Highland County Arts Council Seeks Executive Director

The Highland County Arts Council consists of a strong working board with many talents and varied experience in the arts and nonprofit realms. I sat down with Highland County Arts Council Board President Donna Bedwell to discuss the move to a paid Executive Director.

“The Highland County Arts Council has an over 25 year history of accomplishing a lot of wonderful programs in the county and working toward making Highland a destination for the arts,” said Bedwell. “We have an extremely strong board, a dedicated committed board, and have been fortunate to have that calibur of individual coming in and helping with the arts council. But, we’ve grown a lot in the last several years, and we’ve grown a lot of our programs and we’ve gotten to the stage in our development that we just need help. As a working board, we don’t want to exhaust our members. We would like to have somebody who could come in and look at some of our programs and help us take them to the next level. Because as an all volunteer organization, it’s really hard to stay committed on a weekly basis to the task at hand. But if you have an associate, have an employee, that that is their primary goal, that you get their best hour of their day to work on your programs, then it enables you to take that next step so that you can continue on the growth pattern.”

The Highland County Arts Council applies for grants and completes fundraising throughout the year to support a litany of youth and adult programming above and beyond what membership dues can allow. 

This paid, flexible part-time position was also made possible through support from another arts organization. 

“Thanks to the Little Swiss Foundation, we have budgeted for this year up to $30,000 for this part-time, 20-hour-per-week position,” added Bedwell. “Now if you extrapolated that out into a full-time position, that would be a $60,000 a year job.”

“So, we’re looking for someone who either has experience with nonprofits and a great appreciation of the arts, or someone who just has fire in their belly and wants to learn from some of the really skilled people that we have on the arts council board.”

To apply, email a cover letter and resume to highlandcoarts@gmail.com. Bedwell encourages anyone with interest to ask questions and even come in for an informational interview to see if there might be a fit.