In the nonprofit arts sector, we have been dealing with issues of scarcity for a long time. There is never enough and survival is a continual struggle both for individuals trying to make their lives as arts professionals and for the institutions we have established to support and connect artists and their work to audiences. We certainly talk a lot about the scarcity of resources – financial, human, arts facilities – but scarcity also extends into our dialog about audiences, critical discourse and societal value around artists and their work. Much of the dialogue that has taken place in the field over the past couple of decades has been directed by the mindset of ‘how do we create more?’ How do we create more audiences for our performances? How do we create more interest in what we do? How do we create more funding for our organizations? How do we create more talented and dedicated arts leaders? How do we create more facilities in which the arts can be developed and shared? While progress has been made, we continue to circle back to these same issues over and over again. More, it seems, cannot be created.

Interestingly, within the framework of the TLC Toronto process, several of the participating arts entities looked at scarcity challenges through a different lens. Instead of continuing to struggle with how to create more within a closed system, they opted to reframe the system. What we mean by this is that they opened the scope of the issue by redefining the boundaries of what they were trying to achieve. Instead of focusing narrowly, for example, on building an audience for one theatre entity, they considered how they could be a part of building engagement in the performing arts. Instead of trying to figure out how to sustain an arts center, they focused on building a community-supported public space.

Our mechanistic thinking is so often an impediment to deriving solutions in a systemic and holistic world. As we followed the thinking of the arts leaders we worked with, we realized how often we frustrate ourselves by trying to fix something that is, when we reframe it and view it differently, really an integrated part of a larger system that will never be functional in isolation. We were truly excited to see how arts leaders are able to turn scarcity into abundance by reframing their issues not as isolated concerns but as components of a larger system, developing new approaches that are already showing promise in creating a more resilient performing arts sector.