Episode 71: Roberta Miller (Watertown Public Arts and Culture Committee Chair)
Meet Roberta Miller! She's currently the Chair of the Watertown Public Arts and Culture Committee, but she's had a hand in many things in the city over the years. In this conversation, we cover a lot of ground from growing up in North Dakota and being an exchange student at a historically Black college in the South, serving on the first Watertown town council then later traveling the country developing and sharing new facilitation techniques as a consultant to other city councils. We talk about her being a leader in the Arsenal redevelopment project that resulted in bringing a handful of community benefits to Watertown that still exist today, her time directing the Mosesian Center for the Arts (twice), and being honored with a state heroine award for her work. Then we end with a bit of the Public Arts and Culture Committee and the upcoming River of Light event. There were a lot of stories to share in here, so there will be a separate River of Light event highlight episode that will be released shortly after this one for a deeper dive into that.
Released January 9th, 2026
(Click here to listen on streaming apps) (Full transcript below)
River of Light Event Information
Watertown Public Arts and Culture Committee Page
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Transcript
Matt: 0:07
Hi there. Welcome to the Little Local Conversations Podcast. I'm your host, Matt Hanna. Every episode I sit down for a conversation with someone in Watertown to discover the people, places, stories, and ideas of Watertown. This time I sat down with Roberta Miller, who's currently the chair of the Watertown Public Arts and Culture Committee, but she has had lots of involvement in Watertown over the years. So I'll let her introduce herself, then we'll get into the conversation.
Roberta: 0:30
I'm Roberta Miller. I am currently the chair of the Watertown Public Arts and Culture Committee, which is a recently formed committee for the city of Watertown. And I've had a very varied career, just to say it. When I actually looked back on it, I hadn't looked back on it in a long time. I realized I changed direction just about every five years. And I'm 75 years old now, so that's a lot of twists
Matt: 1:03
That’s a lot of chapters.
Roberta: 1:04
Yeah, a lot of chapters. So I'm not particularly daunted by the next chapter, considering the fact that I've changed chapters so many times. And I've always been very curious about all of the different sectors. So I was curious about the public sector, how that worked, and the nonprofit sector, how that worked.
Matt: 1:27
We'll get into each of those kind of mini chapters. But first, we know you're a Watertown person, but where are you from originally?
Roberta: 1:35
I grew up in Bismarck, North Dakota, which is a very cold state, mostly a farming state. I grew up in a town about the same size as Watertown. Bismarck was the capital, but also a small city in the middle of North Dakota. It was very clear to me very early on that I did not want to stay in North Dakota, though I do miss the wide open skies that I experienced on the plains. And I did get to ride a horse kind of in the backyard.
Matt: 2:12
Nice.
Roberta: 2:13
Which you really can't do here.
Matt: 2:14
No.
Roberta: 2:15
But it's a very different experience. Backyard ponies were the idea rather than equestrian.
Matt: 2:22
So you weren't jumping over things.
Roberta: 2:23
Occasionally I would and then I would fall off.
Matt: 2:30
Yeah. What were your interests when you were a kid? You know, what were you getting into as you grew up?
Roberta: 2:35
I think I was interested in everything. I remember as a very small child, well, not terribly small, because I was in like the seventh grade, and I remember in our science class and the way it was taught back then. And I was reading through the science book and thinking, this isn't that interesting. They've already discovered everything. So they knew how the universe worked, you knew how the stars worked, you knew how all of these things worked. So I think my overall interest kind of led me to think about social science. But I went a lot of different ways doing that. It's how people interact with each other and they interact with organizations, which I found really interesting. And I found the problems of that to be really fascinating. And I always also felt that where I grew up, there wasn't a lot of support for creative thinking. I think when you live, and I don't know whether this is true, it's just was true for me growing up. North Dakota is a very harsh place. And people are very practical. And so when I was doing a writing project and coming up with a variety of different people from different eras all interacting together, for my English teacher, she basically looked at me and gave me a D. So there wasn't a lot of openness to what I would call creative thinking. So I realized I wasn't going to flourish in that environment. So that's why I was looking for other places to live.
Matt: 4:17
So where did you go from there?
Roberta: 4:19
Well, I went to school for a short period of time at the University of North Dakota. Then I went to a traditional black school in the South. I went to Grambling College, which was a black football college as an exchange student from the University of North Dakota, which taught me a ton about what it's like to be a minority, an extreme minority, which has guided me throughout my life. And it got me familiar with a minority culture in this country, which was very helpful.
Matt: 4:53
Is there any particular story that sticks out as impactful from that time or that can shed light on that a little bit?
