The Risk-Takers

Cincinnati’s Innovators and Entrepreneurs

By Craig J. Heimbuch
Photos By Felts Photography

They lay it on the line. They cash out their savings in pursuit of a dream. You only live once, right? But it is more than just the seize the day thing. It’s a burn. An ache. A vision for a product or solution, a business model that’s been formulating in the back of their head for as long as they can remember. They live with and for a purpose, not content to tend someone else’s store, they make their own way.
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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. Read the rest of this entry…