This title is neither violent onomatopoeia nor a Femi Kuti reference, rather I quote my mom’s favorite phrase which is synonymous to “check, check, check.” While I’d cringe whenever my mom exclaimed this in her Filipino accent, I think it captures my enthusiasm around the three key accomplishments (some unexpected) that resulted from the Los Angeles emerging leader mentorship program.
People rarely wield the science to invent and hand-craft their own mentor. I’ve observed that mentors tend to emerge in unlikely places and heighten or recede in their presence throughout one’s life. But, in 2007, a nine-member taskforce of Los Angeles Emerging Arts Leaders (EAL/LA) had lost patience with an organic model of mentor acquisition, and began scheming on how to meet a dream career mentor through professional connections and a structured program.
After a year of monthly meetings to strategize recruitment, the matching process, the structure, marketing, and evaluation, we officially launched the Arts Professional Advisors Link (APAL) in the fall of 2008. Each emerging leader member completed an “application” which described professional development needs and wants in a mentor. As a team, we reviewed one another’s applications and leveraged our connections, to help match advisors to the profiles drawn up in the applications. Advisees were charged with all of the administrative work around the program and were to initiate and organize all advisor meetings (four at the least) over the course of the program year. The advisee was to steer the content of the meeting conversations and bring clear, yearlong goals to the table around which the advisor might provide guidance. Over the course of the year, we threw a kick-off orientation mixer, a mid-year opera outing and mixer and a culminating mixer. Read the rest of this entry »


(My thanks to Jean Cook of the
So how do we, emerging arts leaders, embrace the new creative economy, but not become what Angela McRobbie described in her essay “Everybody is Creative: Artists as New Economy Pioneers” as “a society of lonely, mobile, over-worked individuals for whom socializing and leisure are only more opportunities to do a deal”. How do we stay afloat, while helping to drive innovation and keep a diversity of (popular as well as thoughtful, well-crafted) art alive in our communities?
Marc’s Seder post
I was reading
What is it about cross-sector collaboration that turns on young arts professionals? Whether its art therapy, eco art or political activism through the arts, my peers seem particularly drawn to social service, urban design, environmental, health and economical revitalization partnerships. This inclination speaks to our interest in expanding the scope of our organization’s artistic work so that it may touch and speak to a broader public. It also speaks to emerging leaders’ diverse professional interests.
When someone leaves an organization one has to ask: did they jump or were they pushed?
First off, you need to know how hard it was not to type “Knot knowing the Ropes,” but I managed to resist at least for a few seconds.