Roberta: 5:02
Oh, so many. Um well, I remember I was an 18-year-old person, and I was one of the few white students on campus. There were literally a handful. And I remember meeting the president of the college who made a tremendous deal about meeting me, and was very beyond accommodating and congratulatory, and I could not figure out why a man of his stature was making such a big deal about an 18-year-old girl. And I found it kind of embarrassing. So it gave me an insight into the racial dynamics in this country and how people were managing to survive in the South, because this was deep in the South in Louisiana. So it was very illuminating.
Matt: 6:00
Gotcha.
Roberta: 6:01
So I was just trying to go to as many different colleges as I possibly could to find out what the world was like.
Matt: 6:10
So science we have figured out, but people you realized could never really be figured out.
Roberta: 6:13
People are really, really puzzling. Really puzzling. So I could work on that one.
Matt: 6:17
And so you studied social.
Roberta: 6:19
I did. I got a degree in psychology and English. So that was what I launched with. And then I managed to never go to school again, which was greatly satisfying for me. But I managed to find fields that really were brand new. So I didn't have to go to school again. I was part of creating those fields. So that turned out to be a really fun thing to do.
Matt: 6:44
What was your first field you were in in terms of creating something new or a new field that was out there that you were diving into?
Roberta: 6:51
Well, I was home with my kids for a while. I have three kids, and now we have six grandchildren. But my first foray into, aside from kind of part-time jobs that I had along the way to make money, I ran for the city council in Watertown in the 80s. And it was a brand new form of government that had just come out of town meeting to a council form of government. So I got to be on the ground floor of creating a new form of government, which I think was a fabulous experience. And I worked with some amazing people, Louie Andrews and Phil Payne, who really were willing to kind of show me the ropes. So it was a great orientation to what it's like to run a city. And from then, I was puzzled with the kinds of problems that municipalities and governance structures face. So we had worked with a consultant late in that tenure, and it was clear that I had to go back to work. My husband was going to go back to school, we were going to switch roles. So I started working as a consultant to other city councils that were trying to resolve some of the same kinds of problems that we did. And we started using alternative dispute resolution techniques and collaborative planning techniques on how to resolve public issues. So that kind of took off, and I did that for 25 years. I did a lot of work around the country because it was new work. It wasn't like everybody was calling to do it. So I actually had to travel quite a bit in order to make that career work.
Matt: 8:38
And what is that field? What is alternative dispute resolution?
Roberta: 8:42
Well, it's whatever I made it back then. Because it was brand new. So we had a lot of structured decision-making tools that we would use for people to make decisions. We had paired comparison tools, we had all of the kind of facilitation that you now see in public meetings, all of those tools were developed back then, or we started to implement a lot of them back then, at least for use in the public sector. Some of them had been used in engineering and some of the other fields before, but not much. A lot of them are fairly common now, you know, using little red dots to kind of identify how many people feel what is a priority in a public meeting is very common practice. That had never been used before. I remember doing a facilitation job in South Dakota, and the guy came up to me later and said, I really don't know what you did, but I think I liked it. So it was a new field and a new focus on the process of how you do governance, not the substance of how you do government. I did that for a good chunk of time. Again, a variety of different content areas from financing to, you know, solid waste disposal to capital planning for cities, for, you know, dysfunctional kind of city councilors. How do you handle all those situations? So it was fun. It was always challenging. And by the time I did it for 25 years, I never wanted to run another meeting as long as I lived. But I've broken that rule a few times.
Matt: 10:27
Yeah, I was going to say. And in that chapter, is there anything about kind of humans that you feel like you solved or figured out from the beginning of your time doing that to the end of that?
Roberta: 10:39
Oh my God.
Matt: 10:42
Basic questions here.
Roberta: 10:44
Really basic questions there, Matt. I mean, the thing that I think I learned, and this is, I mean, there's a million different rules that you can have. But if people can move into a situation where they understand the expectations and they understand the context of what they're moving into and the rules, then they will behave a lot better. I mean, some people are always going to behave badly because it's, they're either have a very rebellious streak or they're, they just have another agenda. But generally, if people can know at the beginning, in this meeting, you have two minutes. In this meeting, everybody is going to get a fair shake. In this meeting, we will not respond to you. We will respond to you later. In this meeting, we are going to be coming up with a plan. We are not going to be implementing that plan. In this meeting, blah, blah, blah. If people know and understand, they're going to behave better. It sounds kind of basic, but it's actually a lot of work to make sure that there's the pre-work before a meeting or before you start an endeavor that people really understand what they're engaged in. Because they'll come with their own assumptions. Why aren't you doing this? Of course you should do that. Why are you so stupid? You know, there's all of that.
