I know it’s been ages since I posted anything here - and I’ve even got a post about Goal #3 in the works, but that’ll have to wait a little while longer.

I’ve been doing a lot of reading up on informal education models and curriculum planning (thanks for the resources, Andrea!), and I today I stumbled upon this really interesting concept called Open Space Technology. It’s really less about education and more about bringing a group of people together to collaborate and co-create something, but I think it could have some really interesting applications for the Drama Farm.

So, what is Open Space Technology?

The basic idea is that you invite a bunch of people to come together for a specific goal (defining a vision or strategic plan for an organization, solving a specific problem, etc.), with these four principles in mind:

1. Whoever comes are the right people
2. Whatever happens is the only thing that could have
3. Whenever it starts is the right time
4. When it’s over, it’s over

At the beginning of the meeting/conference/retreat, the attendees are invited to write down the issues that they feel are most important and post them on the “agenda wall” with a specific meeting time and place. Once the group finishes creating the agenda, they split into smaller groups to discuss the issues - anyone can attend any of the smaller groups, and can move between them at will.

The idea is that only the people who are really interested and passionate about the topic will attend, and they’ll do their best collaborating if left to organize themselves as they deem appropriate. It’s really a very simple idea, but the Open Space method seems to provide a structure that encourages people to participate while preventing it from becoming a free-for-all.

What does this have to do with us?

The way I see it, there are two possible applications for this idea in the planning/operating of the Drama Farm (I’m sure there are more - these are just the two that popped into my head as I was reading).

First, a meeting like this could be a great resource in the planning of the Farm. We’ve been talking about organizing something like a charrette - basically, a meeting of the minds to discuss the direction the Drama Farm is heading and the best strategy to pursue it. But, what we had discussed was inviting a select few “experts” in various fields to meet and talk about specific questions that we had for them. The Open Space conference sounds like a much better incarnation of that idea, since rather than “experts”, we’d have passionate, knowledgeable people who would create the agenda themselves and discuss what they thought was really important.

My other thought is that this could be a really interesting way to collaborate on a theatrical production. Let’s say you have your whole cast and production team together for the first meeting - they’ve all read the script, but beyond that, nothing has been discussed - most of them have probably only known each other for a few days at the most. What if you used the Open Space technique to discuss everyone’s ideas about the play - what they thought the important issues were, what direction they’d like to take things, etc. And what if you used the same technique at all of the subsequent production meetings?

OR…

What if we used it at the beginning of each Drama Farm session, to allow the students to direct the program to suit their interests and needs? We’ve been struggling with finding a way for the program to be flexible and adaptable to each individual group of students, without making it so flexible as to disintegrate into chaos - something like this might be just the kind of structure we’re looking for…

If you’re interested in reading more about Open Space, there’s a great short(ish) summary of it here - or, if you’re looking for something a little more in-depth, check out this OST Practice Guide, via Michael Herman’s website.

And let me know what you think. Am I totally crazy, or might this work? How else could we put this technique to work for us? Ideas? Thoughts? Comment away!

So, now that we’ve got a whole year to plot and scheme before we actually do anything, we’ve got a few things that we’d really like to accomplish, in order to be ready to roll once we’re settled in Pittsburgh. Here’s what we want to do:

1. Set up the company’s structure. Ultimately, we’ll want the Drama Farm to be a tax-exempt nonprofit organization - that way any contributions our supporters make will be tax-deductible, we’ll be eligible for more grant funding, and we’ll get all the other benefits associated with nonprofit status. The question is: do we need/want to set that up now, or would it be better to wait? And when we do get it set up, what kind of nonprofit structure do we need?
2. Create an education plan. We’ve got a lot of ideas about the direction we want the Farm to go in, and things we want to work on with the students, but we really don’t know anything about coming up with a real plan for what we’re doing. The idea behind the Drama Farm is very much a free-form education model, but I’d like to work with someone with a real background in education, to come up with a formal plan for how the program will work. Ideas are great, but the more thought and planning we put into it, the better the students’ experiences will be.
3. Create a fundraising plan. Once we get ourselves settled in Pittsburgh, we’re going to want to start doing things - which means we’re going to need some money. Should we do some fundraising this year? Should we wait until we get to Pittsburgh and do a big fundraising push there? And what sort of fundraising should we do?

