015 The Path of Humiliation | Harrison Center for the Arts Exec. Director Joanna Taft

Joanna Taft proposed starting a charter high school out of the arts nonprofit she was leading. She had no background in education. 

Her artists were leaving Indianapolis because nobody was buying their work, and she decided the fix was to grow a new generation of art patrons. (Talk about a long-term vision…) She raised the idea to a city commission expecting someone else to run with it. They just looked back at her, waiting for her to take it on.
But right after the hearing, a board member pulled her aside and told her she was not the person to lead this school, and asked her to step down from the new initiative. However, nobody else would take her place. So she got to work. 

Joanna says her biggest fear is humiliation, and her specialty is starting things she knows nothing about. Sounds like a lot of fun, right? 
But that willingness to go forward through her fear keeps doing great things. It built an art center inside a near-empty church. It launched the charter school, now with more than 3,000 graduates. It also conceived of a neighborhood cultural preservation museum and opened in only fourteen months, using assemblage art and augmented reality she had never worked with before. 

Joanna describes the only thing she believes she knows how to do: weave other people's ideas into something worth caring about, something fundable and sustainable. 

Joanna Taft is the Founder and Executive Director of the Harrison Center in Indianapolis, housed in the city's oldest Presbyterian church building. She has lived four blocks from the Center for nearly 40 years.

Transcript

The Journey of the Harrison Center

Adam Jeske 0:05

Nonprofit CEOs are constantly making consequential decisions, often under pressure or in isolation. I'm Adam Jeske, the Nonprofit CEO Advisor, and this is the Nonprofit CEO Podcast, where CEOs talk about the decisions they carry. Today, our guest is Joanna Taft, who has spent 25 years building the Harrison Center in Indianapolis, turning an old church into a nationally recognized arts nonprofit, launching a charter school out of that uh nonprofit, and pioneering creative approaches to neighborhood revitalization. Today we're talking about the decisions Joanna has made along the way. Joanna, welcome to the show.

Joanna Taft 0:41

Thank you for having me.

Building a New Generation of Art Patrons

Adam Jeske 0:42

Joanna, tell us about a consequential decision you've had to make during your tenure leading the Harrison Center.

Joanna Taft 0:48

Well when we started 25 years ago, our desire was to fill the building with artists and just make them really happy they're in Indianapolis. Well, that didn't quite work exactly as I had hoped. We did fill the building with people and parties. However, people weren't buying art. And my artist started threatening to move to LA, New York, Chicago. And so I realized I needed to think ahead and to think now about growing a new generation of art patrons. So not just my artists could stay, but the artists in the future could stay in Indianapolis. And Indianapolis could be a world-class city. And so we did something crazy. We started a high school to grow a new generation of art patrons. That school is now a campus of three schools, which have graduated more than 3,000 students.

Adam Jeske 1:40

That is such a novel approach to increasing the patronage of the arts. How has it gone as you look back through these years? You had this crazy idea to start a school in order to build that up. How has that worked?

Joanna Taft 1:53

It's been amazing. We started with 99 kids. We wanted 100, but we didn't quite make our goal that first year. So 99 children in the basement, we called it the lower level of the Harrison Center that year. I thought that this would be a long play, 20 years before we would see kids establishing their career and coming back and buying art. But I was blown away that almost immediately students started coming and saying, hey, I have $20 and I want to buy my sister a piece of art. And so we always made sure that we had a wide variety of prices, price points, so we could attract all these buyers at these different price points, knowing that once you make your first purchase, you would come back and do a second and move up in that ladder. So the students were buying almost immediately, and then they started bringing their families. And the families started coming to the Harris Center on Friday nights instead of going to the mall. And I thought that was fascinating. And I'd watch families actually, actually, I'm thinking of one family in particular, they bought a piece of art every first Friday together, and it was a family decision. They had two girls and they'd walk around and they would choose together what piece they would buy. That was just really beautiful to watch families bond and connect over art and beauty and supporting local rather than the chain context of the mall. But you know, I also mentioned that we were thinking about growing art patrons, and art patrons are not just people that buy art. They actually are so important to the health of a city. They become our voters, there are volunteers, there are philanthropists, there are soccer coaches, there are moms, there are doctors, there are artists. So they're the well-rounded people that can contribute in many ways. So we have been building that uh through that high school and other initiatives uh with confidence because it really works.

