The Sustaining Community Fund is Now CONDITIONS

Hi! Some of you are hearing from me for the first time. If you’d rather not, please unsubscribe below. No hard feelings.

For those who are interested in keeping up with my work, keep reading.

So, I’m figuring all of this out as I fly the plane. “This,” being building a business that is aligned with my integrity and my humanity. And “the plane” being operating a sustainable business during ** gestures widely ** an apocalypse with no safety net.

That said, please give me grace. Give yourselves grace too. No one really knows what they are doing. But I think we are all doing our best.

Ok enough small talk, drum roll please…

On the two year anniversary of the founding of The McGuire Consulting Group and the one year anniversary of creating the Sustaining Community Fund, I’ve decided to transition this newsletter, in name and in purpose, to CONDITIONS by The McGuire Consulting Group.

CONDITIONS is a publication about art as the driver of climate movement and what it takes to change the conditions people are actually living in.

We have been treating the climate crisis as a problem of information. Publish the study, run the campaign, put the number on the wall, wait for the behavior to follow. It has not followed. It has not followed for forty years.

The blockage was never informational. People know. Knowing has not moved them, because the thing that has to move sits in the body and in perception, in the nervous system that has learned to go quiet when a subject is too large, in the grief we were never given a container for, in the paralysis that looks from the outside like apathy and is actually a kind of protective shutdown. You cannot argue somebody out of that. You have to change the conditions they are perceiving from.

Art is the technology human beings have for doing exactly that. It has always been the thing that moves a fact from something you were told into something you can feel in your chest, and it works at the level where the resistance actually lives. Which means art is not an aesthetic of climate work. It is the primary driver.

So there are two directions here, and most people collapse them into one.

Climate work in the arts is the sector getting its own practice coherent. Museums and galleries and design studios have an outsized platform and an outsized footprint, and the platform has no credibility until the footprint is being handled. This is the work of audits and coalitions and contract clauses and green teams, and it is unglamorous and necessary. This is work that The McGuire Consulting Group does enthusiastically, effectively, and sustainably.

Climate work with the arts is the larger claim. It is the deployment of artistic method as the instrument of climate work everywhere else. Participatory design. Co-authorship. Language built into social space. Ritual and convening and the deliberate construction of rooms where a shift in perception can actually occur. This is what I mean when I say art is the driver. Not that artists should make more work about the climate. That the way artists work is the method the rest of the field is missing. This is also the work the happens within the McGuire Consulting Group. It is the internal foundation to support every external output.

I move across four scales, and this publication does too. The body, where the shutdown happens and the grief lives. The community, where authorship gets redistributed or does not. The organization, where the structure either holds the change or expels it. The civic, where it becomes durable or stays a pilot.

Free, twice monthly. Essays.

The thinking, unfenced. Grief and the somatics of climate dread. And how to transmute this grief into systemic change. Systems thinking and how I actually apply it. Community authorship, and who gets to tell their own stories. What I am seeing inside institutions (with discretion) and neighborhoods right now. Announcements and first access for convenings, including the Climate, Arts + Philanthropy Lunch series.

Paid, monthly. Interventions. Investment into the Sustaining Community Fund

One documented intervention per issue.

By intervention I mean it in the systems sense: a designed change in conditions that shifts what people can perceive, and therefore what they can do. Sometimes that is a sentence inserted into a contract. Sometimes it is a workforce model turned inside out. Sometimes it is a room built so that people can grieve in company instead of alone, which is infrastructure even though it will never appear on a facilities budget. The range is the point.

Each issue: what the conditions were, what I changed, why that leverage point and not another one, what it cost, what it set off downstream, and what I would do differently. Written for the person who has to go do it on Monday. There is almost nowhere else to read this, because this field documents its outcomes and almost never its reasoning.

Paid subscribers also get the SPIRAL Method tools as they are built, and office hours by request.

