BOSNIA AND HERZEGOVINA 
2007
Consultants: Paul Elicker • Lyndel King • Jillian Poole • Sally Yerkovich
Sarajevo
February 26–March 1,
2007
Arts 2 Business Seminar:
Corporate Partnerships and Advocacy for the Arts
The four-day “Arts 2 Business Seminar: Corporate Partnerships and Advocacy for the Arts” was organized in Sarajevo in response to Jillian Poole and Paul Elicker’s trip to the Balkans in 2004. The Fund worked with Aida Kalender, Manager of Akcija, an agency for cultural development and advocacy based in Sarajevo, to create a seminar that would help participants develop an understanding of advocacy as well as how to engage the business sector in support of the arts. Dr. Sally Yerkovich, President of The Fund, and Dr. Lyndel King, Director and Chief Curator, Weisman Arts Museum, led the seminar on behalf of The Fund.
Twenty-six young arts managers and artists from around Bosnia-Herzegovina attended the seminar representing a range of organizations, including a puppet studio, the Bosnian arm of the international organization Musicians Without Borders, the National Museum of Bosnia and Herzegovina, the National Theater, the World Music Center in Mostar, and the Youth Council in Srebrenica. Many of these groups are new NGOs, created in part in response to the flood of money that came into the area after the war. They are now struggling with issues of survival and sustainability and grappling with the difficulty of continually having to raise funds.
During the four-day seminar, Dr. Yerkovich and Ms. King discussed successful advocacy and fund-raising by first focusing on how to write a mission statement and support it with creative programs, proper staffing, leadership, and fiscal responsibility. They discussed fund-raising through earned income, grants, corporate sponsorships, and membership programs, and they gave examples of letters of intent, grant proposals, and grant reports. Participants were organized into 6 teams and given several exercises to do. They wrote mission statements for institutions they created, formed coalitions with other groups to solve common problems, wrote letters of intent, and gave presentations of their grant proposals.
Though participants initially were resistant to what two Americans might be able to bring to them, their skepticism dissipated quickly and they became engaged in all the discussions and activities with a high level of energy and enthusiasm. Though the participants represented a diversity of arts groups and genres and did not know one another before the seminar, they immediately began to work together and help one another solve immediate problems as well as come up with joint projects and think about ways that they might collaborate in the future. For example, Tanzelarija, an organization for the promotion and development of contemporary dance in Bosnia and Herzegovina, has preliminary plans to do a joint production with the Badger Theater in Banja Luka, and the youth council in Srebrenica hopes to initiate cultural tourism project. They also formed a Google list, and to this day they not only use it to stay in touch with one another, but also, in the words of Aida Kalender, “… refer to our Arts2Business seminar as one remarkable event for one great group of people”.
During the course of the seminar Dr. Yerkovich and Ms. King discussed the creation of future related seminars with Ms. Kalender, who expressed a willingness to raise local support so that this can be the first of a longer collaborative effort. The day after the seminar, Dr. Yerkovich and Ms. Kalender called on Kimberly Murphy, Cultural and Educational Attaché at the American Embassy. They outlined two additional seminars – one on audience and program development and another on leadership – that could be produced in future years.
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