CreativeMornings: Alison Gerardot, how your creative life is half-controlled by you
Alison talks on balancing your life with your creative flow and how sometimes those two streams diverge.
Fort Wayne’s third CreativeMornings event in March 2019 featured Alison Gerardot, Director of Philanthropic Services at the Community Foundation of Greater Fort Wayne, speaking on the theme of “water.”
“I alone cannot change the world, but I can cast a stone across the waters to create many ripples,” Mother Teresa.
Gerardot’s great passion is helping people and organizations create bridges of connectivity and achieve goals to strengthen an entire community. She does this by working with nonprofits on their longevity through fundraising, assisting individuals and families in their own personal philanthropic journey and creating solutions for a more sustainable community.
Having worked in the nonprofit and public sector her entire career, she knows that no single approach is the right one for each individual or organization. Through employment in social service, arts administration, city government, and a community foundation, she has learned that each entity is different in the work it does to serve others. She believes that blanket solutions rarely solve fundamental issues that should be addressed through individual strategic and creative problem-solving.
Her educational background includes a Certification in Fundraising Management from the Indiana University School of Philanthropy, a BA in English with a Communications concentration, and coursework completed toward a Master’s in Public Management from Indiana-Purdue University Fort Wayne (now Purdue Fort Wayne).
She currently serves on the board of Project Ballet, several nonprofit committees, and has facilitated and developed both strategic and fund development plans for several nonprofit organizations and a small parochial school.
Even so, throughout her CreativeMornings speech, she repeated the powerful phrase she has wrestled with throughout her career: “You are not what you do.”
Watch Gerardot’s full CreativeMornings speech in the video above.
CreativeMornings is a free global breakfast lecture series that launched in Fort Wayne in January 2019. It happens from 8:30 a.m. to 10 a.m. on the second Friday of every month at a different location in downtown Fort Wayne. It includes a short talk by a local creative, a Q&A, and of course, free breakfast.
Visit CreativeMornings Fort Wayne’s website for more information and announcements about future events.
The next CreativeMornings is Friday, April 12th, at Artlink.
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