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The Fund for Arts and Culture

now available
2011 Annual Report

MESSAGE FROM OUR CEO

To all our friends of The Fund:

If you look closely in the mirror you can see reflections of Wayne Harvey and me at The National Hotel in Moscow in 1997. Together with Sally Yerkovich and Olga Reva (our translator extraordinaire), we had travelled through a nightmarish snowstorm from Yaroslavl to Moscow to get on another plane to Kursk, but the Moscow airport was deserted. The only room we could find that night was the Tsar’s Suite of the National Hotel, sheer heaven after having felt so close to hell. This photo seems particularly emblematic of the highs and lows we experienced in our extraordinary twenty years of setting out from the U.S. to a total of twenty-one countries, mostly in Central Europe, to share what we knew about keeping cultural institutions living, thriving, and growing. Our not-so-small army of some 150 expert volunteer arts executives, museum managers and administrators, opera directors, architects, planners, teachers, historians, curators, librarians, public relations and marketing directors, fundraisers, videographers, and exhibition designers gave their time and taught of their experiences to a growing number of willing listeners, government leaders, city officials, cultural leaders, and seminar participants, who in turn recruited others and let us know they had indeed benefitted hugely.

The Fund occupied a unique niche in a time when changing governments, jarring new regulations, altered systems and shrinking budgets forced new thinking on how to continue to run arts institutions. We created exchanges between countries and cities, and had impact on the programs, planning and direction of museums, orchestras, theatres, dance and other performing arts organizations, and changed the very architecture of some major organizations and even some tiny ones. I’ll never forget the day the director of the Political History Museum in St. Petersburg came to me and said, “For the first time in our long history we can decide how we tell our history. Will you help us?” We ended up working with that museum on exhibit design and major physical renovations for several years, and our representatives Barbara Charles and Bob Staples and Jonathan Hess certainly got involved in the telling of Russian history.

Everyone involved in The Fund helped create and build an extraordinary twenty-year adventure that included periods of high hilarity, total inspiration, eureka moments, extraordinary friendships, warmth and laughter, intense concentration, learning, revelations, trudging voyages, kindness, generosity, helpfulness and sacrifice.

With thanks and deep appreciation to all who joined us on this voyage,

Jillian Poole