Matt: 12:09
And is there any particular success story in that chapter that stood out for you?
Roberta: 12:15
You know, I think the biggest success I ever had was I was in Scottsdale, Arizona, working for their city council. And this must have been 30 years ago. And Scottsdale is a relatively new city. It's in a beautiful desert setting with kind of the mountains in the background. And it's a fairly affluent city. And the city councilors were really grappling with development issues. And at one point, one of my major goals in working with them was I got them to think about nature as one of their constituents. So they always thought about their constituents as the people who live there. But through kind of working with them and making associations, that if they were going to take care of the people who live there and the reason they live there, they would have to answer to nature as one of their constituents. So it's that kind of shift that I think really makes a difference in how people then deliberate and make decisions.
Matt: 13:29
Interesting. And how did that change their conversation from there?
Roberta: 13:33
I have no idea.
Matt: 13:34
You have no idea. You just planted the seed.
Roberta: 13:37
Yeah. I mean, that's the problem with being a consultant. You move in, you do something, and then you often have no idea what happens afterwards. That's the thing that's the least satisfying about it. You don't get to see what necessarily evolves. I worked for them for many years, so I would see them once a year, but it still wasn't the same. You didn't get to be there and see what happened.
Matt: 14:03
Right. You just get the aha moments. Yeah.
Roberta: 14:05
Yep.
Matt: 14:06
Gotcha. Yeah. Before we move to the next chapter, hopping back to the Watertown Town Council, because some people might want to hear this. Like, how did you get involved with that first one? Did you reach out? Did someone reach out to you? Or how were you involved with that first group on the council?
Roberta: 14:21
You know, absolutely nobody asked me to run. I just came up with this idea that I should run. And I don't know why. I just thought this would be a great thing to do. And I remember I went down to the city clerk's office, and believe me, there were very few women running for office back then. So I walked into the clerk's office and I said, I'd like to run for office. And you had to register in the clerk's office. And he said, Oh, you want to run for the Library Board of Trustees? And I said, No, I want to run for the city council. And he said, Oh, okay. So I ran. And nobody knew my name. My neighbor, who was well known in the community, helped me run my campaign. Luckily, it was the year of proposition two and a half, and all the municipal governments had to be cut. And the people who had thought about running for public office decided that was about the worst year you could possibly run for office. So there really wasn't a really strong field. And I came in absolutely dead last, but I came in.
Matt: 15:39
And for people who don't know, proposition two and a half, that's like raising taxes. So people don't want to be associated with it.
Roberta: 15:44
Did not want to be associated with what that was going to be. And that also meant that the city had less revenue to run.
Matt: 15:52
And how many years did you serve?
Roberta: 15:55
Well, I served five, which was two terms back then because the first term was three years. I mean, there are usually only two, but it was an off-year, so. And I loved it. I loved it. I just learned a ton. I thought it was very interesting. And it really informed the work that I did in the 25 years of my consulting practice. And my consulting practice really evolved into what I considered the evolution of democracy. That how we can actually make democracy work better, reflect better the will of the people, voting is kind of a crazy way to do it because people change their minds and it's a little bit of a, it's kind of a crude tool in really figuring out what people feel about certain issues. So that really fascinated me. But I couldn't really figure out at the end of that 25 years, I wanted to do something else with that evolution of democracy. And I just didn't see an opening. I applied for a state-level job on thinking about how better to match up kind of how people really felt about things, how that could be better reflected in policy development. And I applied for a job on the state level and I didn't get it. And what they ended up hiring is someone who was going to work on voter registration, which is a very different part of the evolution of democracy. Very important, but not what I was good at or interested in. So.
Matt: 17:34
Yeah. So then what was the next chapter then? Is this where we get into the arts center, or is there something another little chapter in between?
Roberta: 17:42
Well, the next step, it does kind of get into the arts center, but it came also through government. I kind of flipped between working and then coming back to Watertown and doing public service work. And my parents were aging and I needed to kind of step back from full-time work. So I put in my hat in the ring to be on the Watertown Arsenal Development Corporation, which was redeveloping this 32-acre development site in Watertown. And again, I had the good fortune to work with some fabulous people, particularly John Airasian. John taught me a ton about how communities really work, how getting things done in communities, how to raise money in communities, all of those things John was fabulous at. And he was a great leader. So it was just a riot to work on a development project. Because you got to take a plot of land, define how it's going to be utilized, and then solicit proposals from a variety of very talented developers, and then guide that development process for the benefit of the community.
