The 100K Project is just getting started! We are building a team of arts and civic leaders to guide this work. Our Steering Committee is in formation. You can make a tax-deductible donation via our fiscal agent, Fractured Atlas!
Loretta Brockmeier has spent decades working in not-for-profit cultural organizations in local, state and national settings. These entities included public school systems, public arts organizations, museums, state arts agencies and national service organizations. Her work involved fieldwork-based projects in ranching, citrus, farming, Ukrainian culture, Latino culture, traditional music and crafts, the cigar industry, Native American cultures, African American history and culture and others in several states. This work resulted in, among other things; museum exhibits, audio visual programs, education programs, conferences, a curriculum book and folk festivals. Loretta wrote, managed and directed grants in support of this work on local, state and national levels. For eleven years, she directed the Ethnic and Folk Arts Programs at the Illinois Arts Council. She says “One of the tremendous benefits to this work was witnessing the power of culture to provide understanding to the way in which culture provides balance in heart, mind and spirit and makes each person a true human being. We lose this at our peril.”
Matthew Brockmeier was the Executive Director of the Chicago Music Alliance and was deeply involved in the Chicago performing arts community’s efforts to save the National Endowment for the Arts in the early 1990’s. The center of his work over time has been community, whether physical community, virtual community, or communities of interest. In all of these settings, the framing of issues and advocacy have been compelling concerns. He says: “Along the way I have served as a leader in a range of nonprofit organizations, as an instructor in nonprofit management for undergraduates, as parliamentarian for regional church bodies, and as an elected official. This has included leadership roles with Chicago Dance and Music Alliance, the Illinois Coalition for Music Education, the Fine Arts Ticketing Consortium (Chicago), Community Support Services (Brookfield, IL), the Cedarburg Cultural Center (WI), the Village of Random Lake (WI), the Greater Milwaukee Synod of the ELCA, and Natya Dance Theatre (Chicago). This road has included rewarding challenges, like advocacy for the arts, music education, and human services; disappointing challenges, like other rounds of advocacy; and fun stuff, like presenting Guitar Shorty, The Nylons, CJ Chenier, and the Glenn Miller Orchestra. We cannot afford to lose sight of the fun stuff, but we also need to recognize that we inhabit a serious moment. Finding ways to promote and protect the things that are worthwhile, actually, that are essential, is this moment’s centerpiece.”
Quanice G. Floyd (she/her) is a renaissance woman who wears many capes. Born and raised in NYC, she has spent over a decade in Washington, DC where she has received her Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees in Music Education from Howard University and Kent State University respectively. Her passion for arts administration led her to pursue her second Master’s degree in Arts Management at American University and is a Doctor of Education from Drexel University. Quanice was appointed as the Executive Director of National Guild for Community Arts Education in 2022 after previously serving as the Executive Director at Arts Education in Maryland Schools Alliance, an arts education advocacy and service organization. She is also the Co-Founder of the Arts Administrators of Color (AAC) Network, an organization committed to empowering artists and arts administrators by advocating for access, diversity, inclusion, and equity in the arts in the DC and Baltimore metropolitan areas. She has also been a public-school music educator where she taught elementary and middle school general music, chorus, band, and orchestra. Quanice serves as a commissioner for the DC Commission for the Arts and Humanities and is an alumna of Fractured Atlas’ Artist Campaign School, the National Guild for Community Arts Education’s Leadership Institute (CAELI), ArtEquity’s Racial Facilitator Cohort, Baltimore Symphony Orchestra’s Music Educators and Arts Administrators Academy, 4.0 Schools’ Essentials Program, and the Arts Education Collaborative’s Leadership Academy. Quanice received the Americans for the Arts’ American Express Emerging Leader Award and the Arts Advocate of the Year Award from the Coalition of African Americans in the Performing Arts.
John R. Killacky served two terms in the Vermont House of Representatives. Previously he was executive director of Flynn Center for the Performing Arts, program officer for arts and culture at San Francisco Foundation, executive director of Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, and curator of performing arts for Walker Art Center. Other past positions include program officer at Pew Charitable Trusts, general manager of PepsiCo SUMMERFARE, and managing director of the Trisha Brown and Laura Dean dance companies. He received the First Bank Award Sally Ordway Irvine Award in Artistic Vision, William Dawson Award for Programming Excellence from the Association of Performing Arts Presenters, Dance USA’s Ernie Award as an unsung hero, Fan Taylor Distinguished Service Award for Exemplary Service to the Field of Professional Presenting, and Vermont Arts Council’s Kannenstine Award for Arts Advocacy. He curated a retrospective photography exhibition, Dona Ann McAdams: Performative Acts, that toured to five venues in Vermont (2019-2021). As an artist, he was in residence at Champlain College Art Gallery, co-curating FluxFest (2023) and at Fabric Workshop and Museum (2024). He co-edited the Lambda Literary Award-winning anthology, Queer Crips: Disabled Gay Men and Their Stories and published a compilation of his writing, because art: commentary, critique, & conversation.
