Enter the world of Angela McConnell, executive director of the Community School of Music and Arts (CSMA) in Mountain View. Her task: to raise almost $9 million within three years. Hired July 2001 in the depths of the dot-com crash, two months before September 11, McConnell was charged with raising the funds necessary to give the CSMA something it has never had in its 36 years of existence: a permanent home to call its own.
Founded in 1968, the CSMA has served Silicon Valley residents for more than three decades, already providing education for 325,000 Bay Area residents — adults and children alike, following its motto, “Arts for All.” The school offers a variety of classes and programs in its effort to accommodate the region’s cultural diversity. Examples of these include after-school classes, private lessons, free family concerts, community outreach events and the Arts in Action programs in local schools.
The unfortunate truth is that even in the world of art, money makes the world go ’round. Add to that a soft economy, a quarter-century of Prop 13 in California (a law that held down property values, cutting off a major source of revenue for the state government and leading to drastic cutbacks in arts education), and you’ve got yourself a local institutional maelstrom. That McConnell succeeded in raising the funds, let alone within three years, is a great victory for the community. But it could also be seen as a natural extension of McConnell’s own interests — she sings opera, and her twins, Emily and Jake, currently take classes at CSMA.
In the Spark episode “Movers and Shakers,” see how McConnell makes everything happen. A usual day for her starts at 5:30am with some time at the gym that includes networking. Then she’s off to meetings with local figures, such as the mayor of Mountain View. Also on her agenda: seeking the attendance of Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger at a CSMA event and obtaining funding from giants like the Silicon Valley-based Google. In the end, it is her hard work and her ability to inspire the members of her own organization that has made McConnell one of the most formidable fund-raisers of her kind — and a pricelessresource for the advancement of arts in the Bay Area.
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