Matt: 18:59
And for people who don't know about this, we have talked about this in previous episodes with some other people too, but this is the space where kind of Arsenal Yards, next to that where the Mosesian Center is and all those lab buildings now that have been other things over the years. But that's a space that was sold from the U.S. government to the city. So that's the space we're talking about for people who are unaware of this. And this was early 2000s. Yeah. But sorry. Continue.
Roberta: 19:27
Yeah, we could look that up.
Matt: 19:28
Yeah. That information is out there. But I just want to give that context to people who don't know what this arsenal redevelopment was. So it's trying to figure out with this property that we were getting, what the town could do and should do with it.
Roberta: 19:40
Yeah. So it was a fascinating process. And we held an initial public meeting based on some of the tools that I had been working on in my career. John was kind of an old fashioned guy and was like, okay, now we're in charge. Now we're going to do it. And said, no, we have to really listen to the community about what they think. So we managed to work together to work that out and had an initial meeting. And in that initial meeting, the community came forward and said, we want an art center there. So it wasn't my idea. It really was Dinah Lane came forward, who is the person who really started, director of the children's theater. You know, the community really came together around this as an important part of this development. So we were all listening. We were there to listen. That really gave us some direction, particularly about the arts center. It also made us put those things in the documents that we put out to the developers. So they knew that we had expectations for a public participation and a public part of that development. That had been a research site that had been totally closed off to the community. And we wanted to open that heart of Watertown to Watertown citizens. So the arts center was one of the primary ways to do that. And that was an extraordinarily successful development. We were just lucky, lucky, lucky. We hit the real estate market at the right time, very rare. It wasn't because we were so smart. It was really because the timing really worked out. We made a lot of money for the town. We were hoping just to break even. We made, I think, $15 million plus tons of community benefits. The Commander's Mansion was a part of that. The million dollars to seed the community foundation was a part of that. And the shell of the building for the arts center, plus a very important negotiated part of that, was that they would, whoever owned that property would pay a third of our utilities at the art center. So it was a huge win for the community. And it was deeply satisfying and lots of fun. So it was something that I really started to think about, okay, this is fun to do. I wonder what it's like to do on the other side. So then I took a short job working for Bill McQuillan, who is a developer on the development side to see how that worked. And he was the major developer for what we now call Arsenal Yards. And back then, before they had really totally redeveloped it. But we created the beginning of Hatch, started there, our makerspace in Watertown, which has now moved to Watertown Square. We developed a partnership with the Audubon Society. We created an innovation space, all of which kind of settled that development and connected it to the community and innovation. So that was a lot of fun.
Matt: 23:13
Any particular insights from that side? Because I think a lot of people, you know, hear the development word and like big evil. So from that side of things, was there anything that you were surprised by or that really stuck out as changing your mind about something?
Roberta: 23:26
Well, I mean, the realities of the development side is it's driven by money. But it, you know, everything is driven by money. It's like the town can only spend the money it has, you know, and the developers are in the game to make money. So I think the thing that was interesting to me is seeing the timing for community betterment opportunities, that they're usually early in the process of development. It's like they've got to establish that this is something that needs to happen for this particular community. And communities can be smarter or not about establishing what those priorities can be. And developers like to move quickly. They don't want to waste time. Time is very expensive for them. So if you hold them up, that's a very expensive thing. So it's better not to hold them up, but get the community benefits that you want. So being clear about what your rules are, what you expect in order to live peacefully and happily in this community. How do you contribute to the community, because you have to contribute to this community. You can't kind of extract this kind of profit from this community for nothing. It's just for your tax dollars. It's really not right. And a lot of developers are happy to do it as long as they know and they're clear about what the rules are and what the expectations are. And is it fair?
Matt: 24:58
Sounds almost exactly what you were talking about with the municipal government meetings, expectations and such.
Roberta: 25:05
Yep. You know, I think the planning department tries very hard to make that clear, but I think it's hard to do. It's hard to do. So I think there are opportunities. You know, we got a lot from Brian O'Neill, who redeveloped the Arsenal site. There's a lot of things that exist to this day because of those community benefits. And we can continue to do that and have that benefit Watertown. You don't want to have them build something that's not going to serve the community in the long term. They can do it in a way that helps us all.
Matt: 25:39
Yeah. Nice. So then after that little stretch, is that next step, is that the Mosesian Center or Arsenal Arts Center at that point?
