Items tagged with "membership"

Four decades ago, in a Whitesburg, Kentucky storefront that once held a “tire supermarket,” Herb E. Smith, a seventeen-year-old member of the Appalachian Film Workshop—Appalshop, for short—learned to work the 16-millimeter Arriflex-S camera.

Capacity means the ability to accomplish, change, remodel, or act on something that is a necessity, but often invisible because it is part of the operations or architecture of an organization. Since nonprofits must focus so intently on the work that becomes their public face, they do not have an easy ability to re-engineer the infrastructure hidden below. Since 1999, NAMAC has offered modest capacity building grants -- much like capital infusions to either start or complete a much-needed home improvement project.

In June 2004 Film Arts completed its groundbreaking Member2Member appeal, raising $40,700 from over 400 members. This member-driven appeal re-connected Film Arts with our community and its core values and raised six times more money than Film Arts’ regular direct mail appeals. It is also our first fundraiser using email, with 16% of all gifts arriving via the Web. With the exception of a $10,000 matching gift from Board Chair Henry Rosenthal, no gift was larger than $500 – truly a grassroots effort.

 

“Mapping the Media Arts Field” is a NAMAC research project that sets out to accomplish something long overdue—create a baseline assessment of the media arts nationwide. The project is critical to field-wide planning and to the long-term health and viability of our field. It is designed to capture empirical data about the field and to assess our economic, community, and creative indicators.

In 2004 NAMAC conducted four regional think tank discussions with media arts leaders in Atlanta, Georgia; Albany, New York; Columbus, Ohio and Lincoln, Nebraska. Representatives from a total of twenty-eight cities, eight states (including Tennessee, N. Carolina, Oklahoma and Kentucky) and sixty-six organizations were involved in thinking together about the direction of the media arts field. The think tank discussions also served to strengthen relationships and provide feedback to help NAMAC assess its services to the field.

In the fall and winter of 2003, NAMAC conducted think-tank discussions with media arts leaders in the Boston metropolitan area and the triangle area of North Carolina, including Chapel Hill, Durham, Wilmington, and Asheville. NAMAC sought to engage organizations in thinking together about the direction of the independent media field, to strengthen relationships among participating groups, and to generate information to help assess NAMAC s service to the field.

In the fall of 2002, the National Alliance for Media Arts and Culture (NAMAC) collaborated with the Association of Independent Video and Filmmakers (AIVF) to present the Media Arts Environmental Scanning Tour of Regional Organizations (MAESTRO). With support from the National Endowment for the Arts, MAESTRO celebrated the media arts and encouraged connections among regional media arts organizations through a series of screenings, workshops and discussions in San Diego, Denver and Chicago.

Last year we asked NAMAC collaborator Paula Manley to design and facilitate a series of think tank discussions with staff leaders in the media arts. We undertook the project as a way to aid NAMAC in evolving its programs and services based on the experiences and needs of independent media organizations in the field. Paula's compiled findings are presented here for MAIN readers.