2012 Fifty Most Powerful and Influential People in the Nonprofit Arts

This is the fifth annual Barry’s Blog listing of the Most Powerful and Influential Leaders in the Nonprofit Arts. It has become far and away the most popular of my postings (last year it attracted 5,000 page hits in addition to the subscriber base circulation)... This year there are a couple of changes in the format. First, this year’s list includes 50 people. And rather than do a rigid ranking (in past years the list has been a ranking of 1 - 25 — including in the past couple of years — multiple people under some of the numbers

— thus including more than 25 people on the list), this year I group those on the list in broad categories — (e.g., National Leaders, Foundation Leaders, Policy Wonks, Arts Education, Bloggers, Researchers etc.), but no longer numerically rank those on the list. As an experiment this year, I do single out one person in each category whose name came up more often than others, and I have invited individual leaders in the field who are familiar with that person to write a brief, personal, homage citing some of the reasons that person may have power and influence. (I would like to thank each of those who contributed a thumbnail piece on the featured leader in each category). The descriptions of everyone else were cobbled together based on comments and insights from nominators and others around the sector, with editorial license.