In just two days my Houston arts experience has completely changed. Last week I emailed http://www.diverseworks.org/ offering pro bono assistance in arts management following Hurricane Rita. Executive Director Sara Kellner immediately contacted me to say that she would be interested to see how we could possibly work together.
Now I’m helping with their http://www.artsmarketing.org/ National Arts Marketing new audience development plan and feel like I’m instantly learning about the progressive arts in Houston. At a focus group today I had the pleasure of meeting several artists and arts managers and was blown away by how candid, positive and friendly everyone was. In fact, I have already received emails from two folks and we’ve setup times to get together and talk arts as well as life in Houston.
The next challenge is to make sure that I don’t overload my schedule with volunteering as I did in San Francisco at times. Since I don’t have a car and am getting around by foot, bike and lightrail this will hopefully force me to keep my meetings to a minimum - in other words, just two per day instead of four. Working for myself means balancing time in meetings with actually getting work done.
Looks like this weekend I’ll take some of my car sale money and put it into organizing my office. Not too messy but I have this bad habit of piling things on stuff with dirty plates in the mix.
