in a loop right now. There's no here. There's no. We're not people. You don't forget that. I think the other thing it provides is I found that transparency is a really good way for open people's eyes. I don't think bias comes from all the negative places. Sometimes you don't see it, and there's an education process to go through that. And if you have transparency and say, look at all of the hires you've made in the last six months. Here are the slated candidates. Here's the selections. Here's what your team looks like. Here's what your success and performance looks like. And is it diverse or not? And what are the differences with teams that are? Having those conversations with some facts, I think you have much more transparency and the behavior changes like that. Because they can see it, and oh my gosh, I didn't realize, oh my, and let me ask different questions about my candidate slate and how do I go through it, and really what are the requirements up front? Don't change them all the way through the process, right? So there's, I think there's opportunity just to be more transparent and have some facts behind it, and it's really hard to, you know, not want to change. Because that knowledge is power, and when it's a black box and you don't have access to that information, it's a really good call. Well Amy and Bridget, thank you so much for coming on theCUBE, a really, really fun conversation. Thank you very much. Thank you for having us, thank you very much. I'm Rebecca Knight for Dave Vellante. Stay tuned for more of theCUBE's coverage. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage.


Hey, everybody, Bob Trossett here alongside. Lynchburg head coach Kadelka, coach. Obviously LaCrosse the game runs, and it seemed like your team responded to almost every single run that RIT put together. What happened in that final quarter? Well, I mean, I think it's a four-quarter game.  And you just couldn't take the lead there in the second half. I think that could have changed a little bit of the momentum of the game. But I thought, I mean, we had our chances. We had a couple of fast breaks late in the game, and they just get a stick on it. And they're a great team for a reason. And we were really close, and that's the way the game is.  Well, that was clearly not the case. You guys hung in there. We had the lead several points. What was your message to the team pre-game? Well, I mean, we're a proud program. And we mean, we put in the national championship game a couple of years ago.  We've played everybody. And so our guys are battle tested, and we planned all week to beat RIT today. And we came up a couple goals short. But we thought we had a good game plan. I thought, well, guys did a great job of playing as hard as they could. And a couple of balls here and there. I mean, it's a different ball game. But we're obviously not excited with the result. I mean, we want to win this game. We expect to win this game. Sure. The Mustang Classic is one of the more competitive tournaments you'll probably play in all year long. What's the biggest takeaway you want to sort of establish yourself for the rest of the season as a team from a tournament like this? Well, I think you come here, we played back-to-back games last weekend. We won a conference game and then played a really good Elizabeth Towne team.  And this is kind of the who's who division three right now. Some great teams here. And I'm sure there's a lot of other teams that wish they could be here and playing in this thing. Because it is an awesome event. Stevenson does a great job putting this on. And we get a chance today to play what everyone ranks to be the number one team in the country. And then tomorrow we get to play another great Nazareth program. And so we're excited for this opportunity. This allows us to go where we want to go throughout the year, I think. At the end of the day, it's March 16th. And nothing will be decided until May. And so we're still hopefully striving to become the best version of ourselves we can. And we've got some time to do that. Appreciate your time, coach. Good luck the rest of the year. Thank you very much. He's coached good luck on Bob Trossett saying, so long from day one, game number two, here at the Mustang Classic.


This study is the first to conduct a large-scale assessment of urban heat island, UHI, and urban heat sink, UHS, in Morocco, revealing that UHI amplitudes are higher during daytime and increase with urban area size. The analysis also suggests that adapted trees can be used as a natural cooling mechanism for mitigating urban heating in Morocco. This article was authored by Najla Fathi, Lahouari Bounua, and Mohamed Masouli.


In this experiment, you're going to determine the concentration of unknown solution of barium hydroxide. You're going to titrate the barium hydroxide with a standardized solution of sulfuric acid. You're going to monitor the titration with a conductivity probe. The conductivity will start out initially high due to the presence of barium ions and hydroxide ions in solution. As you add sulfuric acid, the hydrogen ions and hydroxide ions will react with each other to form water. The barium ion and the sulfate ion will combine to form slightly soluble barium sulfate. The conductivity of the mixture will decrease. At the point where you have the same number of moles of barium hydroxide and sulfuric acid, the conductivity will reach a minimum value. After that point, the conductivity will increase due to the ions from the excess sulfuric acid. You will use the volume that gives you the minimum conductivity to determine the concentration of the barium hydroxide solution. We're going to calibrate a CBL conductivity probe. To start out, press Apps on your calculator. Select Cambio. Press Enter. Go to Setup Probes. Number of probes. 1. Type of probe. Select Conductivity. We're going to set the switch on the conductivity probe to 0 to 2,000. It's in channel 1. We're going to perform a new calibration. We're going to wait 30 seconds for it to warm up. Press Enter. This is a two-point calibration. The first point, I'm going to remove the conductivity probe from the distilled water. The first point will be in air. We wait for the reading on the CBL to be stable. We press Trigger on the CBL and Enter a reference value of 0. We'll place the conductivity probe in the standard solution. Wait till the CBL reading is stable again. Press Trigger on the CBL and Enter a reference value of 1,000. We will get a slope intercept for the calibration line. And this will take us back to the main menu. If we've standardized our conductivity probe, we're now going to prepare our sample. We're going to pipette 50 milliliters of an unknown solution of barium hydroxide into the 250-milliliter beaker. We're going to add 120 milliliters of distilled water to the beaker. We're going to stir the mixture. We'll take our conductivity probe out of the distilled water, put it in our solution, and clamp it in position. We want to make sure that our magnetic stir bar does not hit the probe. We're ready to collect data. Arrow down to collect data. We're going to use Trigger Prompt. Arrow down to Trigger Prompt. Press Enter. Wait for 10 seconds to warm up. Our first data point will be when we've added no sulfuric acid. So there'll be 0 milliliters of sulfuric acid added. Our initial data point will be 0 milliliters of sulfuric acid. When the CBL reading is stable, we'll press Trigger on the CBL and enter a value of 0.00 on the calculator. We're going to ask for more data. Add 1 milliliter of the sulfuric acid solution. When the CBL reading is stable, press Trigger and enter the volume of the burette reading 1.00 milliliters. You will continue to add the sulfuric acid in 1 milliliter increments. Wait till the CBL reading is stable each time. Press Trigger and enter the volume off the burette. Continue to do this until you've added about 30 milliliters of the sulfuric acid solution. As the sulfuric acid reacts with the barium hydroxide, very slightly soluble barium sulfate is formed. We see this as a white precipitate in the beaker. The conductivity of the solution decreases until you reach the point where you have the same number of moles of sulfuric acid as barium hydroxide. The conductivity will then increase due to the excess sulfuric acid. You will use the Intersect Program to find the point of minimal conductivity. At that point, the moles of barium hydroxide equals the moles of sulfuric acid. You know the concentration of the sulfuric acid. You will solve for the concentration of the barium hydroxide.