In this episode, I return to a lesson I learned more than forty years ago in one of the most unlikely classrooms imaginable: the California prison system during one of the most violent periods in its history. At the center of the story is Verne McKee, an incarcerated artist and leader whose practical wisdom about trust, power, responsibility, and human relationships became a blueprint for understanding how successful community arts partnerships are built—and why so many fail.
Drawing on Verne’s ten rules for survival and collaboration, I explore the hidden dynamics that determine whether partnerships become transformative long-term alliances or short-lived projects that leave communities worse off than before. Along the way, I unpack the difference between outreach and partnership, why artistic excellence remains essential to social change work, and what shared power actually looks like when artists, institutions, and communities work together.
You’ll discover:
• Why trust—not funding, programming, or good intentions—is the real currency of sustainable partnership.
• How Verne McKee’s ten rules reveal the conditions that help cross-sector collaborations thrive and the warning signs that often predict failure.
• Why communities deserve more than one-time projects, and what artists and institutions owe the people they invite into a creative process.
If you’ve ever wondered why some community partnerships flourish for decades while others collapse despite talent, resources, and enthusiasm, this episode offers hard-earned lessons from the front lines of creative community change.
NOTABLE MENTIONS
Key Figure
Verne McKee — Former president of the Art and Musicians Guilds at California Medical Facility and a respected leader within California’s prison arts community. Over many years of conversations about how teaching artists could work effectively and responsibly inside correctional institutions, McKee shared insights drawn from lived experience that became the foundation for the “Verne’s Rules” framework discussed in this episode. His observations about respect, artistic excellence, humility, responsibility, self-care, and the central importance of relationships continue to inform approaches to community-based arts partnerships far beyond prison walls. McKee is featured in the documentary Art and the Prison Crisis and was released from prison before his death in 1990.
William James Association — A pioneering nonprofit organization that helped develop, expand, and sustain California’s Arts in Corrections programs for decades. Through partnerships with artists, correctional institutions, and community organizations, the Association played a central role in establishing prison arts as a nationally recognized model for rehabilitation, education, and personal transformation.
California Arts in Corrections Program — One of the nation’s longest-running state-supported arts-in-prison initiatives, providing instruction in multiple artistic disciplines throughout California correctional institutions.
Center for the Study of Art & Community — Research, training, and consulting organization focused on art and social change, community cultural development, and cross-sector partnerships.
Animating Democracy — A national resource center documenting and supporting arts-based civic engagement, social justice practice, and community cultural development.
Places Mentioned
San Quentin Rehabilitation Center
Folsom State Prison
Correctional Training Facility
California Medical Facility
Historical Context
The episode references a period during the late 1970s and early 1980s when California prisons were experiencing intense racial, political, and gang-related violence. Organizations mentioned include:
These references are included to provide historical context for the environment in which California’s prison arts programs were operating.
Related Resources
Good Partners Are… — A collection of partnership-building tools and reflections developed by the Center for the Study of Art & Community, including The Hard Questions for Community Arts Partners and The Partnership Commandments. The publication explores trust, shared power, accountability, reciprocity, and the practical challenges of building effective long-term community partnerships.
Art and the Prison Crisis (California Revealed) — Historic documentary featuring incarcerated artists, arts leaders, and correctional staff involved in California’s pioneering prison arts movement during the 1970s and 1980s, including Verne McKee.
Hey there. So here's the question I want to sit with today. What does it take to build lasting cross sector community arts partnerships?
From the center for the Study of Art and Community, this is Art is Change, a chronicle of art and social change where activists, artists and cultural organizers share the strategies and skills they need to thrive as creative community leaders. This partnership question has been at the center of my work for more than 40 years.
And what I found is that the answers are almost never about the art. They're almost never about the enthusiasm or the commitment.
They're almost always about the relationships and whether the people involved really understand what they're getting into. Today I want to explore three things.
First, what genuine cross sector partnership actually looks like, because I think a lot of what gets called partnership isn't. Second, what the conditions are that make sustained partnerships possible and what tends to kill them.
And third, what we owe the communities at the core of these partnerships when we enter into those relationships. To get there.
I'm going to start with a story, because in my experience, a good story gets you further into the truth of something than a ponderous pile of facts and opinions ever will.
Verne it's the summer of:
The front lines were hidden behind razor wire in places like Folsom Mainline, the Soledad mess hall, the San Quentin prison yard, and the combatants were Nuestra Familia and the Black Guerrilla Family and the Aryan Brotherhood and the California Correctional Officers Association. And amidst all that, nearly 400 resident artists are interacting with over 10,000 incarcerated artists and staff.
The paint cart for our mural program at Soledad kept getting commandeered as a gurney for shanked inmates.
Lockdowns at San Quentin were cutting off access to condemned rope, which led to mounting tensions and self destructive behavior by men who had very little left to lose.
