“Conversation reveals all”

Agatha Christie

I have dinner with an amazing group of people once a year who come together at every Grantmakers in the Arts conference.  At first blush it looks like a roomful of Asian women and friends, which is how this gathering originated, but after a  few rounds of drinks and appetizers we become a roomful of Asian women and friends having a fabulous time and our true identity is revealed -

We are the Joy Bucks Club!

We are all involved in the nonprofit arts universe, we represent foundations, funders, artists, policy makers and government agencies and we can often figure out and talk through things together as girlfriends, and gourmands.

Early this morning I got an email invitation from the Rockefeller Foundation inviting me to attend a lunch for the NYC Cultural Innovation Fund Grantees.

“We are hosting this lunch in order to allow our NYC Cultural Innovation Fund grantees to meet one another, share their experiences with their projects and to advise the foundation on our efforts to catalyze innovation in New York’s creative community.”

The Foundation believes in supporting the creative sector in projects that “fire our imaginations, enrich our neighborhoods, and inspire us to envision and build a better tomorrow.”

What an amazing lunch this will be!  And  – clutch the pearls! – what a brain trust!

Imagine a roomful of gatejumping restless creative people connected to each other through the Rockefeller Foundation reconnecting to check in with each other and the progress of our projects.

The NYC Cultural Innovation Fund has supported 49 organizations.  Innovative projects that include an open-air festival celebrating the year’s innovations in architecture and urban design,  incorporating extreme action techniques such as high wire and skydiving to spark new dance forms and the application of new income-generation models to individual artists.

I am very excited about sharing the work we have done on our project the ArtXPhone and designing an interactive cell phone cultural guide to transform the #7 train into an art express in Queens.

But what fires my imagination is the opportunity to listen.

The Foundation will also be listening for advice from this group on their efforts in catalyzing true innovative creativity.  We will all have our ear to the ground for messages from the field.  Our field.  Our creative community.

Holly Sidford is a person whose passion for the nonprofit arts sector inspires me every time we meet.  Her company, HeliconCollaborative,  recently released a study about the arts and the recession which was the underlying theme of the recent Grantmakers in the Arts Conference which took place in Brooklyn this past October.

In her report, Paul Light of NYU suggest four possible futures for the nonprofit sector:

• the rescue fantasy
• the withering winterland
• an arbitrary withering
• transformation

Are you kidding?  Those choices are about as appealing as a root canal.

I would like to strongly suggest lunch as a contender for a nonprofit future.   We are a resilient, risk taking, fearless and creative field.  By gathering us purposefully and in a well catered way, Rockefeller will:

• gain invaluable learnings from us that will enable them to be more agile and adaptive in their support of the creative sector
• change the mindset from scrambling for limited external resources to harvesting inner abundances
• encourage us to build and support the passionate experiences of our work together

I will be bringing a healthy appetite and hungry ears with me to this lunch and I hope to take away a sense of what great stuff is going on among all of us.  But what I really want to do is give away as much as I can to be helpful and to be part of the answers.

Bon appetit to all!