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With the holidays around the bend and the chilly weather making indoor entertainment all the more appealing, the theater season soon will be heating up in Philadelphia.
For those who may have trouble gaining access to cultural performances in the area due to a visual or auditory impairment, Michael Norris and Art-Reach have delivered an early present this year.
"It’s the first time there has been one go-to stop. Before, if you were blind, you had to look yourself, check out each individual organization and find out if they were providing any accessible programming," the Ninth-and-Bainbridge-streets resident said. "Now, you can just go to the Phillyfunguide."
The Art-Reach executive director and his dedicated team have spent a year-and-a-half designing, compiling and readying a calendar of all accessible programming throughout Greater Philadelphia. The addendum to the established site can be retrieved at www.phillyfunguide.com/access.
"’Independence Starts Here,’ it’s a joint program between Art-Reach who co-leads the project with another organization, VSA Arts," Norris, 45, said. "[The initiative] is designed to do two things: First, help cultural organizations became more accessible … The other is the audience-side of it. So if you have an accessible program, you need people to come and enjoy it.
"This is what Art-Reach is responsible for."
To cull an audience, the minds at the nonprofit decided to create the comprehensive guide that would keep an up-to-date listing of all accessible programming in hopes of becoming indispensable and avoiding overlapping schedules.
"We want cultural organizations to provide access and they will be much more excited to do that if they know there is an audience for it, so it’s designed to approach both those issues," Norris said of the online guide launched in early October.
The impact has been immediate, with at least one local arts haven at 1020 South St. reaching out to take part.
"The Philadelphia Magic Garden on South Street — and the beautiful thing about them is they don’t need any technology — they were thinking about how to be accessible," Norris said. "So they had a group come in and they were able to go on a guided [tactile] tour of the installation and they were able to touch the mosaic and get a sense of what it is about. Now they are doing that once a month."
In other venues, programming adjustments for the hearing- and visually impaired range from LED-screen closed-captioning for plays to a live-action depictor to speak a characters’ visual movements.
"A cultural organization would have to rent an audio description system … and that can cost thousands," Norris said. "What VSA now has as part of ‘Independence Starts Here’ is an audio-description system that can be shared across the community.
"The cost barrier to access is significantly reduced."
Since coming to Art-Reach in 2004, Norris has relished his time connecting across multiple organizations and affecting the entire community in a significant way. The most recent developments are one more step up the steep ladder.
"We know that those who reap the benefits of the arts the most have the least access to them," Norris said. "The injustice of that is what motivates us every day. We know there is a great world of arts and culture we are so blessed to have."
Norris spent his early years in Chester County, where he got the first glimpse into his future career path.
"When I was a kid, my mom was a teacher’s aide at an intermediate unit for a public school system. That was really my first introduction to understanding the challenges, the obstacles and the frustration that people with disabilities face," Norris said of the classroom setting for children with learning disabilities where his mother Nancy worked.
Attending Temple University, Norris graduated in 1986 with a bachelor’s in journalism and landed a job at Radnor-based "TV Guide."
"I was an edit researcher, which is essentially a fact-checker. But it was my first job and I’m working for this national magazine," Norris said. "It was cool. It was fun. It was a good time."
After paying his dues, Norris moved up the ranks to become editor of a local publication house that managed a "Who’s Who of the Delaware Valley." The position was a inadvertent opening into the world of nonprofits.
"We started getting approached by people from the nonprofit community. I was in my 20s and it had never occurred to me that people in the nonprofit community, that they would find info about government leaders and community leaders helpful to make connections and things like that."
When the publication he worked for was shuttered, Norris decided to "take the plunge and see if I could get work. I was on unemployment in the early ’90s."
Eventually things began to pick up and good things fell his way.
"By fate or random chance or good luck I was offered a position doing fundraising at the Walnut Street Theatre," Norris said of the theater at 825 Walnut St. "I very quickly became quite passionate about the arts community."
That passion was kindled over the next nine years after a transfer to the Arden Theatre, 40 N. Second St., where in addition to fundraising, Norris took on the marketing, event planning and advertising.
"I loved every second of it. It was a great time to be there," he said.
His positive impact at the Arden was responsible for bringing his name into the conversation when Art-Reach’s only executive director was looking for a replacement since starting the nonprofit in ’86.
"Having some experience with the organization, I was aware of the mission and liked that it just seemed like a really good opportunity for me professionally," Norris said. "I was really attracted to the idea of working with multiple cultural organizations and helping them reach into the community."
Annually helping more than 15,000 in the underserved population enjoy the arts, Art-Reach has proven the right choice for Norris, however serendipitous.
"We’re an organization that exists totally in partnership with cultural organizations or individual arts or human service agencies and it’s all about those relationships. I really like that; It’s been a really good fit for me," Norris said.
While maintaining the still fledging online calendar, Art-Reach is shifting its focus to combat an even less publicized underserved population.
"The Cultural Alliance released a new study and it talks a lot about the barriers citizens feel about the cultural community," Norris said of people’s views of art as inaccessible due to social or economical segregation. "We are in the very early stages of thinking about a way that the underserved audience can get some of the background concepts, educational material and behavior social norms [information]."
Through the many projects in place and those yet-to-come, Norris operates under one main axiom:
"How do you make this stuff be part of the day-to-day thinking of the arts community," Norris said.
