LAC’s New Strategic Plan
Drumroll, please! A nice formal introduction is in order for our nonprofit’s new board president, Annah Kim Nelson-Feeney. Annah is an artist herself in photography and recycled art mediums. She got involved with LAC in May 2023 after viewing our ‘you are not alone’ show at Slip Gallery and meeting executive director Alaina Stocker at a networking event.
Utilizing expertise from her day job as a consultant (currently with Salesforce) Annah jumped straight into work with LAC by putting together a plan to research, interview community members, and eventually produce a strategic roadmap that will guide LAC into the next several years and beyond.
Read on to learn the highlights of the strategic plan. You can also view the full thing in pdf form:
Co-create session
Annah kicked off her strategic plan research in June 2023, shortly after joining as our new nonprofit board president. She researched the current Seattle art scene and interviewed current and former LAC leadership and artists. In August, she brought several of the folks who participated in interviews together for a co-create session, where she shared her research findings and led us in brainstorming. Some of her key observations included:
LAC’s current operational effort overhead is high.
There is a huge desire to connect with others in the Seattle arts scene.
Artists generally know the path to profitability, and they need help getting there for various reasons.
Artists want an ally, or union and union leader of sorts to represent them.
In going through these observations, participants in the co-create session discussed ideas and questions related to current LAC programming, then identified priorities to be done over the next several years.
August 2023 co-create session participants Alaina, Annah, Tori, Ren, and Yev.
What’s the plan?
Annah took her findings from our co-create session and put together a final strategic plan, detailing her recommendations and the steps needed to accomplish each. With the final readout document, she identified the overall opportunity as:
How might we grow and scale Living Artists Collective so that it may support low-income Seattle-based Artists through sustainable funding and operations?
The strategic recommendations include:
Expanding LAC’s executive network in order to obtain funding and grow our brand awareness. This includes recruiting a 3rd board member in the Treasurer position with nonprofit board experience.
Putting on more resume-building shows to increase artist engagement. This involves expanding our current practices for showing by recruiting more artists, volunteers, and staff to take ownership of LAC events.
Digital strategies for social media and the LAC artist directory. This includes using our current branding to develop reusable assets that make content creation easier, and systematizing our artist onboarding process so it can be completed by volunteers.
Business education for artists. This involves facilitating programming that equips artists with knowledge and experience to run their own art businesses in Seattle (like the tax basics and business structure workshop we did on September 23rd).
Artist grant pilot program: the central goal! This involves giving 3 unrestricted grants of $1,000 to qualifying low-income visual artists. Please donate towards this initiative!
The Timeline
We’ll be working with three strategic plan phases:
The first ends May 2024 and includes goals such as giving out the grants for our pilot program, developing a calendar for networking within the Seattle community, creating a schedule of events and workshops for 2024, and obtaining funding to hire a operational staff member.
The second is end of 2025, with goals such as expanding upon our grant program, growing the board by 2 people, and hiring a social media manager.
Long term includes hiring a CFO, identifying corporate sponsors to fund the grant program, and managing artists to put on quarterly LAC shows.
Annah reading out her strategic recommendations during a call with LAC leaders and volunteers.
Donor Event at Magnuson Park Gallery
We invited community members and supporters to our annual donor event on September 30th, this year held at Magnuson Park Gallery in conjunction with our show, “Support artists while they are alive”. Folks mingled, enjoyed the artwork, and eventually settled in for a presentation by Annah and Alaina outlining the findings of Annah’s research and our plan for the future. The highlight was an announcement of our pilot grant program: 3 grants of $1,000 each to be given to low-income artists already in LAC’s database.
This event was such a great opportunity to let supporters behind the scenes and get feedback on what programming they’d like to see, how they think grant giving should work, and ideas for expanding LAC’s network in Seattle.
Annah presenting the final strategic roadmap during LAC’s donor event on September 30th.
If you didn’t get the chance to join, we’d still love your feedback. Read the full strategic plan pdf here. Please reach out if you’d like more information, have any ideas, or want to get involved with the nonprofit organization. We are currently looking for a nonprofit board treasurer, as well as an operations staff member.
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-The Living Artists Collective team