Cultural consultant congratulates Plainfield on FUSP gift

The FUSP building has been donated to the City
for a cultural center.

In the late 1990s, Plainfield applied for and won the largest grant given by AT&T at that time to do an arts and culture plan for the community.

The consultant who developed that plan for Plainfield worked for more than two years in the process and I have remained in touch with her over the years since.

When she heard of the gift of the FUSP property to the city for a cultural center, she responded with the following in an email --

I am very excited to hear that a building has been set aside for use as a Cultural Center in Plainfield.

I remember fondly my several years of work in Plainfield and the report full of recommendations for the development of a thriving cultural life in the City.

I hope that the New Audiences report will get revisited as the building goes through its re-use and business planning stage.

I have been working on a new inner city arts park in Boston for almost a year, and the project is already in the final design phase with fundraising well underway.

If the City of Plainfield needs some guidance in developing a sustainable plan for the project, it would be my pleasure to work with the arts community  and local government to support its successful launch.

Thanks for letting me know the good news.

Sincerely, Andrea Kaiser

The grant application was put together by the Central Jersey Chamber of Commerce (then headed by the late Barbara Ballard) and a volunteer committee that included Ballard, Nellie Dixon, Vicky Griswold, Barbara Fuller, Helen Rodriguez, Amelia Andrade and myself.

The project was entitled "New Audiences for Plainfield" and involved an exhaustive inventory of arts and culture groups and individuals active in the city (more than 400 were discovered).

Face-to-face interviews were conducted over a period of several days and the needs and desires of those interviewed were assessed and helped lay the foundation for a cultural action plan that was delivered at the end of the process.

At the time, Assemblyman Jerry Green was politely supportive but had his energies focused elsewhere, and local officials were preoccupied with other matters, so the report's recommendations were not put into effect.

However, the gift by the Unitarians of their building to the city for a cultural center, along with the development of a budding Plainfield Arts Council suggest that the time is ripe to revisit the New Audiences report (which is on file at the Plainfield Public Library) and consider what lessons might be drawn from it going forward.

Thanks again to the First Unitarian Society of Plainfield (FUSP) for their generous gift and the window it has opened on the possibilities for a rich cultural future for Plainfield.

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 -- Dan Damon [ follow ]

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