On Topic: Season Two, Episode Three

On Topic is platform exploring the complex and lucid cultural conversations that represent the DNA of MCAD. If you like this episode, you can explore events, writings, and more episodes. 

Ben Cameron, President, was Program Director for the Arts at the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation (2006-15), where, during his tenure, the Foundation created the Doris Duke Artists Awards and received the National Medal of the Arts from President Barack Obama. He previously served as the Executive Director of Theatre Communications Group, as the Senior Program Officer for the Dayton Hudson Foundation and Manager of Community Relations for Target Stores, and as the Director of the Theater Program at the National Endowment for the Arts. He received an MFA from the Yale School of Drama, a BA with honors from UNC-CH and is a recipient of three honorary degrees. He currently serves on the Board of Directors for the Minnesota Council on Foundations.

Marianna Schaffer is Vice President of Programs, a critical leader at the Foundation providing oversight and management of all programmatic activities. In her role, she ensures alignment with Foundation goals and values focused on equity, anti-racism, and justice. Marianna has nearly 20 years experience as a philanthropic nonprofit sector leader. She was the inaugural Director of Artist Initiatives at Creative Capital, an organization that provides adventurous artists across the country with substantial financial and capacity-building grants. While there, she ushered in the widest national diversity of applicants, awarded artists, and practitioners in the organization’s history. Prior to Creative Capital, Marianna was Program Officer at the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation, where she worked with individual artists and small arts organizations at the intersection of arts and social justice. She also managed the New Climate Initiative, a partnership with the Sundance Institute focused on climate change-related media projects. Before joining Rauschenberg, Marianna was Director of Programs at the David Rockefeller Fund. There she oversaw day-to-day operations and grantmaking focused on arts access and engagement, criminal justice reform, and climate justice and advocacy. 

Full Transcript: 

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Sanjit: For this episode, I had an engaging conversation with two leaders in the philanthropic sector. Ben Cameron from the Jerome Foundation and Marianna Schaffer from the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation. Recorded this past November, the discussion touched on how the philanthropic field has changed and how foundations can more equitably support the artists of today as well as long into the future. It was a pleasure to speak with Ben and Marianna and gain their insights which are so relevant to the reality that we occupy now.

I'm excited to have this conversation today and I'd like to give a warm welcome to my two guests, Ben Cameron and Marianna Schaffer. Ben Cameron is president of the St. Paul-based Jerome Foundation where he has been at since 2016. The Jerome Foundation is a vital source of support for early career artists in Minnesota and New York City, and last year, the foundation awarded over $5 million in grants to support the creation, development and presentation of new works. Ben previously led Target's giving in the arts and the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation, one of the nation's largest arts funders. With a background in theater, he has an MFA from the Yale School of Drama, and has also served as director of the theater program at the National Endowment for the Arts and is executive director for the Theatre Communications Group, a national service organization for the theater community in the United States. So excited to have you here Ben.

And I'd also like to welcome Marianna Schaffer. Marianna is vice president of programs of the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation. In her role there, Marianna is a critical leader and provides oversight management of all programmatic activities, ensuring alignment with the foundation's values focused on equity, anti-racism, and justice. Marianna has nearly 20 years of experience in the philanthropic and non-profit sector. She was inaugural Director of Artist Initiatives at Creative Capital, an organization that provides artists across the country with substantial financial and capacity-building brands. Prior to Creative Capital, Marianna was program officer at the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation, where she also managed the New Climate Initiative, a partnership with the Sundance Institute focused on climate change-related media projects. So welcome Marianna.

I'm so excited to have this conversation with two people I admire so greatly for not just your work but also your keen insight, and I guess I'm wondering if I can hear from both of you about what were some of your earliest, most significant cultural experiences that you think kind of helped benchmark or kind of helped guide the work that you're doing now?

