Giving the World a Stage

By Jeff Waddle

Mary McCullough-Hudson gives hope to all of us who have seen our careers take some unexpected twists and turns. Jokingly referring to her 30-year career at Cincinnati’s Find Arts Fund (FAF) as the result of a “failed opera career,” McCullough-Hudson has played a leading role in growing the FAF into an $11 million operation that today supports over 100 area arts organizations, making it the largest such fundraising campaign in the nation.
She briefly sang with the Cincinnati Opera after earning undergraduate and graduate degrees in Opera Performance from U.C.’s College Conservatory of Music, but she has been FAF’s president and CEO for the past 15 years following a 10-year stint as its campaign director. And, though it wasn’t exactly the opera diva career she originally envisioned, the FAF has allowed her to follow her passion for the arts in a way that has touched the lives of countless Cincinnatians.
“While it’s been tough, this year, in many ways, has been among the most rewarding for me, seeing the response from the community,” says McCullough-Hudson, referring to FAF’s 2009 campaign in the midst of a deep recession. “It dropped a little bit, about eight percent, from the year before but I think it says an enormous amount about the value people here place on the arts. Actually, our number of donors diminished at a much smaller rate than our actual dollars, so we have a lot of people who say: ‘I can’t quite give as much but I still want to support it.’ That’s enormously gratifying.”

Signs of Progress

Ever the optimist, McCullough-Hudson believes recent developments suggest the region’s arts community remains vibrant. “Our attendance at arts events has been remarkable this year and that has been true over history in times of challenge,” she says. “Participation in the arts has a tendency to go up because when life is a little scary, that’s when we need it most. Previous generations have sustained this (arts organizations) over the years so that we get to benefit from it during tough times…Those that can have really stepped up to say we need to make sure we continue this so it’s there for our children and our children’s children,” says McCullough-Hudson.
At every turn, she stresses how the Fine Arts Fund has evolved over the years moving away from a fundraising organization only to assuming a professional development and advocacy role in the city’s cultural arts sector. Among its goals are new initiatives to engage all segments of the community more effectively with educational outreach programs and other ways to encourage active participation in the arts. She believes it’s starting to pay off.
“We have always had one of the highest numbers of community theaters of any region in the country, and one fascinating phenomenon recently is the growth we’ve seen in community-based arts centers,” she says. “There is a sense that communities are coming together not only to watch other people perform but to participate in it themselves. There is a real appreciation here for the role that arts can play in our lives at every level, sort of a Pro-Am approach to art…a sense that the arts really are for everyone, not an elite pastime other people do.”

In Her Blood

FAF may not have been McCullough-Hudson’s first career choice but in many respects, she’s the perfect person to head up Cincinnati’s most important arts support and development organization. She grew up in a working-class Hamilton neighborhood. Her father put himself through college playing sax and clarinet in dance bands on weekends. “We had a piano and we were surrounded by music in the house,” she says. “It wasn’t something we saw somebody else do, it was something we participated in.”
McCullough-Hudson was hooked on performance arts the first time she saw a musical, and she was taking voice lessons at CCM by high school. After college, she found herself doing ensemble work at the Cincinnati Opera where she was competing with a stellar lineup of fellow female singers.
Along the way, she met her husband, Greg, and they courted a dream.
“We toyed with the idea of going to New York and starving—he was in theater and I was in opera—but we decided that we probably didn’t want it badly enough to sacrifice everything, so we set out to try to find some way to make ourselves employable and stay even part way in the field,” she says.
They found a compromise, a comfortable spot. Greg found a teaching spot in Cincinnati in theater and communications and Mary found her place.
An arts fundraising event where she was singing gave McCullough-Hudson a chance to meet the FAF staff leadership, and she soon accepted a support position there. Thirty years later, she remains as committed to the local arts community as her first day on the job.
“What has kept me here all these years is that this has not been a static organization,” she says. “There are always new challenges and extraordinary new opportunities to connect people with experiences that bring them great joy. And, every year we bring in all-new volunteers and these are the people who recharge our batteries and bring the energy and enthusiasm.”
As a life-long lover of the arts, McCullough-Hudson says the opportunity to attend so many arts events is what she enjoys most. “But I have a tendency to watch the people more than the artists because I get such a kick out of just the energy and the pleasure folks get.”

Get Out of the Sales Mode

In the process of raising millions in her 30 years at FAF, McCullough-Hudson has naturally learned a few things about fundraising. “Too often we in fundraising are in a sales mode and we need to be in a listening mode and hear what is important to the people whose support we’re seeking,” she says. “You also have to be passionate about the cause and have a real sense of the value of whatever you’re raising funds for. You can’t fake it. It’s got to be real.
“It’s what binds us together and gives us an identity and personality that makes us uniquely us,” she says. “It’s our heritage, our legacy and also a way – in an increasingly diverse world – to celebrate the unique cultural heritage of different peoples to help bridge understanding, to help us better know each other and ourselves and our past…That is a role the arts play in a way that almost nothing else can.”