The Columbus Arts Council has a new director.
Columbus native and Mississippi State University alumna Lynn Brown will take the CAC’s helm July 5 following the departure of Tina Sweeten-Lunsford, who stepped down to move to Flowood to work as regional volunteer officer with the American Red Cross.
Brown holds a degree in public policy and administration from MSU but has lived outside the Golden Triangle area for about 20 years, five of which she spent teaching English in South Korea. She’s been working with nonprofit organizations for most of that time, with her focus sharpening in the last couple of years to fundraising.
Her responsibilities will include managing staff, grant writing, marketing CAC programs and growing endowments for long-term support of the organization.
“I’m thrilled to have the opportunity to lead this deeply respected organization with such a legacy of community building through the arts,” Brown said in a press release. “With an outstanding staff and a dynamic board of directors, I am excited to build on the great work of my predecessor, Tina Sweeten-Lunsford, and to continue to promote and expand access to the arts across the Golden Triangle Region.”
At the CAC, responsibility for fundraising will now fall to Brown as director. Her first priority is to find ways to diversify funding.
“What I’m interested in most is long-term support,” Brown said. “A lot of organizations tend to give one-off donations, whether it’s a sponsorship for a gala or an arts festival. But what I would like to see happen is to have companies and towns to have a little bit more buy-in where they can support, say, an arts program for kids for X amount of dollars for X amount of years.”
In the past couple of years, she’s been working with nonprofits on different ways to strengthen revenue streams and raise money all over the country, from organizations in the Washington, D.C. area to the Starkville Area Arts Council, helping to raise more than $5 million for various organizations since 2016. In particular, she helped organize a gala to benefit Higher Achieve, a D.C.-based nonprofit that works with low-income students to raise academic achievement, that raised $1.4 million.
“I’m hoping some of those strategies and things I learned up there, I’ll be able to incorporate here,” Brown said.
Higher Achievement was particularly good at coaxing funding from corporate sponsors by telling stories from the children’s and parents’ points of view, Brown said. But it’s important to have funding coming from multiple sources — not just corporate or grants or private donations, but a mixture of everything.
“You don’t want your funding stream too heavy in one section,” she said. “…If your organization is corporate-heavy on funding, what happens if you ended up losing a chunk of that? That kind of leaves your organization vulnerable. … How do you get funding sources coming in from multiple streams and not just one, because that does leave you a bit vulnerable?
“It allows you to kind of get creative as well,” she added. “This is an opportunity. How can we do Columbus Arts Council 2.0? How can we bring our group into the 22nd century? How creative can we get to attract more people, to get more buy-in from the community?”
Fundraising is also not a one-person job, said Brown, who looks forward to working with the incoming board of directors which will officially begin its duties in July.
“Lynn is exactly the kind of person we were looking for,” said incoming CAC board president Jerry Fortenberry in a press release. “Someone with experience but also someone with energy and a drive to succeed.”
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