ArtsLIVE in Ventura County

Op-Ed / Essay Submitted by Hugh Ralston

We are the arts in Ventura County

The Ventura County Community Foundation, in partnership with The James Irvine Foundation’s Communities Advancing the Arts, launched ArtsLIVE in Ventura County, a three-year effort to attract new capital to our local arts organizations, and to strengthen the ways the arts are produced, consumed and shared in our region.

Like most nonprofits, the arts have suffered in the recent downturn, particularly the smaller companies or institutions where the budgets are thin and the reserves even thinner. But as technology changes the ways we experience the arts, and the how we share our passions for the arts, it poses challenges for local arts providers. These changes fragment audiences for arts organization but also, at the same time, provide new bands for community.

Our goal in this initiative is to help raise more capital for local arts organizations, train local arts leaders to succeed in meeting these new challenges, seed a new scholarship fund to send our most talented arts students to the best schools in the nation and expand the level of engagement in our local arts community.

ArtsLIVE is guided by an advisory council of distinguished leaders in our arts community: donors and patrons, board leaders, staff CEOs and grants managers, community leaders and artists. 

We have asked each to share in these articles how the arts influence their lives, informs their work and how it expands for them the profound nature of being human and being in community. 

In sharing their insights with the wider community, we hope you, too, will reflect on how the arts play a role in your life, and how you – in your own creative ways – are not only an artist, but part of the larger artistic community of Ventura County.  

If you, too, would like to write an op-ed on how the arts have transformed your life, visit the guidelines. Show us how your art lives in Ventura County.

Hugh J. Ralston is president & CEO of the Ventura County Community Foundation.  An avid choral singer, his artistic passions include gardening and books.

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