Readings

It was April 1968: I was out for lunch break with Jim and Mary, co-workers from the general accounting office where we worked in the University District. They were old hands in the office. I was new on staff and excited. This was my first real job out of high school after a string of just so-so jobs. There had been the eyeglass factory where I stood, eight hours a day for three months in a windowless basement knocking lead weights off newly polished eyeglass lenses with a mallet. A friend of my mother's had gotten me that job.

The full text of this article is not yet available on this site. Below is a brief excerpt.

Five years ago, after more than twenty years as a nonprofit management consultant, I went back to the classroom to pursue a doctoral degree in organizational behavior. Although personal renewal was my primary goal, I was also eager to put a set of theoretical legs under two decades of consulting practice.

As the time came to choose my dissertation topic, I found myself gravitating to one of the most complex subjects in my consulting practice—the behavior of nonprofit founders.

This essay is from an address prepared for the Music Educators National Conference, Washington, D.C., March 28, 1990.

The moniker, "Grantmakers in the Arts," could suggest that our job as funders is solely to read proposals and write checks, a straightforward transaction that takes a hiatus when the award letter goes out and revives when the final report comes in. In reality, we know that the most important work we do may take place before the proposal is even submitted and that the impact of our work only improves as the quality of our ongoing interaction with our grantees strengthens.

Recently, while sitting in a coffee shop in Chicago, I overheard a language that sounded familiar. Being a folklorist I'm sensitive to occupational language. You can blindfold me in front of conversations of cowboys or farmers and I will be able to pick out a number of things that distinguish their talk. And having a private language is not bad, it's a reality.

Alternate ROOTS is a coalition of artists and cultural workers in the Southeastern USA; addressing racism and other oppressions has been integral to our mission for a long time. At our 2004 Annual Meeting this past August a panel of ROOTS' founding members discussed the function of ROOTS as a cultural continuation of the civil rights movement - beginning with our founding at the legendary Highlander Center in New Market, Tennessee.

The Chicago Dance Mapping Project (CDMP) was conducted by Dance/USA over a period of eighteen months through 2002 "to capture a census of dance activity" in the six counties of the greater Chicago metropolitan area. Although the research coincided with the San Francisco and Washington, D.C. needs assessments described in the winter 2004 (Vol. 15, No. 1) Reader, the Chicago research was even more broadly inclusive of diverse dance entities and was originally intended to be reported and used as a database.

The full text of this article is not yet available on this site. Below is a brief excerpt.