I know you talented people out there could be a huge help with some of this - some of you have already expressed an interest in helping, which we’re incredibly grateful for! I’ll write more on each of these goals - what we’ve found out so far, what our thoughts are, etc. - through the coming week, but if you see something you’re interested in helping with, jump right in! Leave a comment or drop me an email - your expertise would be greatly appreciated!

You may have noticed that in the last few hours, references to the pilot program all over the website have been changing from 2008 to 2009. Bet you’re wondering why that is, huh?

Well, just as we were gearing up to get the pilot program up and running for the summer of 2008, a great opportunity came our way, and we just couldn’t pass it up.

Our dream from the very beginning has been to ultimately find the Drama Farm a home of its own. Imagine a dedicated facility where our students could come to get away from the hassles of college life - a quiet retreat where they could just do theatre, far enough from the rest of the world that they could focus on their work, but close enough to a city that they would have access to all the culture and resources they wanted. Wouldn’t that be great?

After talking with several friends back in Pittsburgh, PA (where the Drama Farm idea was first conceived), it looks like those dreams might be a lot closer than we thought. I can’t go into the details just yet, but there’s a good possibility that we might be able to acquire an actual farm outside of Pittsburgh, complete with farmhouse and barn theater, to use as the Drama Farm’s permanent home.

Given that possibility, we’ve decided to postpone the pilot program for now, in order to focus all of our energy on finding a way to make this happen. We’re still working on plans for the pilot program, though, and we hope to be up and running in Pittsburgh (farm or no farm) by the summer of 2009.

Until then, we’d still love all of your help and input into our plans - those of you who have chipped in so far have been a huge help already, and we’re always looking to get more people involved!

I’ll also have more info on our plans for the farm soon, and you’ll be sure to hear about it as soon as I do. So stay tuned - it’s going to be an exciting year!

Derrick recently did a great interview with Steli Efti about Supercool School, a new global online school that Steli is working on. Steli’s got some great ideas about education and making learning fun and interesting - rather than focusing on assimilating to the rules, structures and expectations of a formal school system, he’s working on creating a platform for people to help each other find the knowledge they desire and need. It’s actually a lot like the “open-source education” idea that Derrick and I both wrote about a while back.

You should definitely check out the whole interview, but here’s an excerpt from it that particularly spoke to me:

We want to get the sauce tasty. I often use the analogy of inventing tomato sauce. Tomato sauce was a huge invention - a great idea per se. But if you got the recipe wrong - it’s not tasty and people won’t eat it. So in our case, we believe that what we wanna do is a great idea and it will succeed. But we’re not 100% positive that the recipe is perfect right now so what we want to do is get it out there to as many people as possible and get feedback. If people say “mmmhhh…tasy” that’s great. If not, that means back to the kitchen table and more experimenting till we get it right.

This is exactly how I feel about where we are with the Drama Farm right now. We’ve got what we think is a great idea, but now we need to test it out and see how it works - where the obstacles are, what needs to be tweaked and fixed to make it better, and also what’s really great about it and what we should keep.

Steli talks about using Facebook as a way to get feedback from a large community of people, and I’ve been thinking about ways we could do that too. I’ve also been thinking that we need to just jump in and do it - maybe create a small “beta version” of the Drama Farm, and try it out next summer. I think we won’t know exactly what we’re getting ourselves into until we try, so let’s do it!

If you’re a student, theatre professional, or just interested in what we’re doing, and you’d like to be one of our “beta testers”, leave a comment below or drop us an email. And spread the word to other people you know - the next step is to build a real community of people and get as much feedback as we can, as we start to put together a program for next summer. This is one case where too many cooks will definitely not spoil the sauce!

Also, check out Steli’s post elaborating on his tomato sauce analogy, and take a look at Peopleized, where Derrick did his interview - I haven’t played with it a lot yet, but what I’ve seen is very cool!

I had a great meeting yesterday with Ms. Joan Sadler; Joan has been deeply involved with A.C.T. since the very beginning - first volunteering, then serving on the board for many years, including spending several years as the board’s President. She knows what it’s like to be with a company from the ground up, and she had some good insight into how to proceed with our plans.

