blueprints

280 | toolkit: Bent nails and short Boards
pect that someone has a hand in the till, you need to make your suspicions
known to staff and board members and, ultimately, if you don’t receive a
satisfactory accounting, to the authorities.
If things have become very bad financially, your organization may have
to reorganize in a major way, which could mean canceling an event or a set
of events while you raise money and otherwise regroup. During its own
recent reorganization, Writers at Work canceled its annual summer conference
but still held a competition and mounted mini workshops in the fall
and spring. These brought in money and kept regular supporters and participants
involved. If you have to regroup, don’t vanish from your supporters’
radar screens. Chances are, they will be looking for ways to help you out.
You might be surprised to find little checks coming in and nice turnouts
for your fund-raising events.
Serious Injury or Death
First, we are sorry. This is what we all most fear. Fortunately, this kind of
catastrophe is truly rare at poetry events, which, perhaps strangely, tend to
be relatively safe places to be in this day and age. Nonetheless, as artists and
art lovers know better than most, mortality catches up with us all.
In this case, there are two possibilities: the first, which we dealt with
above, is that a serious injury or even a death occurs at your event. You, as
instructed, immediately call the proper authorities. If there is an injury or
some sort of removal must occur, someone connected closely to the organization—probably
not the leader but someone high in leadership—should
either travel with the injured person and/or family members who are present
or go to the hospital or other destination. Another board or staff member
should be in charge of finding and notifying family members if none
are present.
This is obviously a somewhat more harrowing case than if the tragic
event occurs offstage. However, once the ambulance, police officers, and
designated board member are gone, the leadership members remaining
behind face the same question you will face if a board member, an organizational
leader, a participating poet, or someone else especially close to your
community has a crisis or dies quite close to your event: do you continue? If
you do, how do you do so sensitively and in a way that honors the loss?
The truth is, unless the tragedy is unusually horrific or has befallen
someone so central to your event that it absolutely can’t continue, you will