Call for Applications

SPA Coaches

Click here to apply by May 30, 2023

Summary

MAP Fund’s Scaffolding for Practicing Artists (SPA) program is hiring new coaches for artists that are recent recipients of MAP Fund and Jerome Foundation grants. The SPA program was founded in 2012 in response to grantees’ requests for a more holistic and comprehensive level of support in addition to financial resources. SPA’s goals are to increase artists’ feelings of agency in their artistic work/careers and to build a deeper sense of community and belonging. To learn more about SPA, including our program values, history, and current members of our coach ensemble, please visit our webpage. 

We pursue SPA’s goals by providing artists with two kinds of support:

• Coaching: one-on-one, over a period of 12 months (up to 7 sessions)
• Gathering: a two-day experience wherein SPA artists coach each other, and coaches facilitate

At this time, all program elements of SPA are virtual. 

Driven by new partnerships and MAP Fund’s response to artists’ requests, the SPA program has grown to include more than 80 artists a year. To continue to steward this growing pool of artists, MAP is looking for an additional four coaches (learn more about our current group of coaches here by selecting the “current coaches” tab).

Coach Responsibilities

Coaches are a part of a learning community that meets twice each year to exchange ideas, questions, and insights that help strengthen the collective coaching practice in addition to 

individually coaching between 2-14 artists per year and co-facilitating artist gatherings. Overall, the coaching commitment requires a minimum of 50 hours per year. Our fee scale for this work averages $125/hr.

SPA’s Approach to Coaching

We center artists and their practices as sacred in all of our work. SPA is not a curricular program, and artists determine the course, flow, and topics of their engagement. In a field riddled with competitions, hierarchies, and judgment, it is rare for artists to receive dedicated time and attention from a person who has a mileage of experience and who is not assessing them. The sacred acts of listening, reflecting back, validating, valuing, and supporting artists to map steps forward toward their goals and desires are SPA’s core offerings. Many SPA artists have shared that the kind of care and intimacy they receive through SPA coaching is a rare, precious, and often transformational process. 

Having worked with more than 200 artists over the past decade, we’ve found that providing both structure and flexibility is key to strengthening artists’ sense of agency. While coaching is the core of what SPA offers, one-on-one engagements can take on elements of mentorship and consulting, per the artist’s needs and coach’s skills and capacity, but MAP staff does our best to set artist and coach expectations about what is in and out of bounds.

Coach Qualities

You would be a great member of the SPA Coach ensemble if you… 

• Believe in the crucial role of artists in society;
• Embody the SPA program’s values: curiosity, humility, intuition, compassion, shared responsibility, ease, analysis of structural oppression;
• Have a history of professionally coaching/advising artists – either as formal coaching or as an identifiable and consistent practice of engaging with artists that may not have previously been defined as coaching (Note: if you haven’t coached artists, that’s alright! We’ll want to know more about your interest in doing so.);
• Can facilitate conversations that support learning and growth; 
• Know how to ask powerful questions that help a person identify their core needs, underlying assumptions, and existing skills that they can apply in service of their goals;  
• Are an active listener; 
• Have experience supporting people as they navigate racism, patriarchy, ableism, and other systems of oppression;  
• Understand the kinds of questions, tensions, and challenges that working artists in the U.S. face; and
• Have a system of self care that does not center yourself when supporting others.

This may not be the right opportunity if you…

• Would prefer “fixing” things, giving an artist advice over coaching them;   
• Have a difficult time being present with other people’s emotions, especially when those emotions include things like fear, guilt, shame, anger, or sadness;  
• Find it difficult to provide coaching support over the phone or video conference; 
• Lack working knowledge of how systems of oppression affect working artists; or 
• Do not have some flexibility to schedule coaching sessions to meet the artist’s needs.

Process Components & Timeline

MAP Fund has assembled a hiring committee consisting of MAP Fund staff—Ron Ragin, David Blasher, and Sarah Mostov—and members of the coach ensemble—Georgiana Pickett and Michele Kumi Baer. This group is managing and implementing the hiring process and will make final decisions about whom to hire. 

The application process will include the following steps:

Part 1: Online application

1. Why coaching? Why artists? (100 words)
   Briefly answer the following questions: Why is coaching important? Why is coaching particularly important for artists?
2. Statement of coaching experience that can be submitted in writing (under 400 words), or in a video or audio file (under 4 minutes): In your own words, tell us about your experience with coaching and your experience supporting artists. Please describe your values, approach, and methodology, and share at least one example of the impact you’ve understood your coaching to have on artists with whom you’ve worked.
   
   Rationale: We want to understand the relevant coaching experience you would bring to your work with SPA.
3. Resume, CV, or Statement of Qualifications: We want to open this process to folks who are passionate about supporting artists and who may have come into their coaching practice through many channels. We welcome people to share resumes or CV’s or to offer your own approach to demonstrating your experience and qualifications to work as a SPA coach.
   
   Rationale: We want to get a sense of your relationship to the arts and culture field, as well as other expertise and experiences that inform your approach to coaching.
4. Contact information

Application materials can be submitted through this portal 

Applications due by May 30, 2023

Part 2: In-person interview

Based on review of application materials, the hiring committee will select and meet with a subset of candidates for real-time interviews, which will take place via zoom. More details about the interview process will be provided in advance.

Contact information

For any questions regarding this opportunity, please email info@mapfund.org with “SPA Coach Recruitment” in the subject line. 

About the MAP Fund

The MAP Fund invests in performing artists and their work as the critical foundation of imagining and co-creating a more equitable and vibrant society. MAP is the longest running private funding source for new performance works in the United States and its territories. Since 1989, MAP has championed cultural equity and formal innovation in performance practices with an investment of more than $34 million. Over three decades, thousands of artists have received grants and strategic support for groundbreaking projects that interrogate presumptive cultural norms, challenge entrenched ideologies, and remind us over and over again of our shared humanity.

The MAP Fund values radical inclusion. We welcome any individual‘s engagement with the program, regardless of age, economic means, ethnicity, gender, physical abilities, race, sexual orientation, or any other element of their unique identity.