Roberta: 25:48
Well, at the end of the working on the Watertown Arsenal Development Corporation, we got a million dollars from the developer for the arts center, and then we had to actually raise the rest of the money, which was over seven million dollars. And John Airasian and I were the co-chairs of that capital campaign. I never dreamed that we could raise that much money. One of the things that I think I would just say to other people, I had no idea that I could raise money. I had never raised money in my entire life. I was kind of scared of money, and money seemed kind of intimidating. And what I found out, that when I asked people in a very straightforward way is, they gave us money. So John and I worked together and we ended up raising that money to build the center. So what I would say to others, you don't know whether you can do something until you try doing it. So it was a capacity that I had no idea that I could do.
Matt: 27:03
Yeah, I mean that's yeah. Never raising money to raising eight million. Well, raising seven million, getting to eight million overall.
Roberta: 27:11
Yeah. I mean, John had all the contacts. I was just kind of starry-eyed along for the ride for a while, and then I thought, oh, this is how it works. So, you know, you can learn to do it. And people, people who have a lot of money, and this was an illusion I had. There are a lot of people who have a lot of money who would love to put it to work on something that matters, and something that is going to really help people and enhance their lives. I mean, some people don't give away money. Some people have a lot of money and they never give away a cent. But there's a lot of people out there who have a lot of money and they would love to give it away to something that makes sense. So discovering that was really eye-opening for me.
Matt: 27:59
So is it more finding people than making your pitch perfect, you know?
Roberta: 28:03
Yeah. Yeah. It's finding the people who care. And there are a lot of people who care. I mean, that's the wonderful thing that I've discovered through all of my different careers. There's a lot of people out there who care. Not everybody does, but there are a lot of people who do. And once they get together and figure out what they want to do, we can do almost anything.
Matt: 28:23
Most people are good people.
Roberta: 28:25
Most people are good people. Absolutely. And they can do amazing things.
Matt: 28:31
Yeah. So then you stepped into, I know you were a leadership role with the actual arts center too, once they got off and running. What was that like?
Roberta: 28:40
Well, I did one other thing.
Matt: 28:42
Okay, go ahead. I'm skipping a chapter, sorry.
Roberta: 28:45
No, I actually had to write these down, otherwise I was going to forget. Which is one of the things that really intrigued me, and I didn't know. There was a lot of talk during these years about startup companies. And I didn't really understand how they worked. How do you do a startup? How do you finance a startup? How does that early financing really work? And I'd seen that with the arts center of how to, in the nonprofit sector, how to get that kind of up and running. So I ended up working with a group called Launchpad, which worked with startups. So I, through a couple of years, I got to hear monthly pitches from different companies, and I got to see how that financing got put together. And I learned how pharmaceuticals get funded and marketing startups get funded. And it was incredibly illuminating.
Matt: 29:40
So you were on the group of people giving the money out to these companies, making the decisions. Okay.
Roberta: 29:44
Yeah. It was a remarkable education. And how people really are making bets and risking money on these startup companies. And a lot of them fail. I mean, most of them fail. That's the interesting thing, is people think that businesses are so much more reliable. They're not. You know, most of the startups, you lose everything. So it was another really interesting piece of what I wanted to learn. And it was fun.
Matt: 30:17
Any insight into what made a successful startup?
Roberta: 30:20
You know, most of it's luck. I mean, you have to run everything reasonably well. And but it's again the timing. If the companies that had the right technology at the right time, if you had it too early, forget it. It wasn't gonna go. If you had it too late, you missed it. It's really a lot of it's just timing. And it's very hard to judge those things. Very smart people judge it wrong all the time. I remember a company that did well and ended up selling was developing their software for mobile devices. And it was just when people were starting to switch to their phones. So they hit that technological and societal development at the right moment. And they had the technology to do it. So they were the company that succeeded.
Matt: 31:16
Right.
Roberta: 31:17
So it's a crapshoot there.
Matt: 31:20
Yeah, it's tough.
Roberta: 31:21
It's tough.
Matt: 31:22
So you didn't solve that one either.
Roberta: 31:23
No, it didn't solve that.
Matt: 31:24
Humans and business haven't been solved.
Roberta: 31:27
No, nope, didn't solve any of those.
Matt: 31:29
So then, so what's the chapter after that?
Robera: 31:31
Then we're off to the Mosesian Center for the Arts.
Matt: 31:35
Was it the Mosesian Center at that point or was it the Arsenal Center?
