A Letter from the NETneXt Bridge Ensemble - Planning for NET's Future
Dear NET Community,
For the past two years, NET’s Staff, Board, and Bridge Ensemble have been engaged in NETNeXt, a process to radically transform and activate our organization and community of artists and ensembles. You may have spent time with us in New Orleans or on one of the many online gatherings we held in the fall. Maybe you sent us your community agreements to help us inform ours. We're so grateful for your voice and participation.
This work continues, beginning with several upcoming regional gatherings, beginning with the first in Los Angeles, announced here. As an advocacy network for ensemble artists and companies, we also need to know more about the current state of our community, so please fill out the surveys we’re sending to help us support you.
As we plan for NET’s future, we’re prioritizing short-term approaches to current challenges, which, as you probably know from your own work, are real. Specifically, we’re focusing on two immediate goals:
1) generating resources to keep NET going and
2) re-engaging with our past and present membership following the difficult and isolating years of Pandemic and recovery.
Resources: As a community founded on trust and mutual aid, we want to make sure you’re aware of these challenges and priorities. Specifically, we’re in a race against our cash balance. We’re coming to the end of our NET NeXt funding (for which we are ever grateful to the Mellon Foundation) and confronting a looming retreat by the grantmaking community from the funding of “intermediary” organizations like NET and other service networks in the arts. This is compounded for NET by having pivoted during COVID-19 Pandemic to Pay-What-You-Can ($1 minimum) membership dues model, repurposing grant funding to offer quick mini-grants to encourage remote connection between members and their peers. Four years later, we still run on that model.
Membership: You, the artists and companies of NET, are NET. Compounding our changed dues structure during lockdown, a complicated system collapse compounded our inability to track and renew membership. As we work to course-correct our technological infrastructure and data systems, we still have a lot of catching up to do. That means, we have a lot of catching up to do with YOU. That’s why these first steps into NET’s future will happen together–in regional meetings, online, through information gathering and the sharing of stories and struggles and plans for our shared future.
NET, like the field, is at a crucial turning point and, as we face all the uncertainty, we have become even more certain of one thing: the learning, democratic practices, and values of ensemble art are more necessary than ever–to the theater field and the culture at large. Thank you for standing with each other and with NET.
