Knitting Makes Me a Better Executive Director
Email
Print
Hoong Yee Lee Krakauer is Executive Director of the Queens Council on the Arts [4] in Jamaica, New York, a children's book author, a pianist, and a fanatic knitter. In this First Person Nonprofit story she tells what she's learned from knitting:
I had been a classical pianist. But as an executive director, being able to play 32 Beethoven sonatas was not going to provide the knowledge I needed. So I asked someone for advice who had left one world successfully for another world: my mother.
What I got was a ball of yarn and two knitting needles.
My mother taught me to love creating works of art from a single strand of yarn. She taught me to aspire to mastery: "You want the yarn to move gracefully through your fingers, up and over the needles like a little dance." She brought me into her knitting circle.
And in my Mom's knitting circle I learned the power of peer circles. In both knitting circles and peer circles you sit in a circle, shoulder to shoulder, and discover that you have all the answers -- and all the questions -- in the room. In both cases there's something in your hand, and something in the middle. Both these gatherings are places to share, to be vulnerable and to be supported.
I love the buzz in a room whether it is a knitting circle or a peer circle of visual artists: it is the sound of a creative community. In a recent piece in the New York Times about things that make people happy and things that don't, David Brooks writes: Joining a group that meets even just once a month produces the same happiness gain as doubling your income.
Knitting and budget cutsÂ
Knitting is transforming something linear into something multi-dimensional. I've lost two funders recently, each with substantial amounts of money for certain programs. If I look at this in a linear way, it's a loss, a cut. But if I can see it in many dimensions, I can see that if I'm losing funding and support in one area it means that there must be some fat somewhere to cut. And that instead of a loss it's a way to re-evaluate what we're doing and ask ourselves honestly, is the tail wagging the dog or is the dog wagging the tail?
How do we become excellent?
When I was a music student there were conservatories around the world training students like me for careers in performance. But there were no such academies when I became an executive director. How do you become excellent in this work? What do you need to practice, what experience do you have to create?
In learning a craft or a trade, it is customary for apprentices to spend years studying with a master before they could become journeymen and artisans in their own right.
How do you get better at anything? Practice. That, at least, I knew from my piano days.
So I knit a little everyday. It delights me to see the progress I have made. I love the feel of the yarn and needles. As an executive director I strive for excellence on a daily basis, through reflective practice of actions big and small.
We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit. -- Aristotle
I am changing the world, one artist, one peer circle at a time. It is work I embrace with the same commitment to excellence and practice that I was taught as a young pianist, that I learned in knitting circles, and that I practice every day as an executive director.
Hoong Yee Lee Krakauer is an executive director who writes style notes for people who change the world at www.hoongyee.com [5]. She is also an artspy, momspy and nonprofit knitter. You can follow her on Twitter here [6].
[7]
> Read more [8]