Radical Programmatic Changes

Adam Jeske 3:48

Let's go back to the season that you described where you had this idea. This idea surfaced of starting a high school out of the center, which was a pretty radical programmatic change right in the middle of the organization. How did you make that decision?

Joanna Taft 4:07

So we had been around for a year and a half when my artists started saying, Hey, you know, we don't have art patrons, we need to move. And about the same time, there was a building around the corner, which was the original Indianapolis Museum of Art building. Um it was called the John Heron Art Institute. And it had been the museum and a school. And in the 60s, when um men were making, we're having three martini lunches and making decisions without everybody else, um they decided to move the museum to the suburbs and they left this art school penniless behind. So for the next 30 years, the teachers at this art school, which was a college, um, were teaching with buckets on their desks, you know, catching drips and trying to figure out where they could go, how they could move. And they eventually were successful in finding a new location with IUPUI, which was on the west side of town. So when they announced that they were leaving, the name of the school was the John Heron Art Institute. And the name of the neighborhood was Heron Morton. And it was kind of an identity crisis for us because they were taking the Heron out of our neighborhood. Plus, it was an anchor institution. And for those buildings, a campus of three buildings to fall, you know, for the state or the city to own them would really be a bad thing for our neighborhood. It would just be vandalism and, you know, an unknown. So our mayor decided to uh put a commission together. And he asked me to be on this commission. The commission was to figure out a new use. I'd never been on a commission before, and I felt, I felt like I didn't have anything to say. So I sat in the back of the room and they were asking for ideas on how to reuse these spaces. And I heard crazy ideas. People were, oh, people had ideas. But I'm in the back thinking, they're not fundable, they're not sustainable, and they're not the kind of ideas that people get passionate about, which are my three tests for a good project. And so I slowly raised my hand in the back and I was like, hey, I don't know much about this charter school movement, but it looks like, you know, Bill Gates is funding high schools. Um, this is an opportunity for a funding stream. What if we were to honor the art and education history of the site? It had been a museum and a school. And what if we were to start a high school, not a fine art school for artists, because I have a lot of artists. What if we were to start a liberal arts school to grow art patrons, these well-rounded citizens, these voters? And people liked the idea and they, I thought they would run with it, but they looked back at me. And uh I learned over the next year and a half that you could do a lot while you were afraid. You could be scared to the core of your being and get a lot done.

Adam Jeske 6:57

Yeah. What a dramatic switch from what you anticipated when you started the Harrison Center. Did you have people near at hand, advisors of some sort, that could inform that decision and the thousand decisions in the first few years? Because I've been really surprised at the the amount of novelty in the best way possible, innovation in the Harrison Center. That's one of the things that I've commented to you about. Have you had people to help you figure these things out? How much of it is just working scared? Uh, and how much of it have you been able to pull in advising and wisdom from others at key moments?

