Free-Range Drama Farm

It’s only been a few days since the big Pilot Program Announcement, and the support and encouragement has been coming in from all directions!

Chris Brogan and Derrick Kwa both gave us great writeups on their blogs, and our new Facebook group already has 19 members!

Still only 3 people in the forum, but I expect that will probably take a little longer to build up - if you be a part of our plotting and scheming, stop on by and say hi!

Finally, I’ve gotten emails of encouragement and offers of help from at least half a dozen other people who hadn’t even heard of the Drama Farm before two days ago. It’s great to know that we’ve got so much support already - and we really appreciate the help. Keep the emails coming - we want to hear what you think!

…to keep you busy while I plug away at updating the website… =)

I recently discovered the blogs of two university theatre professors who (I think) have the right idea about what theatre education should be like. Tom Loughlin at A Poor Player wrote an article yesterday about whether theatre departments today are inspiring their students to create, or just to re-create. In response to Tom’s article, Scott Walters at Theatre Ideas talks about creating a learning environment, rather than focusing on producing “good shows”.

These articles are both part of a longer series that Tom and Scott have written on the current state of theatre education, and I think a lot of it is relevant to the Drama Farm and what we’re trying to achieve. Take a look, and let me know what you think!

Another stunning thing that I discovered at Nonprofit Boot Camp is that there are hundreds of resources out there for nonprofit organizations - and there are even more nonprofits that don’t know those resources exist.

As I walked around the exhibit hall, I recognized the names of at least 70% of the exhibitors there; that didn’t seem all that strange to me - after all, it was a conference focused on my chosen industry. What astounded me was that most of the attendees seemed not to know about the services available to them. They had no idea that VolunteerMatch.org could fix them up with volunteers who were interested in their cause, or that The Foundation Center offers free workshops and classes in fundraising basics.

That’s when it hit me: all this research I’ve been doing for the past year has really paid off!

Once I discovered that I had all this useful knowledge about nonprofit resources, I had to do something with it! I decided that the best thing to do was to put it all in one place, where it’s easily accessible and other people can add their own resources to it as well. To that end, I proudly present:

The Giant List O’ Nonprofit Resources!

It’s a Squidoo lens where I’ve compiled all of the great nonprofit resources I’ve found so far - links, blogs, services, books, etc. - and I’ll keep adding to it as I find more. I’m encouraging other people to tell me about their own resources too - there’s no way I can find all the good stuff, and if we pool our knowledge, we’ll all end up better off in the end…

Check it out, let me know what you think, and if you’ve got a resource to add, leave it in a comment! Also, if you buy anything through the Amazon links, a small portion of the money will go to Donors Choose, and another small portion will go into the Drama Farm Startup Fund. So do some shopping - it’ll make you feel good!

I just ordered a box of Moo cards for the Drama Farm. If you haven’t been to moo.com yet, you must have a look - you can get a box of 100 mini-cards with up to 100 different images on the front! For now, we’ve got a collection of six theatrically-inclined chickens (all drawn by yours truly!), but I’m working on expanding the set for the next batch of cards we print. Hopefully these guys will arrive before Saturday, so I can take them to Nonprofit Boot Camp with me!

We’ll be setting up a CafePress store soon with lots of chicken gear for you to make your own - but in the meantime, check out the rest of the chickens on my flickr page, and let me know what you think. All input is greatly appreciated!

I just signed up for Nonprofit Boot Camp - it’s a one-day conference organized by the Craigslist Foundation, with exhibits, seminars and workshops about starting and running a non-profit organization. Boot Camp SF is in Berkeley on Saturday, August 18th, but there’s also one in New York in September, and I think they’re working on holding them in several other cities in the next year or so. If you’re interested in going, you can check out the event and workshop schedules, and you can register for it here.

While you’re at it, check out the Craigslist Foundation’s nonprofit resources page - they’ve got tons of great information and networking tools to get you started in the world of nonprofiteering!

If you do decide to go to Boot Camp SF, drop me a line and maybe we can meet up in between workshops!

Oh, and a big thanks to Katy and slowe for pointing me towards all this cool stuff!

So, I just finished reading Informal Learning, by Jay Cross, and my brain is just spinning with all the possibilities. I’ve talked a little bit about the book here, but that was before I really got into the good stuff. Now, I think Jay Cross is my new hero.

The book is really geared towards using informal learning in employee training - that is, letting the employees be free-range learners, gathering information as they need it, rather than being sent to a week of training courses and having the knowledge force-fed to them, just so they can forget 80% of it when they leave the classroom. I think, though, that there are a lot of ways that informal learning can be applied to theatre education, even before theatre workers are done with their training and join the workforce.

Anyone who’s been through a college theatre program knows that there’s already a lot of informal learning involved - every time a student works on a production, they’re learning on-the-spot, solving problems as they go. But college-level production work frequently takes place in something of a bubble - the student goes to class all day, then spends four hours focusing on the production, before returning to the world of school and homework. In the best of circumstances, that schoolwork ties in with the production work, and the student makes connections and applies what they learn in class to what they’re doing in production - but the nature of the college situation is that learning through actual experience is limited to a small portion of the day.

So what happens when we shake that up? What if students spend 80% of their time learning through experience and 20% attending workshops and seminars, instead of the other way around? That’s what I want to find out with the Drama Farm. I think as long as the students have a solid base of knowledge to work from - which their more conventional theatre programs will have given them - the opportunities to learn from experience are endless. Especially if we shape their experience to guide them towards the things that they’ll learn the most from. Jay calls this “learnscaping” - I’ll be writing more about that shortly.

Until then, if you’re interested, check out the book - it’s definitely worth a look!

Becoming a not-for-profit organization appears to be pretty simple. Getting 501(c)(3) (tax-exempt) status, not quite so easy.

For the poor souls out there who haven’t had a course in Everything You Ever Needed to Know about Theatre Management from the fabulous Don Marinelli (founder and head of Carnegie Mellon’s Entertainment Technology Center), a 501(c)(3) is an organization that the IRS has exempted from paying taxes, because of their charitable work in education, scientific research, religion, or a whole slew of other altruistic things. Even better, though, is the fact that any charitable donations made to a 501(c)(3) are tax-deductible - is that a great way to get people to give you money, or what?

So, I’m looking into what it takes to achieve tax-exempt status, since we’ll definitely want to do that before we start asking people to give us money. Nolo has a great little online guide to get you started, but it seems that - like everything else - the rules for incorportating and applying for tax-exempt status are a little bit different in California than they are in the rest of the country.

Of course, there’s a book for just that problem, so I stopped by Nolo’s outlet in Berkeley the other day and picked it up. I’d never used one of Nolo’s books before, but I’m incredibly impressed, just from the small amount I’ve read so far - if you’re in the market for a layman’s guide to anything law-related, they’re definitely the place to go.

I’ll post updates here as I glean key pieces of information on starting a non-profit, but for now I leave you with this tidbit: If you’re doing anything that involves legal stuff, and you’re in California, research it very carefully, because everything works differently here. Everything.