Creative Campus Innovations Grant

In attendance: Bill Menezes, Sharon Fantl, Jackie Hooper, Jeremy Robarge, Susie Ericon-West, Cheryl Perry, Michael Soldate, Kathleen Maceda, Maureen Ahern, Zachie Valentine, Lisa Kuneman- facilitator

Develop a Communication Plan:

Look at how to best use media: (see graphic- below)

Coordination:

• Important to keep everyone who wants to be involved up to date

• Information needs to be accessible, manageable (can’t rely on emails to make important connections)

• How does ‘What Sustains Us?’ overlap with other campus based activity?

Work with evaluation team, Thorne and similar campus resources. Idea for Cohen Center- How people sustain in            times of trauma? Every year they do an art based exploration

Continuity re: information, priorities and sustained effort is very important

Possible involvement in future campus-wide events?

ISP has used the term in discussion of Integrated Outcomes, there may be room for confusion and/or                                     combined effort re: communication. Also, 33% of classes are ISP classes

Faculty/ Student Connections:

• Explore shared goals/ parallel developments with Integrated Studies Program (meeting described below).

• Talk to Andy Robinson (VP Student Affairs) How to best be effective? and Mary McEntee (community service coord.)

Keene Plan Mayor can be very supportive, has planned involvement with Arts Alive

Current Status/ Existing Information There is a good deal that is known about the grant, strategic and casual communication is possible with what’s known.

Develop a Timeline

Unknowns make timeline for implementation unclear: What, if anything, should or can happen during grant interim period? Will energy be lost? Can word of mouth sustain it? Should the Advisory Committee continue to meet in the interim?

Either way, getting started on materials and continuing to build communication should happen now.

With application outcome unclear, what’s possible or likely with or without CCIG? Probably will continue in  some form. How will this be discovered and defined?

Discuss the generation of graphic images, printed matter and other media

Logo and other design- Would students in Graphic Design Dept have an interest in this piece? Bob Kostic, Dept Chair)

Might be potential for 2 Logos: one for CCIG and one for “What Sustains Us” as it might exist otherwise

Other?

Discuss generation of copy-

words used in written information for dissemination

Have begun to solicit ideas re: attention grabbing, pithy phrases that are easy to repeat

Grant language may be useful- perhaps grant writers can help with this?

What is needed to complete this task?

Pithy Comments

Active, involve the reader immediately, curiosity inducing, enduring questions, starts a dialog, emphasizes multidisciplinary work, context will be important: can change meaning, can be an accompanying image.

If you can’t imagine it, you can’t do it.

In good times and challenging times.

What makes life worth living?

What gets you up in the morning?

What keeps you going?

The question is the purpose

Sustainability- it’s more than recycling (keep recycling!)

The wheels of creativity.

Got Art?

Sustain?

Who Needs Art?

Creative discovery through artisitic engagement.

From comments on blog:

What if? isn’t possible without it

Community Connections-Creative Collisions

The Food We Eat

What makes us whole?

When the going gets tough, what makes one get back up/keep going/try again?

What feeds one’s soul?

The arts …make our country worth defending

What sustains us as individuals? as professionals? as citizens?

Sustaining Sustenance: Our Needs and Our Responsibilities

Next Steps

Clarify Timeline

Will require homework (as yet undefined)

Next Meeting

ISP -  a small meeting will be scheduled with Anne Rancourt, Peter Nielsen and Gordon Leversee.

Update: Dan, Bill, and Sharon are in the midst of scheduling this meeting. Lisa will schedule CCIG Communication     Coordination meeting to follow as soon as possible after meeting with ISP.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Contact: Bill Menezes, 603-358-2171

KEENE STATE AND COMMUNITY TEAM WITH THE REDFERN IN CREATIVE CAMPUS INITIATIVE GRANT

KEENE, NH, 1/27/10 – Keene State College’s Redfern Arts Center announces that an advisory committee made up of campus and community constituents have joined the Redfern staff to work on the final Creative Campus Innovations Grant application administered by the Association of Performing Arts Presenters with funding from the Doris Duke Foundation. The Redfern’s first-round grant application designed to explore the question, “What Sustains Us?” was one of 31 selected from nearly 150 college and university arts centers throughout the United States and Canada to apply for the final round of the grant. Eight to 10 arts centers will be selected to receive grants of $100,000 or $200,000.

The theme of sustainability was chosen, not only for its usual notions of the conservation of natural resources, reducing energy consumption, or recycling but also as an opportunity to explore the question of what sustains us as human beings, both in good times and challenging times. There is no single answer to this question; however, it is essential that we consider it if we are to make life-sustaining personal choices, and choices that create healthy, thriving communities – however those communities might be defined (e.g., college campuses, towns, workplaces, etc.).