Angela Meleca has led and shaped public policy, funding access, and sector transformation. From 2020–2023, she led a coalition that secured $160.7 million in state funding for Ohio’s nonprofit arts organizations—preserving thousands of jobs and reshaping advocacy for the creative economy. As founder of Meleca Creative Advisors, Angela helps Arts CEOs, advocates, and creative leaders reframe their relevance and build measurable, meaningful impact strategies. She is also the host of the ARTS Redefined podcast, adjunct faculty at Miami University, and a national speaker on data-driven storytelling, arts entrepreneurship, and cross-sector innovation. She asks us: “Does the arts sector need a new playbook?” She continues “The arts have been undervalued, misunderstood, and underfunded for too long. We’re changing that. I help arts leaders, funders, and CEOs move beyond outdated advocacy—and adopt a data-driven strategy that secures long-term funding, drives policy influence, and proves the arts’ public value. Through the Collaborative Arts Impact Initiative, I equip organizations with real-time tools to measure transformational outcomes—empathy, creativity, belonging, resilience—and translate those into ROI for funders and investors.” Listen to Angela’s “ARTS Redefined” podcast.
For the last twenty-eight years Lois Saperstein has worked to raise awareness of the impact and power of the arts, forming the nonprofit, Center For The Arts: Creativity, Experience, Empowerment to create, develop and facilitate arts programs with youth and communities at risk across the USA, as well as women’s workshops on creativity and using the arts as a health and wellness tool. Through this nonprofit Lois had created the first business partnership with the School of Social Work at Rutgers University to create The Breaking Down The Walls: Reaching Youth and Communities at Risk Through The Arts National Conference and the Arts IN Prevention Certificate Program to train social workers and artists in using the arts for violence and substance abuse prevention in communities, schools and youth facilities. These programs lasted for ten years. Lois has created many different arts programs still in use today, state initiatives on Arts and Health, presented at conferences and written articles. She has created several campaigns to raise awareness of the power and impact of the arts, such as Can You Imagine A World Without the Arts, The Arts Make America Great and Voice Arts Value. She is working to build out the ArtsHouse Project – “a national museum/center celebrating the arts: organizations, programs, projects and artists. Educating, raising awareness, and dialogues to the public on the impact and power of the arts and health and wellness, arts education, arts in communities across this country and around the world, arts in society, social justice, equality, politics, science, climate change, the economy, arts as building world-wide cultural bridges.” Her work affirms “The arts do the public good.”
Born and Raised in Ireland, Gully Stanford came to Canada in 1970 and entered the United States in 1974, becoming a citizen in 1985. With a background in classical studies, he spent 35 years in the performing arts, from Stagehand to Managing Director, most recently as Public Affairs Director and Associate Vice-President of the Denver Center for the Performing Arts 1981-2003. From January 2004 to June 2014 he served the post-secondary aspirations of Colorado’s students at the Colorado Department of Higher Education, first as Director of Colorado GEAR UP and subsequently as Director of Partnerships at College In Colorado and P-20 Alignment Director for the Department.
Career highlights include assisting on campaigns to create the Scientific and Cultural Facilities District in Metro Denver and Amendment 23 (funding for P-12 public education), helping pass Colorado’s first Adult Literacy bill, helping to protect bi-lingual education, one term on the Colorado State Board of Education and a year on the Colorado Commission on Higher Education. Gully is married to former DCPA Executive Vice-President Dorothy Denny: they have 4 children, two daughters Genevieve (BA Edinburgh 1999, Richmond, Surrey) and Emily (BA Syracuse 2008 summa cum laude Phi Beta Kappa, Andover Mass) and two sons, Cormac (BA Bristol 2002, Ewell, Surrey) and John (BA William and Mary 2010, M.A. Arizona State, Charlotte NC) and 10 grandchildren. Gully and Dorothy, a New York native, both retired in June 2014, and relocated to the Hudson Valley. Gully served on the NY Regents Blue Ribbon Commission on Arts Pathways to Graduation, as well as volunteering for Arts Mid-Hudson (Advisory Board), the Poughkeepsie City School District and the Dutchess County Medical Reserve Corps. In 2018 he was appointed to the Dutchess County Youth Board Coordinating Council and in 2019 was appointed co-chair of the county’s Path to Promise Implementation Committee. Elected to Dutchess County BOCES Board of Education, April 2020, he was appointed Vice-President in July 2023. He serves as membership chair of the New York State Alliance for Arts Education.