The Role of Community and Family

Joanna Taft 7:40

I would say my number one source would be my family. So the dinner table. And that includes my kids. I mean, my son, early on when we were trying to raise funds for the high school, there was a guy that collected public art. He loved art, he came to the Harrison Center, and I started taking kids to go visit his public art collection. And my son was like, Mom, why are you always talking to him about art? You need to talk to him about graduation rates. That's what he cares about. He cares about student achievement. And this is like my kid was 14 telling me this. And I started doing it. He gave us $2 million. So I'm all ears, right? And so the dinner table, we're talking about all these things. And um, it's really been amazing how my husband and each of my children have incredibly have informed this place. My office is one room. It's a it's a room full of couches. I sit on a couch. You know where my filing cabinet is? Under the cushion. You come visit me, I will open the cushion and you will see my the, you know, I don't have much paper anymore. Everything's on my laptop, but if I have paper, it's it's under my cushion. So what that that crazy room where there are anywhere from five to 20 people in the same space, ideas collide. Ideas collide and it's amazing. It's how you get the ideas of, you know, karaoke and an elevator, and suddenly you have a karaoke elevator. It's talking to neighbors in your office. It is talking to interns in your office. It is the staff working together and these ideas colliding.

Adam Jeske 9:14

Tell me about the relationship of the Harrison Center with the neighborhood.

Weaving Ideas Together

Joanna Taft 9:19

Yeah. So I'm a neighbor. I live four blocks away. And the reason why I got involved with this building was because I was a neighbor. So the Harrison Center is the old first Presbyterian church building, the oldest Presbyterian church building in Indianapolis. And I used to work for Indiana Landmarks, which saves historic buildings. My husband has a master's degree in historic preservation of architecture. So as a family, we care about historic architecture. Twenty-six years ago, um, I got a call from my former boss, and he said, Hey, Bill and Joanna, um, there's a nearly vacant Presbyterian church building four blocks from your house. You guys are Presbyterian. You guys should get it and start a Presbyterian church. Well, we're not pastors. Like, you know, how do you start a church? That's kind of weird. Presbyterians do things decently in an order, in case you were curious about everything else I've said. Um so um we went through this Presbyterian process of pitching the idea of a new church being downtown. And so this church was became a place that I could walk to, right? But the church congregation was very small, like very, very small. And this building's 65,000 square feet. And so a church is always trying to figure out how they can love their neighbors. And often it's a food pantry, thrift store, right? But the neighbors, in this case, wanted an art center. My thought was if you can love a neighborhood through an art center or through a thrift store or a food pantry, why can't you love a neighborhood through an art center if that's what the neighbors wanted? And so that's where the art center came from. They didn't want the social services to go away in the neighborhood. They wanted the arts to complement it. So we really tried to listen, what do the neighbors want? And let's have that posture. And we've tried to continue that posture ever since.

Adam Jeske 11:05

Joanna, I find that generally CEOs come to an organization with a given expertise in development or maybe in the program that is offered by the organization or finance or something. As a founder, it's a little bit different for you. So what expertise did you bring in as you launched this and as you've led it? And what have you needed to learn?

Joanna Taft 11:30

So I think when I started it, my I'll give you two things. Um I was a neighbor. That was my only expertise. You know, I was a neighbor, and I've learned that's actually super powerful. But in hindsight, looking back over the success and the skills that I brought, I can really say it's one thing. It's weaving. I can weave ideas together. When neighbors bring me three ideas, I can weave them together and create one. When um the city has multiple problems of high school graduation rate of 16%, you know, for um African-American males or, you know, whatever it was at the time, I can weave that desire for a creative class, that desire for world-class citizens, that desire for art patrons, that desire for a graduation rate that is actually serving the community to turn it into something.

Recent Decisions and Community Impact

Adam Jeske 12:19

Joanna, beyond the early years and some of the other significant changes you've had to make, give me an example of a more recent decision you've had to make that was quite weighty.

