Request for Proposals: Strategic Planning Consultant

Summary

The NYC Arts in Education Roundtable is a nonprofit service organization working to improve and advance arts education in NYC schools, communities, and beyond.

This RFP is for a consultant or firm to facilitate a strategic planning process and help the NYC Arts in Education Roundtable develop a new five-year Strategic Plan. We seek to engage a qualified consultant with experience working with nonprofit organizations similar to the Roundtable in size and scope. The consultant will work in partnership with Roundtable staff, Strategic Planning Committee, and Board of Directors to complete the scope of work.

Send any questions on the RFP to:

Kimberly Olsen
Executive Director
Phone: 516-205-7639 (cell)
Email: kolsen@nycaieroundtable.org
Given our current capacity, we are unable to take meetings related to our Strategic Plan RFT at this time.

Send proposals to:

Kimberly Olsen
Executive Director
Email: kolsen@nycaieroundtable.org

Budget: $30,000 – $50,000

Timeline for Engagement:

RFP Published: Friday, March 21, 2025
Responses Due: Wednesday, April 30, 2025
Interviews: Monday, May 5 – Friday, May 30, 2025
Firm Selected & Contacted: Monday, June 9, 2025
Project Kick-off: June 2025
Strategic Plan Target Launch Date: April 2026

Outline of RFP:
Click on bullet point below to jump to section.

View RFP in PDF Form

NYC Arts in Education Roundtable Overview

The New York City Arts in Education Roundtable is a non-profit service organization working to improve and advance the state of arts education in New York City’s schools and beyond. Our membership represents NYC’s cultural organizations and thousands of teaching artists in every discipline (including Carnegie Hall, Lincoln Center, Brooklyn Academy of Music, NY Philharmonic, ArtsConnection, DreamYard, Apollo Theater, and many more). We are a community of cultural organizations and educators that shares resources, provides professional development, and advocates for the needs of our constituents and the communities they serve.

The Roundtable was created in 1992 by and for a small group of education directors at Manhattan-based cultural organizations to share best practices in fostering arts experiences and teaching artistry in public school classrooms. More than thirty years later, the Roundtable now includes every arts discipline, organizations and practitioners in all five boroughs, and teaching artists as well as administrators. Our members range from large-scale citywide institutions to community-based and culturally specific organizations, independent teaching artists, and consultants.

The Roundtable provides members and staff access to policymakers and experts of all kinds as well as opportunities for peer learning; programs are grounded in research and expert practice while staying true to our roots of leveraging the strengths of the community to self-evolve. Our programs have matured from skills-sharing lunches between mid-level administrators to more dynamic, varied, responsive, and constructive training and work sessions reaching a range of arts practitioners.

Today, the Roundtable provides professional development, strategic field leadership, community, and amplified advocacy for arts education in NYC. The Roundtable’s primary function is to ensure the sustainability of the arts education community and promote a culture of continuous improvement from lessons learned in classrooms and through research. We build our efforts around the value that arts education is a right for all NYC students.

Our programs include: the annual Face to Face Conference (the 2-day flagship event, the largest of its kind in NY); regranting; a mentorship program; monthly professional development events; an Black Women’s Wellness Retreat; a job fair; advocacy campaigns for equitable access to arts education; and regular community open spaces. Our goal is to assist arts educators to do their best work toward helping NYC students succeed in and through the arts.

The Roundtable currently operates as a hybrid workspace, with an office in midtown Manhattan. Our staff includes four full-time employees (Executive Director, Programs Director, Operations Manager, Development & Membership Manager) and two part-time employees (Mentorship Coordinator and Retreat Coordinator). Our team is supported in-part by a working board of directors composed of 31 practitioners from the field and at-large members. While our budget size had historically been under $250,000, in FY21 our budget grew to over $1,200,000 — bolstered largely by the administration of a multi-cycle pandemic relief fund for arts educators. Since then we have been able to sustain growth in budget despite transition from pandemic-era regranting programming, maintaining a strong and stable financial position with an annual budget ranging between $750,000 – $975,000.

For more information about the Roundtable, please visit our website: https://nycaieroundtable.org/

Our Audience

The Roundtable consistently engages with the multidisciplinary NYC-based arts in education community.

The Roundtable’s membership includes thousands of practitioners from over 200 organizations — representing NYC’s largest and smallest cultural institutions, community-based organizations, and youth organizations from all 5 boroughs, as well as individual educators and artists. Collectively, the membership brings dance, visual art, theater, music, media, and creative writing to students city-wide, helping them develop new modes of thought, creation, and motivation.