george emilio sanchez is a writer, performer, educator and advocate for indigenous rights and sovereignty, and was a nominee for the 2025 United States Artist Fellowship. Currently, sanchez is touring the U.S. with his most recent collaborative performance titled, In the Court of the Conqueror, a collaborative performance work created with visual artist, Patty Ortiz. This new work premiered at Abrons Arts Center in New York City, and has since toured to 6 states between 2022 and 2024. This performance will be presented at La MaMa Theater in December 2024, and at Virginia Tech in April 2025. This piece focuses on the 200 year-old history of Supreme Court rulings that have diminished, diluted and rarely upheld the tribal sovereignty of the Native Nations of Indian Country, while also navigating the generational trauma of being raised in an Ecuadorian immigrant household in Orange County, California and the embedded bias towards indigenous peoples. Subsequent to the premiere of this work in 2022, sanchez and Ortiz collaborated on two more performance projects. The first was an outdoor performance titled, sitting on a park bench while unlocking the cages of captivity, which was performed on Indigenous Peoples Day in Columbus Park in Brooklyn. The second is only the imagination can unlock the cages of captivity. A work-in-progress showing was presented at LATEA this past March, and a completed performance will be presented there in January or February 2024. sanchez initiated the performance series called “Performing the Constitution” with XIV, which premiered at Dixon Place in New York City in June 2019. This solo work revolved around a 1946 Appellate Court case, Mendez v. Westminster (1946), that involved 5 Mexican families who sued the local school district in Orange County, California for its segregation policy that did not accept Mexican students into public schools. This case took place 8 years before Brown v. Board of Education (1954). Buried Up To My Neck While Thinking Outside The Box, premiered at Dixon Place in 2009, and was remounted as a 6-hour outdoor installation in 2015 produced by El Museo del Barrio. In 2002 sanchez wrote and performed in Rosa that was commissioned by Dixon Place in a solo work that addressed the tragedy of the attack on the World Trade Center in 2001. His first two solo performances, Chief Half-Breed in the Land of Nepantla, and LATINDIO, were produced by, and presented at Dance Theater Workshop (New York Live Arts) in 1992 and 1994. Chief Half-Breed in the land of Nepantla was also included in George C. Wolfe’s Mo’ Madness festival of solo works at the Public Theater in 1992.He is the Performance Director of Emergenyc and has directed this program that explores the intersection of arts and activism for 15 years. From 2017-2022 he served as a Social Practice Artist-in-Residence at Abrons Arts Center. From 2020-2023 he served as the chair of the Board for the Brooklyn Arts Exchange. He has also served as a mentor for The Shed’s Open Call performance series from its inception, and continues to work as a facilitator for the Posse Foundation working in over 30 universities and colleges since 2008. He teaches at the City University of New York’s College of Staten Island and sits on the Executive Council of the Professional Staff Congress, the union for faculty and staff for the City University of New York. During the Covid lockdown he completed a Masters in Legal Studies in Indigenous Peoples’ Law program at the University of Oklahoma as part of his “artistic research” for In the Court of the Conqueror. He is the recipient of a Fulbright Scholarship to Peru in 1994 and two New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowships (1993 & 1997), and in 2021 was named the inaugural recipient of the Keith Haring Fellowship in Arts and Activism by The MacDowell.
Tom Tresser is a civic educator and public defender based in Chicago. He has over 50 years experience in public life, with his first voter registration campaign was in 1971. He has started or led 14 nonprofit enterprises in the arts, community development, and civic engagement. Tom has a Master’s Degree in Urban Development from Spertus College. He was a Shakespearean actor and co-founded The Free Shakespeare Company in Chicago in 1981. He served as the Managing Director at Pegasus Players from 1985 through 1990 and was one of the most successful Off-Loop producers in recent history – taking the theater’s subscription base from 220 to over 1,500, twice running three shows at once, creating the FlexPass ticket, and creating what would become the League of Chicago Theatre’s (LCT) co-op ad program. At Pegasus, Tom created the Chicago Young Playwrights Festival, which is heading into its 39th season! In 1991 Tom worked for the LCT as an organizer coordinating the performing arts community’s campaign to save the National Endowment for the Arts. He wrote his first op-ed urging creative workers to lead in public life in December of 1991. In 2009 he was a leader of the No Games Chicago campaign that spiked Chicago’s bid for the 2016 Summer Olympics. Routledge Press published Tom’s account of that unprecedented grassroots organizing in September of 2024. In 2013 Tom co-founded the CivicLab in Chicago’s West Loop as America’s first co-working and maker space dedicated to civic engagement and social justice. In 2013 he founded The TIF Illumination Project that uses data mining, investigatory reporting, graphic design, and popular education methods to explore and explain the hyper-local impacts of Tax Increment Financing Districts on our communities. Tom has taught civic engagement, public policy, community organizing, creativity, nonprofit management, and leadership at six local universities. He has done over 300 public meetings and countless training workshops in front of over 20,000 people. Download his training offerings. You can check out his writing for his Substack email newsletter “CivicNotes,” his current work for The Nonprofit Quarterly and more here.