Wardens down south were calling us desperate, asking how fast could we put together prison yard concerts just to let people blow off some steam before something really exploded? Hard and crazy doesn't begin to cover it. And in the middle of all that, it becomes very clear that we need help.
Not the kind of help that comes from a policy manual or a best practices document. Real help from someone who actually knew the territory. The person I turned to was a resident of Vacaville prison named Verne McKee.
Verne was also president of both the artists and musicians guilds there. When we first started the work, he told us that bringing arts into Vacaville would save both lives and money. And he was right about that.
And he was right on with what he said to me that summer. He said, bill, your honeymoon is over. He said that given the rising tensions, a lot of lives were at stake and there was very little room for error.
And then he shared what I've come to call Verne's rules. Now I'm going to come back to those rules, all of them, because they're the spine of everything I want to say today.
e California prison system in:
A damaged, brutalized, invisible to the public and politically abandoned community, but a community nonetheless. It had its own culture, its own economy, its own social hierarchy, its own version of everything that every other community has.
And we, the artists, the arts administrators, were outsiders, well, meaning outsiders who thought we understood the territory, but we did not, not really. And Vern knew that. That's where the rules start. Act two, Verne's rules. And what they mean for us right now. Okay, rule one, Dress for success.
This one always gets a laugh. But Verne was not joking. He said that the war being waged inside was a life and death form of theater because there was no territory and no spoils.
And most of what was being contested inside was symbolic. Costumes mattered. Presentation mattered. The artists coming in looked like beggars. No one took them seriously.
He told me, bill, you need a haircut and a suit. I bought two suits and went to the barber. And he was right. It made a massive difference. Now expand that out.
In any cross sector community partnership, you are entering a world that has its own symbolic language, its own signals of credibility and respect. The community organization that has been doing the work for 20 years reads those signals. The residents read those signals.
And how you show up, the seriousness and preparation you bring is the first statement you make about whether you are worth trusting. You don't get a second first impression. Dress for the work you're claiming to do in the language of the community that you're serving.
Rule two, no fools. Verne meant no proselytizers, no missionaries, no romantics with prepackaged visions of what the community needs.
He said the most valuable currency inside was respect.
And when someone comes in from the outside thinking They've got some version of the truth that needs to be delivered unto the wretched masses that's both disrespectful and dangerous. The prisoners didn't want saviors.
They wanted talented people who could teach art and make art and they would decide for themselves how to wield its power. I've seen this failure mode in community arts work more times than I can count.
The well resourced organization that arrives with a fully formed program designed somewhere else for someone else and tries to transplant it into a community that didn't even ask for it, didn't design it, and has no real ownership of it. That's not a partnership, that's an extraction wearing a partnership costume. Rule three, no hacks.
Vern said basically he expected artists to be honest about what they know and what they don't know. The incarcerated artists could recognize phonies and fakes, and they were highly insulted by them.
They wanted the artists coming in to have their act together artistically, technically, humanely. In community arts work, there's a version of hackism that I find particularly troubling, and that's the drift away from actual art making.
There's so much pressure on artists in these settings to be everything. Therapist, social work evaluator, community organizer, that sometimes in all of that, the art just gets soft, the artistic quality slips.
And I think that is a betrayal of the people you are working with, because it is the quality of the art and the depth of the creative engagement that generates the real transformation, not the proximity to art supplies. Most successful programs I have ever studied were built by artists making art. But here's the caveat.
Their art form was community art making, not studio practice. Light on location in a community.
Their excellence was defined by the amalgam of best materials, best technique, along with the rigorous partnership and ethical practices needed to make art that both inspires and creates change. And that is no small thing. Rule 4. Know that you do not know where you are. This is the one I come back to the most.
Verne said the very fact that we could leave made us visiting Earthlings and that unless we had done time, we would never know what it was like to be a Martian. As long as we accepted that we were not hearing and seeing things the same way the prisoners were, we'd be okay.
The trouble always starts when outsiders begin to think they know where they are. I've watched that happen over and over again in community work.
Someone spends six months in a neighborhood or reads a stack of reports about it, or has deep relationships with two or Three people from it, and they begin to talk about the community. So their piece of the picture, the picture, every community's cultural, social and political ecology is unique, not just different, unique.
And the assumption of understanding when it's premature is one of the most dangerous things an outside partner can bring. Rule 5. Do your homework.
And yet, despite the fact that you'll never truly know where you are, Vern believed it was our absolute obligation to learn as much, as much as we possibly could about the social landscape, about the history, about the politics, about the people. And he said, don't assume that places and people that look the same are the same. Everyone has a different story.
These two rules, 4 and 5, live in a kind of creative tension. And I think that tension is important. You hold both at once, you commit fiercely to learning, and you stay humble about the limits of what you know.
