My research methods consisted of 10 interviews with current Producer Board members, young alumni who served as Executive Producer during their time with CityStep, and a number of advisors or community members with whom we work, including the founder of CityStep. I would like to thank these CityStep members and supporters for giving generously of their time to support my project and contribute to the continued success and longevity of CityStep Harvard. 

Community Partnerships

1. Parent Engagement

When initially envisioning strategies for community partnerships, my initial thoughts centered on re-establishing high-level relationships with City of Cambridge officials, affiliated councils, and arts organizations. For years and years, the Mayor of Cambridge declared one to two days around our final show “CityStep Day” in the City of Cambridge and issued a proclamation in support of our program. 

While reviving CityStep Day and engaging high-level City leaders are still certainly positive, long-term goals, through my interviews I realized that the most important and valuable community partnerships we currently need to strengthen are actually those with our CityStep parents. 
 

CityStep has a long and storied history, and - in line with my personal experiences - interviewees described speaking with parents with several children who had all gone through the CityStep program, parents who had participated in CityStep as children and whose own children were now part of CityStep, and parents who serve the school district in various capacities who spoke incredibly highly of their children’s time in the program. Somewhat serendipitously, we recently had a principal of a Cambridge elementary school (one of the earliest schools to participate in CityStep) reach out to us about bringing the program back to this school during his tenure because his children had participated in CityStep at another school and had such a positive and meaningful experience. The parents of our students are some of the greatest champions of our program in the community, want to be more informed and engaged about our work throughout the year, and - critically - should be partners in our support and teaching of our CityStep students. Although we survey CityStep students, Harvard student participants, and often the CPS teachers of our students, we do not currently have a pulse on our parent body. As CityStep has undergone recent changes - whether about scheduling, transportation, or number of classes per week - my research supports the notion that engaging parents and understanding their capacity and desires for the program should be significantly expanded. Classroom Directors are primarily in charge of regularly communicating with their students’ parents to inform them of logistics, scheduling, expectations, and requirements like permission forms. However, in classes with parents with language barriers or limited use of/access to technology, additional forms of parent engagement may be able to expand inter-parent communication and facilitate increased channels of engagement and exchange among parents and between parents and our company.
 

• Parent Newsletters - 2x a semester
  • In addition to the CityStep mailer we send to alumni as a fundraising call, establishing a parent newsletter to consolidate upcoming dates and events (like mini-performances in December, field trips, All-Day rehearsal), celebrate class accomplishments, and solicit feedback would provide an additional channel of communication and engagement with parents. This is also an additional channel via which to send out parent surveys, aiding in both our pulse on the CityStep parent voice and gaining data for our strategic programming and data collection for grants.
  • CityStep Calendar - to be linked in parent newsletters - a view-only Google calendar, accessible via link, with each class and school’s events, breaks, class times, and final show schedules
• Class/School Parent Liaisons 
  • In each class, there are virtually always parents - often quite a few - who are familiar with the CityStep program, either via older children’s participation or even via their own participation as children. The role of the parent liaison would serve to engage parents who may wish to be more engaged with CityStep and can assist in an informal way with answering other parents’ questions, coordinating carpooling or transportation among parents, and providing an additional resource when Classroom Directors end up fielding lots of phone calls, particularly at busy times of the year for CityStep. The position would ideally be held by two parents in each class, depending on the size of the class, and would provide an additional channel of communication to parents who may be more comfortable sharing feedback or expressing concerns via another parent than directly to a Classroom Director. Gauging parent feedback before and after the introduction of this pilot program would provide insight into how to best shape the position to best serve CityStep and its parent constituents. Sometime after the bulk of my interviews, I learned via the CPS website that individual CPS schools each have parent liaisons via a similar model. 

