As an arts administrator, both by profession and education (Columbia College Chicago, Master of Arts Management), it’s frankly hard to imagine how three or more organizations could share a single administrative person. This presents severe challenges both for the sharing organizations and the individual that attempts to fill this role:

- During peak times, such as the top of most seasons, how do the organizations figure out who gets priority on the individual’s time? Even within an organization, individuals rarely have more than one direct supervisor due to obvious issues surrounding workload priority. This would be severely exacerbated by having the person report to several supervisors who are not even in the same organization.

- It’s easy enough to split monetary compensation, but who pays for the benefits necessary to attract and hold employees in today’s workplace?

- It is impractical and unrealistic to expect that a single individual will have all the skills, knowledge, and experience necessary to effectively run the entire administrative side of any artistic endeavor. Unless an organization is only looking for the most basic of skills, functions of this position would have to include marketing, financial, development, and operational talents that, quite frankly, just don’t typically all find themselves in the same psyche. And the individual would have to cover all these roles for multiple entities.

There are several approaches that seem better to me:

- Most importantly, I recommend that as artists, musicians, and directors, you educate yourselves about the business and operational functions of your art form. Knowing how to do your finances and what constitutes a good marketing plan will save you a lot of time and money because you’ll be able to do some of it yourself in an efficient manner. To accomplish this, you can do such simple things as auditing undergraduate accounting, marketing, development, and copyright law classes at PPCC or UCCS. You may even wish to look into an Associate’s degree in business or a similar field, such as non-profit administration.

- Temp agencies: while often frowned upon as not sufficiently specialized for work in our sector, these may be able to provide individuals who can fulfill basic office needs if that is all that is required. These present an option that allows for very part time personnel, without the trappings of running an HR function.

- Local students: UCCS, CC, and PPCC have literally hundreds of undergraduate and graduate students in their business, communications, and public administration departments that would love to intern under an arts organization. We use 10-20 interns on an annual basis from these academic institutions in a variety of ways that help keep our costs down. They often take on project-based work that frees us up to not only perform more administrative tasks, but also work on strategy and planning for the growth of our organization. Time for strategic thought often gets lost in the bog of projects and administration, and these interns help us rise above that.

My intent is not to criticize, but to offer some alternatives that have been proven to work for us.