That's not a contradiction. That's just intellectual honesty. And it's the foundation of every productive partnership I've ever been a part of. Rule 6.
Good guys and bad guys are not as obvious as they may seem. Verne believed that the game of survival and the game of life had, well, different rules inside both incarcerated folks and correctional staff.
We're in the survival game, and everybody playing has good guy cards and bad guy cards that they need to play in order to, you know, get through the night. He said outsiders watching through a black and white lens were watching the wrong movie, and that made them highly accident prone.
In partnerships, it's important to resist the easy narrative. The funder who seems obstructionist might be trying to protect you from. From a mistake that they've seen before.
The community leader who's resistant might have been burned by a dozen well intentioned partners before you showed up.
The institutional administrator putting up barriers might be doing so for reasons that have nothing to do with you or everything to do with what happened before you arrived. Slow down. Ask more questions. Widen the lens. Rule 7. Free speech equals rights plus responsibility.
Now, Verne lived in an intensely interdependent culture where everyone was ultimately accountable to everyone else. In such a world, the question wasn't whether it was wrong to falsely shout fire in a crowded theater.
The question was, when you know the theater is burning, how do you communicate that in a way that doesn't get people killed in the stampede?
That's a sophisticated ethical question, and it applies in every community context where outside partners with their platforms, their resources, their audiences, enter into relationships with communities that have less power, less protection, and less ability to absorb the consequences of a misstep your speech has reach. Your actions have consequences in communities that you may eventually leave but your partners cannot. You got to own that. Rule 8, no one night stands.
Verne was adamant. When the power and force of the creative process is made available to vulnerable imaginative souls, you do not turn it on and then walk away.
Once someone has become addicted to what he called the creative life force, we all have a moral responsibility to maintain that access to support the habit. He was clear, for some people it is a matter of life and death. I think this is the rule that the community arts field violates most systematically.
Not out of bad intention, but because of how we fund things. Project based grants, one year cycles, pilot programs with no continuation plan. We light people up and then leave.
I've been saying for years that outreach is out. The word itself assumes a center, a source and a target.
And many communities have been subjected to a cycle of outreach and abandonment that has done real damage, undermined local efforts, produced a legacy of bitterness, and taught people that trust is not safe. You can only be lifted up and drop down so many times before you stop opening the door. Rule 9 Take care.
Chaotic, unpredictable, sometimes violent environments are very toxic. Verne made it clear that the men he was working with needed the artist who came in to be at their best.
He suggested we adopt a post disaster self care regimen as a standard practice. We did it and it made a world of difference. This is not a soft point.
If you don't build real support structures for the people doing this work, artists, administrators, community partners, everybody involved, you will burn through them and then you'll be mystified when the program just collapses. The work takes a toll. Acknowledge it and treat partner care and support as part of your basic infrastructure. Rule 10.
You have nothing but your relationships. This is the one that ties all the others together.
In prison, who you know and who has your back is sometimes the only thing standing between you and serious harm. So Vern cultivated and nurtured his relationships inside and out. He never promised more than he could deliver. He always kept his word.
You have nothing but your relationships. I've said that in a lot of rooms over a lot of years, and every practitioner I respect says some version of it.
Relationships are not the means to the work. Relationships are the work and after all is said and done, are often the most valuable and sustained outcome of the work.
Act 3 what this looks like in practice. So let me try to make this concrete because Fern's rules are wisdom. But wisdom needs a structure to live in.
I think about cross Sector partnerships as existing along a continuum. At one end you got what I call de facto relationships.
You know, the UPS driver, the group membership, the space rental, the annual event you both show up to. These are real relationships, but they're largely unacknowledged. Low trust, low commitment, with no real explicit goals at all.
Then you move toward what I call situational partnerships. One time mural project, a single residency, what gets called an outreach program.
These are episodic, often controlled by whoever's holding the funding, often fragile because they haven't been tested. Then you have sustaining partnerships. And this is where things get interesting.
These are multi year, multi dimensional relationships, long term residencies, serial projects, multi year funding built around a genuine relationship, not just a project. In the best of them, these partnerships have been tested and have survived those tests. Powers actually shared, real mutual veto, real mutual finance.
Community input is genuine and success is defined not by completing a deliverable, but by long term community involvement and evidence of actual change. And then at the far end, integrated partnerships. These are long term partnerships where missions have been coordinated or even merged.
Permanent residencies, co owned facilities, organizations that have become so interdependent that the notion of one working without the other doesn't quite make sense anymore. Most of us are going to spend most of our time somewhere in the lower middle of this continuum, and that's the way it often turns out.
But you need to know where you are and you also need to be honest about it. And you need to be intentional about whether and how you want to move. Here's what I know about the ones that work.