Marianna: That's a great question. You always have such wonderful questions Sanjit, thank you so much for including me in this conversation today. In thinking about that, I would say my earliest memories are of being a child and my parents would have a lot of parties and I would come and I would go into my room and I would prepare a performance, and that I would come out and perform to the audience. I'm an only child and so I grew up thinking about what it felt like to be on a stage or imagining myself on a stage. So that sort of informed, I think that is a thread that I have pulled throughout my life, this deep personal creative passion, and I would say also sort of being a creative child and also growing up in a home, my mother is Brazilian and comes from a family of creatives and just growing up in an environment where I saw my mother as a creative, she was a designer and had a bespoke fashion business in our home so there was always opportunity for creativity and invention and resourcefulness about what is possible with a creative mind.

And so, I would say that sort of is my earliest understanding of creativity and I think that notion of ingenuity and resourcefulness, and then, of course, I would say ... I spent some time in France as a young person and then coming to New York, being around art and creativity and being in more formal museum spaces was sort of the gateway to a love of that expiration around what other creatives are doing. Sanjit, this is such a great question because it pulls on so many threads and then the last thing I'll say is my earliest career in philanthropy was in David Rockefeller's office and being around his love of creativity and artists and being around incredible art in physical proximity was also a really important piece for me and also how he approached the way he collected art. I hesitate on the word collected because I think for him he had a real love of creativity like his mother and he just collected things that he loved and didn't necessarily worry about the appreciation or the value of it.

Sanjit: Fantastic. Ben, what are some of your initial kind of formative moments?

Ben: Yeah, you know, I grew up in the early to mid-1950s and it was just a very different time then and a lot of my early exposure to the arts was actually a sort of larger social assumption in terms of participation. I sang in the church choir, I acted in the school plays, I made my debut as the caboose in The Little Engine That Could, a performance that still the people in High Point, North Carolina describe as definitive in terms of my rendition of the caboose. I was on the speech team, I actually ... All of those things you just did as an ongoing expectation of growing up at that point in North Carolina really infused my appreciation of the arts and quite frankly my grandfather, who was an Appalachian country doctor without two nickels to rub together, at great personal expense sent his daughter, my mother, to the Cincinnati Conservatory of Music in 1923 to study voice. It was part of our family lore to be immersed in the arts and a lot of what I began to appreciate, especially in my time with my grandparents, was just sitting on the porch in that great tradition of great storytelling out of the South and how that legacy just infuses.

I was lucky enough to realize at an early stage I think that my gifts as an active artist were not singular and that the world would not be in mourning if I never set foot on the stage again, and I had a mentor who steered me toward the dramaturgy program at Yale out of an ability to combine my love for the English, I had been an English major in college, with my love and background in the theater and that was where I began to find that I might be able to make a contribution in terms of how I looked at systems, how I was able to facilitate the work of other artists without being an artist myself, and so it's been that trajectory over time.

 I will say that probably for many years, maybe I was the only one that did this, I think I carried a sort of guilt complex that maybe pursuing a life in the arts was not of sufficient value to the world, and it was a sort of form of self-indulgence or self-gratification without really making a larger contribution and of all things it was a performance of The Cherry Orchard at Lincoln Center that, in the way they told that story, and knowing my grandfather who I mentioned before who had an apple orchard which was sold and chopped down for them to build condos, I suddenly was in a theatrical space where we lept across a continuum of time and nationality and human experience to really begin to drill down in terms of what it really meant in our core to be humans and to contribute over time and to reflect and to move in a way that transcended the moment in which we live, and for that moment, I suddenly began to realize there is a larger social and artistic value in this life, and that it does make a meaningful contribution, not only to the people in the audiences but the people that will come that we will never meet, and with that theatrical encounter, my questions about if this was a legitimate form of life pursuit were resolved.

Sanjit: I think for so many socially-minded creative practitioners that have tried to negotiate that, I think ... I do wonder if there was always that kind of reckoning with purpose and whether it was self-indulgent, and in some ways, maybe that ... It's a perfect segue into kind of the- that follow-up, which is that ... My initial question was asking about those kind of creative, seminal creative, and cultural experiences that helped guide you. At the same time, I think I'm talking to two people that are so keenly dedicated to the terrain of equity in so many different ways, and I guess I'd say that the kind of follow-up is, where is your kind of experience in starting to understand that it wasn't solely about a passion within a creative enterprise or creative cultural experience, but where did equity come into play? Were you starting to feel like this also became about how you were addressing inequality in some way, shape, or form, and I'm just wondering if you can find kind of those early moments or individuals that you think helped shape this idea of sharpening your focus and your passion towards trying to right historical or intergenerational wrongs that have occurred over time.