A team of nearly 20 partners have been working with the Redfern staff in a participatory process in shaping the grant before it is submitted by March 1, 2010. Among the community partners are the Cheshire Medical Center’s Vision 2020, New Ha and MOCO.

Our partners at Keene State include participants from Health Sciences, Environmental Education, Early Sprouts, Women’s Studies, the Theatre and Dance and Music Departments, the Keene State Sustainability Office, the Thorne Sagendorph Art Gallery, and the Cohen Center for Holocaust & Genocide Studies. The grant initiative has also received considerable support from the offices of the Provost, the Dean of Sciences and Social Sciences, and the Dean of Arts and Humanities. Artists selected to participate in the grant will be engaging with community and campus constituencies in cross-disciplinary projects and working in an immersive creative process.

The Redfern and the advisory committee are encouraging interested parties to think about how they might contribute to the topic and then communicate to the committee on how the concept resonates with them, their organization, or their curriculum. Interested parties are encouraged to post comments on the Creative Campus blog at http://keeneweb.org/ccig. You can leave a comment on the blog, or you can email the team at ccig@keene.edu. Your input is important toward helping us complete a successful application. The team looks forward to your engagement in the dialogue.

At the “What Sustains Us?” Advisory Committee* meeting on 1/20, there was discussion regarding the challenges to effective communication regarding the grant and the project.

(*formerly known as the Core Committee)

1. The meaning of the question (vs the answer to the question)

2. the whole point of naming the big picture with a question

3. the variety of relationships people have to the concepts and language of sustainability

4. the development of lead projects and lead partner relationships (the core of the grant proposal)

5. the potential, in aggregate, for campus and community engagement regardless of the grant’s status- including clarification of  any relationship there may be to ISPs separate efforts to explore the question “what sustains us?”in it’s planning process.

The committee articulated a need to generate phrases and material for copy that have the potential to convey these things with pithy, repeatable phrases.

You are invited to offer your thoughts, and suggestions here. This is the opportunity to say whatever comes to mind- even if you think it isn’t quite “it” !

Lisa Kuneman

Letter from Provost Mel Netzhammer to the Campus Community inviting the campus into the discussion of “What Sustains Us?”:

Colleagues,

I am writing to share exciting news, and to invite you into a campus wide discussion on a question very much in line with our public liberal arts mission:  What sustains us?

The question of what sustains us as human beings, both in good times and challenging times, is an enduring question without a single answer.  However, its contemplation is essential if individuals are to make life-sustaining personal choices, and for the creation of healthy, thriving communities-however those communities might be defined (e.g., college campuses, towns, workplaces, etc.).    With the motto “Enter to Learn, Go forth to Serve” Keene State College wants our students to graduate with a strong sense of what sustains them personally and their role in sustaining their chosen communities:  basic human needs (food , shelter, healthcare), meaningful work, work/family balance, connection to the environment/natural world, art, spirituality, and connectedness and service to others.

This past summer Keene State College, under the leadership of Redfern Arts Center, put forward a preliminary grant application to receive funding to engage in a campus-wide dialogue on this topic from the Doris Duke Foundation (via a grant program from the Association of Performing Arts Presenters).  The exciting news is that Keene State College’s application was recently tapped as one of the top 31 applications submitted from institutions around the country.  The attached press release lists the other institutions with which we share this honor, including institutions such as The Ohio State University, Penn State University, University of Michigan, and UCLA.

With this honor, we have been awarded a $7,000 grant to plan and submit a full grant application due in March, with the potential to receive $200,000 if our full application is deemed to be one of the top 10.  This presents an amazing opportunity to engage all corners of our campus (faculty, staff, students and alumni) and our partners in the Keene community in a 2-year dialogue around the theme  ”What Sustains Us.” The purpose of this grant is to help us think creatively as a campus about this question through activities of our choosing in a variety of formats, such as the visual and performing arts, lectures, classroom activities, shared campus experiences, and community outreach. This project has the potential to enhance and be enhanced by many of our existing academic and co-curricular programs, such as our Biennial Symposium 2011, the Keene is Reading program, Founder’s Day, and the many lectures held on an annual basis across campus.

Partnering with us in this effort is Cheshire Medical Center’s Vision 2020, which aims to make Keene the healthiest community in the nation by 2020, and the New Hampshire Dance Institute.

