Salzburg Global Forum for Young Cultural Leaders opens
tanding at the front of Parker Hall and addressing 50 25-35 year olds, the president and CEO of National Arts Strategies, Russell Willis Taylor declared: “We are looking at our future. You are the future of our field!”
These 50 people from 37 countries and six continents have been gathered as the inaugural in-take of the Salzburg Global Forum for Young Cultural Leaders, running from October 26 to November 1. The program has been designed in partnership between the Salzburg Global Seminar and US-based National Arts Strategies to identify and strengthen young leaders in the arts and culture sectors across the globe.
Chosen from an vast field of applicants, the successful participants come a wide variety of backgrounds in the arts – from dance, music, and theater to visual media, museums, and festivals – and already have at least three years of professional experience in the cultural sector. To be selected they had to have a demonstrated interest in strengthening the position of the arts and arts institutions within societies and of having a positive impact on society, as well as showing creativity in their approach to work and openness to innovation.
Through the program, co-chaired by Taylor and Mulenga Kapwepwe, chair of the National Arts Council of Zambia, these young practitioners will improve their leadership skills to enable them and their organizations to thrive in a field characterized by rapid change, uncertainty, and limited resources.
Mixing theory and practice, the Young Cultural Leaders will hear lectures on the creation and communication of value, defining what is global and local in today’s interconnected world, and the role of arts organizations in society and communities, as well as participating in skills development workshops focussing on effective communication and team-building, change management and innovation—all draw on the knowledge and experience of and delivered by recognized international experts, from across the world.
The intention of the annual forum is to strengthen the leadership capacity both of individuals and of the field as a whole, while at the same time enhancing international understanding and cultural exchange through a vital, new global network of young cultural leaders.
Explaining why Salzburg Global Seminar had taken a leading role in developing such a program, Vice President and Chief Program Officer Clare Shine explained:
“Salzburg Global Seminar was founded in 1947 but right from the start, the idea of youth being a driver and not seeing any reason to say “why not?” was part of the DNA…
“Even in the early years, the performing arts, the different artistic disciplines were an integral part to the way they approached the values and the debate around how you build a better society so that it would not go back to war again in that century.
“When you look back over the 65 years of our programming, we’ve had this continuous connective tissue of programs around the arts, around culture, but also around the social cohesion that goes with bringing people together outside their ordinary productive sectors. What we try to do now, and what is a priority as we go forward, is looking to see what we can learn from the nature of the arts in not only the way we do our culture and arts programming but also what they can tell us in the other areas of our work…
“The value of learning through creative practice to collaborate, to listen, to value other voices, to value other perspectives that may seem very strange in the beginning—that set of skills is absolutely critical to global problem-solving and the mission of the Seminar is bound up with challenging creative thinking around the global problems of today and tomorrow.”
The program runs from Saturday, October 26 until Thursday, November 1. A full list of faculty is available here: www.salzburgglobal.org/go/498. To follow the discussions taking place at the seminar, please check out our Twitter hashtag #SGSycl and Twitter list: https://twitter.com/salzburgglobal/sgs-498 and for more information visit the YCI webpage: http://yci.salzburgglobal.org/
