How I Spent My Summer: Adam Yasinow

As someone who has been a member of two different summer internship programs, I have learned that there is only one factor that determines the "worthwhileness" of an internship—your relationship with your supervisor. Lucky interns are placed with a stellar supervisor while the unlucky report to supervisors who doom the entire...

How I Spent My Summer: Modesto Acosta

Every day, people search for that one thing that inspires them. They look for that something that excites them every morning when they wake up or titillates their imagination as they push through another hard day's work. I too, have been looking for my inspiration, and this summer I have come one step closer to knowing what it...

Measuring how much your organization matters

Read an interesting piece last night on community engagement from Chris Corrigan, Canadian facilitator and blogger who moves within the space between. He mentions several principles such as “find a centre, find something that you can continually come back to that roots you in who you are” and “don’t sacrifice relationships at the...

How I Spent My Summer: Andrew Katusin

Curiosity did not kill the cat. In my first week at the Cleveland Museum of Art, being a curious intern has helped me find my sea legs and a rhythm at work. Asking questions about the organization's mission, the department's role in that mission, and how I fit into all of it has really helped me find comfort and confidence at work...

Philanthropy and civil society

Originally posted to this blog: 3/4/08 While preparing a talk to faculty and students of the Baker-Nord Center for the Humanities at Case Western Reserve University recently, I ran across a 2004 issue of the journal The READER. The journal is published by Grantmakers in the Arts, a national association of professional arts...

How I Spent My Summer: Marijose Vila

My experiences with the Cleveland Foundation and its summer internship program have provided me with a fresh new insight into community development and the nonprofit world.  Participating in the program has opened numerous doors and allowed me to explore Cleveland to better understand the needs of its community and the existing...

Reverie Sans Madeleines*

I attended the Cuyahoga Arts & Culture (CAC) board meeting this week (why does no one from the arts community except a representative from our commercial classical radio station ever show up to these open, public meetings?) and suddenly was caught by thoughts of how much has changed in our arts community in the past decade. Most of it...

The Arts Reformation 2.0

In a number of past blog posts I have talked about how the world within which the arts now function has changed so dramatically that there are real questions about the relevance of the arts as traditionally experienced. I wrote about this dilemma, among other things, in an op-ed piece the Plain Dealer published earlier this year. It is...

Dangerous

Is theater dangerous – can it cause riots, upset the applecart of perception, change the world? Or is it merely a fancy of the intelligentsia that art can actually counter prejudice, illuminate the dark corners of injustice, actually advance society? Who gets to decide what an artist can or cannot say or portray? Where is the line...

Winnovation

My first issues of Arts Journal for the year arrived, and the two top articles in the "Ideas" section dealt with the role of jargon in the field of arts and arts grantmaking. Judith Dobrzynski (yes, she’s related to our own Marsha Dobrzynski of Young Audiences) talks about "Inventional Wisdom," a term coined at the Massachusetts...