Keynote Speaker - Thursday, October 22 

Dr. Candace Matelic, Thriving on the Edge of Chaos: Engaging Community and Transforming Our Organizations

Our field is teetering on the edge of chaos. With a challenging world economy, many museums, historic sites, and cultural organizations are facing brute survival, or at best, severely curtailing their staff, operations, and services. Yet, other organizations are experiencing growth and new support from their communities. What is the difference and what are the secrets to thriving in these challenging and exciting times? This keynote presentation will explore how to engage community and fundamentally transform your organization to create a vision that addresses what people care about, rethink policies and work patterns, harness creativity, develop innovative programs and services, and build long term organizational sustainability. The transformation starts with our own beliefs, and evolves as a shared journey of organizational learning and development, leading to new rules of engagement and operation.

Keynote Address - Friday, October 23

Pier Giorgio Di Cicco, Poet Laureate of The City of Toronto

Pier Giorgio Di Cicco has authored 17 collections of poetry since 1976. He was born in Arezzo, Italy, raised in Montreal, Baltimore and Toronto, and did post-graduate work at the University of Toronto. In 2004 he was appointed by the City of Toronto as its second Poet Laureate.

Di Cicco has extended the role of Poet Laureate beyond the area of arts advocacy and into the realm of "civic aesthetic", a term coined to define the building of a city by citizenship, civic ethic and urban psychology. He has championed the abolitian of art as "destination point" and the notion of culture as civic ambience and engine of urban prosperity. Di Cicco's urban philosophy has influenced municipal policy in Canada, the U.S. and United Kingdom and has moved the role of the poet laureate into the forum of global engagement in issues that address the urban aesthetic and its relationship to livable and sustainable cities.