Author: Maggie Pate

It is a great honor to announce that CVNC.org has been awarded an Emerging Leader Award by the The Kennedy Center for our accessibility work. Andrea Luke, Executive Director has also been accepted into an Arts Learning Community for Universal Access (LEAD) as a CVNC representative by Raleigh Arts, which includes LEAD Conference attendance this summer and cohort meetings with other arts professionals. Luke has also been awarded the Kennedy Center Lehman Scholarship to further help support her LEAD Conference experience. This year’s LEAD conference will take place in late August in Boston, Massachusetts.

CVNC is grateful and excited to accept these opportunities and jump into arts accessibility work with both feet. Luke has noted that as executive director for CVNC, LEAD has been one of most fun and rewarding part of her job thus far. Says Luke, “I’m so lucky to be receiving extra support and validation in these efforts.”

Last year, Raleigh Arts sponsored the attendance of Luke and Maggie Pate, Editor in Chief at the LEAD conference which was held in Raleigh. Luke notes that since that time, she has added arts accessibility work to her job description because of the impact that the Kennedy Center’s Leadership Exchange in Arts and Disability Conference had on her. Last year’s conference gave the CVNC team many amazing ideas on how to improve our coverage and CVNC has begun a massive website redesign over the summer that will not only update our infrastructure, but allow us to implement more thoughtful accessibility features throughout.