I have spent the past 30 years as a manager in a variety of cultural and media organizations and philanthropic foundations. I have enjoyed the creative challenge of changing jobs and being able to participate in the cultural sector from many vantage points. I enjoy meeting people and making things happen and I am gratified when I am able to support creative individuals and organizations reach and connect with audiences and communities.
I tried to be a professional bassoonist but was in more demand for organizing concerts and people than I was as a player. Then one thing led to another. In the Bay Area I led a community music center that had classical and jazz performing and training programs. It was funded almost entirely by CETA for those of you old enough to remember that federal jobs program. After that I was executive director of Pro Arts, a multi-service cultural organization in the heart of downtown Oakland that organized exhibits, readings, and concerts and that employed dozens of artists in community centers like schools and youth centers. We were among the first in the US to organize and promote artists’ open studio events. It’s gratifying to see that East Bay Open Studios is still alive and kicking — more than 50,000 people attended last year. I still have the original posters from Open Studios #1 in my memory box!
From there I became the Executive Director of the Fleishhacker Foundation in San Francisco. I worked there for seven years, founding the Eureka Fellowships program (first of its kind in California) and helping to provide early support to many small, vibrant cultural organizations in the Bay Area. While there, Grantmakers in the Arts was formed as an affinity group of the Council on Foundations and I joined the Board. First with Wendy Bennett and then with Anne Focke I worked for many years as co-editor of the Grantmakers in the Arts Reader, which has become important reading in the field.
In early 1990 I was recruited to the Twin Cities to become a program officer at The Bush Foundation, which at the time had a robust cultural grantmaking program and one of the largest artists’ fellowship programs in the United States. Among the projects I worked on at Bush was diversifying the cultural funding programs to include grantmaking aimed to strengthen the energetic cohort of smaller-budget and important cultural organizations in the Twin Cities and in the Dakotas. With Anne Focke’s leadership a few of us also spent a couple of years during this time trying to launch Artswire, an early attempt to aggregate the nonprofit cultural sector on-line (this was before Graphical User Interfaces — we were pioneers!).
Minnesota Public Radio recruited me in 1999 and I had a happy home there for 9 years. My first assignment was helping to launch KPCC, or Southern California Public Radio, now The LAIst, which is Los Angeles’ leading public media news service. Later I was the lead staff in launching The Current, a new station for Minnesota. I also was Executive Producer of two Peabody Award winning series, American Mavericks and The MTT Files, both created in conjunction with Producer Tom Voegli and with the San Francisco Symphony and Michael Tilson Thomas. My experiences at MPR included leadership of both its large news operation and the cultural programming group for my final three years of employment there, as SVP Content and Media. We did a lot of good work there transforming our public radio organization into a public media organization and incorporating digital distribution and audience engagement into our content development work.
From 2009 – 2012 I served as President and Managing Director of the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra. The SPCO is the nation’s only full-time professional chamber orchestra and is widely regarded as one of the leading chamber orchestras in the world. We worked to broaden our media reach through the SPCO’s freely accessible digital concert library and launched a concert membership program that’s still going strong.
In 2012 I left the SPCO to launch an independent consulting business, now named 8 Bridges Workshop. We work with cultural, public media, community development, and philanthropic organizations across the US, focusing on field studies, strategy, planning, program development, evaluation, and once in a while, search. You can learn more about what we’re doing, read past public-facing reports, and browse information about our clients and projects on the 8 Bridges Workshop website.