Dear Affiliates,
We’ve returned to the office and are getting back to normal after Hurricane Sandy left us without power for a week. We’re grateful that none of our staff experienced substantial damage and are conscious that there are students, teachers and schools in this area that, unfortunately, have suffered far worse. Thank you for your support and patience during the disruption.
Just before the Hurricane hit, we finished the last stop on our marathon of travel for the Mega-Region meetings. Since mid-September, we hosted these meetings in New York, Detroit, Albuquerque, Atlanta and Portland, and we had the immensely valuable opportunity to talk with more than a third of the network in person.
Thanks so much to all of you who attended, and special thanks to our generous hosts. A summary of the meetings will be posted in Robbie’s Room within the next couple of weeks, and we will be following up more specifically on some of the strategic planning issues discussed at the meetings.
The regional meetings were shoehorned between three days of National Student Poet events in DC, the opening of the Art.Write.Now exhibition at Detroit’s College of Creative Studies and the exhibition opening at the Department of Education and Presidents Committee on the Arts & The Humanities. Our partners at the U.S. Department of Education posted a blog about the opening activities, which tells the story wonderfully and includes some great pictures. That event has grown substantially over the past few years, and we were honored to welcome students, teachers and families from up and down the east coast and also from Nebraska, Arizona, California, Michigan, Texas, Colorado, and Oregon.
Joining us from the U.S. Department of Education were Jim Shelton, the Assistant Secretary for Innovation and Improvement, and Martha Kanter, Undersecretary of Education.
Office of Innovation and Improvement’s: Martha Kanter’s blog
http://www.ed.gov/oii-news/artwritenowdc-201213
US Dept of Ed’s blog: From the student perspective
http://www.ed.gov/blog/2012/10/student-art-transforms-lives-and-ed/
These are busy days at the Alliance. We just placed an order for 40,000 teacher pins, we’re recruiting jurors, finalizing our annual appeal, planning a fundraising event in January, and working on national events at Parsons and Carnegie Hall. National events are always heartwarming and exciting – it’s hard to top Meryl Streep! – but we do expect this year to be special, and we’re going to pull out the stops in honor of our 90th anniversary.
We’re planning our presence at next week’s National Writing Project/NCTE conference in Las Vegas and lining up speakers for the NAEA conference in Fort Worth in April.
Our new website offers improved opportunities to address issues that students and teachers face when they prepare their submissions, so we’re going to post a series of short videos; the first will be about how to photograph artwork, and it will “star” Awards’ alum and Scholastic’s head of photo services Steve Diamond. We’ll follow that with one about how to pack artwork. We got a lot of useful feedback on the road, and we heard that these videos would be helpful, so we’re happy to get them underway.
And to help us through these busy times, we’re thrilled to announce that we’ve just hired the new Manager, Affiliate Services – Jermaine Harmon. Jermaine went through an intensive interview process, including one interview with the Chair of the Affiliate Advisory Council, and the overwhelming consensus was that he is highly qualified to provide exceptional customer service to you and is deeply passionate about and committed to the mission of the Alliance – over the long-term. Jermaine’s first day at the Alliance was scheduled the week of the Hurricane, and we were happy to welcome him when the office re-opened this week.
Please watch for more detailed communications from us related to pressing administrative items, particularly rescheduled tech trainings. We know that many of you are counting on those and they’ll be back on the calendar very soon. Again, thank you for your patience as our staff navigates the consequences of the Hurricane.
Please be in touch with questions and feedback, and thank you as always for your partnership and support.
Best regards,
Virginia McEnerney
Executive Director, Alliance for Young Artists & Writers
