Ebenezer Center
Years ago, in Savannah, Georgia, I was involved with an as-yet unfinished passion project. In addition to being a technology product designer and educational technology leader, I am also a part-time musician. It should be no surprise that I see music as fundamentally an expression of Meaning. Like mathematics, music can communicate meaning without recourse to metaphors or images—it can simply transmit ratios or proportions directly and abstractly—with or without additional messaging. Of course, music can include lyrics and images, but it does not need to. The relationships between sound and quiet, between tones and pitches, the metrics of rhythm, etc., allow us to immerse ourselves in Meaning in all of its glory. The Meaning conveyed by music is arguably the pinnacle of human experience. Hardly anything can induce the kinds of euphoria that music unlocks in our lives.
The Problem
As a working musician, it troubled me to no end to see that my peers who had committed their lives to the craft of making music, in nearly every case, simply had to accept that the normal protections afforded to workers in almost any other industry were not available to them. Despite the fact that Savannah’s musicians, like the musicians in any America city, make the local economy thrive and provide tourists and locals alike with the most memorable experiences of their lives—experiences that other industries (like hospitality, food and beverage, transport, etc.) are paid handsomely for—while musicians are expected to work for a pittance without any safety net. I have been both a creative and a “career” employee in corporate America, and I can say definitively that a below average working musician is far more dedicated, harder-working and more talented than the average employee at the average company. Yet, the employee enjoys, at minimum, a living wage, decent working hours and conditions, sick leave, vacation, and health insurance, none of which are available for even extremely popular musicians. In the arts, there are the Taylor Swifts of the world, then there are brilliant people who are every bit as talented but somehow can’t make rent. There is no “middle class” for a musician.
The Idea
This reality struck me as a design challenge. Along the way in my career, I have not only re-designed corporate structures but I have actually helped to design and launch a new College. The very first thing that I insisted on as I joined that project was this: Our people will not be forced to forego the normal protections that any employee enjoys simply because this is a “passion project.” There are words for when human beings are asked to work without pay or with no protections, and they are not nice words. I would not be part of perpetuating what I believe is an easily addressed cultural ill in America. So, the first thing that I did was to onboard an HR partner and to ensure that all employees would get the same kind of benefits that any normal, good job would offer. This was not a difficult task. For some reason, when “corporations” (which are collectivist groups of humans aligned to secure certain benefits) set out to provide a living wage and social protections, it’s “normal.” But, when other collectivist groups of humans seek to do exactly the same things, it becomes a “union” or…God forbid… “socialist.” So, I chose to focus on the desired outcomes rather than the inane labels used to describe different types of organizations.
Imagine a world where being an Artist (in this case, a musician), were an actual “job.” Let’s say a corporation hired artists as employees whose job was to be as great at their art as possible. These employees would go through the same onboarding process as any other employee:
Interview (or be recruited)
Get hired
Receive benefits, insurance, sick leave, PTO, etc.
Receive regular performance reviews
All of this could be done with a bit of up-front investment to help the company get started. Since music only happens a few hours per day for the average performer, even in the best case scenario for a working musician, the Company would find other ways to make use of the employee’s time. Therefore, the Company should diversify its offerings: Not just talent to be booked for shows, but a location that can generate income during off hours. For example, a coffee shop, a bar, food and beverage, a maker space / studio, a performance venue, a merch shop, an instrument shop and any other offering that makes sense to be co-located with working musicians plying their trade. This idea came to be know as…
The Ebenezer Center for the Intuitive Arts
The name “Ebenezer” was a nod to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s Church. The work that Dr. King performed is far from finished his fight, while racial as a result of being waged in America, was universally about human dignity, which extends into economic justice. Human beings should not be asked to work for no wages, with no protections. Of course, in America, there is a long legacy of not only asking but forcing human beings to do exactly that. The racial justification for such practices are as inane as the supposed justifications for why “artists” and musicians should work for free. No human being should work without adequate compensation and protection, period.
The “Intuitive Arts” was suggested by the Civil Rights Museum in Savannah who rightly noted that calling it a “Folk” center or similar does not communicate well outside of (mostly) white circles. It also acknowledges the reality that “folk” culture is largely “intuitive” or improvisational culture. What makes a working musician such a valuable asset to a local economy is their ability to act like a human lightning rod—to subject themselves to a scenario that most people find terrifying (public speaking)—and to take that situation and alchemize it into something transformative for the entire audience, to lift a room full of complete strangers out of their worries and cares and to transport them to a place of joy and wonder. It is magic. It is Meaning. It ain’t easy and most people will never be able to do it, even though everyone is welcome to try. The best performers are in a conversation with anywhere from a handful to a stadium full of other human beings simultaneously. They intuit their audience’s “vibe” and they find a way to connect, in the moment. This is the greatest asset that humanity has ever discovered and, for some inexplicable reason, it has been extracted from creatives with little to no compensation for centuries.
The Proposal
This was the sort of ‘back of the napkin’ proposal to local investors and cultural leaders. Someday, I’ll pick it back up. For now, this dream will live in the back of my mind and I fully expect it to come true as all of my dreams have always done.
The concept is fairly simple and the proposal has a lot to do with the city of Savannah and its history.
Savannah was a colony founded without slaves and that welcomed disenfranchised populations like the Jews at a time when this was not common. The city was founded on what the Brits call “allotments” but what Savannah calls “Squares.” Each family was given a parcel of land to tend to make their livelihood. They were asked to contribute to the city by encouraging the silkworm population, which founders hoped might replace cotton trade. Sadly, this utopian start succumbed to the pressures of slave culture and King Cotton.
During the Civil War, Savannah was the headquarters of General Tecumseh Sherman as he broke the Confederate resistance. From the Green Meldrim House, he passed Field Order 15, the famous “Forty Acres and a Mule” declaration in which he declared that freed slaves would be given parcels of land along the Georgia Coast. This land today is some of the most sought-after real estate in the country and it was intended to be a cornerstone of reconstruction in an alternate version of American history that sadly was cancelled. But, the story is never over until it’s over, so, for the Ebenezer Center, the proposal was:
What if we simply continued the good work? What if we took the models from the past and applied them to the present for the sake of the future? What if we provided human beings with their own parcel to work through their talents and the sweat of their brow? They could then not only sustain themselves and their loved ones but also contribute back to the community and could counter-act an extraction culture where only those at the top of the pyramid have security while the millions of others have none. Once established, such a Center could become part of a network with other sister cities. We could simply draw a radius on a map to all of the cities within one tank of gas to Savannah—places like Chattanooga, Charlotte, Charleston, Raleigh, etc. A reciprocal network of talent could be created to exchange artists from town to town while ensuring that everyone within the network was adequately compensated for the talent and labor they contributed. Within the network, of course, there would need to be provision for the “best” to be the most successful, but not at the expense of simply leaving the least to fend for themselves. If an artist were to achieve a level of success that became a sort of escape velocity where things like health care and other protections were no longer a concern, they could “buy out” and leave the Company to go it alone.
The goal was to create an ecosystem, a network where those who benefitted would leave not only the Ebenezer Center and its artists better off, but would also contribute to the City of Savannah (and any sister cities that joined the network), so that talent and wealth did not get extracted then concentrated in places like New York or LA, but could remain in the regions and places that had given birth to the distinctive local artists and art forms that emerged city by city, region by region.