Roberta: 31:38
It was still the Arsenal Center. Well, it was the Arsenal Center, but very soon after I joined, we changed the name. So I think we were literally on the cusp of changing the name to the Dorothy and Charles Mosesian Center for the Arts. So we were in kind of bad straits at the Mosesian Center, and Sally Young actually came to me and said, you know, do you think you'd be interested in stepping in as the interim executive director at the Mosesian Center? I said, Well, maybe. I'll think about it. So the board was kind of struggling and they were doing a search, and I ended up joining the staff as the executive director. We were not in great shape, and it was kind of hair-raising as to whether we were going to continue to make payroll every two weeks. So it was kind of a tense time. I originally had a contract for three months. And after a month in the job, I came back to the board and I said, you know, I don't think we should hand this thing off to a stranger in three months. I'm gonna recommend that you either extend my tenure as an interim or I'll throw my hat in the ring as a permanent. And the recommendation from the board was throw your hat in as the permanent. I did. I then was hired as the permanent executive director and then served for five years. And that was tons of fun too. I mean, again, I got to work with Mike Denneen, who was a board president, who tragically died of cancer three years later, but was an amazing guy. He ran a studio, a recording studio. So he knew music, he knew the arts, his daughter was in children's theater. He was just a fabulous human being. So I got to work with him for a good chunk of time. And we brought Earful to the center. We did another fabulous piece of work with the exhibitions. We brought Please Touch the Art, which was really a groundbreaking exhibition for people who were low sight. Anyway, we got to do a lot of really fun things. Once we got ourselves out of the fiscal hole, it was deep and ugly.
Matt: 34:03
How did you get out of the fiscal hole? I mean, what were some of the things that you were able to do to fix that?
Roberta: 34:08
I mean, it's the same thing you have to do in business. You reduce costs and you bring in more money. You know, it's kind of simple.
Matt: 34:16
Simple but not easy.
Roberta: 34:17
Simple but not easy, yeah. And I think all these arts organizations, they always have to run a little lean. There's not enough revenue. And particularly in this country, we don't have institutional support for any of our arts institutions. So we have to run lean. And we had to run particularly lean back then, but we still have to run lean. And then you have to do all the kind of outreach and create programming that excites people and people want to come to and they want to see. And that can be really fun, but you have to be really careful with how much money you spend.
Matt: 34:58
So why were you interested in the arts? Because we haven't talked about anything previously in this story about you being involved with arts really. So why did the arts center, I mean, other than you were involved with the creating of it, but how were the arts important to you in general?
Roberta: 35:12
I mean, the arts have always been important to me, but I've never been an artist per se. I've been a huge appreciator of arts and performance and theater, dance. My kids went through the children's theater. I saw what that did for them. And all my friends are artists. I don't know how I didn't get the gene, but I didn't. Everybody I know is an artist. It's funny, I was thinking about this interview, and I thought, I'm often not the person to come up with the idea. I'm the person who hears about the idea and says, oh my God, that's a great idea. We should do that. It's like the Arts Center, I didn't come up with that idea. Dinah Lane came up with that idea. And a lot of the really great projects that we did, somebody else came up with. And I weighed in and said, Oh my God, that's fabulous. We should do it. You know, from everything that we've done in Watertown, that's been really fun. Yard Art was come up by Barbara Epstein, and we all weighed in to make it happen.
Matt: 36:15
That's an important role to have because especially I think artists need that person.
Roberta: 36:20
Yeah.
Matt: 36:21
So and it's often, I think, it's often an overlooked person in the connection of how things happen. You know, the idea person always gets the celebration, but that's an important role to have. So the artist, thank you for your, for your gumption and know-how on that end of things. So yeah. So you were there at the Arsenal slash Mosesian Center for a number of years, but then you got involved with other stuff in the town too. So the Public Arts and Culture Committee is obviously something you're involved with. Do you want to talk about that a little bit?
Roberta: 36:53
Sure. When I finished and retired from the Mosesian Center the first time, I'd been running the Mosesian Center for about five years. COVID happened. We were about to hire a new person. I stayed on a little longer just to kind of manage that partial shutdown and then shut down for COVID, which was, of course, very painful, as many other people experienced. And then they hired a new executive director during that time. When I stepped back, the city was starting a Watertown Public Arts and Culture Committee. And that seemed like the perfect retirement job. I wouldn't have to worry about funding a building. That sounds so great. We could just, you know, fund artists. So I threw my hat in the ring for that one and was selected, and it's been, again, tons of fun. I've got to work with you, Matt, which has been totally great. Our committee is fabulous. Liz Helfer, who is our staff member, is a dynamo and can make an enormous number of things happen. I think we've done some remarkable work. Again, Sally Young brought us a fabulous project that has been a multi-year project of Edible Watertown, which is in a dual way increasing our artistic sensitivity to all of the plant life around us, as well as connecting us much more directly to the plants that grow around us every day. So it's had an environmental kind of component to it, as well as an artistic one, which is a really interesting combo. And the sculpture walk has been great. Porch Fest has been amazing. For a while we were doing Yard Art, Yard Art was fun. And now we're working on River of Light. I just think this is a great thing. It's somewhat opportunistic. We have a very small budget from the town. The city. I'm sorry, I slipped back into town because when I moved into town, it was a town.
