Ms. Jordan Shue

Celebrating National Volunteer Week with the Arts

Posted by Ms. Jordan Shue, Apr 13, 2016 0 comments


Ms. Jordan Shue

This week is National Volunteer Week, started by Points of Light in 1974 to inspire, recognize, and encourage people to seek out imaginative ways to engage in their communities. Seeking out imaginative ways to engage business employees through volunteerism has a natural link with the arts, as we’ve seen from over 40 years of experience with the Business Volunteers for the Arts® (BVA) Network.

Since its founding in 1975 by the Arts & Business Council Inc., the BVA program has grown and adapted to serve the changing needs of both the arts and business communities. Over its 40-year history, the BVA program has proven to be a dynamic and effective model for diverse sizes and types of communities. Since the programs inception, nearly 25,000 business volunteers have served more than 26,000 arts groups across the United States.

However, over the past 10 years we’ve seen a multitude of changes in the corporate volunteer environment, with shifting interests from both the employees who volunteer and the businesses in which they work. Because of these changes, Americans for the Arts has embarked on a process to develop the best resources on engaging business employees through the arts, which can happen in a variety of programs that go beyond the traditional Business Volunteers for the Arts®.

Employees from two Nashville law firms taking part in the creation of a bike hub for the city with local artist, Andee Rudloff. Photo by Stacey Irvin.What’s the need?

A 2014 PricewaterhouseCoopers study revealed that “employees most committed to their organizations put in 57 percent more effort on the job—and are 87 percent less likely to resign—than employees who consider themselves disengaged.” Both the Society of Human Resource Management and Gallup report that employees in the United States remain only moderately tuned in at work. Gallup went so far as to say that we’re facing an “employee engagement crisis.”

Our latest pARTnership Movement essay, “Engage Your Employees,” focuses on the relationship between the arts and employee engagementparticularly how the arts can help with training and development. Mark Royal, a consultant at the management consulting firm Hay Group, says that engagement tends to be deeper among employees who feel that they have opportunities for growth and development. By partnering with arts organizations, companies can provide employees with innovative opportunities for growth and development, which can in turn have positive effects on engagement, morale, retention, and performance.

For arts groups seeking to build deeper ties with the business community, offering to address the need to engage employees in their work can serve as a powerful tool and argument for why supporting the arts is a win-win for everyonethe company, its employees, your organization, and the entire community.

This week, we released the first of three workbooks written by practitioners in the field who run successful employee engagement programs. Each workbook in this series is based on a specific organization’s programs, philosophy, and tactics about creating employee engagement programs for the business community. The first three focus on:

  1. The Arts & Business Council of Greater Nashville’s WorkCreative, an arts-based training program that brings arts into the workplace by engaging employees in hands-on creativity to stimulate communication, build teamwork, and spark innovation for effective business growth.
  2. ArtsWave’s CincySings, a corporate arts challenge that brings arts into the workplace by creating a friendly, amateur singing competition featuring choirs of Cincinnati-based company employees.
  3. Americans for the Arts Business Volunteers for the Arts® program, a pro bono consulting program for arts organizations that operates in several cities around the United States.

These workbooks will be followed by more over the coming year, each of which will focus on a different type of program that can be used to engage business employees through the arts. We’ll also release a series of other resourcesself-paced classrooms online, virtual meetings, blog salonsthat will explore the facets of this work from different angles. During this National Volunteer Week, we remind you that employees can be engaged through the arts in a number of ways, and Americans for the Arts serves as a resource, guide, and hub for all the information needed to start, sustain, or transform a successful employee engagement program.

And if you’re trying to make the case to businesses in your area that using the arts can engage their employees, check out our one-pager advocacy tools, Six Ways to Use the Arts to Boost Employee Engagement and The Arts Boost Employee Engagement.

Do you know of a business that engages employees through the arts? Share your story with @Americans4Arts on Twitter using #ArtsandBiz or email us at [email protected].

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