Letter from the Executive Director
Keeping the Community in Art
Dear Friend of the Arts,
As a community Arts organization, Catamount Arts is built on strong relationships, and our success depends on our ability to bring people and organizations together in support of Arts & culture. Despite difficult economic times, we continue to receive extraordinary support from our members and donors, volunteers and patrons, artists and presenters, business partners and foundations, schools and towns, and our own staff and Board of Directors.
Catamount proudly collaborates with vibrant organizations like Kingdom County Productions, Circus Smirkus, Northeast Kingdom Classical Series, First Night St. Johnsbury, The Colonial Theatre, Lyndon State College, Green Mountain Film Festival, School of Creative and Performing Arts, and Karmê Chöling. We are also grateful for our new neighbor (in the old Catamount building), Neko Case, who has opened her facility and heart to Catamount. Furthermore, we are honored to stand together with our fellow cultural institutions in St. Johnsbury—the Athenaeum, the Fairbanks Museum, and St. Johnsbury Academy—each of which shares a long tradition of community-centric cultural stewardship that started with the Fairbanks family in 1842 and continues to this day.
Catamount’s 20/20 Vision: Eye on the Future is the culmination of an exhaustive and inclusive exercise in community planning that began in 2005 with the renovation of the Arts Center. It represents the collective wisdom of our community; we believe that the integration of Arts and culture into our daily lives is critically important. But we need your help.
In a community this small and remote, every dollar counts. Your contribution can reach far in this under-served region of rural New England. Your donation will have a tangible, immediate effect on people’s lives here. You can give low-income schoolchildren their first breathtaking exposure to the thrill of live theater. You can introduce community college students and young families to the magnificence of the Martha Graham Dance Company. You can fill our movie house with a bus load of senior citizens, all laughing like kids at a free Charlie Chaplin screening mere hours before the after-work crowd sits spellbound by a nationally-acclaimed one-man play. Better yet, your contribution brings us all together—farmers, shopkeepers, bank tellers, nurses, factory workers, teachers, and students—to the local high school auditorium on a brisk early autumn night to watch with pride and sing along as our own neighbor—a Grammy-nominated musician—belts out an impossible, heart-stopping note in a stirring two-hour, sold-out benefit concert to support her local Arts Center.
Please consider joining the Catamount Arts community. We’d love to have you.
Thank you for supporting the Arts!
Sincerely,
Jody Fried, 802.748.2600 x. 105
Executive Director
