From the Archives: Va. Foundation for Humanities increases private funding, helps mark Civil War

Va. Foundation for Humanities increases private funding, helps mark Civil War
March 19, 2011 12:21 AM MST

Sponsored by the Charlottesville-based Virginia Foundation for the Humanities (VFH), the annual Virginia Festival of the Book brings about 25,000 visitors to the city to hear and engage with authors, publishers, book reviewers, and bibliophiles.

The 2010 festival hosted 160 events featuring 307 authors, drawing visitors from 35 states and at least six foreign countries.

It should come as no surprise, then, that VFH president Robert Vaughan says, “We’re certainly going to continue this annual book festival, there’s no question about that.”

Vaughan spoke to the Charlottesville Libertarian Examiner at the University of Virginia on March 16, after a presentation on civility in public life by former Iowa congressman Jim Leach, who now serves as chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Private giving
Asked about what VFH is doing to encourage private philanthropic giving to promote the humanities in Virginia, Vaughan explained that the foundation has “a very active private giving program. Our private giving has increased over the past five years significantly.”

Even before five years ago, he said, private giving “was getting better and better,” but added that in the past half-decade, “we flipped, actually, from being about 60 to 65 percent either federal or state funding to being about 60-plus percent private funding.”

While the VFH does not have any programs to assist private donors looking for potential recipients, Vaughan did say that “we have increased our earned income, which I think is something that both private donors as well as public donors appreciate.”


Women and minorities
Over the next year, Vaughan said, the VFH will continue its traditional programming activities but it is also branching out.

“We’ve always had a long and strong interest in minority communities and minority cultures,” he explained. “We began focusing on women early on,” as well as on “the black community in Virginia, because it’s large and significant and historic.”

VFH, he added, has recently begun to include Virginia’s Native Americans in its programs.

Vaughan also pointed to a couple of events at the book festival that feature speakers from the Muslim world and the Middle East, and explained that these are related to a fellowship program that started about 18 months ago that also includes “Asian immigration and Latino immigration into the Commonwealth of Virginia and the influence and effects that that’s having on the culture, the community, the sense of place that we have.”

Marking the Civil War sesquicentennial
VFH is also involved in efforts to commemorate the 150th anniversary of the American Civil War, which began in April 1861.

“We have been involved with the Virginia Sesquicentennial [of the American Civil War] Commission,” he said, helping “in a minor way” with the seven conferences the commission is putting on. “There have been two so far. The next one will be on May 21st at Virginia Tech, focusing on military" issues.

A larger project that he described is “building an encyclopedia of Virginia, an entirely on-line, digital publication,” which has been in process for about four years.

“It takes a long time because it is gigantic, as you might imagine,” Vaughan explained. “It can include virtually everything – virtually in both ways” that word is used.

The connection to the Civil War commemoration is that for the past year and a half or so, the encyclopedia “decided to focus on the Civil War because of the timing.”

This digital publication, Vaughan noted, also provides “the content for the Sesquicentennial Commission’s web site on the Civil War,” serving as “the educational component of it.”

The encyclopedia’s virtual pages, he concluded, are “quite a glorious record of the good, the bad, the indifferent, about the Civil War and the way that Virginia was involved.”

The VFH-sponsored Virginia Festival of the Book continues through Sunday, March 20, in and around Charlottesville.

Publisher's note: This article was originally published on Examiner.com on March 19, 2011. The Examiner.com publishing platform was discontinued July 1, 2016, and its web site went dark on or about July 10, 2016.  I am republishing this piece in an effort to preserve it and all my other contributions to Examiner.com since April 6, 2010. It is reposted here without most of the internal links that were in the original.

Georgetown's Mask & Bauble Launches Fundraising Drive to Light Stage III

Just in time for #GivingTuesday (which follows #BlackFriday, #SmallBusinessSaturday, and #CyberMonday), the Mask & Bauble Dramatic Society at Georgetown University has announced a fundraising drive to purchase new lighting equipment.

Now in its 162nd season, Mask & Bauble claims to be the oldest continuously-operating student theatre troupe at any U.S. college or university -- and, even if it's not the oldest, it certainly is in the top three or five.

Mask & Bauble's storied history includes putting on shows at the White House during the Kennedy administration, helping to create the legend of Camelot that was revisited so extensively last month. It launched the careers of Tony-winning playwright John Guare, Tony-winning director Jack Hofsiss, and Oscar-nominated actor Bradley Cooper, among many other theater professionals too numerous to name.

