Leadership in the Arts Roundtable: A Collaboration, One Year Later
by | August 26, 2019 | Blog
In September 2018, student leaders and staff from the Office of the Arts at Hunter College (New York, NY) and Suffolk Performing Arts at Suffolk University (Boston, MA) met at Hunter College for a roundtable discussion on leadership in the arts. Suffolk Performing Arts organizes an annual trip for select student leaders to experience the arts and culture of NYC and meet arts professionals. The two directors, Dara Meyers-Kingsley and Kristin Baker, met at the annual AAHE conference and collaborated to bring the idea of the roundtable with student leaders to life. Our goal was to facilitate a free exchange of ideas by having our most active students share their insights on building an arts community.
Photo by Hunter Arts Ambassador Sabrina Song
As the Communications and Outreach Coordinator for the Office of the Arts at Hunter, I relished the chance to hear directly from students about their successes and challenges. It was exciting to hear from students from both schools discuss the programs they were most passionate about: outings to performances & museums, student-led productions, and mentorship programs. Since Hunter invited students nominated by faculty in all our arts disciplines, I was pleasantly surprised to hear about arts experiences I hadn’t been aware of even at our own school.
Photo by Hunter Arts Ambassador Sabrina Song
One of the struggles of operating a small office within a larger University is the lack of feedback from colleagues. While we frequently collaborate with faculty and staff in the arts departments and other offices, the work we do differs from the curricular programs. We reach our student body through a combination of newsletters, social media, and physical presence at tabling events. In an effort to build our student base, we launched an Arts Ambassadors program in August 2017 following the model of fellow AAHE member schools and with the support of our Presidential Initiative for Student Engagement. This program has exponentially increased our ability to engage students, and our ambassadors were among our standout student leaders who provided insightful feedback and captured the event in photos & video.
Photo by Hunter Arts Ambassador Sabrina Song
Throughout the conversation it was clear that both schools shared similar strengths and challenges. While being located in a thriving arts city offers tremendous advantages, commuter schools face a greater difficulty when it comes to engaging students in extracurricular activities and access to space. We all do our best to work with our challenges, and everyone has them, but those struggles are eclipsed by the joy of working with students and colleagues who are driven, talented, and believe passionately that arts and education are vital for everyone.
The discussion helped me to sharpen my focus on three primary ways to implement what we learned:
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- Maximize student-driven projects. I was inspired by Hunter’s Arts Ambassadors and Techterns who volunteer their time to share their passion for the arts while gaining valuable skills in the process, as well as Suffolk’s “Instaram” social media team and the active performing arts students who program and spread the word about their performances. I have since reshaped our social media strategy for @artsathunter to include more student-driven content and doubled our engagement; created opportunities for students to program their own work on campus (like our Winter Arts Festival & Art of Protest Exhibition); and retooled our Go with OOA series to empower Arts Ambassadors to act as hosts bringing fellow students to arts exhibitions and performances throughout New York City and sharing the experience in our Instagram stories.
- Engage students prior to the start of the fall semester. One of the most exciting programs I learned about from Suffolk Performing Arts was their three-day extended orientation program for students interested in the arts prior to the start of the fall semester. This created a bonding experience for new students seeking a community, introduced them to the Boston arts scene and gave them opportunities for peer mentorship from the older students. This year, we beefed up our pre-college presence by engaging students in a collaborative vision board art project during our Hunter Hawk Day orientation event coordinated by our Admissions team; speaking to students at our Scholar Programs Orientation; and offering an “Arts Near Hunter” scavenger hunt to introduce our nearby Cultural Partners to our incoming students.
- Create more opportunities for interdisciplinary/intercollegiate conversation. This idea has been built into the DNA of the Office of the Arts from the beginning: We strive to provide access to all of the arts for all of our students. To that end, we communicate with the arts departments and offices in addition to outside Cultural Partners in multiple arts disciplines. However, this kind of larger gathering provides an exciting cross-pollination of ideas that differs from one-on-one conversation. We are planning to implement more ways to foster interdisciplinary discussion among our students and faculty by programming a Hunter Arts Gala to honor student leaders across arts disciplines and provide an opportunity for students, staff, and faculty in the Hunter arts community to gather and share updates. We are also planning more roundtable discussions with AAHE partner schools as well as a regional conference modeled after the national AAHE conference.
At the end of our roundtable, the Suffolk University team very generously offered tickets to Arts Ambassadors to join them at The Lifespan of a Fact on Broadway. Thanks, Suffolk Performing Arts!
Click here for a video of the event created by Hunter College Arts Ambassador Sabrina Song