One thing she mentioned - something I’ve been thinking about for a while now - is that people are much more likely to donate to an project if they can see something tangible that the organization has already done. Some people are willing to contribute based on the strength of an idea, but most want to know that you’ll be able to follow through, and bring the idea to life. I’ve been thinking about this myself, but I wasn’t sure how to scale down our plans to the point that we could do them without major funding; Joan had some good ideas about doing a small project in conjunction with an existing theatre company - possibly in their off-season, so we could use their space and share their resources. Another possibility is to charge the students a small amount of tuition, rent a space for the pre-production/rehearsal period, and then use another company’s theater for the performance.

It would probably have to be a summer program, since we wouldn’t have the resources to sustain it for a whole semester - probably just a 2-3 month program would be best. It’s only been stewing for a day, but at this point it seems like something that should be achievable by next summer. I’m going to start working on a plan, figuring out how we can make it work - it’s kind of exciting to be actually doing something, instead of just pondering funding and nonprofit law!

Donor Power

I’ve recently discovered the Donor Power Blog, written by Jeff Brooks of Merkle|Domain, a company dedicated to helping nonprofits strengthen their relationships with their donors. Jeff talks a lot about empowering your donors - treating them as real people who want to make a difference, not as ATMs; by giving them the ability to see and choose where their donations are going, you can give them a personal connection with what your company is doing, and how they helped make it happen.

That idea really strikes a chord with me - I’ve been striving to get as many people as I can involved in the Drama Farm, because I really believe that the most exciting ideas come from collaboration (after all, that’s part of what the program is about!) So, why not include the donors in that collaboration? Encourage them to contribute ideas, to be involved in the lives of the students and what we’re doing with their generous donations. Make them a part of the Farm!

Adopt-a-Chicken!

So, how’s this for an idea? We figure out how much it will cost to operate the program for one student for one semester - materials, facilities, housing costs, etc. - and then we ask potential donors to give enough endowment funding to sponsor one chicken’s (er, student’s…) stay at the Drama Farm each year. We could even attribute specific rooms in the dorms to specific donors, and give the donors updates on the student that they’ve sponsored for that semester - who they are, what they’re doing - even get them in touch with each other. It could be a great networking possibility for the student, and it would give the donor a form of direct involvement in the program. It might even result in some lasting relationships that could benefit both student and donor in the future…

Standing Out

I’ve also been reading a bit about how to make your organization stand out - how to make it remarkable and memorable - and it seems to me that active donor empowerment is a good way to achieve that. We don’t want to be the same as every other group that’s asking these people for money - something needs to make them sit up, take notice, and get involved. This might be one way to go with that.

Any other ideas?

A couple weeks ago, I wrote this post about trying to distill the idea of the Drama Farm into a few sentences, in the hopes of explaining what we’re doing without talking our listeners’ ears off for 20 minutes. I’ve been thinking about it a lot over the last few weeks, and with Erin (my newfound partner in crime - more on that soon!) we managed to come up with a pretty good one-paragraph description that hits on the really important points. It’s still a work in progress, though, and several things that I’ve encountered in the last few days have given me some more ideas on what direction to go with it.

What makes us unique?

Chris Garrett, who writes a great blog about internet marketing, wrote a really interesting article about defining your uniqueness - figuring out how you’re different, and what sets you apart from the crowd. His focus is on how to use this to market yourself and make yourself stand out from your competitors, but he asks some good quesions that apply here as well:

• What are our core values?
• What’s our philosophy?
• What makes us uniquely us, and how does that benefit the people we’re talking to?

All extremely important things to think about, and to be able to define for people when we’re talking to them about the project.

Start with the basics

Then yesterday I had tea with the fabulous Mark Jackson, who told me about the application process he went through for his fellowship from the Humboldt Foundation. The written application started by asking him to describe his project in 5 words. After that, he was asked to describe it in 2 or 3 sentences, then a paragraph, and so on and so on, until finally he had to write a 4-page description of the project and all its details. Mark said that going through that process forced him to really focus on what the core elements of the project were, so that he could find the right five words to describe it. He then expanded from those five words, bit by bit, and by the time he got to the 4-page description, he knew exactly what he was doing and why he was doing it.

