The Fund for Arts and CultureMessage from our CEO2008 was a challenging year for The Fund. We provided a variety of workshops to Russia and Ukraine, held our Fourth Annual Regional Museum Directors Conference in Romania, and sent a consultant to Azerbaijan to explore possibilities for Fund activity. We made major efforts to find options for expanding The Fund’s activities geographically. Our aim was, and still is, to find a way to restructure this organization to one with a paid chief executive and a new Board to broaden our mission. Our desire to widen our reach is predicated on the proposition that our operating model has been thoroughly tested. Over 100 senior executives have served in 21 countries where our services have been effective and welcomed; we would like to offer these same services to countries in Latin America, the Middle East, and East Asia. Present Fund activities will be folded into this new larger international organization (The Culture Corps). In the meantime, we are shortening our name to The Fund for Arts and Culture to reflect wider interests. We investigated whether there may be a useful and appropriate role for our work in India and Indonesia and explored the possibility of a strategic partnership with the Salzburg Global Seminars. We solicited options for creating a business model for our proposed Culture Corps with a business consulting firm, and then more extensively with the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth. Alas, the financial markets collapsed in the months our proposal was finalized. We also developed new programming options. One was a partnership proposed to us by the Museum of Political History in St. Petersburg, Russia. At their suggestion, we recruited twelve distinguished U.S. museum directors to meet with an equal number of Russian directors to explore the role of museums in creating civic awareness. However, prior to our scheduled November meetings, the political climate in Russia changed, and our Russian colleagues indicated they did not think it timely to discuss the topic they had proposed with Americans. Another new initiative involves a proposed partnership with one of the American Enterprise Funds to undertake an in-depth evaluation of the cultural capacities in their country of operation. This could develop into a three-year consulting program with some reimbursement for The Fund. I hope to be able to share more about this program if it develops in the coming months. China may also be on our horizon. My own brief October trip to Bucharest, Belgrade, Kiev, and St. Petersburg reconfirmed that requests for our consultants in the coming year and for 2010 remain strong. Whether we will be able to fulfill these requests depends, of course, on our funders. Although our overhead is minimal (our only paid staff is part-time administrative support), the costs of travel continue to soar. Our support does not. I don’t know what The Fund’s future holds, but some of it can surely be determined by readers of this report who have generously made our past work possible.  Jillian Poole accepts the 2007  Jillian Poole |
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secretary@fundforartsandculture.org