Joanna Taft 12:31

So two years ago, we've been partnering with a neighborhood uh next door to us, which is a historically African-American neighborhood, um since 2016. And during COVID, our relationship with them deepened, but it was different because of the distance we had to have with COVID. And we noticed that some of our neighbors started dying. And um we realized that um we needed to start collecting their oral histories because these were amazing leaders that had um were were important to preserve their stories. We had been influential in saving a building called Polk Stables in their neighborhood. We don't own it, but we got some people to save it. And they they were finished, they had we're a year away from finishing construction, and they came to us and they said, we want you to have a gallery here. And I was like, you know, that's that doesn't really make sense for the particular spot, but I have a better idea. And this is like on the phone, I have a better idea. How about a museum? And so literally on that phone call, I came up with a concept where the neighbors would donate artifacts like a rolling pin, a piece of a tree, a handkerchief. These are all things that they a pot, a pan, like all these things have been donated. And we would weave them, there's that word again, we'd weave those things together on the walls. Uh, so you know what collage is, right? That's 2D. We did 3D collage, which is called assemblage art. So when you go to a museum, the walls are covered with items, artifacts. And then you take your phone and you swipe the artifact, you swipe the rolling pin and out pops that neighbor telling a 15-second story about the rolling pin. And so we've not only was it neighborhood co-created,

Innovative Community Engagement through Art

Joanna Taft 14:24

but it's using an art form. You know, there are no glass cases, all the art, the artifacts are installed as art, but we also used augmented reality, which of course we knew nothing about any of these things, by the way. So we took different ideas together, wove them together, and within one year, actually one year and two months, we opened a museum. And I just, I just came from the museum and 40 people were there in that space. And it's it's just amazing um the gift it has been for the community and what a model it has been for other communities. It's a cultural preservation museum, but it's but it inspires um everyone, no matter what your culture is.

Adam Jeske 15:06

Such a beautiful way of preserving the life of a neighborhood uh and the stories therein. That's that's the really unique part about that. I've heard that story before, and I love the the way in which it's hyper personal. It is very focused on the actual individuals living there, uh, very close in and rich and lived.

Joanna Taft 15:35

Yeah. And I think the the other cool thing, just personally, when I moved into an urban neighborhood um almost 40 years ago, I thought history was 100 years old. I didn't know it was 10 years old or 20 years old. And I was a good neighbor. You know, we we helped our neighbors painted their houses and found furnaces and all that stuff. It has been so beautiful to discover the joy of history that is 20 years old, 10 years old, and that when new neighbors move into that neighborhood, whether a neighbor, you know, some neighbors would have been there for 60 years, but um, when new neighbors move in, they now don't see the neighborhood as a blank slate. I kind of viewed my neighborhood as a blank slate. I was here to like start things, but they view it as a story they can be a part of, which I just think is so beautiful. It's so honoring to the long-term residents and it's honoring to the residents that are moving in, and it brings them both together. It gives me hope for the future.

The Journey of Leadership and Personal Growth

Adam Jeske 16:32

Joanna, throughout your years leading at the Harrison Center, what areas of the work, of the role, produce the hardest decision landscape calculus?

Joanna Taft 16:44

So you know what my biggest fear is? Humiliation. That is my biggest fear. And so imagine how painful my job is because I've, for some reason, I'm always doing things that have this huge potential to fail and are very public. And I have to live into the fact that I am afraid of being humiliated, but I yet I feel called, I feel called to do something. And so I would say that is a recurring theme and nightmare and blessing in my work.

Adam Jeske 17:20

The natural question, if you're willing to answer, is when have you failed? When, when have there been risks taken that did not end up the way you had hoped?

