Podcast: Speaking of Quality: Wealth Management Insights with Hank Smith
Season 4 Episode 6 Title: The Value of Arts & Culture in Economies and Communities

Episode Transcript:

Maxine Cuffe 00:06 

You are listening to Speaking of Quality: Wealth Management Insights with Hank Smith, a podcast by The Haverford Trust Company on speaking of quality, Hank chats with authors, influencers, and wealth management experts to bring a sense of clarity and calm to the complexity and stress of personal finance. And now here’s your host, Hank Smith. 

Hank Smith 00:27  

Hello and welcome to another episode of Speaking of Quality Wealth Management Insights. I’m your host, Hank Smith, director and head of investment strategy at The Haverford Trust Company. On this podcast, we explore topics ranging from quality investing, retirement resilience, stock market trends, estate planning, small business ownership, behavioral psychology, and more. 

This season, we’re focusing on unpacking the economic drivers of today and tomorrow. Joining me today is Joan Roebuck Carter, Senior Vice President of Institutional Advancement at the Mann Center for the Performing Arts, located in Fairmont Park in Philadelphia. Joan is a veteran fundraiser and brings a distinct perspective on the value that the arts and culture provide to both the economy and our communities. Joan, thank you for joining me on this episode of Speaking of Quality. 

Joan Roebuck-Carter 01:22  

Hi, Hank. I’m happy to be here. 

Hank Smith 01:24  

Well, it’s great to have you, Joan. You’ve been with the Mann Center now for six years. For our listeners who might not be familiar with the Mann, can you give us a little bit of the history of the Mann Center and its’ mission?  

Joan Roebuck-Carter 01:39  

Sure, I’m happy to. The Mann Center is actually now called The Mann Center for the Performing Arts as of about 20 years ago. And it began actually in a totally different location, which is now called the Dell. But back then in 1930 it was called the Robin Hood Dell, and it was basically a concert venue, a beautiful concert venue that was for the orchestra. It was the summer home of the Philadelphia Orchestra. Fast forward to 1976, the Mann moved its venue over to Fairmount Park where we are today in the town of Parkside in West Philadelphia. Now, the previous home is the Dell, which is where there are also wonderful concerts all summer. Back then in the thirties and the forties and fifties and up until ‘76, the Robin Hood Dell was mainly orchestra concerts. Then, in 1976, we continued to have orchestra concerts with the Philadelphia Orchestra and eventually evolved into adding a whole other genre of music, many genres of music, starting with rock and roll, then becoming a little bit more with R&B and just offering a variety of programs. 

Now, we have everything from the orchestra still continuing several shows every summer. We love it when they come because we get to be graced by the presence of Yannick Nézet-Séguin who is the conductor of the Philadelphia Orchestra. The very energizing and exciting Yannick. We love it when he’s there and our audiences love it. But we also have so many other varieties of music now ranging from rock and roll to rhythm and blues to dance. We have a wonderful relationship with BalletX and BalletX now has a festival with the Mann this summer and every summer, and we’re doing a lot with them. And we have jazz. We have a Jazz Under the Stars series. For any jazz lovers, everybody sits on the stage with the musicians on the TV pavilion, presser stage, which is absolutely amazing. 

We have a dinner supper club, jazz concert with Gerald Veasley, who’s Philadelphia’s Jazz Ambassador. He brings his very famous jazz friends and they perform on stage right in front of us. It’s very intimate and lovely. We think of the Mann as a place that’s really kind of willing to try anything. We’re very thoughtful though, and we don’t do anything unless we are able to sponsor it. We’re a nonprofit organization and as the fundraiser, that probably should have been the first thing I said. We are a nonprofit organization, 501(c)(3). It’s a very dynamic place, which we’ll talk about. 

Hank Smith 04:21  

How long does your season extend for? Obviously, it’s seasonal. You don’t have concerts in the winter because it’s outdoors. 

Joan Roebuck-Carter 04:29  

We begin in May. Actually there was a concert in April last year I believe, but typically we begin in May and this year BalletX is our opening performance for two nights, and then we go into September, October. This year, we are wanting to stop early October because we are building a new plaza. A brand new plaza will happen in 2026. We have to stop the concerts in early October in order to begin that construction, but they typically go May to October. 

Hank Smith 05:00 

You’ve been in the development fundraising business now for the better part of 14, 15 years, but prior to that you were in TV production both with a local news CBS affiliate in Pittsburgh, and then with the Oprah Winfrey Show in Chicago. How do you transfer from that career into a career of development? 