1. Identifying and Developing “CityStep Champions”

Cambridge and CPS Contacts

Over the past 35 years of CityStep, CityStep has benefitted greatly from what one of my interviewees terms “CityStep champions” - Cambridge school officials who fought to keep CityStep programs in their schools when standardized testing pressure was driving the elimination of arts programs and other “extras” in the school day, staff members who meet with us each year to ensure the success of our final show, school board members who have extolled the benefits of CityStep to their peers - members of the Cambridge community who will vouch for CityStep, assist in our work, contribute to our success, and champion us in the community. However, just like the student leadership of CityStep, there is turnover among school and community leaders, and these relationships have to be continually fostered. Inviting individually via Paperless Post the members of the school board, the Cambridge Arts Council, many CPS administrators, principals, and other prominent community members to our final show this year and a pre-show reception was a positive start to increasing intentionality around these partnerships, and many of these administrators who attended the show we learned had children who had gone through CityStep years ago. My research supports continuing this engagement and, additionally, identifying specific CPS administrators - such as the K-12 arts coordinators for the district - who would likely offer us valuable insight into program communication and improvement, in addition to further strengthening CityStep’s name within CPS to ensure a strong future. In addition to being a great source of insight, these community members can also assist in challenges in working with schools at times, like the extremely significant cost of using our final show space at the local high school or vouching for our program when principals or school leadership change and do not know CityStep.

Creation of an Advisory Board in Cambridge/“Friends of CityStep”

In a number of my interviews, the at-times strained relationship between Harvard and the City of Cambridge was emphasized, as well as the fact that CityStep provides an extraordinarily positive and enduring model for reciprocity and collaboration between Harvard students and Cantabrigians. Therefore, I propose the creation of an advisory board - not a graduate board or a governing board - but a group of Cambridge community members (such as school administrators, board members, arts officials, or parent leaders) and Harvard supporters of CityStep. These Harvard members might include various deans, representatives from Office of the Arts, faculty members who led CityStep as undergraduates like Diane Paulus, or alumni who wish to engage further with CityStep in Cambridge. No work is necessarily required of this advisory board, but my research supports the value of bringing together various stakeholders to lend their name and time when available to legitimize, support, and engage with CityStep’s work. This board also provides a valuable group to turn to when faced with problems like attempting to regain use of Sanders Theater again at a student group reduced discount in order to restore the reciprocal nature of each year’s shows, which historically alternated taking place each year, between CRLS (Cambridge high school) and Sanders Theatre.

Producer Board Structure/Roles

Throughout my interviews I gained a great deal of insight on the various structures and roles that have existed under the Executive Producer(s) throughout the past few decades. While PBoard and its roles have certainly regularly shifted in overall size and role definition, studying archival material from old show programs (either digitized or kept in giant storage boxes in our SOCH office) provided additional insight into the various forms in which Producer Board and non-EP producer roles have existed over CityStep’s existence. 

While interviewees were actually quite split on the necessity of and degree to which non-EP roles should be structured and defined, the need for experienced producers in specific roles became apparent. For example, my co-EP and I piloted to role of “Producer Classroom Liaisons” (PCLs) this year, which we later learned had existed in various forms and with varying levels of responsibility, but at several points in time, took the form of “Classroom Producers,” which served the similar function of handling logistics for individual classes, including snacks, field trip logistics, visiting the classroom when necessary, permission slips, and other class-specific tasks that would otherwise fall on the EPs or on the Classroom Director. Halfway through this year, we reorganized the PCL structure, as the model was not as efficient as possible and specifying roles (one person handling all permission slips, one person spearheading all costumes, etc.). Through my interviews, the difficulty of fully integrating PBoard members into the company and CityStep community was raised many times due to PBoard’s distance from the classroom, despite our significant improvements in PBoard, Music Board, and Teacher Board community-building this year. New PBoard members often felt unequipped to be Classroom Producers because of their lack of familiarity with CityStep’s day-to-day functions, events, and final show, but yet wanted to engage with the classroom in order to fully understand the CityStep experience. Therefore, I propose a loose structure that establishes experienced Classroom Producers - one to three serving all the classes, depending on experience, time available, and number of classes; however, each new producer will be assigned to a classroom “team” to help out with logistics when possible, attend annual mini-performances and a small number of classes, and build community with an individual teaching team, without the enormous responsibility and understanding required to manage a class’s non-curricular operations. Additionally, for this coming year, we are piloting a new structure of PBoard roles - to which returning producers apply - in order to provide an improved stepping stone to the Executive Producer position. While returning teachers often apply to become Classroom Directors, there was no PBoard equivalent that let returning producers take on more leadership. These are new four positions - Design Director, Operations Director, Show Director, and Development Director - and can each also be co-directors, particularly Development Director, which will oversee sponsorships, fundraising, alumni relations and mailers, and internal programming. While these producers will also be asked to take the typical “all hands on deck” PBoard approach to tasks around final show time and other busy times of year, I look forward to the implementation of these newly designed roles and all the experienced, returning producers CityStep will have next year, as I am the only graduating senior on PBoard. I hope that, as my co-EP and I attempted this year, and in line with my research, these roles and the additional responsibilities that will be distributed to producers next year will be in line with producers’ interests and the experiences and skills they most want to take away from PBoard.
 