The partnerships that last are built on long term mutual self interest. Not altruism, not charity, but genuine reciprocity where each partner is getting something real they could not get, or on their own.
And critically, you don't need complete alignment of values and beliefs for that to work. Partners can share common goals for very different reasons. As long as those reasons are visible and on the table.
When everyone's self interest is transparent, you can actually manage it. Bottom line, trust is the core currency of these kinds of partnerships. And trust is not built through declarations.
It's built through the continuity, predictability, regularity and consistency of how you show up over time, over a long time, years, many years. And of course, power has to be on the table. This is where most partnerships fail or stall.
Those who hold power are often unaware of the extent of their privilege, which makes it genuinely difficult for them to understand, let alone respond to demands to share it. But shared power is not a nice to have in Sustained partnership work. It's the prerequisite.
If the financial decisions, the programmatic decisions, the public facing narrative are all controlled by one partner, you have a sponsorship relationship. At best, you do not have a partnership and the work has to be mission driven. Not funding driven, not opportunity driven.
The best collaborative projects I've seen are built around a shared mission and a set of shared goals, not around chasing a grant. Shotgun weddings and arranged marriages are not good partnership models.
You need to discover clearly defined mutual self interest before you commit not constructive retroactively to fit a funder's requirement. Act 4 what goes wrong and what We Owe Let me be honest about failure for a minute. Why? Well, because I think the field doesn't talk about this enough.
In my research over the years, I've looked at a lot of programs that didn't work.
Like I said before, the most striking finding consistently is that the failures have almost nothing to do with the quality of the artists or the enthusiasm of the project partners.
The breakdowns were almost always about poor partnership development, poor communication, differing levels of commitment that nobody had surfaced and addressed, a lack of sustained impact. All too often the artists and their partner organizations came out describing themselves as damaged by the experience.
And in some cases, and this is the part that's the hardest to say, the communities being served were left with less than they started with because of the disruption, because of the expectation that were raised and not met, because of the cycle of entry and abandonment that I talked about earlier. That is is a real moral weight to carry in this work. And I think we owe it to the people we work with to carry it honestly and responsibly.
The other thing that's been consistently destabilizing is the power imbalance that happens when large, well resourced organizations from outside a community try to collaborate with smaller, locally rooted ones. Large organizations tend to take control when the going gets tough. That's their instinct. They have the capacity, the infrastructure, the urgency.
But success in partnership depends on having the patience to share the struggle, share control, even when it's uncomfortable. Because if you can't do that, then what you're building is not a partnership, it's an acquisition. And then there's the issue of money.
Large infusions of outside funding into locally rooted work can and do destabilize despite the best intentions, because the presence of significant outside financial power changes the dynamic of every relationship it touches.
I'm not saying don't fund the work, I'm saying enter that territory with utmost caution, move slowly, build the relationship before you build the budget. So given all these possible complications, how do you do that?
There are, of course, no guarantees, but one of the strategies we have found that significantly reduces the potential for disaster.
We call the hard questions, which is basically a simple self administered set of questions that possible partners first explore separately and then come together to compare notes. The questions are pretty basic, but they can reveal a lot before you tie the knot. We'll include a link for the hard questions in our show notes.
Now I'd like to close where I started.
Vern McKee was an incarcerated artist in a California correctional facility who ran the art and musician skills and who understood more clearly than most of the professionals I've worked with over four decades what it takes to build real relationships in difficult circumstances. He understood that you have nothing but your relationships. He understood that trust is built on deeds, not words.
He understood that when you invite someone into a creative life, you've made a commitment you can't walk away from when the funding runs out or the residency ends, or the grant cycle closes. He also understood, and this may be the most important thing, that the creative process is not a tool you deploy in service of some other goal.
It's the thing itself. It's what generates the trust, the transformation, the sustained change.
Not as a side effect, but as the direct consequence of people making art together seriously, over time, with honesty and skill. A good partnership, I've said for years, is like a good marriage. It's far harder to find consensus and get things done than you ever imagined.
And the results?
When you stayed through the hard seasons, when you shared the struggle and shared the power, when you've been honest about your self interest and humble about what you don't know, the results make the journey worthwhile. Those tests that come along, and they will come, they don't just measure the strength of the partnership.
They become the crucible upon which that strength is forged. There are no microwavable shortcuts in this work. Every community is unique.
The time you spend learning the culture, building the trust, doing your homework, even when it's slow and unglamorous, that's not a detour from the work. That is the work. Vern knew that. And if we're honest with ourselves, most of us know it too.
Artist Change is a production of the center for the Study of Art and Community. Our theme and soundscapes spring forth from the head, heart and hand of the maestro Judy Munson. Our text editing is by Andre Nebbe.
Our effects come from freesound.org and our inspiration comes from the ever present spirit of UK 235. So until next time, stay well, do good and spread the good word.