Examples of our members, demonstrating the range of organizations involved, are: Community-Word Project, Orchestra of St. Luke’s, Little Island, Studio in a School, ArtsConnection, Flushing Town Hall, NY Philharmonic, Bronx Arts Ensemble, BRIC Arts Media, Opening Act, Brooklyn Arts Council, viBe Theatre Experience, National Dance Institute, Jamaica Center for Arts & Learning, Flushing Town Hall, and Roundabout Theatre Company, as well as independent teaching artists.

Our 2023-2024 season saw 3,000 members and non-member arts education practitioners engage in the Roundtable’s in-person programming, webinars, and online open spaces. More than 1,500 arts education advocates have participated in our advocacy campaigns since Spring 2020, yielding an additional $170+ million for arts education in NYC. Since launching our regranting opportunities in Summer 2020, we have remitted $1.2M+ in regrants to 1,089 individuals, selected from more than 2,500 applications.

Based on our most recent member and non-member survey, most Roundtable participants live in Manhattan (26%), Queens (23%), or Brooklyn (25%), with the remaining residing in the Bronx (4%), Staten Island (2%), or outside NYC (20%). Of those that responded, a majority identified they were between the ages of 25-34 (39%) followed by 35-44 (25%), 45-54 (11%), 55-64 (12%), 65+ (10%), or 18-24 (4%). Experience in the field of arts education varies from emerging practitioners to long-time educators and administrators, with 64% reported working in the field of arts education for 5+ years. In that same survey, responding members and non-members identified their ethnicity as follows: White or Caucasian (63.85%), Black or African American (12.31%), Hispanic or Latino (9.23%), Asian or Asian American (5.38%), Native Hawaiian or other Pacific Islander (0.77%), or Other (8.46%).

Practitioners come to the Roundtable:

To become more effective in their own work (resources)
For tools to advocate on issues impacting the arts education community
To meet leaders in the field
To learn best practices in equity, inclusion, and diversity
For professional development and to learn best practices in arts education
For networking, community-building, and mentorship opportunities
To problem-solve issues related to the field of arts education (navigating contracting with government agencies), career sustainability, etc.)

Secondary audiences are government officials, policymakers, schools, and funders. As the Roundtable grows, we seek to become an information hub for constituencies outside of the field of arts education to help communicate the value and impact of arts in our schools and communities.

Background: Strategic Planning at the Roundtable

The Roundtable’s strategic planning efforts have been instrumental in navigating recent challenges and positioning the organization for a sustainable and impactful future. Galvanized by our current Strategic Plan and the unprecedented circumstances of the COVID-19 pandemic, the Roundtable has demonstrated remarkable agility and growth over the past 5 years.

In December 2020, the Roundtable formally released its five-year Strategic Plan. This plan, originally slated for release in Spring 2020, was thoughtfully revised to address the emerging impact of the COVID-19 pandemic and to more deeply integrate equity, access, and inclusion into all aspects of the organization’s work. At the time, the strategic planning process was undertaken entirely by our Board of Directors — leveraging their collective expertise and dedication towards creating a roadmap for sustainability. Components of that process included a member town hall, field-wide community survey, one-on-one interviews with key stakeholders, as well as board and committee level conversations.

The 2020-2025 Strategic Plan established a framework for collective impact, outlining the following strategic priorities to guide our work over the next five years:

Enhancing arts education through PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT for administrators and teaching artists
Strengthening the community of arts educators — to share challenges and lessons learned, ensuring the SUSTAINABILITY OF ARTS EDUCATION and its ability to thrive
Advocating for arts education professionals and organizations and empowering our members to be ADVOCATES FOR ARTS EDUCATION

These priorities reflect the Roundtable’s commitment to making arts education more thoughtful, rigorous, and responsive to learners’ and field-wide needs.

Prior to 2020, the organization operated with limited staff capacity (1-2 part-time staff with a budget of under $250k). Since then, significant strides have been made in professionalizing the organization. Guided by the Strategic Plan, the Roundtable hired its first full-time Executive Director and expanded its team from one part-time employee to 4 full-time and 2 part-time staff members — working in partnership with a dedicated 31-member board composed largely of arts workers. This transition has allowed the board to focus on oversight and governance, further strengthening the organization’s stability.

