This past spring, Jim Kennedy and I sat down with Rich Boyd, Executive Director of the Tennessee Arts Commission and  his talented staff and brainstormed about how to help arts agencies across Tennessee chart their own courses for weathering these financially challenging times.  We settled on holding a two-day conference that would help these agencies, large and small, find and take advantage of opportunities they may not otherwise see in the wake of a recession that has hit arts funding pretty hard. 

The conference takes place October 13-14 at Paris Landing State Park, with almost 200 registered participants.  It will feature some of the best and brightest people in the arts industry, including Wayne Lawson, retired head of the Ohio Arts Council, Ellen Hays, lobbyist and marketing specialist, Helen Johnson with CreateHere, Stephen Moseley with Cool People Care, Jack Riggar, Chattanooga’s most experienced fundraiser, Mike McClamroch of the East TN Foundation, and Rob Kret, Henry Schulson and Gordon Stalans three architects of one of the nations’ most successful arts non-profit business collaborations.   

The kind of forward-thinking that created this conference is a big reason that Tennessee’s arts commission is one of the finest and most robust in the US.  Thanks to the leadership of Rich Boyd, his commission members and Tennesseans for the Arts, our state’s arts agencies will likely emerge ahead of the pack as seismic changes alter the arts funding and arts and culture programming landscape for forever. 

The conference is based on three over-arching themes:

1.    The arts agency world is changing and will continue to change regardless of the current recession; so seize the opportunity in these changes and don’t look back.

2.    One’s colleagues in the arts agency world are extremely valuable resources; learn from and offer help and advice to one another.  Every arts agency benefits when any one of them does well. 

3.    There is no substitute for interactive learning: try it, test it, risk it.  Do something different!  You will only get the same old results from doing the same old thing.

We’ll be posting more about this conference and what we learned at it in coming months.  In the meantime you can follow it live, so to speak, on the Facebook fan page: “Arts Agency Idea Exchange.”  And stay tuned on the TAC website: http://www.arts.state.tn.us/