Joan Roebuck-Carter 05:26  

I have to tell you, there are days when they feel very, very similar. I feel really blessed that I’ve been able to have two exciting careers. I mean, my television career was nothing but a thrill. It’s a very fast-paced environment and it’s always exciting and you get instant gratification when you’re a news producer because everything happens every day. You have a new start and you’re covering new news stories every day. And then in the talk show realm, you are creating the conversation. And that in and of itself was a career shift for me because I was used to news, which comes to you, and you report it out in the most creative way. So, you’re still using your creative skills, but you really are reporting on facts and you’re trying to make those facts feel very easy to understand and easy to relate to people who are just passively watching TV or not passively. 

With a talk show, you’re creating the conversation. So, it’s a whole other responsibility. You are beginning from scratch. And the thing about being on the Oprah show, you live and die by your show ideas, and that is the toughest part of that job is getting an idea approved. But once you do, because it was the Oprah show and because we had a wonderful budget, which not all TV shows can say, but because of Oprah’s amazing success and because of her ability to allow her team to do their thing, one of the most gratifying jobs I’ve ever had. You do have to create the conversation, and it has to be worthy of somebody like Oprah to engage with your guests and share in your passion for the idea that you pitch and make it come to life every week. We had a new show. My team had a new show that we had to produce. 

Hank Smith 07:08 

What brought you to Philadelphia and the world of fundraising? 

Joan Roebuck-Carter 07:13  

While I was at the Oprah show, I met my future husband, Brian, and we already had a commuter relationship because we met in Chicago, and he was transferred with his job to Jersey in year three of our dating. The Oprah show was so busy. There were times when I was like, OK, I don’t need a boyfriend, I need to be focused on my shows. But by the third year we were engaged and by the fourth year we were moving to Los Angeles and wanted to be together in that. Moving to Los Angeles, I still maintained a relationship with the Oprah Show. I was a field producer, and I got to do some amazing interviews out there, but it was a very different life. It’s very much a freelance world out there in many ways. And I did a lot of freelance projects, but I loved having that relationship continue with the Oprah show while I was out there figuring out what my next step would be. 

Then, when we were moving back to Philadelphia, again, my husband’s job had him on a fast track. At that point, I had to make a decision as to what I wanted to do and kind of who I wanted to be when I grew up. I knew that I was not interested in going back into local news, and I didn’t have a lot of contacts in the national talk show circuit in Philadelphia. There weren’t that many. I just thought this might be the opportunity to do something that gives me something back in terms of gratification. I was very fortunate to ultimately land at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and a friend of mine recommended me for a position that they were filling. I went in and a woman named Alexa Aldridge gave me a chance. I don’t know what she saw. 

And it wasn’t like she was saying, oh yeah, she’s going to go ask Oprah for money. It was never like that. It was more she saw something, and it allowed me to shift gears in my career. She was the head of the development effort back then. That was in 1998. I kind of fell in love with it. I fell in love with the fine arts and just the art scene in Philadelphia was really cool. I was able to become a fundraiser. And the reason I say that there are many days when I feel like there are similarities between my TV career and this is because it’s very much fast paced. The museum is not as fast paced as the performing arts, I will say that. But you’re constantly talking to people and asking them for something that they don’t have to give you. 

People who come on TV talk shows don’t have to come on that show. They’re not being paid, they’re just doing it because they like the Oprah Show and they want to tell their story and bear their souls on many of those shows. And even the producers often thought, wow, I’m so happy that they said yes, but I hope they know that it’s just a show. And people would come on. And it was wonderful. And the same thing with being in the arts and being a fundraiser. You don’t know if people will support you. You know that they don’t have to. There are plenty of other wonderful nonprofits that they could give to. I think it’s kind of that tenacity that it takes to be a producer and the ability to take no for an answer and keep trying and coming back and offering something wonderful to whoever you’re talking to. 

And I feel like that’s a big part of what drove me and has allowed me to stay in this business. Many of the attributes that it takes to be a producer, I often say to the team here and to my friends that I don’t know how I would do this job if I didn’t have that background. You really do have to take rejection well, and you have to know how to get back up and go back and maybe ask that person in a different way or ask them to support you with a different project, but you just don’t give up. I think that that kind of resiliency is what makes a good fundraiser. 