Joanna Taft 17:34

So there's good news and bad news. The good news is pretty much every project has been successful. I will show a really painful thing that that happened when we were starting the high school. So again, I was a neighbor. I was not a fancy, uh, well-pedigreed person. I was not a community leader. And none of the community leaders wanted to lead this thing. So here I am leading this. You asked me who was advising me. Well, my my children. And they had never, they'd never presented to like city council before. And they'd never presented to the mayor's charter hearing. I remember the mayor's charter hearing. We got our charter, but I didn't know, I didn't understand the formality of it. And I just talked as a neighbor would talk. After that hearing, we got our hearing, one of the board members pulled me aside and said, Joanna, um, you've done a good job, you know, getting us to this point, but you are not the person to lead us. You are not the person to lead us. You're not a community leader. We need somebody that has some more experience in this kind of thing. And he asked me to step down. And so that, so imagine how like devastating that is. Like you're replaying, you know, all this in your brain. And then what was worse is that nobody would take my place. And so I had to keep leading, knowing that I wasn't good enough, right? But I but there was nobody else. I felt like, you know, Moses and Aaron, you know, like trying to figure out how to keep going, right? Because like you're called, but uh you don't have all the gifts. And so I think of that in hindsight, even though I clearly had missteps as a neighbor, I actually do believe it was being a neighbor that was my sweet spot at that point. And that they may not have had grace for a community leader presenting the type of project that we were doing, whereas they did have grace for a neighbor. Does that make any sense? But that was hard, really hard because that was a very public humiliation to be told that I embarrassed them.

Navigating Challenges and Embracing Vulnerability

Adam Jeske 19:48

Yeah, that would be very difficult. And it's also amazing to me because I see before me Joanna, the director of the Harrison Center, who is obviously a community leader. Uh how have you grown in those ways from such a significant hit to you know your sense of self and your sense of your leadership? How have you navigated since that point? Because you seem like you lead very well in that way now. That's how I experience you.

Joanna Taft 20:21

I've learned several things. One, you have to do what you're called to do. Right. And I'm not always equipped. In fact, in almost every situation, I started something I knew nothing about. I didn't have a background in the arts. I didn't have a background in education. Never started a museum before. Right. So, um, and we and we have a new project, right? So again, I have my specialty is starting things I don't know anything about. So my specialty is putting myself in the, you know, in the path of humiliation. I feel like there's this beautiful thing called calling that is bigger than all of that. And it's calling that gets me out of bed, right? It's it's when I was scared with the Heron High School thing, every morning I was reminded of my calls, what gave me the courage to get out of bed, because it's calling that gives you passion, it's calling that gives you courage, it's calling that gives you perseverance. And so I just keep going back to we are created to continue the work of creation. We are we are called to repair broken things. We're called to bring beauty, we're called to bring healing, we're called to to bring justice to education and to neighborhoods. And so if I really believe that, I have no choice but to do that work and just to trust that God is gonna, even in the heal humiliation, that God's gonna be there. And I also have to be, I think I've learned to just be honest about it and not to pretend. I think that's a good thing. We have a lot of interns. We've about fifth 50 interns a year, and I think it's a really good thing for them to know. that you can you can lead in that way. You can lead in confessing. You can lead in repenting. You can lead in, I think there's a, there's a, it's not a weakness, there's a strength there. Helps you and other people.

Adam Jeske 22:15

Thank you so much for stepping into that. You didn't need to share those sorts of things, but it that ending underscores the thing you've learned, which is you just keep stepping into that, that that's where growth is and that's where innovative efforts lie, like the Harrison Center and some of this discrete programs within the center. It's the the strength of saying, I don't know, or I'm not ready. And then there's nobody else who are who's going to do this. So I guess I guess here we go and seeing how it goes. I think that served served me well in in my work, but it seems like it's served you and your community well also. I

Lessons Learned and Wisdom Gained

Adam Jeske 23:06

want to step into something of a lightning round. And so the first question in this kind of quick hits is um what do you wish someone had told you before you launched the Harrison Center and before you were the executive director of a a substantial thriving nonprofit.

Joanna Taft 23:26

I think what I said earlier that you could get a lot done when you're afraid. I mean being afraid is inconsequential. It's something that sometimes you learn how to work through the fear, sometimes you can set it aside, sometimes you have to work during it, but you can actually get a lot done when you're afraid. I didn't know that.

Adam Jeske 23:43

So yeah I've got two two kids graduating from college this spring and I think I'll be quoting you back to them. You've met one of them. What is a book or two that has been formative for your leadership?