Marianna: Well it's an interesting question that I pause to think about because I think ... Again from my background, I grew up with a family of not only creatives but of civil servants, and this idea of justice and for me the most formative time in my life was a trip I made to Brazil when I was nine and understood very clearly right in my face what inequity and poverty looked like in a way that I had never seen in my suburban Denver reality, and so I think that experience, coupled with parents who were civil servants, parents who were constantly questioning and having conversations, particularly my mother, about politics. Again, as an only child, I would sit at tables with adults and hear these conversations, so for me, it's been a thread that I've been pulling throughout my life that I can't really pinpoint a moment when it started.

What I will say is that over time, my understanding and concept and framework has changed and shifted. I think I was very much assimilated into dominant culture and understandings and ideas of sort of the bootstrapping and all of those ideas, so I would say my adult life has been a process of undoing a lot of that and I think it will be a lifelong process. I would say being a student at Antioch College, that I always say I was the most conservative person on campus because I was with anarchists and socialists and every other kind of social deviant for lack of better language also put me on a path that I would see again, pulling the thread from before, about this idea of resourcefulness and thinking outside of the box with my mother, it's always this idea of ... At that time you called it deconstructing, and looking at things from different perspectives and always trying to uncover what else is here that we're not seeing. What else is here that's not visible, that's actually impacting this work. So having classes where we studied bell hooks and Toni Morrison and all of that and the people I engaged with I think ...

These are all building blocks to get me to where I am and again as I said I'm still learning and evolving and I would say in philanthropy I think for me, it took a moment to understand the space and I would say I had ... Again, I'm talking about the Rockefeller family, the David Rockefeller branch of the family, that were also keenly aware of key social justice issues and I think that also continued to frame and help me understand global issues, particularly ... They were early funders in the criminal justice reform space, and just being a learner through that family and also in the environmental space and learning from them about what's so important and how trying to move resources for change is something that I think is very much grounded in their family and again I just want to also name that it's complicated with great amassing a lot of wealth, right? And that's the complication of philanthropy that we all ... Well I don't want to speak for everybody that we,  in the field, I think, struggle with what it means to be working with such massive amounts of wealth and trying to redistribute it.

Sanjit: It's great to hear the arc of knowing that it wasn't a seminal kind of light bulb moment, but rather it was kind of a progression, is really fantastic to hear. Ben?

Ben: Well yeah, and I assume it will continue to always be a progression and always a journey as we move forward over time and we'll never I hope to get to a point where we're like, "Okay. Well that's now done or we think we've got the answer," or whatever. Personally again as I alluded growing up in the 50s in North Carolina, I grew up literally 15 miles from the Woolworths where there was the sit-in and I remember that. I remember Martin Luther King, I remember Malcolm X, I remember, not as historical icons, but as contemporary conversations, and the conversations around race in North Carolina were animated and ardent and passionate on both sides and speaking personally the high school I attended was the high school that was created in my town when the all black high school was shut down and they took some of the white students from the white school and created a new high school. So I went to a majority black high school that the community was waiting to see go up in flames, and we were damned if we were going to give them that satisfaction. 

So this issue around race relations and social expectation has been front and center for me for as much of my life as I can recall. I think there are ways that in any conversation around equity you both ... There are levels of intellectual apprehension, where you perceive what's going on in a way and I think the fire in the belly happens because of personal experiences. Some of which are directly related, some of which are analogous, and so again, just ... I've always tied discussions about inequity to what I have known firsthand as a Southerner and about how, what that means for how I know how people think of me. That when I grew up if you were from the South, you were in Beverly Hillbillies, you were ... Dogpatch in Li'l Abner, and still, still to this day, if you want a signal in a movie or TV that you are an ignorant, biased, prejudiced, stupid, evil person you put on a Southern accent, and there's a piece of that that as a Southerner, I know. As a gay man, I know what it means to be assumed that you have limitations to what you can achieve. 

