blueprints

A Place for Poetry | 183
For me, one of the beauties of nonprofit community
building is going back to articulated purpose and creating
new relevancies as the world changes.
Another strand in the development of the PITB model is its continued
reinvention to meet new funding opportunities and new opportunities for
service. For me, one of the beauties of nonprofit community building is
going back to articulated purpose and creating new relevancies as the world
changes. The simultaneous trick almost always requires building engagement
and the financial participation of many individuals to support the
work. The goal is to have a mission, services, and the ability to support them
all aligned.
ExTRAPOLATING FROM THE PITB MODEL
If you want to pilot writing workshops for seniors or if you are an administrator
at a natural history museum—and if you are reading this—you
already have an intuition that poetry can help your constituency enter
into a different kind of conversation. Poets House has enacted this kind
of connectivity in many ways. Baseball poetry contests and readings at
minor-league stadiums. Special children’s programs on ecopoetics in park
settings. Poetry in zoos. The list could go on and on. It is yours to add to
and activate.
Happily, sharing great poems does not have the attendant expense of
mounting a production of Madame Butterfly. But it is also true that whatever
we cook up will have some cost. Honesty about the costs will help everyone
have a better experience. Volunteering to create a poetry corner at your
company would not be expensive. But supporting it by developing an
annual in-service for poets to work with the entire staff would probably
require discretionary funding. (Poets should be paid for their work!)
At the heart of the PITB concept is willingness to experiment with
interlocking program elements to create a more nuanced exposure to
poetry. If you are just getting started, outline your overall program goals.
Who are the partners? What kinds of programs would you like to see and in
what sequence? How can you reinforce them with a more visible daily