Add Chicago to the list

I am pleased to announce that we will be presenting one of the Future Leadership events in Chicago in partnership with the Illinois Arts Alliance.  Those of you from around the area, be sure to give us your feedback as we continue to develop the content for the events!

Possible event sites

In case you couldn’t guess from the last post or two, we’re ramping up the program development to make sure we’re able to present the pilot series of events in September and October.

The first step has been connecting with people across the country to help us identify partners within our targeted communities.  In the conversations we’ve been having, we’ve been looking for people (or organizations) that are already thinking about or working in leadership development and succession planning for arts and culture professionals.  We’re also looking for people who are either involved in – or have access to – networks that include our target audience (arts and culture professionals who aspire to lead organizations in the next 5-7 years).

Nothing is set in stone at the moment, but we’ve identified some strong partners in a number of our target communities.  If I had to guess, I would say it’s pretty likely that we will end up presenting events in:

• Chicago
• Miami
• Minneapolis/St. Paul
• New York
• San Francisco/Bay Area
• ??

It will still be at least a little while before we’re able to finalize the locations for the events, but if you are from one of the communities above, we would be especially grateful for your insight and thoughts as we go through the design process.  Your reactions are welcome either as comments on here or, if  you prefer, you can email me directly.  Regardless of how you do it, we’d love it if you’d share your thoughts with us as we fit all the pieces together.

The search for the cities

We are concerned with figuring out which cities we should present these events in.  It would be great if we could put out an RFP and see which communities respond.  But we’re determined to present these events by the end of October and  don’t have enough time.  Instead we’re going to have to do this in a more focused process.  Here’s a list of factors that crossed our minds (in no particular order):

• Where are there communities already thinking about leadership development and succession planning for arts organizations?
• Are there cities we think we should be in that we aren’t currently?
• Are there cities we work with a lot that we think should definitely be on the list?
• We need geographic coverage to approximate a national program as much as possible.
• American Express is the sole funder for this program – do we need to think about their target markets?

Our first pass at a list of possible sites:

Chicago
Detroit
Los Angeles
Miami
Minneapolis/ St. Paul
New York
Philadelphia
Phoenix
San Francisco
Seattle
Washington DC

We obviously can’t pursue each of these, since we’re only going to present in about 5 cities.  But before we get into paring down the list – are there any cities that you think we should be looking into which aren’t on this list?