TACA Launches Arts Accelerator
TACA -The Arts Community Alliance – recently announced the launch of the Arts Accelerator, a new learning experience for small and emerging arts and culture nonprofits in Dallas County. The nine-month initiative is designed to increase arts groups’ organizational capacity, teach new skills, and create plans for sustainable growth.
“As a grantmaker serving our arts community for over 50 years, TACA has a unique, birds-eye view of what’s happening at arts organizations of all sizes, genres, and geographies across the region,” said Maura Sheffler, TACA Donna Wilhelm Family President & Executive Director. “In recent years, we have seen a surge of organizations on the cusp of considerable growth that could benefit from multifaceted resourcing. We are answering the call for a comprehensive support system that otherwise would be out of reach for many developing nonprofits.”
TACA created the Arts Accelerator in hopes of creating an opportunity to learn fundamental practices of managing an arts nonprofit while also creating a space for participants to build community with other leaders taking their organizations from startup into growth stages.
Six organizations were selected to participate in the initial pilot cohort, which will run from September 2023 to May 2024. All participants are either in the early years of nonprofit status or experiencing growth or transition in size, scope, activity, and funding levels. The TACA Arts Accelerator is free for all participants. The Arts Accelerator participants include:
- Arts Mission Oak Cliff
- Bombshell Dance Project
- Pegasus Contemporary Ballet
- Pegasus Media Project
- Soul Rep Theatre Co.
- Verdigris Ensemble
TACA developed The Arts Accelerator with Suzanne Smith, founder and CEO of Social Impact Architects and adjunct professor at UTA and SMU. All sessions will include training with a subject-matter expert, discussions with arts professionals, working time with each organization’s participants, and peer-to-peer content sharing and learning.
The program’s content will be based on the flywheel effect, first articulated by Jim Collins’ book Good to Great. For nonprofits, the flywheel is connected to long-term sustainability and addresses core elements, including growth and performance improvement in operations, financing, and other functional components of organizational management, as well as arts-specific content in audience development, fundraising, board development, and impact.
“The intentional design behind the Arts Accelerator will be like rocket fuel – helping organizations be intentional around their value proposition and leveraging modified business practices to truly go from start-up to growth phase as an organization,” said Smith.
Learn more about TACA’s Arts Accelerator at https://taca-arts.org/our-programs/accelerator/.