And so while those don't give me access to knowing what the racial dimensions are, by analogy, that frustration, that sometimes rage, that grief about expectations based on just unjust and inequitable assumptions is something that by analogy can tie me into these conversations in addition to the conversations I've been part of.

Sanjit: If I can, what I'd like to do is actually ... I'm going to shift gears a little bit. I'd love to pivot to where the two of you are now with philanthropy, and specifically in thinking about evolutions that have occurred in philanthropy. I keep thinking that the former senior political advisor to John McCain said in regards to Republicans that were supporting Donald Trump at the early point in his presidency, commented that there's “no such thing as a learning curve on a moral compass”. And I love that phrase, and it's something that has stuck with me and I guess I'm kind of wondering about applying that to philanthropy, which is to say that over the past two years, has there been a significant learning curve within philanthropy? Has there been an arc of evolution within philanthropy from your perspective or through the work that you have done that you think tries to provide a degree of a course correction? 

Marianna: There has definitely been some initiatives, some movements, some folks doing really good work in trying to move things, but in reflecting on this question, I think as long as we have an extractive philanthropic structure in place, we're still playing in the same sandbox, and I think we need a new sandbox. So we can make all sorts of changes and I think again when I think about who's showing up at conferences, who programs-[inaudible], that's all changed tremendously since I started in the field, and I have incredible colleagues who are doing this work. But for me, unless we actually fundamentally change the structure of philanthropy, and I would say down to sort of the tax law that governs philanthropy, right? And these ideas that we have of how resources are used and this power dynamic, I don't ...

We can do all of these things, but we're still working within a structure I think that doesn't serve the field. I've said this a few times, I said if I can ever get down to writing an article about philanthropy, I'd call it something like ‘Sisyphus Was a Philanthropist’. Because it's this constant up and down of the same ... Of sameness, even though we're trying to shift and change within the system that we have, and I think that's really important. But I think we have to continue to push to rethink what this sector looks like because it's still a finite number of people with a lot of resources that only deploy a finite amount of those resources to a finite amount of organizations. And this just goes down to a whole bigger rabbit hole for me around this notion of non-profits creating a social safety net, and philanthropy is fickle also.

Ben: It's interesting, when I talk to people who want to talk about philanthropy a lot, part of what I'm always conscious of is I always think of philanthropy as being kind of an ecosystem in itself, and to say basically let's remember, among the things that haven't changed is that individuals give probably $0.80 out of a contributed dollar, that hasn't really changed, that we have seen already, we're seeing ... Bill Gates is going to give away every penny within 10 years of his death, Jeff Bezos' wife is giving away billions of dollars right now. Yes, some people give away 5%, other people give away 10, other people spend out. Corporate philanthropy is very different than foundation philanthropy so even the construct of what we mean when we talk about “philanthropy” is really a kind of multi-tiered and multidimensional thing.

For me, the thing that I think we haven't figured out, and to be quite frank, at my age, there's a lot of even the permanently endowed foundation structure that I do believe in. I know this is, Marianna, to your point, I know a lot of people think that we shouldn't have endowed foundations at all and one of the things I know at Jerome, where I currently am Sanjit, is that if we had had a mandate to spend out, we were started with $10 million, we would have probably spent about $15 million and we have ... We would have gone out of business by 1995. And by adhering to the 5%, we're now worth $125 million. We've given away $195 million. We're still here, and artists know that there's money coming for them and in an endowed structure, I sometimes think of this as permanently endowed foundations which shouldn't be universally true, but as our piece of the foundation, there's a piece of that that's around generational equity, that future artists will have somewhere to go if we stay the course.