Institutional Memory Building

Via my research, I hoped my interviews on their own would start to build a repository of institutional memory and historical knowledge of PBoard and CityStep over the years. In initially envisioning what I thought might be most helpful in preserving and passing down requisite knowledge for the EP role and for other producers, I thought that a comprehensive manual - likely written by the outgoing EPs and added to at the end of each year - would be the easiest and most straightforward method of building institutional memory and streamlining EP transitions. However, my findings from my interviews, although they supported the creation of various types of documents to support EP leadership transitions, showed that the process of building institutional memory and comprehensive records is actually more complex and needs to be more gradual that I initially assumed. In attempting to conceptualize this EP transition/producer board manual, I realized that there was no adequate way to show the scope of the work and constant communication my co-EP and I undertook this year, just like EPs past. Additionally, it is incredibly difficult to enforce a system of outgoing (often graduating) Execs creating a massive transition document or yearly report after the show is over, their terms have ended, and finals are approaching. Therefore, my proposal for institutional memory documents is as follows:

• A “living document” transition guide, organized by month like a timeline, to be added to over the course of the year and added to each consecutive year, with comments/notes about what worked well and what timelines need to be altered for next year - this “calendar” then does not need to be reconstructed at the end of the school year like has been attempted in the past, despite valiant past attempts at doing so
• Producers used to submit monthly (even weekly) reports about their ongoing work, which were printed out, distributed, and stored in binders by PBoard. I propose that a short “report” - complete sentences not required - be created by the EPs and added to by the producers at the end of each month, listing projects executed and general start and completion dates. This document will help facilitate the transition guide mentioned above.
• Organization of agendas - one extremely well-received change this year instituted by EPs was the creation and sending out of agendas before each PBoard meeting. Based on a few ideas from current producers in my interviews, I propose that the agendas, rather than being created in separate documents in the Google Drive, be created within the same long document each week, with a linked Table of Contents at the beginning so as to not require endless scrolling. This document - e.g., “PBoard Agendas 2019-2020” will provide a week-by-week record of all tasks, division of labor, often meeting minutes, and brainstorming that occurs at every PBoard meeting throughout the entire year, without requiring incoming Execs to search through the Drive and compile each individual document to get a sense of the trajectory of the year. 

Lastly, while not always possible, there is great benefit to having one outgoing EP remain on campus the following year to be readily accessible for guidance. I learned via interviews that Diane Paulus took over the CityStep directorship (three directors at the time) when she was a sophomore, which allowed the program to flourish under her leadership for multiple years. When possible, and while still choosing the best candidate(s) for the role, it appears ideal that at least one Exec be a junior or even highly qualified sophomore so as to further facilitate the gradual shoring up of institutional memory and transition information over the beginning of new Execs’ terms.