Overall, the implementation of the current Strategic Plan has been successful including achievements related to staff expansion, creation of a new website, a teaching artist compensation/employment research study (in progress), the successful transition to a board oversight model, better activation of equity and inclusion values across the organization, increased programming, and growth in regranting and advocacy-related activities. Key findings from our current strategic plan include:

COVID-19 Impact & Recovery: As the arts education field continues to rebuild following the significant disruptions caused by COVID-19, our existing Strategic Plan provided a roadmap to help us support our community through times of transition and upheaval. Technology has emerged as a crucial gateway for expanding access to the Roundtable’s resources, information, and professional development within the community.
Capacity Building & Sustainability: To effectively meet programmatic and service demands, staff expansion and budget growth (catalyzed by the Strategic Plan) has been essential to help us stabilize the organization and keep pace with the needs of our community
Equity, Inclusion, & Stakeholder Engagement: Embedding our values around equity and inclusion throughout the organization’s goals and programs facilitates broader engagement with previously underserved stakeholders and helps foster trust and relationship-building within our community.
Advocacy & Leadership: Over the past five years and moving forward, the evolving government landscape has necessitated strong advocacy and coalition-building efforts to support equitable access to arts education and ensure sustainability of our field at-large. The Roundtable has worked to fill this gap locally and is recognized as a leading voice in arts education among both internal and external partners.

Having successfully navigated the past five years despite challenging times for both the education and arts sectors, the Roundtable is now poised to embark on a new strategic planning process. Building on the significant progress of the past five years, this new process will focus on ensuring organizational sustainability keeps pace with the Roundtable’s continued programmatic growth and evolving needs, especially through a changing political landscape — setting the stage for continued innovation and impact in the next chapter.

Recognizing the significant growth and evolution of the organization in recent years, the Roundtable is now seeking external support for its next strategic planning cycle. This shift acknowledges the need for specialized expertise and a broader perspective to effectively guide the organization’s future trajectory and build upon its recent successes.

Potential Scope of Work

Strategic Planning Process Prep-Work and Kickoff
- Review documents and resources identified by Roundtable staff, including our prior Strategic Plan, programmatic priorities, current Equity & Inclusion values, and other key organizational documents
- Create a work plan and timeline
- Set roles and expectations
Facilitate Targeted Staff, Board, and Stakeholder Input
- Gather and analyze stakeholder input from staff, board, committees, and membership
- Conduct an organizational assessment to identify internal and external challenges and opportunities
- Facilitate stakeholder input, such as stakeholder interviews and landscape survey
- Work to understand the Roundtable’s vision, mission, and ethos
Planning Sessions
- Organize, participate in, and/or facilitate strategic planning strategies sessions with board and Strategic Planning Committee
Strategic Plan Creation
- Guide the development of goals and outcomes development
- Prepare and finalize a written strategic plan, providing space for board review and feedback via multiple mediums
- Work with board and staff leadership to build internal awareness, alignment, and buy-in across the organization
Final Product
- Final plan that is 15-20 pages maximum that outlines 3-5 strategic priorities accompanied by a road map to operationalize the Strategic Plan — inclusive of measurable/achievable goals, key performance indicators, objectives, and recommendations for next steps for financial planning (optional).
- 1-2 page version for easy dissemination to current and potential stakeholders
- Presentation for Roundtable Board, staff, and other key stakeholders
- Optional: Provide graphic design for plan
Rollout
- Create an implementation plan to help organization operationalize goals and objectives as outlined in plan
- Optional: Develop thoughtful marketing roll-out strategy for the first three months post-release of Strategic Plan

Budget Details

As listed in the summary, our total budget for this portion of the project is $30,000 – $50,000. While we prefer the most cost-effective solution, all proposals that fall reasonably within this range will be considered and weighed based on their merits. Proposals that offer flexibility in billing for non-required elements will also be considered.

Proposal Requirements

Please include the following in your proposal response:

Overview of your company
Overview of how you will meet our objectives
Explanation of your proposed campaign plan and scope of work
Outline of campaign design & development strategy
Proposed timeline from ideation to launch
Details about you/your team
Recent relevant examples, including examples of past Strategic Plans you have worked on
References
Identify Key Team Member(s) who would be working on this project
Any key differentiators about you?
Terms & conditions

RFP & Project Timeline Details

RFP Sent: Friday, March 21, 2025
Responses Due: Wednesday, April 30, 2025
Interviews: Monday, May 5 – Friday, May 30, 2025
Firm Selected & Contacted: Monday, June 9, 2025
Project Kick-off: June 2025
Strategic Plan Target Launch Date: April 2026

Thank you for your interest in responding to this RFP with a proposal for the facilitation and creation of our upcoming strategic plan. We look forward to your response!

If you have any questions, please contact Kimberly Olsen at kolsen@nycaieroundtable.org. Given our current capacity, we are unable to take meetings related to our Strategic Plan RFT at this time.

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