Photo Roger Coda

Chautauqua Today

PHOTO ELIZABETH MYERS

CHAUTAUQUA IS MANY THINGS—a place, an annual gathering, and a worldwide community, open to all. Chautauquans come together every summer to learn, play, worship, talk, be entertained, and be challenged. All this happens here in western New York owing to a long history and consistent mission. Chautauqua is a common ground for all. It provides an atmosphere in which artists and scholars, young and old, left and right, Christian, Jew, Muslim, Buddhist, and atheist can explore, exchange, and grow--all unencumbered by the divisiveness found elsewhere, and encouraged by the acceptance and welcome we offer one another. This safe and respectful collision of divergent ideas, political viewpoints, age groups, and faith traditions is a rare occurrence on the planet. Indeed, we believe that this summer laboratory of learning and exchange on Chautauqua Lake provides an increasingly rare human practice that is essential to our future as a nation and as a global community.

In organizational terms, CHAUTAUQUA THE INSTITUTION is a $28-million-a-year nonprofit corporation at work to program, enhance, and sustain this shared space—this common ground. We take seriously our continuing obligation to innovate and to provide the multiple forms of investment and support needed to keep the 136-year-old Chautauqua community vital.

STRATEGIC DIRECTIONS

For the period 2010-2018, Chautauqua Institution has adopted a three-part strategy to enable deeper engagements and exchanges among those who gather here, to reach out to larger numbers of people who might wish to become Chautauquans, and to facilitate truly open discussion of the topics that shape our times.

THE GROUNDS

You feel it the minute you step inside the gates. All who have come here before—Thomas Edison, Thurgood Marshall, Franklin Roosevelt, Susan B. Anthony, Helen Keller, Margaret Mead, Al Gore, Ken Burns, Bill Cosby, Calvin O. Butts, Bill and Hillary Clinton, Elie Wiesel, millions of learners and families—you can feel their presence in this place. Their words, art, conversation, and passion linger in the air, the buildings, the landscape. As many have said of Chautauqua: This is sacred ground.

Conserving the grounds, always a priority of the Institution, today involves investing in pivotal new facilities and employing leading edge technologies for environmental sustainability. In the last decade, we renovated a number of historic facilities on the grounds while also adding state-of-the art gallery, craft, rehearsal, and performance spaces. We are constantly improving our use of renewable energy, recycling, and composting, and developing new conservation techniques. In 2010 we introduced two new forms of community transportation (electric and biofuel buses) and have ambitious plans to improve the overall accessibility of the Institution.

This generation of Chautauquans are the stewards of this unique treasure—designated as both a National Historic District and a National Historic Landmark. We recognize we are a constantly changing community responsible for irreplaceable environmental and emotional assets.

THE MIX

The confluence of people and performers, of viewpoints and cultures, of art forms, of theologies and theories is what makes Chautauqua at once steady and ever changing. Arts, religion, recreation, and the life of the mind come together to make Chautauqua an unparalleled experience. "The mix," as we call it, requires our board and staff to perform a continuous re-examination and re-imagination of our programs to take full advantage of the diverse resources we bring together in this place each year.

To keep us vital, we insist that Chautauqua’s programs must reflect both the complexity of modern life and the interrelationship of all of our programs one to another. Therefore, we are working to expand the opportunities for dialogue among presenters and participants, offering longer stays and enhanced hospitality for performers and speakers. We are constantly looking for topics to explore through our Special Studies Classes that deepen the content presented at the 10:45 lectures. We also seek purposeful ways for Chautauqua's extraordinary arts offerings to provide another expression of our weekly themes, and we are always considering how to bring these theme to our youngest Chautauquans in the Boys and Girls Clubs.

Chautauqua Institution is unique in its presentation of both professional artistry and pre-professional student education in visual art, craft, music, drama, dance, opera, and theater. We are building on this strength through a disciplined effort to maintain contact with our former students, further development of scholarship support, continued contact between professional performers and students, and the publicizing of this inimitable aspect of the Chautauqua mix.

