Personal Reflection
SVCREATES Town Hall & Conference Recap
Written by Viridiana Romero, SVCREATES Board Member
On April 1, over 70 artists and arts leaders attended our SVCREATES Town Hall & Conference at the School of Arts & Culture at the beautiful Mexican Heritage Plaza in East San José. We gathered as a vibrant arts and culture community to learn collectively and deepen our relationships.
Fellow SVCREATES Board member and Santa Clara County Poet Laureate Emeritus Tshaka Menelik Imhotep Campbell opened up the day with a powerful poem, helping activate us in this moment and setting the tone for our time together.
Chief Executive Officer Alexandra Urbanowski kicked off the Town Hall, moderating a panel featuring SVCREATES core faculty Roy Hirabayashi, Tanuja Bahal, and Alyssa Byrkit. They shared key learnings from their work with arts organizations, leaders, and cohorts, and emphasized the importance of the arts in bringing communities together. And what’s an art event without art? Local group, the Francis Experience, boosted the ambiance with a wonderful music performance.
Collaboration helps strengthen our work, our impact, and our communities. Scott Winter and Maria Pappas from the Collaborative Commons led us through Growing Your Collaborative Resilience: Powered by Radical Collaboration — a training focused on developing actionable strategies for collaboration. We learned five key practices aimed to build our Collaborative Resilience — our ability to adapt, recover, and grow as individuals and as groups in the face of adversity, stress, and challenges. Scott’s humor kept us engaged and laughing as we talked about the challenges of collaboration and how we can navigate them to successfully work together, anchoring in trust, openness, and shared responsibility to achieve our collective goals. We closed the day with networking and gathering with colleagues and peers over roundtable lunch discussions.
This event was made possible with the support of our funding partners, including Applied Materials Foundation, the San José Office of Cultural Affairs, the County of Santa Clara, and the California Arts Council.
Viridiana Romero is an SVCREATES Board Member and the Manager of Strategic Initiatives at Northern California Grantmakers, where she manages funder collaboratives and pooled funds, including the Arts Loan Fund, and leads programming, partnerships, and strategic initiatives activating the region’s philanthropic sector.
Viridiana’s journey as an immigrant woman strongly impacts her passion for social justice and fuels her commitment to community-based organizations. She has a breadth of experience from the nonprofit, private, and philanthropic sectors. She was most recently Portfolio Manager in Immigration at Emerson Collective (EC), leading national philanthropic investments championing immigration reform, and managing capacity-building programs as EC’s Philanthropy Programs Manager. Previously, she was Program Director at Blue Heart, spearheading programming and grantmaking for grassroots organizations and art collaborations. Her background includes grantmaking at Sobrato Philanthropies, and program and operations management for a variety of nonprofits and companies.
Viridiana has a Masters in Social Work from the University of Michigan, specializing in management and community organizing and B.A.s in Community Studies and Sociology from UC Santa Cruz.