Hank Smith 11:03  

Before you get rejected, you have to make the ask. For a lot of people, that doesn’t come very easily, and for others it does. And clearly for the nonprofit and the cultural organizations anywhere, fundraising is the lifeblood because without fundraising, we wouldn’t have the Mann Center, we wouldn’t have the Kimmel Center and all of the cultural organizations that make our city and every other city so vibrant and such an attraction to come to. 

Joan Roebuck-Carter 11:37 

I agree with you. That’s sometimes what we talk to donors about, to prospective donors about, and everybody’s different. Some people want to know that you as an organization have an impact, and the arts have a wonderful financial impact on the city, but we also have an impact on the community. We have an education and community engagement program that really reaches in and tries to understand the needs and how do we connect those dots to be of service to the community. So, I agree with you. The arts are a huge driver of the economy, but also in quality of life. A lot of businesses that we talk to support us because they know that this gives their employees a reason to be here. One of many reasons, but a reason to recruit, to be able to offer a vibrant cultural life to your employees or your recruits is a big benefit that we have here. We have a fantastic orchestra. We have a great Broadway series with the Kimmel Center, and we certainly have amazing concerts all summer long at the Mann. 

Hank Smith 12:42  

I think it’s somewhat overlooked, perhaps, the economic impact that cultural organizations have on a city. I recently saw a statistic in Greater Philadelphia Cultural Alliance that Philadelphia’s cultural organizations have an over $4 billion economic impact on the city.  

Joan Roebuck-Carter 13:02  

Exactly right. It absolutely is. When you combine the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Kimmel Center, the Mann Center, the Zoo, the Please Touch Museum, I mean, we’re in the Centennial District. The first centennial of this country was celebrated in the Centennial District. If you look at the trifecta of the Mann center, the Please Touch Museum and the Zoo, we’re looking at how can we do things together because that is where the first centennial of this country was celebrated, and that’s where a lot of new things emerged. A lot of innovations of the day emerged in 1876, and so we’re very proud of that. As we’re about to celebrate the Nation’s 250th anniversary, we want to put a spotlight on this community as well as all of Philadelphia. The arts have a lot to do with the success of a city, and we passionately believe that.  

Hank Smith 13:54  

How do you attract new interest? A lot of the older generation, they’re not going to be around forever, and you might be fortunate enough to get the gift in an estate plan, but really the lifeblood is attracting younger people that may really have never been exposed to classical music or anything to do with live productions. How does that play into your job? 

Joan Roebuck-Carter 14:25  

I think we’re fortunate at the Mann. We have such an inviting vibe and such a casual vibe, and yet it’s very sophisticated in that people know the Mann, they love the Mann, they come here and they form memories. If I tell someone I work at the Mann, I always hear a great story, and I always wish I had a microphone and a camera to record them because we are about to celebrate our 50th anniversary in Fairmount Park, and we hear these great stories. In fact, we did record a bunch of Mann moments from people who’ve been a part of the Mann for a long time. But the way that we take that passion and try to share it with a younger audience is to your point about classical music, when the orchestra comes to the Mann, whether it’s Yannick conducting or a guest conductor, one of the great things that I noticed immediately when I came to the Mann was that we record live, we film live the orchestra’s performance, and that live feed is projected on two main screens within the TD Pavilion. 

The audience that’s right there, undercover, gets to see closeup shots of the conductor and some of the musicians, and I think it draws you in. I had worked at the Kimmel Center for nine years, and we’re a lucky city in that you can see the orchestra in the most formal setting and in the most elegant, beautiful Verizon Hall at the Kimmel Center. But you can also come in your shorts in the summertime and your sandals and hang out at the Mann and take a lawn seat, bring a picnic basket, sit on the lawn or sit in the main pavilion and just listen to beautiful music and get the opportunity to see the interaction of the musicians and the conductor. There’s something incredibly magical about that. It really is magical. So, we get both of those in this city, but what the Mann is doing, I don’t think that we set out to do that when we put the projection screens, but I do think that it makes what is a classical genre of music a little bit more accessible to everyone. 

