There seems no end to the praise for the quality and discipline of the campaign run by President-elect Barack Obama.  Now, smart observers have identified virtues and best practices from the campaign that they believe are applicable to the management of...

I was a Legal Observer on Election Day, assigned to a small, near-West-Side Hispanic district.  While there was much that was unremarkable about many voters’ engagement with the process, and a few moments of minor drama throughout the day, here are some...

I first encountered the concept of "flow" more than 40 years ago at a summer ceramics workshop in California. One of the instructors tried to explain what happened in that moment of creativity at the potter’s wheel when we felt excited and calm at the same...

The tension around the upcoming election is really getting to me.  As I often do when anxious, I search through my favorite poems, looking for wisdom or solace or inspiration.  So it was that I came across the following three poems.  The first, by Denise...

In Atlanta this week, I am attending the annual conference of Grantmakers in the Arts, a professional association for my very specialized field. About 300 arts staff from family, private, corporate and community foundations and public funding agencies are...

This week I received a newsflash from Americans for the Arts, a nonprofit arts advocacy organization, alerting me to the presidential candidates' views on the arts. Whether or not you believe the federal government should support the arts, the statements and...

Everything goes back to the economy these difficult days, it seems. Last week I discussed the challenges facing the nonprofit sector in attracting strong leadership for the future.  Many of the challenges stem from the historic, and too often endemic, lack of...

More than 10 years ago, a respected colleague of mine, John Kreidler, then the senior arts grantmaker for the San Francisco Foundation, began talking and writing about a critical dynamic of the nonprofit art world: the willingness of arts leaders to discount...

So what’s with the clouds this summer? Have you noticed? Maybe it’s just me, but I have to say the artist in me has been amazed and thrilled by the magnificence of the cloud formations along the eastern horizon here in Cleveland all summer. These are...

On Saturday the sun was glorious and the clouds were Disney fantasy gorgeous; giant scoops of vanilla bean ice cream in the sky.  On the ground, the crowd was thinner than I remember from past festivals – but that may just be perception.  A lot was going...