According to an email sent to M&B alumni and a post on the group's web site:

Our current lighting system in Stage III is on its last leg, and needs to be replaced. As many alumni can attest, the current dimming system in Stage III has been a problem for the past several years, with many productions suffering from flickering lights and spontaneous blackouts. In order to keep the electrics in Stage III in show-ready condition, we are officially launching our "Keep the Lights On!" campaign to raise the funds necessary to purchase and install a new lighting system for Stage III!

I know the current lighting system at Stage III in Poulton Hall is far more modern than the one in use during my years as a lighting technician and designer there. I remember how we used to have to jump into a pit below the tech booth and grab live electrical cables to switch them from one circuit to another. It's statistically incredible that nobody was turned into a human lightning rod.

The M&B email continues:

Replacing this system, which is about fifteen years old, will cost an estimated $33,000. Mask & Bauble has already committed $5,000 to the project, and we are hoping to secure an additional $5,000 through Georgetown funding outlets.

That leaves us with $23,000 to raise, and together, we can make that happen!

Please consider making a tax-deductible donation to Mask & Bauble today by clicking the button below. For larger gifts, feel free to make arrangements with the Department of Performing Arts' Administrative Director, Ron Lignelli. All donors will be acknowledged via Mask & Bauble's standard tiered gift recognition structure, with two additional tiers*.

Sponsor: $50+ (your name appears in our program, newsletters and notices)
Benefactor: $150+ (a season subscription for 2)
Name Your Dimmer!: $700 will purchase a whole dimmer for M&B!
Angels: $1,000+ (complimentary invitation to our annual Banquet and Awards Ceremony)
Name Your Dimmer Rack!: $8000 will purchase an entire dimmer rack for M&B!

All donations large and small are very greatly appreciated, and every little bit will help us reach our goal. All donors over $700 will be acknowledged on a plaque that will be hung in Stage III.

To contribute something to this campaign to bring light to the stage, visit this secure donations web site:

https://www.vendini.com/donation-software.html?d=34861356102ed9f0a76fab4ab0c92dbf&t=donation

If that URL is too long, try this one: http://bit.ly/18WFBBw

Gifts for the Arts at MUHS

My alma mater, Marquette University High School, just announced that it is the recipient of two seven-figure gifts to underwrite improvements in the arts environment on the college preparatory school's Milwaukee campus. These large -- and welcome -- gifts will have a profound effect on the capacity of MUHS students to participate in the performing arts, as well as in various graphic and fine arts programs.

Writing in today's Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, Dani McClain reports:

Two families have donated gifts totaling $2 million to expand the arts progam at Marquette University High School, school officials announced today.

Jerry and Donna O'Rourke have given $1 million to transform the school's auditorium into a performing arts center. School officials said today that they plan to improve the auditorium's acoustics, upgrade the lighting and add a large elevator to move instruments from the band room to the stage.

The auditorium is already named after the family because of a contribution the O'Rourkes made to renovate the space more than a decade ago. Jerry O'Rourke is a member of Marquette University High School's class of 1955, Dan Quesnell, a spokesman for the school, said today.

Ken and Karen Yontz' gift of $1 million will establish a new fine arts center that will include chorus and ensemble rooms, a graphics computer lab, a ceramics room and kiln and a darkroom.

The Business Journal of Milwaukee adds these details:

Marquette University High School is in the midst of a $14.2 million building project that includes a two-story addition featuring the Yontz Fine Arts Center connecting to the O'Rourke Performing Arts Center.

"The generous O'Rourke and Yontz gifts ensure that current and future students will experience the highest quality fine arts program," Sazama said in a press release.

Especially in my senior year, I spent many hours in the then-unnamed auditorium. (Regular readers may recall seeing video footage of the auditorium from the 1970s -- the Prep Players' production of Guys & Dolls in 1977, and "Blazing Seniors," the Senior Follies of the Class of 1977, which was actually produced in November 1976.)

At last year's "Great Homecoming," I was able to snap a few photographs of the auditorium, which really has not changed much at all over the past 30 years. I hope that the transformation promised by the million-dollar-plus endowment does not eliminate its mid-20th-century charm. I especially hope that the decades of autographs painted on the walls beneath the stage and in the wings are not harmed in the construction phase -- that is a historical record well worth preserving, visual evidence of the ghosts who haunt every theatre.

No doubt history will be on the minds of the actors, musicians, and crew members who take part in this weekend's production of Ragtime (reviewed here and here), as well as the audience members who go to see the Prep Players' version of the 1998 Tony-winning musical play, set in the turbulent turn of the 20th-century and dealing with issues of racial equality and immigration that still vex us today.