Peer Advisor Training Program
The Arts Extension Service has worked throughout the United States to train peer advisors to provide management and program consulting and training for their peers in community arts organizations. The program develops paraprofessional consultants in response to the increasing need for management assistance services with declining financial resources. Peer advisors are professional managers who are usually not professional consultants, helping other managers in similar organizations. For example, the managing director of a symphony may, after the training, advise her counterpart in a community chorus. The program is intended to complement rather than replace the need for professional management consulting. Peer Advising was first developed by Craig Dreeszen with Barbara Schaffer Bacon in 1989. Craig Dreeszen is the principal instructor.

 

Benefits
The program provides at least four fundamental benefits.

1. It increases the capacity of arts service organizations to better respond to more requests for management and programming assistance from community arts organizations.
2. It establishes a low-cost, sustainable technical assistance delivery system using local or regional experts trained in organizational development consulting.
3. It recognizes the competence and contributes to the professional development of a region's best professional arts leaders.
4. For membership-based service organizations, the program provides a tangible benefit of membership.

Instructional Topics
• active listening
• consulting styles and models
• the consulting process
• clarifying client expectations
• information gathering
• organizational assessment
• problem definition and solving
• coping with ambivalence, ambiguity, and resistance
• written reports
• disengagement from consulting and
• ethical issues in consulting