Matt: 39:06
The city known as the town of Watertown.
Roberta: 39:08
Yes, it was city as known as the town of Watertown.
Matt: 39:11
Yeah, so the public arts and culture committee stuff has been great. Is there anything else you want to say on that for people who might not know what it is and its purpose within the city?
Roberta: 39:21
Well, it's been an organizing principle for artistic work and artistic vision for the city. So it's been a way to integrate artists into many, many other aspects of how the city works. The nice thing about having Liz Helfer there in the planning department is anytime there's something that gets done by the DPW, is there a way in which we can integrate an artist into this work? So it's just not the same old crazy utilitarian thing that's going to happen no matter what. So it gives us opportunity for that kind of surprise that we could integrate artists into things.
Matt: 40:04
For example, we did bike racks recently that have been going up around town that were designed by an artist.
Roberta: 40:11
Yeah. Exactly. And also having a way for individual artists to continue to submit their work for a variety of shows that we've had based on some of our programming. But having a staff member also has been central to the coordination. I mean we now have this really fabulous kind of constellation of artistic organizations in town. And we have a tiny little town. I mean we're not big, but we have small funding sources from the Community Foundation, from our funds from the city, from the Cultural Council, those are the three funders. Then we also have the programming components done by the Mosesian Center and Watertown Public Arts and Culture. We have the library, which also does a lot of artistic and cultural things. And now we have the cultural district which does a lot of marketing for all of those things. So that constellation is really powerful if we can manage to coordinate all of it. And that's why Liz is so important and the leadership is so important, making sure we're all talking to each other. And also the Commander's Mansion does a fair amount of programming too. So once we've integrated all of those, we have a lot of bang for the buck. We're leveraging a lot of strengths. So I think the work that the city has done and the foresight that they have shown by having staff on that has been well worth it.
Matt: 41:51
Yeah. The last kind of mini chapter to get on here is you went back to the Mosesian quite recently to help out there. And I think partly for your work there and all this other stuff you're saying, you know, you recently got named a Commonwealth Heroine by the State Women's Commission this past year. So let's start with coming back to the Mosesian. What necessitated that and how were you able to go back and help bring it back up again to help keep it going for the foreseeable future.
Roberta: 42:21
Well that was a great challenge. COVID really hit that institution hard. Mosesian was all about convening people and bringing people together and that just wasn't possible. There were, you know, adaptations for remote but, but in order to have a vibrant art center you really have to have people coming together and want to come together and that didn't happen for several years. So I came back really at the request of the president of the board, asking if I would step back in. And in some ways, you know there've been times when I haven't wanted to go back to the art center. It's really, it's a full-time job. It's a very demanding job. But I saw it from the beginning and I saw the number of people who've contributed to that institution and who put their money and their work, you know, all of our resources, the number of people on the WADC who all of those people worked for nothing. You know, the number of people, the number of hours that have gone into that institution so that we could be here today is phenomenal. Plus the amount of money and resources that people gave so that it could last at least a hundred years. You can't turn your back on that. You just have to say okay, let's figure out how to make this work. So that's kind of the attitude I came in with. It wasn't totally clear because we were really down to, we were down to nothing. And we had some debt from the government because we had taken out one of those government pandemic era loans. But it was clear that people wanted, once they heard the story and once they knew where we were at, that people around town wanted this institution to survive. They were a little dubious thinking, oh my God here we go again. But people stepped up in really fabulous ways. And I got to work again with somebody really fabulous, Shauna Harrington, who's the president of the board. She and I worked as a team to really bring the place back. And then we have a really good board. Our board is spectacular.
Matt: 44:44
Yeah, and you had a huge fundraiser that's kind of pushed you over the line there, right?
Roberta: 44:50
Yes. We made more money in our fundraiser than we had ever made in our history. Really now we have a surplus in our budget so we could start this year with a new executive director, very excited about Aliana, and also Matt Jatkola who had been long term with the organization was now the associate executive director, so we had the history and we had a new network of artists coming in with Aliana. So I think we're now poised and with the renovation that we were able to do during the COVID pause, which was always also kind of a miraculous thing, we're now poised to be the kind of institution that can do all the things that I've always dreamed could happen there. And I'm thrilled. I'm just thrilled.
Matt: 45:38
Well, the community really appreciated you stepping in because you did this pro bono to kind of come in and help save the organization and do your fundraising thing again. Yeah, and any thoughts on receiving that award from the state?