I, along with the core team working on the grant proposal, invite all members of our campus community into this dialogue and challenge you to think about what sustains YOU and your community.  Please watch in the coming weeks for opportunities to add your voice to the discussion, including a blog and other forums that will be forthcoming.  We hope this is just the beginning of what will become an enduring dialogue on our campus, lasting well beyond the period of any grant.

Mel

For Immediate Release
Contact: Bill Menezes, 603-358-2171 and bmenezes@keene.edu

Arts Presenters Announces Keene State’s Redfern Arts Center as a Semifinalist in the 2010 Creative Campus Innovations Grants to Colleges and Universities

November 19, 2009; Washington, D.C. - The Association of Performing Arts Presenters (Arts Presenters) announces that Keene State College’s Redfern Arts Center is one of 31 semifinalists in the 2010 Creative Campus Innovations Grant Program.

The Creative Campus initiative began in March 2004, following the 104th American Assembly at Columbia University, where more than 60 arts and higher education leaders gathered to examine the factors that characterize effective partnerships in education and the arts - the projects, proposals, curricula, and creative forces that make such partnerships work.

In 2006, Arts Presenters initiated The Creative Campus Innovations Grant program with funding from the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation. This program was designed to support a set of innovative performance-based projects on American campuses that exhibit the importance of the arts to the educational, service, and scholarly missions of the academy and that fully integrate the performing arts into the life of the academy and the community. In 2007, eight campus-based presenters were awarded one- or two-year grants to implement projects that had the potential to increase value and expand support for integrating the performing arts into the academy and the campus community.

In March 2009, Arts Presenters announced a new round of the Creative Campus Innovations Grant Program with the intent to identify, support, and document exemplary campus-based performing arts presenters who develop and implement programs and strategies that go beyond conventional practice and who integrate their work into the academy. In September 2009, 31 semifinalists were chosen from a pool of nearly 150 applicants, and each will be given $7,000 to help develop a project concept for full consideration as part of the final selection process of this grant program. Up to 10 one- to two-year project grants, ranging from $100,000 to $200,000 each, will be awarded in August 2010 to college- and university-based presenters from among these semifinalists.

The following semifinalists have been invited to submit full proposals: Arizona State University, ASU Public Events / Gammage; Bard College, Richard B. Fisher Center for the Performing Arts; Baruch College, Baruch Performing Arts Center; Berklee College of Music, Berklee Office of Special Programs; California State University-Long Beach, Carpenter Performing Arts Center; College of Saint Benedict/Saint John’s University, Fine Arts Programming; Colorado College, I.D.E.A. at Colorado College; Columbia College Chicago, The Dance Center of Columbia College Chicago; Cuyahoga Community College, Division of Creative Arts; Hiram College, Center for Literature Medicine and Biomedical Humanities; Howard University, Cramton Auditorium; Keene State College, Redfern Arts Center on Brickyard Pond; Lafayette College, Williams Center for the Arts; Lehigh University, Zoellner Arts Center; Montclair State University, Arts and Cultural Programming; Pennsylvania State University, Center for the Performing Arts at Penn State; Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center; Skidmore College, Office of the Dean of Special Programs; State University of New York-Oswego, ARTSwego; Syracuse University, University Arts Presenter; The Ohio State University, Wexner Center for the Arts; University of British Columbia, Chan Centre for the Performing Arts; University of California-Irvine, Irvine Barclay Theatre; University of California-Los Angeles, UCLA Live; University of Dayton, University of Dayton Arts Series; University of Florida, University of Florida Performing Arts; University of Kentucky, Singletary Center for the Arts; University of Michigan, University Musical Society; University of Minnesota, Northrop Concerts and Lectures; University of Washington, UW World Series; Western Michigan University, Miller Auditorium.

Arts Presenters

Founded in 1957, the Association of Performing Arts Presenters (Arts Presenters or APAP) is the national service organization for the field of arts presenting. The organization is dedicated to developing and supporting a robust performing arts presenting field and the professionals who work in it. Arts Presenters has 2,000 organizational members worldwide and brings more than 3,800 performing arts professionals together from around the world at the annual APAP Conference NYC. Members range from the nation’s leading performing arts centers, to civic and university performance facilities and festivals, to the full spectrum of artist agencies, managers, national consulting practices and collaborators, and a growing roster of self-presenting artists who engage communities through live performances. Arts Presenters, a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization, based in Washington, D.C., is led by CEO and President Sandra L. Gibson.

Doris Duke Charitable Foundation

The mission of the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation (www.ddcf.org) is to improve the quality of people’s lives through grants supporting the performing arts, environmental conservation, medical research, and the prevention of child maltreatment, and through preservation of the cultural and environmental legacy of Doris Duke’s properties.

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