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Below is the short piece I wrote for the Mongol Messenger about The Arts Council of Mongolia's awesome pioneer Fellowship program.

If you wonder at the fact that Leo Tolstoy's grandson was here in Ulaanbaatar, you can thank the Arts Council of Mongolia (ACM).

Over the last year, ACM has pioneered a fellowship program to empower arts administration in Mongolia. The nine fellowship recipients hailed from creative and management positions at such well-known venues as the Opera and Ballet Academy Theatre; the Modern Art Gallery; Mongol Costumes; the Arts and Culture Department of the Ministry of Education, Culture and Science; and the Tumen Ekh National Song and Dance Ensemble. Ganbold Dorlig, one of the fellows, is a poet who participated in the World Poetry Congress held in Mongolia in 2006 and who heads up the Feather Foundation. Lkhagvadorj Dorjsuren, who has participated in ice-scultpure festivals all over the world and currently directs the Scultped Arts Center, is another. You get the idea.

Most of the fellows described their goals as related to the desire to network and build management skills within the field of arts administration, so the series of seminars started off with ACM board member Walter Jenkins and the topic of leadership out in the fresh air of Terelj. The ministry of education, culture, and science then helped fund a visit from Ms Kathy Tweeddale, Executive Director of the Seattle Opera, last September. Mrs. Tweeddale led three days of workshops related to arts marketing not just for the fellows but for Mongolian art students and administrators from all the aimags in Mongolia.

Dwight Gee, Executive Vice president of Arts Fund Seattle and President of the U.S. Branch of the Arts Council of Mongolia (ACM-US), led yet another 3-day workshop that extended out into Mongolian society by leading seminars not only for the Fellows but for the Institute of Finance and Economics as well. Thanks to Mr. Gee, several more Mongolian administrators know what an "elevator speech" is. Anyone who has ever attended a Mongolian lecture or event that has gone on longer than some might have liked might opine that this is no small amount of outreach!

Mongolia also hosted experts from Russia in its Fellowship seminar series. Vladimir Tolstoy, grandson of the famed Russian writer, gave a lecture on cultural tourism and the ways it could revitalize outlying areas. In this way and in many others, this program was so attentive to the needs of Mongolia and so inclusive that I, for one, think it's safe to call the pilot year a success. The ministry of Education, Culture and Science was so pleased with Mr. Gee's visit, for example, that it committed to conduct a 2009 National Arts Fundraising training in collaboration with him. They must have liked the elevator speech...