A letter to the members

In the spring of 2007 the board chair, Connie "C.J." Groth, wrote to the membership with news: Monica Haskell was stepping down as President and Executive Director at the end of her contract on June 30, after ten years leading the Arts Council. A search committee had been meeting for weeks and was placing advertisements.

That is the occasion. What makes the letter worth keeping is the middle of it, where Groth stops to explain what the organization actually does, because she evidently could not assume her own members knew. The list she gives is publicity, the website, the weekly cultural calendar, publications and speeches, grants and re-granting programs, organizing exhibitions and concerts, and being the Keys-wide conduit of arts information. She also notes that the Executive Director staffs the county’s Art in Public Places Committee and the Tourist Development Council’s Cultural Umbrella committee.

Nineteen years later that is still, almost line for line, the shape of the work.

Then comes the passage this piece is here for. Groth reaches for an image any theater person in the Keys would recognize, and lands on the truest sentence in the archive.

I think of the FKCA as the support group for arts and culture in the Keys.

Connie "C.J." Groth, Chair, 2007

We aren’t the group in the limelight because our job is to highlight others.

Connie "C.J." Groth, Chair, 2007

The FKCA doesn’t blow its own horn because it’s busy trumpeting the wonders of the Florida Keys cultural community to locals and visitors.

Connie "C.J." Groth, Chair, 2007

It is an unusual thing for an organization to write about itself. Most of what sits in a press archive is an institution explaining why it deserves attention. This is one explaining, cheerfully, why it does not get any.

Source Letter to members from the Chair, March 2, 2007. Published here to its signature; the closing list of committee members’ personal email addresses is not reproduced.