The mix is also energized by our exceptional focus on religious diversity. Chautauqua seeks to be a dynamic catalyst for interreligious dialogue in our programs and options for sacred worship. Fulfilling our mission of openness to all, we also aim for Chautauqua’s population to reflect the population characteristics of our nation as a whole. This awareness informs our programming decisions, as we seek to appeal to diverse audiences and engage a range of issues, cultures, and faith traditions.

GENERATIONS

Increasingly, the United States is a fractured nation, divided into "target markets" singled out by age groups for the purposes of commerce. Rare is the effort to bring people of all ages and backgrounds together for a shared experience. Chautauqua has always valued the idea of extended family, of dialogue and discussion among young and old together, of family worship and lifelong learning. Many homes on the Chautauqua grounds have remained in the same families across a dozen generations, creating a very special environment of lived history and family heritage.

Recognizing the extraordinary value of such inter-generational connections, we will continue to expand opportunities for our young people to participate in all aspects of the Chautauqua program, to lead them to a lifelong love of the arts, of learning, and of living in active and supportive community with others. We consciously structure many of these experiences as inter-generational opportunities. In addition, we are currently developing new opportunities for inter-generational recreation and will expand opportunities for fitness activities and the development of healthy lifestyles.

PARTNERS

In recent years Chautauqua has enlarged its programming capacity by partnering with distinguished peer organizations--the Smithsonian Institution, National Geographic, Colonial Williamsburg, Sesame Workshop, and the George Eastman House, among others. Bringing the expertise and resources of these prominent organizations to address our program themes has been enthusiastically received by all collaborators and will continue in the years ahead.

We are committed to other sorts of partnerships. The Institution aims to engage an advisory group of marketing experts to help get our messages out to a broader audience. The recent designation of Chautauqua as a Steinway Festival also represents a new level of excellence achieved by our Schools of Fine and Performing Arts, who now exclusively use Steinway instruments. And we are continuing to develop collaborations with outstanding organizations in our surrounding region, including the Buffalo Philharmonic, the Oishei Foundation, WNED, and the Albright Knox Gallery.

Through these and other partnerships the Institution encourages dialogue far beyond the boundaries of our physical location and Chautauqua's nine-week summer season.

DIGITAL

The vital mission and programming of Chautauqua Institution are as yet unknown to too many potential participants. Technology is one tool to extend our reach beyond the gates. In a world of information overload, Chautauqua aims to avoid being just one more voice. Rather, we are committed to sharing the Institution's unique strengths of open dialogue and interdisciplinary learning with more and more people in the years ahead.

To this end, Chautauqua has adopted a portfolio of investments in the elements of our program that can be exported via technology--notably, the lectures and interactive discussions that take place daily during our nine-week season. Chautauqua's presence on the internet-based Fora-TV has already permitted hundreds of thousands of viewers to experience the best of our guest speakers through recorded video. At the same time, we are continuing to expand the production of simple podcasts while also testing the viability of real time, interactive video streaming of selected summer events through an initiative called "Chautauqua in Depth."

NEWCOMERS

Chautauqua is a way of life, a set of values, a lived experience. The people who know it well proudly and passionately think of themselves as Chautauquans. Today, through virtual as well as real-time-and-place assembly, we have the ability to engage more people in the mix, to be moved ourselves and then to move others, to reflect and act upon the ideas exchanged here each year. Through both our traditional programs and digital means, the Chautauqua we envision in 2018 will be nothing less than a sustainable, vital, and enlivening force in American discourse for 52 weeks a year, an honest broker of innovative ideas across disciplines, and a place where more and more thought leaders from around the world are drawn to participate in this exchange.

In achieving this goal, we recognize the importance of orienting first-time visitors to the grounds and to our programming online. Making our mission explicit, our vision engaging, and our relationships sturdy are essential. We are also striving to use technology to facilitate and improve access to accommodations, tickets, and information, both on-site and off-site. Providing increased hospitality, better communications, special activities across the country in selected cities, and a wider range of accommodations for short term visitors to the grounds is part of the work ahead of us. We welcome your advice and input.