I think for me the issues that I'm really super interested in trying to figure out, as I sit on a rocking chair in my retirement days, one is I think that the incentives for candor in philanthropy, which is necessary for significant reform, are largely inhibited by two things. One is I think that the seductiveness of philanthropy means that the people who work in the field in many cases are grossly compensated out of proportion with the fields they fund, and I've heard too many people say, "I can't go back into my field." And rather than seeing philanthropy as a destination where you spend your life, to think of it as an opportunity that's a more porous station with going in and out of your field is a different proposition that I tend to believe in.

The other thing I believe in that I would love to figure out is the accountability goes one way. Because we're permanently endowed, we assert our perpetuity. I'm just curious, I'm trying to figure out what would it mean if we said our perpetuity has to be earned, and every 20 or 30 years, we were held accountable by the communities we fund who would then either authorize us to continue for another 20 or 30 years or would be able to say, "I'm sorry. This is not ..." And then we'd have to spend out. So that lack of mutual accountability I think is a deep flaw. I don't know what that would look like or mean, but I think that's for me a question I would love to crack open, because I think there's something there that would transform philanthropy beyond changing initiatives or changing percentage payouts. I mean then we'd really be getting to something.

Marianna: I like what you're saying about that Ben, and I think for me, my comment about structure is not necessarily the endowed structure, but I'm just thinking about ... The non-profit industrial complex is sort of modeled after for-profit, right? The concept of a board of directors and how we give money and to what you've been saying, that power dynamic and I love your idea about this porousness, of moving in and out in philanthropy instead of it being the destination, right? And so again, I think there's so much that's been happening in this space. I think there's more creativity needed in figuring out how we shift from within ...

There are some models like this, but is there a way for a cooperative philanthropic model? Is there a way to sort of remove hierarchical structures within the institution and outside of it, as much as ... I like to think I try to break down power barriers, but they're still there, it's always there. 

Sanjit: It seems to me too, and I think Ben, you were starting to talk about that with this idea that you ... It's earned perpetuity, not kind of assumed perpetuity, and for me, I've got to look at models that exist outside and other places but I keep thinking of ... There's this Japanese shrine called ... I think the Ise Grand Shrine and it's interesting. This shrine was built in the 14th century yet the shrine is never more than 20 years old because every 20 years, one site on the shrine, on the temple grounds is fallow and on the other side, the shrine is built, and then it's destroyed and then rebuilt on the fallow site every 20 years. So it's this kind of really interesting set of inbuilt impermanence, and this idea of the fact that ... And so I do kind of wonder, and I think we speak about that with our team at MCAD too, which is that should certain programs have a self-destruct button or should they not, and instead of us assuming that longevity equals excellence, longevity just equals longevity. So it's interesting to start to think about with philanthropy.

Ben: Philanthropy aside, I've always thought that the moment of institutionalization for any group was the moment when you decide to continue after your founders leave. Because if we're a dance company, we come together because we love this choreographer. When the choreographer says I'm done, why should the company go on? And if you can find an urgent reason that the world demands you continue, that's one thing. But it's not going to be the same reason that you all came together in the first place. And so the moment about how do we constantly hold ourselves to that question of what mandates we continue in the way we have and I think frankly leadership transitions are a big moment where that question has to be begged. Because that's the moment where you say, "Okay, we're about to go into a change. Why do we have to continue doing what we've done before?"

Sanjit, I will say, because you know this because you're on the board. I think one of the great luxuries we have if we choose to exercise it in the foundation world around power structures isn't how we think about who is in our board and what their role is. Because I don't know you ... Sanjit, you're on my board, I've got Daniel Alexander Jones, I've got Helga Davis, I've got the most deluxe board in the world and I love them, but I don't need them to write me a check. And really the conversations we have in the board are always about what do we want to look… what do we want the world to look like in ... We always say nine years because if you're a board member, you serve for up to nine years, who has to be in the room now to call that world into being so it will be that world in nine years? And taking that long-term values-based approach, to be deeply grounded in your values but looking forward, is such a gift with a board in the foundation world, and I'm so ...

