I'm currently in a self-diagnosed professional existential crisis, which is not surprising given the phase of program we're currently in...sort of like being on a plane in-line to take off after waiting on the tarmac for hours. In the back of my mind, I know that the hands-on work will begin in earnest, but in the meantime, that means I have too much time to think and continue to plan for the next exhibition. A wise man once told me, sometimes, the best thing you can do is sit back and wait, and this is definitely one of those times.So, back to the too much time thinking and the professional existential crisis...I find myself reflecting on the past six months and am realizing that I'm feeling somewhat removed from what originally brought me to this unique position. In a sense, I feel as if I've lost the social work side of the community engagement, so in the next few blogs, I plan to address this point by point in hopes that you might have thoughts, advice, and reflections that will ultimately help me find my way back to my core mission.
Point One: Evaluation. Are we making an impact with what we do, and how do we measure that impact? One of the primary reasons for the merging of the applied social sciences and the arts is to further develop and refine the use of evaluation in community programs implemented by cultural institutions. There are a few sources out there that provide a framework for the discussion, one of which being Gifts of the Muse, a report released by the Rand Corporation in 2004 that proposes approaching the discussion about the benefits of the arts from a different perspective. The same tools, methods, and challenges are faced by social service providers, as they seek to justify the relevance and effectiveness of their work. While there are easily quantifiable measures of success, the qualitative effects of programs are more difficult to firmly grasp. Add to that the difficulty of proving causality, bias, and other perils of human subjects-based research, it becomes all too easy to lose yourself in a land of meaningless data collected through ineffective measures. I'm sure this won't be the last time I blog about this, and the issues of effective evaluation are weighing heavily upon my mind at the moment. Do you have any ideas on what a good measure of impact of the arts might look like? If so, I'd love to hear them. Then we can get down to a discussion about methodology, instrumentation, and implementation.