Board of Aldermen 2-06-2020 Page 6
There are many stakeholders involved. From there, the Steering Committee needed to organize itself, and
develop a rhythm which is vitally important for the project’s success. And again, it takes time. The culture
that developed is one where the Committee worked and acts in a very collaborative and consensus building
manner.
The Steering Committee developed three working groups and focused on operations, design and fund
raising. These were working groups that met throughout the spring and summer of 2018 and beyond.
Simultaneously, there was a public procurement process to solicit an architecture and engineering firm,
along with an operator and construction manager. This all occurred in the latter half of 2018. | would be
remiss not to point out that the Performing Arts Center tour took place, which was in the summer of 2018 as
well and the tour was a great team building exercise and helped to educate and give a frame of reference
for the project.
We did not engage the architect and engineers and construction manager until the winter of 2018, early of
2019 as mentioned earlier by the Mayor. And please remember we had the untimely passing of the Chair
of the Performing Arts Center Steering Committee, President Brian McCarthy which understandably
delayed some of the Committee business as we needed to reorganize ourselves. Simultaneous to all that,
the Steering Committee’s Working Group focused on fundraising while organizing and beginning to tackle
the challenge of raising private money for the Performing Arts Center. A public procurement process
occurred in the spring of 2018 to solicit a fundraising consultant as mentioned earlier this evening. Once the
selection was made to hire Full Circle Consulting, which is the company that Betsy McNamara works for, a
fundraising assessment and feasibility study began where 30ish interviews over a four to eight week period
occurred during the summer of 2018. This led to the recommendation and development of a capital
campaign plan. One of the more pressing items that developed was the need to create and organize a
capital campaign committee, recruiting and forming a capital campaign committee occurred throughout the
entire fall of 2018.
The first Capital Campaign Committee meeting occurred in December of 2018. However, just because the
Capital Campaign Committee was formed, does not mean solicitation started. Once the recruitment period
occurred an onboarding and educational process ensued. A lot of the volunteers acknowledged that this
was the first capital campaign and an educational effort transpired during the better part of the winter of
2019 and into early spring. Ironically, as the capital campaign committee was being formed, the design
process was just starting to get underway in January of 2019. The two efforts needed to go hand in hand,
because you cannot realistically solicit donations until a concrete design is achieved. Being the very high
profile public nature of this project, a robust committee process and public engagement piece occurred on
the design, which meant that the designs were not recommended by the Performing Arts Center Steering
Committee until June/July of 2019 or approved by the Board of Aldermen Infrastructure Committee until
August of 2019.
Conversely the fund raising efforts did not begin in earnest until the end of the summer of 2019. However,
the capital campaign committee did not sit idle during the spring and summer, there were a lot of “soft
meetings” taking place to develop leads. Additionally, during the preparation and organizational phase in
the spring of 2019, there was an agreement reached with City Arts of Nashua to be the fiscal agent as a
precursor to the 501(C)3 entity that was actually formed in 2019 and all of that took some time. It was
during the spring of 2019 also that an application for a CDF Tax Credit occurred and | am pleased to state
the application was successful and the project was awarded tax credits in the summer of 2019. It was a
great way to jumpstart the fundraising efforts. Fundraising efforts did not start in earnest until the end and
summer of fall of 2019. | want to give you all that recap to hopefully show and demonstrate that a lot of
work has transpired over the last couple of years, and although it may not seem it and | didn’t even realize
it until | wrote this narrative down, we have accomplished a lot of tasks in a very small amount of time. So
Mr. Chair, if | could I’d like to turn it over now to the Chair of the Capital Campaign Committee to say a few
words.
