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ACM Turns 10

acm_logo_full_smallerI had a grant deadline recently for my organization Access Contemporary Music and I was including the proof of our non-profit status as I’ve done so many times before but this time I actually glanced at it and saw that we had received our official status, and incorporated, almost exactly ten years ago.

In effect, we forgot our own birthday. And such a milestone too! We had been active under the name before 2004 but once we incorporated and got non profit statues was when things really started to move. Our concert season came shortly afterward, the first school in 2007 and the composer membership program in 2010 and now we’re bringing our more successful initiatives to other cities and looking to continue to grow from there.

The best thing for me personally is that we finally have infrastructure. For nearly ten years I was running all of our programs myself and everyone was telling me to delegate but it’s hard to do with volunteers. Once I had staff and was able to effectively delegate the organization really took off.

I think now that the biggest mistake I made early on was this lack of delegation. I always felt so guilty asking people to do things for which I couldn’t pay them. I completely neglected to remember that giving them ownership over a project is a great motivator, that it’s not so much asking them to work for free as to give them a way to express their support for the organization.

If I had been better at motivating volunteers and hadn’t always felt reluctant to ask people to do things I think we’d be further along but there’s no sense in dwelling on that. This is definitely something I now share with young arts leader. Now I have to get good at asking for money!

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