Stanford Thompson has been a Global Leaders Program Module Director for the past six years, and has just finished teaching his module “Frameworks for Advocacy and Action.”
Stanford is a Philadelphia-based musician and educator who serves as the Founder and Executive Director of Play On Philly and founding Board Chairman of El Sistema USA and the National Instrumentalist Mentoring and Advancement Network. Recognized as a TED Fellow, Stanford believes that music education is a powerful tool for positive personal and community change. In addition to his GLP teaching, he regularly presents at major universities and music conservatories about leadership, entrepreneurship and social justice. As a consultant, he has guided the development of dozens of music programs across the United States and collaborated with major orchestras, higher education institutions, and arts organizations to develop new strategies and initiatives that help provide equitable access to the arts.
He was recently presented with the 2021 Alan Cooper Leadership in the Arts Award – an award that honors an arts leader who has demonstrated outstanding leadership in the arts sector within the mid-Atlantic region of the United States.
In Stanford’s GLP module, cohort members gain valuable practical skills to do with managing social enterprises. When creating a new project or enterprise, there can be a scramble of great ideas in all directions, and this module is all about organizing them and making them viable. When setting up an exciting new venture, building a framework for the design, implementation, and evaluation of the organization can be far from one’s mind, or outside someone’s skill-set. The same can be said for existing projects or program initiatives – often people are too busy in the thick of the day-to-day running of a project to have the capacity to formulate a framework that might add value and further enhance the overall outcomes.
Stanford has a calm way of bringing clarity and strength to great ideas, guiding cohort members through the process of building a logic model to show a theory of change, drawing on examples from his own organization Play on Philly and other socially-motivated music programs including Live Music Now in the UK. Over the years he has regularly invited alumni to present their own logic models and talk through their processes with the group.
As someone with years of experience communicating with stakeholders, Stanford is also the ideal person to share his keys to success with a cohort often used to wearing many hats at the same time: entrepreneur, performing artist, educator, administrator, and more. Many projects have worthy goals and deserving communities who will benefit, but the reality of securing the necessary financial resources to make it all happen can be much more complex. This year, the module included a guest presentation by Ken MacLeod, founder of Sistema New Brunswick, where he talked about the various strategies he and his team used to develop and rapidly build their program.
In previous years, cohort members have commented that the logic model framework is a new tool that they have been able to immediately apply within their own organization, or even impress in a job interview when asked certain business management questions. The clarity that comes with having a framework can make the steps to success more manageable, and the outcomes clearer and more achievable.
We asked Stanford Thompson to share a few thoughts on the “Frameworks for Advocacy and Action” module:
What do you think has changed in the years since you first taught this GLP module in 2015?
Each new cohort is coming to the program with more leadership experience than the previous cohort. This certainly signals that more leaders are looking at GLP as an opportunity to expand their networks and knowledge, but this keeps me on my toes as a faculty member. What I deliver each year has needed to grow in depth and challenge the cohort’s thinking in different ways than their professional experience may have taught them.
What hasn’t changed is how much the cohort inspires me to become a better leader and the joy I get from seeing their careers take off in ways they can’t imagine today.
There are now a growing number of GLP graduates employed in non-profits and arts organizations around the world who have experience with logic models from your module – does this end up having an effect on the industry?
I believe the impact of my module more shapes the members of the cohort and the impact they have in their work, rather than the industry. The knowledge gained from the module forces them to think through program planning and management, communication, consensus-building, and fundraising.
Our arts-based approaches to solving social issues are competing for attention against a wide range of interventions and my goal is to help cohort members build clarity of vision and succinctly articulate why their idea is one that should be tried, improved, and/or expanded.