I don't say this Sanjit because you're on my board, I love our board meetings. It is an honor to be in the room with you all because of who you are and how you think, and how do we think about those power structures not to solve our problems today but to call a world into being, that's a big change. 

Sanjit: I think that goes back to also this idea of leadership though. I kind of do want to ask you both is how do you see this type of leadership changing and evolving? Because I think what we're talking about here, in the way that you both are articulating both your personal narratives and your backgrounds, but also kind of the way you see the need for this type of revolution, it's got to have an influence on the way you perceive of what leadership meant now versus when you first started to see leaders in your worldview.

Marianna: That's a really interesting question Sanjit. I just wanted to say that I really love, and I may quote you on this, what world are we calling into being because I think that takes us out of this navel-gazing what are we doing right now and thinking about what are we setting ... And I don't mean to speak for you but what are we setting up for the next generation or the next 10 years or what foundation are we building for who will come next, and I love that, and also this imaginative, this quality of imagination that I think is also so necessary in this work.

And so I think this notion that that leader sort of knows all the things, right? Or you've reached the pinnacle and so ... You know all the things, right? And I think for myself, not to say that I am at any pinnacle or that I know all the things, but I think for me, an increasing awareness that I don't know all the things and who can I call on and who are those folks who do know more and who are the folks who are on the front lines and who are living the thing that I am wanting to understand. So I think for me, being ... And I think that's sort of the setup, right? This sort of creative cultural leader I think is how you talk about it, right Sanjit? And I think that piece about it is about bringing imagination and creativity and imagining a world that we don't see now and again that's why I keep going back to sort of what Ben was saying is that I think for me aside from all of the technical things that make a good leader, I think we have to be sitting in this space of imagination and creativity with what we have and how we envision different and think different and bring different people to the table and come out for the table, right? Cede our seat at the table sometimes I think is another really important piece.

Ben: I think that leadership typically falls into two models. There's what some people call executive leadership which is, it's the leader's job to articulate the vision and set the structures and to hold everyone accountable to it, and then there's more of a consensual leadership model where the leader's job is really to facilitate and convene, synthesize ... Sometimes yes articulate on behalf of the whole and then in that equation what is always tricky is how do you keep the consensus moving forward, when do you get in front of that, when do you build consensus before you move, when do you move first and then build consensus, et cetera. But it's more of a model around synthesizing and collective articulation, and I think that over time, especially in the arts now, we're seeing more and more artists interested in and working in the collective model rather than the executive. Even though the executive still exists, again, if you're a certain kind of choreographer, you're not going to get people together in a room and say, "Okay everybody, show  me what you can do and then we'll make it up together." There are some that can come in and say "No, you do this."

And we need both, but I do think that's a big shift, and frankly, starting my philanthropic career at the National Endowment for the Arts where I did which was always panel-based structure, I've taken that panel consensual decision making with me wherever I've gone, and it's been both a great glory of feeding my spirit by being in those rooms but it's also been the most ardent learning because of what you learn in those panel meetings, by watching how artists make decisions and define and articulate what's important and what's responsive. So that's more my inclination. I might hope that at my best I've been able to listen deeply and synthesize and offer that back, but I'm not the person who's going to say, "This is the way the world should be and so you follow down the road that I'm laying out." That's a different model of leadership.

Sanjit: Yeah. My sense is too is that that's something that's constantly evolving for people that aren't interested in being complacent, that aren't interested in looking like you talked about Ben, I think that the traditional mode of executive leadership is being kind of ... I don't know, it's Ayn Rand and The Fountainhead, it's kind of like ... It's kind of that specific arc, but it's one that's more generative, inherently more collaborative.

Ben: Well I think if I can just respond, you had fed a couple questions to us in advance. One of the questions had been around learning how to collaborate, and part of what I think I always carried with me from my experience at Target Stores was that they said “collaboration is one way of operating but it's not always the right way”. That they said basically there are moments where the task is important and the people aren't, and you are going to coerce because when the building is on fire, you're not going to convene everybody and say, "Let's figure out which is the best exit." You're just going to say, "Get down the stairs now." And there are other moments where you're going to concede because you don't care about the work but you care about the people, and that really collaboration happens when you care deeply about the people and you care deeply about the work at the same time. That's what calls you to collaborate, and I think part of the difficulty now in leading often is the assumption that everybody collaborates on everything, and knowing when collaboration is the right mode versus cooperation which is different versus ... I think that's part of the calibration you have to do as a leader now, even in the moment where you're trying to foster the collaborative.

