On the 21^st of this month, I will start as the new president and CEO of Arts United. Thanks to the time change, the drive from my current door in Tennessee to my new door in Fort Wayne is about nine hours going and seven coming. I love the middle of the drive the most – where the interstate loosens up and you pass grain elevators and towns small enough to see both edges at once.

I know those towns. I grew up in one.

My letter to you centers on three women, because they are the reason I will be joining you in Fort Wayne.

The first was Mrs. Bell, my first-grade teacher in rural West Tennessee. Our school had no money for instruments, so she made them herself, by hand. She was not a music teacher. She simply believed children should get to be creative. That is my first memory of making music. I still see her now and then, and she still talks about it.

The second was my fourth-grade music teacher, Mrs. Robbins, who told me I had an uncanny sense of rhythm. I was a shy kid, not part of the well-off crowd, and I walked out of that room standing taller. Words land as hard as actions do.

The third was Nancy Mathesen.

Nancy was the percussion teacher at the local college. She first visited my high school to give a masterclass, when I was sixteen. We were a small band with tired equipment and limited resources (this was in the late 1980s so no YouTube or internet to learn from). My family could not afford private lessons, but Nancy saw a spark in me. She made an offer: if I showed up at 6:00 am on Friday mornings, she would teach me for free. And if I was ever late, or ever unprepared, she would drop me like a hot potato. No second chances.

I was never late. I was never unprepared.

She taught me for a year and a half. I made All-State band and earned a full scholarship to study music education. Everything that came after – the degrees, the touring, the students, this letter – traces back to a woman who got up before dawn every Friday for a kid who could not pay her.

Years later, I would hold the job that had once been hers. Nancy is gone now. I never did get to tell her that the 6:00 am mornings were the reason for all of it.

Here is the conclusion I didn’t draw until recently. Mrs. Bell built instruments because there was no budget. Nancy taught me for free and helped purchase the school’s only five-octave marimba out of her own pocket for her students. And when I was teaching sixth and seventh graders at a Title I school whose traditional band instruments were falling apart, I hauled my own drums in from home for them so they could play and feel good about making music together.

Three generations of women paying for it themselves so children could play.

That is what an arts council is for. So, the next Mrs. Bell does not have to.

Those inner-city kids became a steel band. We played for the school board, then for local television and NPR stations, and that became two $25,000 grants that bought real instruments – enough for thirty students a year. That ensemble is still performing today, with children I will never meet.

I have spent a career on young people and intend to keep at it. But we tell only half the story. We talk constantly about arts education for children and almost never about arts participation as we age. I have facilitated drum circles for years and watched a room of every age and every ability find a groove together – including people who arrived certain they had no rhythm. The arts do not stop working at eighteen. We stop offering them.

So, my mission has become simple: arts access for everyone, everywhere, at every age.

Which brings me to you. I am coming because of what you already did – an arts campus built around a Louis Kahn theater, and $41.5 million raised to make certain it will still be standing in 50. And Arts United does not serve Fort Wayne alone. It serves all the counties around you, the small towns and the farm roads, which is where I am from.

I do not have a formalized plan for us yet. What I have first is many days of listening ahead of me.

Because somewhere in northeast Indiana right now there is a sixteen-year-old – a drummer, a dancer, a painter, a someone who has not yet found which one she is – with no money for lessons and no idea what she is capable of. Somebody found me. I would like us to find her.

I cannot wait to meet y’all – I am Southern after all.

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