For institutions. Five seats minimum, one invoice.

For teams where the climate question is scattered across operations, curatorial, facilities, education, and development, and everyone needs the same reasoning in front of them. Start here: themcguireconsultinggroup.substack.com/subscribe?group=true

You are inside an institution and the climate question got handed to you on top of your real job. You are inside a community organization, you can see the entire system clearly, and you have leverage on none of it and want to know how to go from point A to B sustainably. You are an artist whose practice keeps colliding with the crisis and you want the structural conversation and the spiritual one in the same room, in the same work, in the same ecosystem from someone who will not make you choose. You are a funder trying to tell a program from an actual and effective intervention. You are somebody who went numb about all of this a while ago and has started to suspect the numbness is the actual problem.

You have read enough climate content that is either apocalyptic or corporate or even inspiring with no clear method or course of action to follow. Neither one reaches the place where the change would have to happen.

Whitney McGuire, Esq.

I am a single mother, lawyer by training, a strategist by trade, and an artist by practice, and I have stopped pretending those are separate. My artistic work is participatory and social, built around language in designed social space, and it is the same instrument I bring into an institution when the problem there turns out to be perceptual rather than technical, which it usually does. My medium is care.

I began as a lawyer for fashion designers, creators, music and fine artists, and eventually MoCADA Museum in Brooklyn. Then the Guggenheim Museum made me its first Associate Director of Sustainability, the first role at a major American art museum dedicated solely to this work.

I built the strategic framework in my first three months and spent the rest of the time making it real. The museum’s first greenhouse gas audit, a baseline of 8,530 metric tons CO₂e. A Green Team of twenty-nine people drawn from facilities, curatorial, education, development, communications, DEI, and security. An 89% diversion rate on construction and exhibition waste. A climate commitment clause written into living artist agreements. A digitized loans process that halved registration-related emissions. Monthly coffee hours, which sound like nothing and were where the culture actually turned. A climate training program for curatorial staff that propagated into three further exhibition carbon studies I never had to run myself. The first NYC Art Museum Sustainability Coalition, which seeded a counterpart in Los Angeles. By the time I left, the University of Lausanne ranked the museum the 8th most sustainable museum in the world out of 206 cultural institutions surveyed.

I co-founded Sustainable Brooklyn, among the first efforts globally to put social justice and the fashion industry’s environmental harm in the same frame, and built as a community co-authorship organization rather than an advocacy one, because who writes the thing determines what the thing can do. My consulting practice is embedded, which means I work as an interim staff member to address roadblocks related to Climate commitments, compliance, workflows, organizational culture, and sustainability, from the inside. For instance, I recently proposed and served in a role as Interim Director of Programs for a sustainable fashion workforce development company here in NYC’s garment district. In this role, I took the mandate of creating more workforce opportunities for cohort graduates and inverted the employment model, so that brand production comes to graduates on site instead of graduates being sent into a market where the organization held little leverage. I am currently working with a sustainable fashion factory in LA on its transition from for-profit to fiscally sponsored nonprofit. Past consulting clients include the Getty, Christie’s and The Kitchen. I taught systems thinking and systems design at Parsons for approximately five years.

The McGuire Consulting Group is an NYC-certified M/WBE practice, based in Bed-Stuy. We work embedded and in-house, because the work needs to be understood, executed and stewarded sustainably in order for it to matter.

Founding subscriptions go to the Sustaining Community Fund, which underwrites the community-authored work no grant cycle moves fast enough to cover. Convenings. Honoraria for contributors. The development of systemic interventions we are creating like Polibot.co. The rooms where the people who usually get consulted are the authors instead.

This is me transparently succeeding and failing and succeeding in building a better world collectively with folks who really want to enjoy a better future for all living beings, starting with art as the backbone and catalyst of this momentum. Will you join me (us)?

Subscribe below. Let’s keep the conversation open.

Interested in working with us? Hello@themcguire.group