SD County Arts and Culture Commission retreat Key Note Speech, June 5, 2025

 

Laura Zucker,  Executive Director of the Los Angeles County Arts Commission from 1992 to 2017 gave the keynote address at the June retreat for the SD County Arts and Culture Commissioners.  She was there to give advice on how to build our commission to the juggernaut that is the Los Angeles is the largest County in the United States, encompassing 88 municipalities and nearly 140 unincorporated areas.  Under her guidance, the Arts Commission funded 364 nonprofit arts organizations through a two-year $9 million grant program, implemented the regional initiative dedicated to restoring arts education to 81 public school districts, funded the largest arts internship program in the country and manages the County’s civic art policy.

Zucker was very straight forward with her advice. The commission has to have a budget to function and that budget is achieved only by using political power. Every year in put on  the county budget  is requested two weeks before the budget is published. At that time the most influential leaders and campaign donors need to visit each county supervisor’s office and get them to sign a memo of support  for the requested amount needed. You need three out of the five supervisors to assure success.

To make sure you can sell your story here is some more advice:

·       Suck up to the Supervisors big time. Invite them to events to be honored and ask them to speak.  Take their pictures and get those published. Visibility is important.

·       Make sure that you broadcast all your stories. The arts are always a good news story and the county has a lot of bad news that needs to be balanced out.

·       Be the solution to a problem, which means you have to know what the platforms of the supervisors are. What do they want to achieve and how can the arts help them.

·       Embed artists in residence every department of government. Funding can come from collaborations and having artist knowledgeable about the functioning of all the issues is so helpful.

·       Make sure that your commission has regional impact.

·       Find out what you can do that no one else can do and broadcast that. Art issues are life issues.

Now this can’t be done all at once, but there are huge opportunities in San Diego to make a difference.

The rest of the retreat was spent discussing the strategy plan and setting new priorities. Most exciting was the discussion about the project with a $29K grant from the Local Arts Agency Learning Network  where it was proposed to hold a series of County Supervisor Arts Convening listening events.