This year begins with a change of leadership at two of Napa’s most prominent nonprofits, the Napa Chamber of Commerce and Arts Council Napa Valley. Former Chamber president and CEO Kate King has retired to her ranch in Texas, while Arts Council executive director Michelle Williams has moved on to the Cultural Council of Santa Cruz County.
At each organization, the shift has taken place with barely a ripple, as the former second-in-command stepped into her boss’ shoes in both cases. New Chamber president Lisa Batto has been working for the group since early 2003. “I started in communications and marketing, and as people moved on, I moved up,” says Batto, who rose from an assistant to director of marketing before becoming the Chamber’s first executive vice president in 2006. At the Arts Council, longtime program manager Kristina Young—who, at one point, was the underfunded group’s only employee—is now its acting director for her second time in the past six years.
The Napa Chamber board’s unanimous decision to name Batto as the 44th president in the 120-year history of the chapter (the fourth-largest in the Bay Area) was no news: “Lisa has been training for this position for three years,” says King, who, with the board’s support, created the EVP job to prepare Batto for the top spot. “When I moved into that executive vice president seat, Kate began to plan for the succession of leadership,” Batto explains.
“Few organizations have a succession plan built in,” she continues. “Something could have happened to Kate, and we’d have been without a leader.” Instead, King can ride off into the Texas sunset knowing her hand-picked successor is on the job. “I don’t foresee any changes” [in operations at the Chamber], Batto says, although her own responsibilities have increased: “When I was working as the EVP, I had one boss, who was the CEO,” she says. Now, Batto reports to the board of directors, a cross-section of local business owners whose chairman Mike Silvas has pledged her their “complete confidence and support.”
An energetic single mom whose teenaged daughter and son are seventh-generation Napans, Batto brings to her Chamber presidency not only real-world experience as a business owner but professional training galore: A graduate of the three-year Western Association of Chamber Executives‘ (W.A.C.E.) Chamber Academy, she was one of only two non-CEOs to receive her Accredited Chamber Executive designation from that group in 2008. “That’s something I’m very proud of,” she says.
Batto is also the 2009 president-elect of the board of the Superior Chamber Executives (SuperChex) organization, a director on the boards of the Kiwanis Club of Napa and Leadership Napa Valley, an honorary director of the Napa County Historical Society and a past member of the Housing Committee in the city of Napa. And “if the governor calls someday and offers me the chance to be on a small business board [which happened to King in 2006] , I wouldn’t turn it down,” she says.
But first, Batto has plenty to do in Napa as she executes the Chamber’s plans for 2010, as outlined during a conference last November. “We’re going to work to create a partnership with the Workforce Investment Board. It has several opportunities to get and keep our workforce employed,” she says. The Chamber is also developing what Batto describes as “industry clusters, to be able to find out what their needs are and try to do some advocacy.” In one case, she continues, “we brought together the restaurant industry with the county environmental health department,” for a meeting in which representatives from the two traditional adversaries were able to exchange their views and begin to establish what Batto calls “a better relationship, just through communication.”
A well-blended community is also the goal of Arts Council Napa Valley, which is to the county’s artists what the Chamber is to local businesses: a membership-driven service and advocacy organization with a volunteer board of trustees and a small, dedicated staff. In 2008, the council held a year-long series of public meetings, facilitated by nationally known, Napa-based consultant Morrie Warshawski (author of A State Arts Agency Strategic Planning Toolkit) to discuss how Napa County could become a more successful environment for the arts. Hundreds of residents attended workshops up and down the county. Using their input, the Arts Council created a County Cultural Plan (www.artscouncilnapavalley.org) as a road map toward a more vibrant cultural community. It was a crowning achievement for Williams, a former actress, dancer and wilderness EMT who became a tireless advocate for the arts in Napa.
Now the work of putting the plan into practice falls to Young, a visual artist who seems more comfortable with the executive director’s job today than she was when she declined it more than five years ago. “I really wasn’t interested in the least at that point,” she recalls. “I saw my role as just a connector, from past to present until they could identify a new executive director.” When Williams came on board, “I trained her and expected to leave shortly after we were able to hire Kate [Demarest] as office manager. But something happened: I began to see the light in Arts Council Napa Valley again. I loved working with Michelle and saw a real potential for the organization and programs I’d worked so hard on. So I stayed.”
Among the programs Young mentions are Arts Education, now in its third decade of providing visual, performing, digital and literary arts programs for children in elementary and middle schools, as well as instructional courses for artists interested in teaching the young; a comprehensive Master Arts and Culture Event Calendar (www.nvarts.org) and the annual Open Studios tour, which brings artists and visitors together for two weekends each September. The council also has a lively Web presence beyond its event calendar, with daily updates for its 800-plus Facebook fans in Napa and Sonoma counties. There’s even a weekly blog by your very own Napa Insider, with arts picks for the seven days ahead. Check it out at http://www.artscouncilnapavalley.org/articles/arts_digest.shtml, and I’ll talk to you next month.
