Collaborated with a group of South Dakota professionals working to create a performing arts organization celebrating the work of Shakespeare and the vibrant opportunity that theater can provide to our society.
I served as the Founding President of the organization for 2 years, working to support the work of the fantastic Chaya Gordon-Bland.
The mission of the South Dakota Shakespeare Festival is to engage, connect, and inspire communities by exploring our shared human experiences through inclusive, professional Shakespeare productions and theatre arts education.
Co-Founder of the Home Starts Here Podcast
Listen today at:
https://extension.sdstate.edu/home-starts-here
SDSU Extension’s Home Starts Here podcast seeks out the individuals, businesses, and ideas that are sparking vibrant communities in South Dakota. Each month, our community vitality field specialists visit with rural changemakers about their ‘why’ and the challenges they face as they transform ideas into action.
For three days, the big tent made its home in Freeman — a modern-day Chautauqua revival was afoot.
The three days featured a wide variety of entertainment, activities, public forums, and dialogue with leaders in the agriculture, biotech, and cultural sectors.
What is a Chautauqua?
“Chautauqua” was a cultural and social movement that started in upstate New York in the 1870s and flourished until the mid 1920s. During this time, hundreds of touring chautauquas presented lectures, dance, music, drama, and other forms of “cultural enrichment”. In rural America, big tents served as temporary theaters for these productions. Lectures by author Mark Twain, suffragette Susan B. Anthony, or a production of “The Tale of Two Cities” are the kinds of entertainment one could expect at a chautauqua show. The Chautauqua Institution still thrives in Chautauqua, New York.
Sessions included:
1. community arts and heritage coordination and its role in community sustainability
2. biotechnology in the present and future;
3. Judicial Voices oral history project,
4. . job services essential for workforce success
5. An update session of the Freeman Arts/Earth Center
6. Refugee resettlement challenges and practices in South Dakota
and
7. the Dakota Rising rural road show.
The Freeman Education and Research, Freeman Community Foundation, Freeman Community Development Corporation, "Faith in Public Life" grant program and the National Endowment for the Arts "Our Town" grant.
Press:
https://www.yankton.net/community/article_83b70ae6-727d-11e7-a5da-9f6a6211b83a.html?mode=jqm