Back in August I presented material in a pre-conference session at the Arts Midwest (AMW) conference alongside AMW President/CEO David Fraher; Creating Connection Program Director Anne Romens; and my friend Nick Sherman. (Slides on the AMW site, scroll down to “Messages that Matter: Tapping into What Audiences Value + Creating Connection: What Does Your Community Value?”).
For my part of the presentation, I spoke about some of the programs we had instituted in our community based on materials from Creating Connection, or as I often refer to it, Building Public Will For Arts and Culture.
One program I hadn’t talked about was our Arts Buddy program which we developed to respond to the problem of having no one to attend an event with which is often cited as a major impediment to event attendance. Long time readers will remember I started developing the idea back in 2015 after being inspired by a program instituted by a Brazilian bus company.
Anne Romens wanted to know more about the program so they could discuss it in workshops they were conducting in September. We ended up turning our discussion into an interview which Anne posted on the Creating Connection blog last week.
Anne told me she presented the idea at 5 workshops in September and people loved the idea. They pulled out their pens and started scribbling. One person apparently asked if I had legal rights to the idea or if she could use it.
I had I known it would be so popular I would have patented it and started a licensing program!
(The idea was developed with feedback from a number of people both through my blog and emails so neither I, nor anyone else should be looking to patent it.)
You will have to read the interview to see what all the excitement was about.