Great pandemic education rewards for local arts agency

by Len Lear
Posted 10/8/20

In April 2019, Whitemarsh Art Center at 100 Cedar Grove Rd. in Conshohocken hired Hadley Yates as a consultant to help market the organization to corporations and funders and to help obtain grants. …

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Great pandemic education rewards for local arts agency

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In April 2019, Whitemarsh Art Center at 100 Cedar Grove Rd. in Conshohocken hired Hadley Yates as a consultant to help market the organization to corporations and funders and to help obtain grants. When the former Executive Director, Ronaldo Ribeiro, gave his notice he was leaving, the Whitemarsh Art Center board approached Yates about taking over the role. She started out as Interim Executive Director in January of this year and was voted in as Executive Director at the annual membership and board meeting in June.

Needless to say, running an arts organization in the time of Covid-19, when the public cannot even visit, is like trying to hit a home run without a baseball bat. But Yates, 38, originally from Albuquerque, New Mexico, is used to difficult challenges. One of her former jobs was as Assistant Project Director role with an organization called Amigos de Las Americas (AMIGOS) in Paraguay.

In the summer of 1999, her first of four summers with AMIGOS, she worked to rebuild a rural Honduran village after Hurricane Mitch. She teamed up with Save the Children on community health and sanitation projects such as building water filtration systems. “During that summer,” she explained, “I saw how if you asked kids about their experiences with the hurricane that wiped out their village, they’d stare at you silent and scared with few words. But if you gave them markers and asked them to draw their experience, they were quite expressive.”

When Yates took over her newest role this year at Whitemarsh Art Center, “I thought my principal challenge alongside directing day-to-day operations would be raising $1-2 million to build new art center facilities; the clock is ticking to fulfill the next terms of a $500,000 RACP (Redevelopment Assistance Capital Program, a Commonwealth grant program) grant the organization was awarded in 2018.

“However, two months after I started, when I’d only recently acclimated to the challenges of our regular programming schedule, the pandemic struck, and we canceled in-person classes. There was talk of temporarily shuttering the center, but ultimately we decided to test the waters of online education — with great reward.

“It was inevitable that I’d grow closer to the instructors as time went on but, surprisingly the variables of online education have expedited that process. I’m often 'spotlighting' or switching palette vs. painting camera views in real-time for their Zoom classes and editing their tutorial videos. Hence, I’ve more quickly learned about our online instructors’ teaching styles and preferences. Via Zoom, I’m 'in their homes' many times a week.

“Sometimes cats walk in front of cameras, students show us their backyard chickens, one student even serenades us with his guitar as people are logging on. There are complexities intrinsic to this type of remote education but also wonderful textures we would not get in standard in-person classes.”

Yates' role has changed radically because of the pandemic. In addition to applying for grants, organizing events, overseeing courses and building updates, she has now edited over 20 online tutorial videos, created dozens of graphics for marketing campaigns and managed live camera angles for online classes. It’s often a 12-plus hour workday fueled by ample coffee, humorous teachers and the determination to overcome the pandemic.

According to Dan Zuena, President of the art center's board of directors, “Hadley has become the backbone of the art center and the mastermind behind our online expansion. Her quick thinking, hard work and experience are leading us through the chaos of the COVID-19 pandemic."

Yates has concluded over the past six months that arts organizations can play a significant role during a period of great stress. “I’ve read studies which indicate that observing and creating art reduces the stress hormone cortisol,” she told us. “At the onset of emotional difficulty, many people look to the arts to help release and sort out their feelings … Arts organizations are vital assets that must play a role in our collective processing and healing both during and after the pandemic.

“To fundraise and survive, art centers like our own must recognize, implement and emphasize how they can offer a sense of community during this time — not just arts education. During required physical social isolation, camaraderie and students lingering around to converse before and after an online class is just as important as the course itself.”

For more information, visit whitemarsh.org. Len Lear can be reached at lenlear@chestnuthilllocal.com