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CONTACTS:
Lenore Morrisson
Coordinator, Community Cultural Education
Phone: 503-338-2473
Nadine Faith
Director, Foundation and College Relations
Clatsop Community College
Phone: 503-338-2306
Web site: http://www.clatsopcc.edu/index.html
Arts & Ideas flow at Clatsop CC
Clatsop Community College’s Arts & Ideas concept is one of the many exemplary efforts among Oregon’s community colleges to “walk the talk” when it comes to encouraging continuing learning and achievement throughout the community.
Clatsop CC owns a resource, the Performing Arts Center, which the Arts & Ideas program works to share with the community. The center boasts incredible acoustics and an inviting ambience.
Lenore Morrisson, a Gearhart resident and Seaside HS drama program leader, was hired about a year ago as coordinator of Community Cultural Education. She has rejuvenated an effort to bring educational and diverse cultural performances to the community and bring opportunities for a venue, an audience, and a market to local artists of all ages. She relies on collaboration and volunteerism to make the program work on a shoestring.
“Together we can make many things happen that we couldn’t achieve independently,” she said. One example is collaborating with school and community groups to bring in national and international performing troupes that schools can then take advantage of for field trips
-- offering cultural enrichment opportunities that may not have existed before Arts & Ideas.
One of her goals is widening the sphere of contacts among arts students in the different schools as well as giving school groups the opportunity to perform in front of community audiences in a real performance hall.
“Lenore has been a unifying force and a phenomenal find for the college and community,” said Nadine Faith of the college’s communications office. “She has the connections in the North Coast art community to get faculty, students and the community excited and involved in Arts & Ideas.
Arts & Ideas draws upon community talent for its programming, including that of area high school students, and works with community groups such as The River Theater in Astoria, the Coaster Theatre in Cannon Beach, the Sunset Empire Parks & Recreation District in Seaside and the Lower Columbia Hispanic Council to provide benefits to students, the community and local artists.
In addition to music, dance and theater, Arts & Ideas started a summer concert series this year, is in the process of developing a winter concert series, and will be offering speakers from and for the college’s faculty, coordinated by the student honor society and the job corps.
About a dozen volunteers from surrounding communities have stepped forward unbidden to help in the Arts & Ideas program, and Morrisson said that in this, her second year, she expects the program to blossom.
Clatsop CC’s Community Education program also offers classes in art, conversational foreign language, cooking, auto maintenance, music, personal fitness, photography, financial investments and other subjects in Astoria as well as outlying areas from Cannon Beach and Seaside to Warrenton and
Knappa.
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