Volunteer Community Teams

Heights Arts has a long history of inviting the community to share their passion and expertise to help the Organization develop and present its public programming. Three ongoing Volunteer Community Teams are charged with facilitating the strategies and action plans for Heights Arts core programming in the literary, musical and visual arts disciplines.

PURPOSE:

The purpose of Heights Arts’ community teams is to expand community engagement in developing and presenting the programs of the organization and to tap the significant expertise that resides in our community. We invite poets, musicians, artists, and other members of the community to work with us to select and showcase the region’s visual artists, poets and musicians in our literary, musical, and exhibition programming. Members of our community teams work together with staff over five-year terms, to select the Poet Laureate every two years, choose poets for our Ekphrastacy (artists talk and poets respond) series, the annual Haiku Death Match, musicians for our gallery series, and to curate and install our exhibitions.

To be clear, our Community Program Teams are not intended as a means for artists to showcase their own work, though sometimes team members who are artists do present work through Heights Arts. The exhibition community team in particular actively recruits working artists, so the issue will arise of how to handle situations where that artist’s work may be selected by the Team for an exhibition. In such cases, team members must recuse themselves from discussion of their own work under consideration.

In addition, team members should not profit financially through their participation in such exhibitions or other programming. We ask, if work is sold, that the team member donate back to Heights Arts an amount equal to or exceeding any profits earned on the work, after subtracting out-of-pocket costs.

In summary, Community Teams serve three main purposes:

  • Provide Staff with expertise in specific program areas of need.
  • Provide community members with opportunities for deeper engagement in Heights Arts programming.
  • Expand the reach of Heights Arts’ programming by leveraging Team member connections to identify new audience members, artists, musicians, poets, donors and members.

Terms:

Terms begin September 1 through August 31 in accordance with Heights Arts’ Fiscal Year.

  • All Team members must affirm renewed commitment to serve as a Team member in June prior to the new fiscal year.
  • Terms are limited to five years, with current members serving an additional two years.
  • Terms may be extended based upon institutional need.

Please click on the community team of your area of interest above to learn more.