You get to come in and relax and enjoy and close your eyes and listen to every instrument that’s being performed. It’s just a wonderful privilege that we have in the city. I think that we endear the orchestra to a younger audience for that reason. We also have movies at the Mann and we bring in beautiful musical scores, whether it’s a John Williams score or another score that just is iconic. We had the Godfather movie a couple of years ago, which is one of my favorite films, all three of them, I love them all. They were on the last weekend, and I started watching it, and I remember thinking about, wow, I saw that at the Mann. And everybody relates to these movies because they’re iconic and they take you back to that time. When you have an orchestra, whether it’s the Philadelphia Orchestra or another orchestra performing that score in front of you while you’re sitting there watching a projection of a film in high quality as well, I mean, it draws you in and you appreciate that you have this orchestra here in Philadelphia and that you have this venue that worked it out with the orchestra to present a live performance of a score while you’re watching a movie. 

I think that endears us to a younger audience too, because not only is it a younger audience that might enjoy that, but you might come with your family as a young family and create those memories that we talk about that people have at the Mann. We want to invite people to come in, bring your families, bring your kids, and create your own love of classical music and all genres of music. 

Hank Smith 18:12  

If you’re looking for a third career, I think you could be head of sales at almost any organization with the passion you just delivered. It makes me want to sign up and get to the Mann this summer. 

Joan Roebuck-Carter 18:26  

Come on, you’re coming. You are definitely coming as my guest. You and your team. You’ve got to get to the Mann this summer. It’s really exciting. 

Hank Smith 18:33  

Let’s talk about some challenges. I think maybe the most challenging environment for anyone either in business or in the arts was COVID and managing through that initial lockdown period. It was really almost a two-year period where no one wanted to be next to anyone. It was a very, very strange environment. Tell us how you and the Mann navigated through this period and maybe some of the benefits that actually occurred because of COVID.  

Joan Roebuck-Carter 19:12  

Wow. Yes. So, I was hired in the summer of 2019. My first concert was the Roots Picnic on June 3rd, 2019. And then within what eight months, we all learned that there was this horrible pandemic and we all, just like the rest of the world, went home on March 13th, 2020 or thereabouts. Though we had just signed a major contract with Live Nation, which is our booking partner that brings all of the wonderful rock concerts and some of the R&B concerts that you can experience at the Mann, we were really looking forward to launching that relationship and everything just came to a halt. So, the summer of 2020, there were no concerts. The summer of 2021, even while we were still working from home, there were few concerts. It wasn’t until the summer of 2022 that we really had the most robust season in the history of the Mann, by the way. 

But that was two pretty dry seasons before that happened, and we did have to figure out how to keep going. We are a nonprofit organization, so we don’t have tons of cash lying around to survive. We created a resiliency fund, and we were able to raise $3 million in about eight months, which was phenomenal. And a big thank you to our board of directors and the members of our chairman’s council to the foundations in the city who eventually began supporting things other than health and social services, which was in dire need. They did turn toward the arts and even the federal government turned to the arts and started to support us. So, we were able to raise resiliency fund money because we did take a huge hit financially not being able to present concerts. We don’t keep all of the revenue, but we do keep some of it, and we didn’t have any of that. 

It was really tough. Our president is quite the visionary, by the way, Catherine Cahill, and she got all of us to create three different scenarios, which was if we do have a concert series, business as usual, if we have half of a concert series, here’s what that budget looks like. If we have a quarter of a concert series. We all thought, oh, this is going to be over. We’re going to have concert series. Why do we have to do all this? We did it, and it ended up being the fourth category, which we didn’t even want to talk about, which would be no concerts. None of us thought that that was going to be the one. She still to this day says, ‘See, you never know. You’ve got to plan.’ So, we had a plan for if we didn’t have any concerts, and at that time, we didn’t think we could raise $3 million. 

We just knew that we had to, and we did. Getting through that time was really tough, but there were some silver linings for us as an arts organization. One of them was, yeah, of course we raised money and people stepped up, but also we were able to shine a spotlight on the thing that all of the development team talks about all the time, because that’s a big part of our fundraising, is our education and community engagement program, which is quite robust. When I was hired, they had just conducted this survey of Parkside, which is where the Mann resides, which is somewhat of an underserved community in many ways. The strategic plan basically surveyed community leaders, church leaders, school administrators and citizens to talk about what can we do to be a better neighbor? When I saw that strategic plan and I saw what the answers were, I was sold. 

I was like, this is where I want to be. This is going to be exciting. They’re visionary, they’re dynamic, and they’re thinking really strategically about how to be a good community citizen as well as a cultural organization. It was amazing to me. We were raising money for it, and our head of education kept that program going virtually. So, we had kids in a program that we call ACOSA, which is the All City Orchestra Summer Academy. These are kids who are talented musicians who are called summer-slide. When you don’t have a camp, you can’t necessarily afford to go to one of the great music camps. We created that camp, but it was virtual. And we had Yannick, the conductor of the orchestra participate, and teach these kids some music and keep their skills up. CBS evening news got information about it and covered it. 

