Strength in Numbers
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By last fall, he was sitting in a bar with fellow students Regan Grusy and Britton Bertran, looking down the barrel of a miserable job market and wondering to do next. “We were feeling sorry for ourselves,” he says. “The big news that day was the official word that the economy had contracted.” It wasn’t a complete surprise, “but we were going into our thesis term and looking at our debt load and saying, ‘Oh my God, what have we gotten ourselves into? There’s no money to pay us. And we don’t want to do work we don’t believe in. We don’t want to take jobs that won’t use our skills. What can we do?’ We made a list of everyone we knew–emerging leaders and established leaders and our colleagues at other schools–and said, ‘How can we bring these people together?’ And not just to sit around and complain, but to say, ‘Here’s what’s going on. We need solutions that aren’t just individual.’”
Just as these new programs were chugging into high gear, the economy tanked. Now nonprofits have more need than ever for skilled managers, but less money to pay them. Government support is largely gone; corporate and foundation money (always more available for special projects than for operations anyway) began to dry up when the stock market headed south. At the same time, Beyer says, the new generation expects to be decently rewarded for its work. “The culture worker has traditionally been driven like a dog–to work for low compensation and to settle for a slow career path. But people aren’t the same kind of idealists [now]. They want to build skills and move into leadership quickly. I’m amazed when I see postdoctoral students taking internships in museums. The amount that’s been invested in their education is enormous and they’re in their late 30s and they don’t have a leadership position yet. It’s great, but to me it’s a bit saintly.”
As the Grant Park Festival season ended last week, director James Palermo announced that he’d changed his mind about dumping his job in order to spend a year studying in Italy. Culture Club reported Palermo’s puzzling resignation in May; it would have taken effect in September, just one season before the festival grabs global attention by moving into its Frank Gehry-designed band shell in Millennium Park. Palermo’s boss, cultural commissioner Lois Weisberg, is “delighted” he’s staying.