Joanna Taft 24:01

You know, I just I love Maka Fujimaro's writing and um the culture care book, even though that's one of his older books, it was such a gift to me because I think I came out of a culture wars tradition. And having the gift of not fighting but nurturing was just incredible and mind-blowing and an unaltering to my work. So that would be one another one would be Malcolm Cladwell this is another old book but I read it again and again but um Malcolm Gladwell's uh book The Tipping Point when we started the Harris Center we had no money. And it was back in the days where to send emails to invite people to First Friday you have to do like nine at nine emails at the time and um you don't you probably don't even remember this. And so I read this book and I'm like oh my goodness Mavens I need to find Mavens. And so I identified Mavens I would email them they'd do all the work for me. It was amazing. They're pathologically helpful perfect.

Adam Jeske 25:08

Those are those are two good older books. I've read both of them are there quotes or concepts about leadership that you have frequently come back to mind?

Joanna Taft 25:20

So the Harrison Center is not a religious organization we we f we rent from the church. That wasn't the initial plan but that that's what happened pretty quickly. And um human beings don't really like to share and we've had over the years tension over sharing the building and this is not unique to the art center in a church. It happens in lots of other situations. There were times my husband would say why are you staying because it's never going to get better and I'd say to him I'm staying because I believe the gospel's true if I didn't believe the gospel's true I don't even want what I'm doing in this world, right? I want someone to come for my heart and I want someone to come for the other people's hearts, particularly the other people's hearts. So I think that what I what I was I woke up one day and I realized that they hadn't changed, but I had that for some reason God changed my heart and all of a sudden I had all this love for this other side and I don't know what happened there, but the lightning round answer should be that a friend told me I should repent in front of my staff. And that was I kind of alluded to that earlier that um when I was not getting along with the people in the building you know the building management or whatever like I should be looking and repenting and question and searching my heart in front of my staff. And that eventually led for a real heart change for me.

Adam Jeske 26:52

Is there a piece of conventional wisdom in in the sector, in nonprofits, uh in in Indianapolis, in leadership is there a piece of conventional wisdom that you ignore well I think that our office the our entire place is unconventional.

Joanna Taft 27:12

So among my peers there would be more silos and there would be people working in their silos collaboration, right? But but working in their silos for concentration for whatever and we we know that we are giving some things up for our the way that we work in a co-working environment so I ignore that that um in fact we've had some staff that have said I can't work in this setting

The Power of Love and Community in Leadership

Joanna Taft 27:41

and my response is we have galleries you can go to the gallery if you need a quiet place. But we're not changing this setting because I've seen the benefits and we're never going to be able to replicate those benefits. Does that make sense? So that conventional wisdom of of having a more conventional office configuration um filing in a file cabinet instead of your cushion I don't know that's good.

Adam Jeske 28:14

Joanna Taft, founder and executive director of the Harrison Center what do you love about what you do?

Joanna Taft 28:23

I love my job so much. I love the fact that I my job is to love other people. That's actually kind of not the way I'm wired I'm really good at getting angry and really good at coming up with things to not like and to critique but what I've been learning in the last six years 10 years is that the arts the arts can hurt people can make you feel uncool, left out can erase stories or the power of the arts can be used to know and love people and know and love their stories. And once I figured that out every day I get to come to work and practice exercise that love muscle which is still a lot of work for me because I still my default is critical get to work we have a lot of stuff to do. That's that's my default I cannot believe that my job is to love people. I can't believe I have this honor. It's just amazing.

Adam Jeske 29:26

Fantastic Joanna thank you so much for joining us on the Nonprofit CEO podcast.

Joanna Taft 29:32

Thank you for having me.

Adam Jeske 29:34

If you know a nonprofit CEO who's carrying something significant send them this episode. And if you want more of the patterns I'm seeing across hundreds of CEO conversations delivered weekly you need the nonprofit CEO briefing at nonprofit CEO.com. I'm Adam Jesky the Nonprofit CEO advisor thank you for what you are leading