Think of the bunnies

Finally, I’m reading an inspiring book called The Imagineering Way, which is a collection of essays on creativity written by Disney’s Imagineers. I’m only partway through the book, but one that really struck me is by Bruce Gordon, one of the Creative Project Directors. He talks about how selling an idea is like coaxing a bunny rabbit out from hiding in the bushes:

You want that bunny rabbit to feast on your idea, but first you have to coax him out from under the bushes and convince him it’s safe to take a little nibble.

So think of your idea as a sweet, crunchy carrot.

The bunny rabbit needs to perceive a safe, non-threatening environment, as well as a reward that will justify the risk it’s taking by poking its head out.

Remember that any sudden movement or loud noise is going to scare the bunny away. And don’t hold out a carrot that’s too big. In fact, you might think of the carrot as just a portion of your idea, rather than the entire concept.

It’s a carrot topping to a whole salad of ideas.

When a concept is revolutionary and changes the current thinking or status quo (no matter how much you know in your heart it’s the right thing to do), a big change can be a scary thing for someone to try to take in all at once. If you were trying to coax the bunny out so it could feast on an entire salad, you wouldn’t dump the whole salad on the ground at one time. The bunny would disappear back into its office - er, rabbit hole - before the last piece of lettuce floated to the ground.

Just coax it out gently with a tasty sample of what’s to come, then carefully introduce the benefits of the big picture: your salad.

This has been my biggest problem so far - I start with the Big Idea, rather than a bite-sized portion of it, and it’s just too much for people to chew on all at once. Reading about the bunny, and thinking about Mark’s experience in formulating his concept, have given me a pretty clear idea of where I need to go from here.

So, what’s the plan?

First, I’m going to go through a process much like Mark’s fellowship application, while keeping in mind Chris’ questions about uniqueness and standing out:

1. Find 5 words that describe the Drama Farm’s core concepts and values.
2. Describe the idea briefly, in 2 or 3 sentences, making sure to include what makes the program unique.
3. In 2 or 3 paragraphs, give an overview of the program, with detail about the philosophy behind it and benefits of it.
4. In 2 or 3 pages, describe exactly what we plan to do, why we’re doing it, and how we plan to do it.

That’ll give us a pretty good foundation of written materials to include on the website, in publicity, and in materials we send to potential donors. The next step is to figure out how to talk about it, without sounding like a canned speech. So, we take those four written descriptions, and we turn them into:

1. a 15-second pitch
2. a 30-second pitch
3. a 1-minute pitch
4. a 5-minute pitch

Once we’ve accomplished that, we’ll have a definitive language for talking to people about the idea, hopefully reeling them in (or coaxing them out), just like the bunny rabbit.

What do you think? I think it sounds like a good exercise for anyone embarking on a big project like this. It’ll help us distill our ideas and focus on the core values, which we sometimes lose sight of while thinking about the more mundane aspects, like funding and legal issues… I’ll post the pieces here as I finish them, and we’ll see how it goes - now, I’m off to start writing!

Just came across an article on CNN.com about how giving money to a good cause actually stimulates the pleasure centers in your brain.

What better reason do you need? Give us some money - it’ll brighten your day! (There’s a button at the bottom on the right - go ahead and click it!)

I’ve been running into an interesting phenomenon as I talk to more and more people about this project. I start by telling them about the program - where the idea came from, where I want to go with it, how it would work - and I generally get a very positive response. Then comes the inevitable question, “How are you going to fund it?” When I tell people that we want to raise a $20 million endowment to support the whole program, the response is usually “Wow.” or “Okay…”, accompanied by a look that says “You really think you can do that? Keep on dreaming…”

Now, I’m not deluding myself - I know very well that $20 million is a lot of money. But I also know that any goal is achievable, if you break it down into smaller and smaller goals, working towards the Big One. Am I going to run right out tomorrow and stumble across a bunch of millionaires who want to give me money? No. But I can work up to that. Here’s how:

Round One

1. Figure out the Big Goal.
   In our case, raising $20 million to fund an endowment. There’s a capital campaign too, but let’s focus on the endowment for now.

__(’Read the rest of this entry »’)

Imagination is more important than knowledge.
~Albert Einstein

And to add my own thoughts to Mr. Einstein’s…

Passion and potential are more important than having all the answers right now. The answers are out there, if you’ve got the drive to find them.

More on that later too!

(scheme scheme scheme…)