There Are Levels to This

Hip Hop Orchestrated founder takes on leadership training to move the organization to the next level

Hip Hop Orchestrated founder, Kia O. Moore, leading a lecture at the National Arts Strategies Retreat.

By Kia O. Moore

The last public event that Hip Hop Orchestrated had a presence at was the Charlotte Kids Festival on the campus of UNC Charlotte back in October 2017. This was not the planned last event for Hip Hop Orchestrated, but as the founder, I came to the conclusion that I needed to take time to reflect on the vision and mission of the organization. I needed to take the time to learn what it meant to be an effective leader. 

Knowing that I learn best in a classroom setting, I set out to find fellowships that would teach me what it took to run an arts organization effectively. Thanks to the way people connect with the mission of Hip Hop Orchestrated, I landed two fellowships. 

The National Arts Strategies (NAS) fellowship and Leadership Charlotte (LC) fellowship allowed me to hone in on the idea of blending music genres to connect people of different socioeconomic backgrounds to generate social capital to solve the issue of upward mobility in Charlotte.

NATIONAL ARTS STRATEGIES

Fellowship Term June 2017 - February 2018

Hip Hop Orchestrated founder, Kia O. Moore, thinking through strategies at the National Arts Strategies Retreat.

National Arts Strategies is a seven-month fellowship that focuses on giving arts leaders a for-profit mindset when approaching organizations that make a social impact. They provided a notebook filled with business models, months of online learning modules, and two days of in-person instruction. NAS’s Creative Community Fellows program views arts and culture as a powerful force for positive community change. 

A trip to Vermont, with NAS at the helm, taught me the importance of mapping out the vision, mission, objectives, and outcomes of an organization. It taught me how to find business models and apply them to my social impact work. Going through logic models, balanced scorecards, design thinking challenges, empathy mapping, and customer journey mapping helped me to better understand how my organization will make an impact on the community. Meeting with mentors helped me to better understand the challenges I would face in making this organization work.

The time in Vermont with other amazing creatives was invigorating. Being in a space learning how to build a vision for your organization around other amazing people brought out the best ideas. It allowed me to reevaluate and reinvest in the vision and mission of Hip Hop Orchestrated.

While in Vermont, I realized that with the Hip Hop Orchestrated Ensemble, the focus was redirected solely to the music and not on the mission that the music was driven by--bringing people of different socioeconomic backgrounds together to help foster friendships that lead to creating social capital transactions that can help pull people out of poverty. Hip Hop Orchestrated had become only about booking gigs and not about building connections between the people in the audience.

Bonds were being built between the musicians, which was great, but those bonds needed to happen out in the audience as well. That was the path toward achieving the vision that drives Hip Hop Orchestrated. The time in the NAS Creative Community House helped to solidify sticking with a clear vision and creating programs that help to achieve the vision but don’t overtake it.

The online NAS course taught Creative Community Fellows about the tactics of working in the communities in which they aim to make an impact. 

On the second NAS trip to Washington State, we learned the power of presenting a concise and impactful story. We took all we learned in Vermont and online and put it in a pitch. Mentors gave us feedback on how to effectively share the story to get an investment.

I learned how an ill-prepared pitch can impact how others view your organization. I learned that the social impact of Hip Hop Orchestrated is so powerful that it needs to be the foundation of every conversation I have when speaking to a fan, supporter, or investor.

NAS solidified the vision and the mission of Hip Hop Orchestrated. It provided me with the tools and vocabulary to better communicate the impact and value proposition of Hip Hop Orchestrated with potential investors.

LEADERSHIP CHARLOTTE

Fellowship Term August 2017 - March 2019

Kia O. Moore, founder of Hip Hop Orchestrated, poses with her fellow Leadership Charlotte participants and the organization’s executive director.

Leadership Charlotte is a two-and-a-half-year fellowship that teaches participants the power of networking at a personal, business, and civic level. Through in-person classes with influential guest speakers, a group service project, and an event planning component, Leadership Charlotte expands emerging and existing leaders’ community knowledge, civic network, and community service reach. 

During the Leadership Charlotte Opening Weekend in Blowing Rock, NC, the LC team put together activities that would open up opportunities for participants to make deep personal connections with each other. We shared personal stories, reflected on old personal wounds, and set intentions to grow throughout the Leadership Charlotte journey. 

From Opening Week, the network expanded beyond fellow participants to influential guests. The first class gave context to how Charlotte developed into the city it is today. It also shed light on where it is presently and the trajectory it is headed toward. The days that followed explored Charlotte’s many systems, including those of the education, government, healthcare, justice, arts & culture, environment, and nonprofit systems. These days gave insight into how the systems work and who to contact to get involved.

What we learned from those days, and looking into our personal network, allowed us to pour into our service project. We helped an area nonprofit work through an issue. The group I was in worked with RETI, a sustainability organization focused on decreasing the energy cost for families with high energy burdens. We were charged to come up with a marketing plan to help RETI connect with its many stakeholders. While working on the project, we learned how much our personal networks can be used to make a social impact when they are harnessed around a socially focused mission.

During the Closing Retreat in Hickory, NC, Leadership Charlotte participants came together to hear about each other’s service projects. We also came to continue bonding with each other while building our personal networks.

From closing weekend, we headed into the program graduation. I was not able to be at the graduation due to personal issues, but my Leadership Charlotte fellows found a way to still make me feel like I was a part of the ceremony. They sent me letters expressing how much they cared for me and wished I could have joined them. 

It was in those moments of reading the letters that I realized how important building a solid network can be. Those letters showed me how acquaintances can transform into caring friends in such a short span of time. The program showed me that when you have a network of friends, you can get things done in your city. This is what we put into practice during year two of the program.

During year two, we were put into a group that was charged with planning a class day. I was part of the Arts & Culture Day team. We all dug into our personal networks and lent our event planning talents to make Arts & Culture Day great for the next Leadership Charlotte fellowship cohort.

We called in favors. We met in person as often as possible. We made sure we brought in guest speakers that would impact those listening. Planning Arts & Culture Day was all about exploring our network and using what we learned about the interconnectivity of the systems in the city to make an education-filled day for the next Leadership Charlotte class. 

Leadership Charlotte taught me the importance of tapping into your network and expanding your network to get things done. It showed me that Hip Hop Orchestrated will only succeed if the network that surrounds it and invests in it is strong. 

THE POWER OF LEADERSHIP DEVELOPMENT

From my time prototyping the concept of Hip Hop Orchestrated to my time during my two leadership fellowships, I learned that leadership is the foundation that can take a startup from a working idea to a sustainable organization. 

A year working on the Hip Hop Orchestrated concept with an ensemble of talented musicians taught me that I needed to formally learn more about leadership. If Hip Hop Orchestrated was going to move from being a good idea to a full-fledged organization, I was going to have to step into my role as a leader armed with the tools that will help me run an organization effectively. 

The combination of National Arts Strategies and Leadership Charlotte has prepared me to take Hip Hop Orchestrated from ideation to organization. The next level is moving from Hip Hop Orchestrated taking gigs to Hip Hop Orchestrated producing its own programming. We prototyped two programs during our first year, Music Speaks and The Opera Cut, but we have to do more.

Now, with new leadership insights, programs like the ones mentioned above will no longer be planned as one-off events. These programs will be transformed into series and signature events. Series and signature events will help Hip Hop Orchestrated become a sustainable organization. They will take Hip Hop Orchestrated to the next level. I learned all this during my time in leadership development programs.