Here we are not having any concerts, not having a soul come to the Mann, but we are on national television because we have this great program that people appreciated. It was kind of lovely to see this great conductor working with our kids from their homes. They were all from their homes, including him. It was amazing. It allowed us to shine the spotlight on the thing that we don’t often get to talk about loudly because we have these great concerts. It was wonderful. It was wonderful in that we got to show what we’re doing outside of the concerts. It also helped us. The other silver lining was that it allowed us to be the go-to venue for some of the other arts organizations in the city because you couldn’t be inside. You had to be how many feet apart and all of that stuff, but if you were outdoors, the limitations were not as strict. 

We had, obviously, the orchestra, the opera, the ballet, all talking to us about we need to come here, we got to be in front of our people. We’ve got to do something. So, if you think back on those times, it’s just amazing what we all went through together. But it was great to be able to be at a place where you could still convene music lovers and people who just wanted to be outdoors. And it felt really good. It was really refreshing. So that was another thing that happened in the pandemic without having our other concerts, we were able to do a little bit for people, and people were really excited and really happy to be there. 

Hank Smith 25:23  

Generally speaking, remote learning was an abject failure, but it doesn’t sound like it with respect to music. It sounds like it was very, very successful. 

Joan Roebuck-Carter 25:34 

I agree. Yes, it was. I mean, that was one of the programs. We also have a program called Motion and Music Academy, which takes music into the schools. It takes it into the Global Leadership Academy, which is a school very close to the Mann. One of the things that was in that strategic plan I mentioned, was taking what we do in bringing it into the neighborhood of Parkside because we’re quite an intrusive neighbor. If you ever come to a concert, the streets are blocked, police patrolmen are everywhere. It’s not where you want to live at that moment. We know that, but we also love this community, and we wanted to show that, and we wanted to make sure that we were giving back in the way that is helpful, not just we’re fond of saying, ‘Yeah, I have a tuba. Do you want to play a tuba?’ 

That’s all I have. We didn’t do that. We surveyed the community and figured out what we could do to help. One of the things that we were able to do with this strategic plan was create something called Creative Convening, which is taking our 22 acres and figuring out how to help the community. One of the things that we did was HBCU Festival, which is historically black colleges and universities, and this was to offer some hope and some exposure to kids who might not even be thinking about college. In fact, they’re trying to figure out how to stay in high school, frankly. So this big festival, which was very festive and celebratory and was first held two summers ago – huge success. We had 30,000 registrants sign up, and TD Bank was our proud sponsor and gave us the seed money to begin it. And we had colleges from everywhere, including Community College of Philadelphia. And they’re not an HBCU, but we know that this is accessible. This is an accessible school, and it’s a good school. It was amazing. It was like a big homecoming weekend at the Mann, and it was all created so that kids could think about something other than what they see in front of them. So the strategic plan was that was one facet of it, but there were many other things that we were doing. 

Hank Smith 27:38 

Well, I certainly have gotten quite an education because I really just thought of the Mann as a place for live performing arts and didn’t realize the component of education, community engagement, and workforce development. You have a real trifecta there. No wonder you’re doing so well and so successful. 

Congratulations, and I’m going to take you up on that offer. And if I may bring my wife with me all the better, please, I’ll score some points, which is always a good thing. 

Joan Roebuck-Carter 28:16  

Pick a show. There’s a lot going on at the Mann. 

Hank Smith 28:19   

Joan, I want to thank you for joining us today on Speaking of Quality. I’ve enjoyed getting to know you and discussing your role with the man and the arts and culture. It’s been a great discussion. 

Thank you for listening to this episode of Speaking of Quality Wealth Management Insights. Our next episode will be released shortly. In the meantime, please send suggestions or questions for me or the Haverford Trust team to marketing@haverfordquality.com. And don’t forget to subscribe, rate, review, and share this podcast. Until next time, I’m Hank Smith. Stay bullish. 

Maxine Cuffe 29:02 

Thanks for listening to this episode of Speaking of Quality Wealth Management Insights with Hank Smith. To hear future episodes of speaking of quality, please subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. To learn more about the Haverford Trust Company, please visit www.haverfordquality.com.

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