Arlene Speaks!
Arlene is an exciting speaker who connects deeply with the hearts and minds of her audiences. For more than three decades, she’s been an activist of profound insight and large vision, with a talent for inspiring, thought-provoking speech. With deep experience in group dynamics, strategic planning, and cultural development, Arlene has inspired people to open their eyes to new ways of seeing and thinking about the world around us.
In her three-day visit to Philadelphia, Arlene was able to bring together a disparate group of people involved with community arts throughout the city—community leaders, artists, students, university faculty and administrators—and help to move us toward a common vision and strategies for cooperative work. With generosity, wisdom, and a wealth of practical knowledge, she listened, spoke, and mediated among all of us, tireless in her embrace of the whole community. Arlene embodies compassionate and powerful leadership as a community cultural worker.
Tyler School of the Art, Temple University, Philadelphia
Arlene Goldbard’s keynote address, workshop and one-on-one consultations profoundly affected participants at the National Guild’s 2006 Conference for Community Arts Education, helping them reconnect with their passion for their work. One participant wrote “Arlene’s session and key note address were the highlight of the conference. They caused me to pause, take personal inventory, reflect, and renew my commitment…” Another shared that “Arlene was accessible, smart, feeling, direct and nurturing. She helped people to get in touch with the why of their work and re-envision it in an empowering way.” By reflecting on community arts education as spiritual practice, Arlene unleashed our members’ energy and enthusiasm, which surely made a difference upon their return home.
National Guild of Community Schools of the Arts
When I think of insightful, articulate individuals for speaking engagements or important deliberations, I always think of Arlene Goldbard. Flawlessly articulate and well-read, Arlene consistently has made important contributions to our work.
When you are ready to push members of a group beyond their current mental envelopes, it is probably time for them to hear from Arlene Goldbard. Arlene brings a wealth of experiences and accomplishments to presentations that challenge and enrich thinking.
I have seen people infuriated, confirmed, mentally stirred, and challenged by the presentations of Arlene Goldbard. I have never seen them bored, disappointed, confused or patronized. Arlene is a talented speaker who never fails to leave an audience with something serious to think about — something basic to reconsider.
Western States Arts Foundation
Arlene is known for giving 200 percent, working closely with sponsors to be sure that her presentations speak to their specific needs and audiences, and making herself available for ancillary activities that help to advance the sponsoring organization’s mission. At universities, when she’s not at the lectern, she’s helping groups of students and faculty to go more deeply into the issues, focusing on what’s most relevant and important for the people involved. She’s always glad to provide any host group with concrete advice about how to make the most of her presentation following her visit.
Your talk cracked open so many doors for so many people. Everybody at the event walked out with this awesome little seed, this little secret power we have in our pockets inspired by the way you weave all these stories together. I am so grateful our students, myself, and others are able to be awakened to your insight. Thank you so hugely!
Experimental Performance Institute,
New College of California
Arlene was one of the most incisive, passionate, and provocative guests in our Distinguished Speaker series. Certainly, she was the most generous and tireless - she spoke with our students informally all day along, addressing their questions with deep consideration. She left us all inspired and poised to act.
Performance as Public Practice, Theatre & Dance Program
University of Texas, Austin
Sample Topics
The Art of Community Cultural Development
For decades, artists have worked for pluralism, participation and democracy in community cultural life, offering their gifts to support a community’s emancipation. Using theater, oral history, visual arts, film, music, dance and digital media, community members are helped to tell their own stories, preserving legacies and making their case to the wider world. Drawing on examples from her book New Creative Community: The Art of Cultural Development, Arlene portrays the history, influences, methods, ethics and current conditions of this burgeoning field.
Everything You Wanted to Know About Cultural Policy
Widely known as an expert in cultural policy, Arlene offers an uniquely incisive, commonsense take on the development of American cultural policy. She never fails to inspire, ignite, and enable listeners to understand this fascinating, complex policy arena.
Community, Culture and Globalization
The processes of globalization are dynamic and differential, at once creating transnational markets and endangering traditional cultures. Around the world, community artists use creative expression to help threatened communities stand for cultural rights and self-determination. Drawing on examples from the Rockefeller Foundation study she co-authored, Arlene demonstrates how, in the new global reality, art can be a matter of life and death.
Leading With Your Best Self
To lead others with heart and integrity, we must first learn to lead ourselves. People who work in the arts know a great deal about the power of imagination and creativity, about how much these powers are needed for social healing and growth. They are also needed to develop remarkable individual leadership: reconnecting to our deepest imaginative and creative energies transforms competent leadership into brilliance. Participants in this workshop re-encounter their best selves in aid of understanding how they can lead from there.
Refreshing Your Vision
Arts activists sometimes get advocacy fatigue: how to summon the energy to make the case one more time to people who don’t seem to be listening? This workshop offers fresh, new ways to look at your work, energizing your creativity and sense of mission.
Ethics of Community Arts Practice
As more and more artists get involved in the exciting field of community cultural development, they encounter the unique ethical challenges of participatory arts practice. How is it possible to balance the commitment to a funder or sponsoring organization with commitments to community participants? Is the community artist’s role to channel others’ creativity without intruding, or should the artist’s own aesthetics, values, and priorities be part of the mix? How do you handle censorship, conflict, disruption? Arlene’s advice is based on decades of experience with practitioners and their real-world challenges.
Toward Integral Organizations
When people want to change the world, they form organizations, pledging allegiance to a slew of honorable values: inclusion, participation, empowerment, diversity, transparency and free expression, among others. But all too often, the challenge of translating these values into practice is too much to bear. People end up feeling demoralized, mired in unproductive process rather than where they’d hoped to be, navigating their way to solid accomplishment. In 28 years of providing advice and counsel to organizations, Arlene has learned how structure sustains organization: like the elements of an ecological system or the parts of a body, organizations need principles that govern communication, cooperation and power-sharing. Learn how to focus and conserve energy, increasing effectiveness by shaping integral organizations.
Current Readings and Appearances