Sanjit: Yeah. I think that nimbleness, that surefootedness, is really key and yeah.

Marianna: I like what you said about that Ben, and I also thought about this question a little bit and the way I thought of it is that this seems notion of collaboration in sort of a broader sense, when I was thinking about it, it felt like a very sort of Western framework in the sense that cultures, communities around the globe are constantly in collaboration and I think to your point there's a discernment around ... There's just an unspoken way that people are with each other, right? And so ... It's a relational approach, it's not necessarily always transactional. Some people just intuitively know how to be in space with other people and call in people, call themselves ... Move in the space of what collaboration means, and so I think for me, that question is also about being in space and community with each other, how we break bread together, how we know each other, and how we have a way of being that allows for this unspoken way that we come in and out of this space together and I don't know that the bigger concept of bigger collaboration comes out in a training. I think it also comes out in sort of people's way of being in many senses.

Sanjit: What I'll do as we start to wrap this up, I'm going to ask you both these kind of two prompts that I've got just to get your just ... Kind of initial thoughts on what do you know that you didn't know five years ago? 

Ben Cameron:    I'll start while you think about that just because 2016 was the year I started the Jerome Foundation so that's an easy arc for me to sort of think about in that time. I would say sort of two things for me. One is ... One of the people on the board that I so am inspired by and adore is a woman named Sarah Bellamy, who has said to us in these conversations around equity, this work is going to call us to hold multiple stories and elevate multiple stories and hold them at the same time. Sarah's injunction about the whole multiple stories is Sanjit, as you know, we have a set of decisions to make around a particular kind of asset we hold, and we're taking a prismatic approach and so at one meeting we're saying, "Let's look at it through this lens of our history as a foundation. Now in the next meeting, let's look at it through the lens of the investment counselors. Now at this next meeting let's look at it through the lens of the native peoples who have been dispossessed by this asset we have, et cetera." 

And so this idea that we're going to hold multiple stories over time and not rush to instrumentalization, but to heighten those things to which we should be paying attention, and essentially sort of hold them high and let them germinate and cross and form before you rush to a decision. That's something that Jerome and Sarah, God bless her, has really taught me strongly. Yeah, so, I didn't know that five years ago.

Marianna: What I know better now that I didn't know five years ago is the importance of movements and movement building and how an artist is at the center of that work. Because about five years ago is when I really took a deep dive into working directly with individual artists and so for me it's been a real ... Thank you for that reminder Sanjit, a real incredible journey. I knew it instinctively, but living it with artists and knowing even more clearly the power of creatives and to be part of a movement and to shift change or to create change, shift. 

Sanjit: Second question for both of you is can you name one cultural leader that you admire? Not the only one, but one that comes to mind and why? 

Ben Cameron:    Well, somebody I deeply admire and I'm blessed to count as a friend is a woman named Helen Marriage who runs a program called Artichoke in the U.K. and oversees the Lumiere in Durham. As typical of Helen, she commissioned the architect from Burning Man to go with her to Northern Ireland to construct a temporary cathedral that would be built by equal teams of Protestants and Catholics, filled with mementos and memories from The Troubles that had divided them in Northern Ireland and then burn it down together. She is fearless, she is imaginative, she is as infinitely generous a human being in spiritual gifts to others. 

She is unstinting, she is a warm and supportive friend and everything she does is out of the conviction  that everyone should have access to the arts, that the unanticipated encounter with the arts will transform human imagination, and that we make different decisions if we have to elect to go behind a door and pay a price for an arts experience. She has transformed how I think about the arts and she is truly one of the most extraordinary people, and I have to say that as we've endured what we've endured here in terms of ... And gone through what we've gone through here in Minneapolis in the last several years when our community has become so divided, I have longed for someone of Helen's artistic imagination to come and build the community together as Helen did with the Protestants and Catholics in Northern Ireland.

