I’m off to Toronto this weekend (and Monday) to speak and to join the conversation for Re-Generation: The Healthy Arts Leader (ou en français), an arts management conference hosted by the Ontario Arts Council. With sessions on succession planning, mentoring, compensation, professional development, and other issues of worklife in arts and cultural management, the conference builds on extensive work in Ontario on human resource challenges in the field. According to a report from one phase of the project (available at the bottom of the page linked above):
[The Creative Management Project] deals with one of the most challenging resource dilemmas facing Canada’s not-for-profit arts and heritage sector — how we can keep our current experienced managers and administrators in the sector and provide for their professional renewal, and how we can attract, develop and retain a new generation of committed managers to continue the work of our present leaders.
The effort mirrors similar work by the Illinois Arts Alliance, forging a refreshing, pre-emptive strike on issues ignored or suppressed by the rest of us.
I hope to publish my keynote on this weblog shortly after the event (pending approval by the conference organizers). And I’m sure I’ll have thoughts and reactions when I return next week. If any of you readers will be there, please come up and say ‘hi’. I’ll be the bald guy at the podium on Monday morning.
