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.
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.
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.
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 nnoproftit 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 FleX Pass ticket, and creating what would become the League of Chicago Theatre’s (LCT) co-op ad program. At Pegaus, Tom created the Chicago Youg Playwrights Festival, which is heading into its 39th season! In 1991 Tom woked 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 unprecidented grassroots organizing in Septmber 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, cretivity, 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.