Sanjit: That's great Ben, thank you. 

Marianna: This is a hard one, Sanjit. So my first question was maybe a little bit of a cop-out which is to say I really follow the lead of artists and creatives. That those are the people that have changed my view on things, have shifted my approach of really ... Really create a richness for me as a human and as a professional and I'll just name one person that came to mind when I was thinking about that and that's Alice Sheppard and had the opportunity to be in space with Alice Sheppard and what I loved about Alice is she was unapologetic and fierce in holding us to task on many things, and it was difficult moments for me and I ... There is remorse around the fact that she had to do that, but for me, it's one of the most ... One of the things that I hold is this idea that accessibility does not equal equity in space, and just how ... Just for me personally. I would think not necessarily, I think she's doing incredible things for the field as well but I think for me personally, I hold so much of what we talked about and what she pushed me on in such an incredible way and I am just so appreciative of having been in space and community with her.

Sanjit: That's great. That's fantastic. I'm going to ask you both one last question just to wrap things up, which is that what's one word that you use too much that you're trying to find an alternative to? 

Marianna: There's a long list for me Sanjit because I'm always trying to fix this lexicon. It's really frustrating. I spend a lot of time thinking and contemplating language. The one I think that I'm really trying, that I constantly am interrogating or two that I'm thinking about is impact and innovation. I really, really struggle with impact language because for me it feels like a finite endpoint when we talk about impact and I still struggle with understanding causality of impact and what we mean by impact and this desire when we're working in spaces and places that we won't know and so I think we have a culture that's sort of rooted in scientific method and counting and measurements and endpoints and so for me I struggle every time I use it and I know that I have to use it sometimes because that's the lingua franca but I also ... It's an ouch moment for me every time I have to use it because I really want to interrogate and unpack and I think this is sort of coming full circle to what I talked about at the beginning of this sort of like always questioning, interrogating, and this resourcefulness and trying to go deep and understand what's behind something.

So I'm doing that a lot with language these days and struggle to often find good alternatives. And then sometimes when you find alternatives, it loses a meaning that you're trying to convey, so also going the opposite direction and just simplifying language and not using jargon that my ten-year-old and five-year-old can't understand.

Sanjit: That's great. I like that. Ben? What about you? 

Ben: Boy, that's such an interesting question, and I'm not sure I've got an answer for you. Like you I've always been suspicious of the impact language and fortunately because the arts are all we do and our artists are early in their careers, we're pretty open to say we're not going to know for 10 or 20 years, so let's not waste a lot of time and effort. 20 years from now, let's reach out and see what difference it made, but we're not going to know for a while, so let's let that go.

And I think my vocabulary has shifted over the last five years, five to ten years, and I'm more inclined to talk about resilience than I am about stability and I'm more inclined to talk about miscapitalization rather than undercapitalization and those things are very different, but I think you've given me a charge. I still teach occasionally. I want to reach out to my students and say what word do I use too much that makes you nuts? Or that you think ... Because I don't know the answer to that. I would love to know from their point of view what the words are that I am using that are obstacles or aren't connecting, but I'm not sure I'm the one to hear it. 

Sanjit: This has been a fantastic conversation with both of you and this could continue for hours and hopefully we'll go ahead and have you back on the podcast for a part two as these dialogues evolve. But my deep gratitude to both Ben Cameron and Marianna Schaffer for joining me on this very special conversation about culture equity and their own unique and remarkable experiences. So thank you both.

Sanjit: Thanks for listening to this episode of On Topic. To find out more about all of my guests this season and from Season One, head to mcad.edu/ontopic, where you can find profiles and links to all of our guests today. If you haven't already, don't forget to like, rate, subscribe, and follow wherever you are listening, and you can always find more content at mcad.edu/ontopic. This podcast was produced with Taylor Lewin and underscoreaudio.co.