Roberta: 45:51
It was very sweet. It was very sweet. And you know, I come from a, I mentioned that I grew up in North Dakota and in North Dakota people are trained not to bring any attention to themselves. It's the ethos of North Dakota. So it's been really hard for me my whole life, when I had my consulting practice I had to advertise myself, I had to do all those things. When you run for office you have to talk about yourself all the time. So I had to learn to do all those things. It was another learning that, it was a lovely award. And it was a little hard for me because I don't always like that, but it was lovely. It was sweet and I really appreciated it. It was really hard work doing this, doing the art center piece. I'm not going to lie about it. But it was very, very nice to be acknowledged.
Matt: 46:49
Yeah. Yeah, well thank you again for all of that, for all those things you've done in Watertown. I just mentioned to you earlier, I think we're going to do a separate episode on River of Light so people are listening, listen to that because we're going to talk about that event that's coming up. But just to give a brief thing for people, what is the date of that and, you know, the 30 second description of that and then if they want to find out more they can listen to the episode we'll do on the River of Light. So you want to just give the bit on that?
Roberta: 47:15
Sure. River of Light is going to happen again this year. This will be the second year. It's on January 17th from four to six at the Mosesian Center for the Arts. It is a community wide lantern building experience and lantern making experience that culminates in a parade of lanterns in one of the darkest times of the year. So at the Mosesian Center we will be having cocoa, we will be having two performances, one by singer-songwriter Sam Newcomer, and then also an Indian dance performance kind of bookending the parade. The parade will be short, I'm warning you, it will be short because it's cold during that time of the year. So come bundled up with your lanterns. And we will have lantern making, very simple ones for kids if they don't have a lantern to bring. So the bookmobile will be there. It's a really fun community celebration.
Matt: 48:20
Yeah, people can check that out. I'll put a link to that in the show notes. Any other last thoughts for this episode that you want to give out to people in Watertown?
Roberta: 48:31
You know Watertown is a wonderful place to live. And I know you know this too, Matt. It's, there's some places where you don't feel like you can do things. And in Watertown people feel like they can do things. And it's not that hard to just say, I think I'd like to do this and you talk to a few people and they kind of say that sounds like a good idea and you can do it. So the bar is not high for participation. It's a wonderful thing about a community and people really care for each other. So I just want to thank all the people in Watertown who continue to care for this community.
Matt: 49:16
I agree. It's a great place. Well thank you for taking time to sit down to share your thoughts and stories.
Roberta: 49:22
And thank you Matt for doing this great series.
Matt: 49:25
So that's it for my conversation with Roberta. I'll put a link in the show notes to the River of Light and I'm hoping to get out a short event highlight episode specifically for River of Light, so you can find a little more information about that, shortly after this episode is released. I was going to include it in this episode but we got deeper into Roberta's story and I didn't want to cut that off and wanted to give time to talk about River of Light too, so decided to split them up. And if you like these conversations, you can find more interviews and insights into the people, places, stories, and ideas of Watertown over at LittleLocalConversations.com. Find all the episodes, I’ll have events starting back up in February, and you can sign up on the website for my weekly newsletter that I send out to keep you up to date on everything going on with the podcast, from episodes to events and just some thoughts that I have. And lastly if you like to help support this podcast head on over again to the website LittleLocalConversations.com. There's a big button on the menu that says support local conversation. You can become a little local friend and help support the podcast on a monthly basis for whatever's comfortable for you.
Matt: 50:28
Alright and I want to give a few shout outs here to wrap things up. First one goes to podcast sponsor Arsenal Financial. They’re a financial planning business here in Watertown that's owned by Doug Orifice, who's a very committed community member, and his business helps busy families, small businesses, and people close to retirement. So if you need help in any of those areas, reach out to Doug and his team at arsenalfinancial.com. I also want to give a thank you to the Watertown Cultural Council who have given me a grant this year to help support the podcast. So I want to give them the appropriate credit, which is, this program is supported in part by a grant from the Watertown Cultural Council, a local agency, which is supported by the Mass Cultural Council, a state agency. You can find out more about them at watertownculturalcouncil.org and mass cultural council.org. And a couple more shout outs to promotional partners, first one goes to the Watertown Business Coalition, which is a nonprofit organization here in Watertown and their motto is community is our business. Find out more about them at WatertownBusinessCoalition.com. And lastly Watertown News, which is a Watertown focused online newspaper. It's a great place to keep up to date with everything going on in the city check that out at WatertownMANews.com. So that's it. Until next time, take care.
