North Carolina Rising

Building a Home for the Arts

Q&A with Feather Phillips

Feather Phillips, founder and executive director, Pocosin Arts

Feather Phillips founded Pocosin Arts Center in 1994. Originally from northeastern Pennsylvania, Phillips began her career working in public television in Boston. In the late 1960s, after realizing that the city life was not for her, she moved to Martha's Vineyard, where, she creatde her life around a sense of place rather than around a career. In 1972, Phillips boarded a boat and sailed south, ending up in Wilmington, NC, where she lived for 9 years. In search of cleaner and more economically viable water sources for her husband's boat building business, she and her family moved to Bass, NC in 1980 and found the Alligator River. In 1987, they settled in Columbia, NC, where Phillips taught Art at a school in a neighboring county. Much of her vision for a community-based curriculum at Pocosin Arts came from that experience and from learning about the area's children and their families, values and traditions.

Q. What was your inspiration behind the project? Have you seen this formula done before?

A. Penland School of Crafts and John C. Campbell Folk School, both in western North Carolina, were the models for Pocosin Arts. I studied at Penland and it was a transforming experience for me. For residents of our community and of the Outer Banks, it would have taken almost 10 hours to get there at the time, due to the distance and bad roads. This tremendous emphasis on the arts in the mountains has made a vast difference in their economy, and so why couldn't we have a center like that out in the east? Our project also fit into the county's plan to develop the economy with tourism. Arts were not included at first, but it made sense, and so it was the right timing for this project to begin.

I also strongly feel that you can't just take the external parts of Pocosin and replicate them. There is something inside, a sincere charitable belief inside the organization that is evident to the people within it. I think it's that we want all of our goals to be met - not just the economy, not just the environment, not just cultural and racial equity. And I think that might be what sets the organization apart. This core belief has been there since day one.

As advice to other people, we'd say look inside your community and find what is there and what is special. I'm not a native North Carolinian, I moved here in 1972. Sometimes an outsider can see something very special in what long-time resident take for granted. We celebrate something that has always been here.

We have an especially strong relationship with the Outer Banks arts community, which has a strong arts market. We're the community outside the Outer Banks where artists can pull back, retreat and develop their skills away from the pressures of the market, and then go back out to the Outer Banks. Just look at the strong arts and crafts community in the western part of the North Carolina. They are 80 or more years old. Pososin Arts is only 14 years old, and yet I've heard people say that Pocosin Arts is to the Outer Banks as Penland is to Asheville, which is a huge compliment.

Q. As advice to other communities who would like to create an arts center in their area, how did you go about securing funding for the project?

A. I first wrote a grant request to the Z. Smith Reynolds Foundation while I was still an art teacher, and they provided us with $25,000 seed money we needed to open Pocosin Arts, and so we went for it. Like I said, it was perfect timing for something like Pocosin to be created. Then the Kathleen Price Bryan Family Fund generously gave us money, then The North Carolina Arts Council, The North Carolina Rural Center for Economic Development, NC General Assembly, the NC Department of Cultural Resources, the NC Department of Environmental and Natural Resources Division of Forest Resources and Office of Environment Education, and the A.J. Fletcher Foundation. We also received funding from local schools for school programming, charge minimal tuition and fees for our classes and workshops, and have some income from gallery sales. We also have an annual fundraiser and this year was our biggest success yet, raising $70,000.

The most important thing I learned is not to invest all of your efforts in any single income stream, because at any given time, it could disappear. You can't just rely on grants. And, if you're not getting money from local businesses and citizens, then you're not serving them either. You need to keep moving along so the local people continue to send in that 10 or 20 dollars, because that could become 50 or 100 dollars in the future as your continue to serve them and meet their needs. In the end, though, your program is your best sales tool. If your program is quality and honest, then people will come back. And the biggest part is patience - and the willingness to never give up.

People often come up to me and say that they have a warehouse and they're going to make it into an arts center. What they don't realize is that there's a tremendous amount of "soil preparation" that is necessary, and that it takes years and years to build support to sustain the organization. It's not something you can try for 5 years and then shut the doors. If you want to survive you have to invest in individuals.

Q. What obstacles have you encountered along the way?

A. My own personal ignorance was a huge obstacle, because I had no knowledge of the nonprofit world before I started. It was a steep learning curve and I was learning everyday. I've been called a visionary by people in the field - somebody who gets an idea and is able to see that idea in the future - and often a visionary is not the best manager. But when a visionary puts forth an idea, there is a lot of passion behind it and a willingness to fight to keep it going. In that way, visionary leadership can be both a benefit and an obstacle.

Being in the poorest county in NC was also an obstacle in creating a nonprofit. There are very few corporate entities in the area, and corporations are extremely important to nonprofits because they have charitable gifts budgeted into their spending. So not only are the individual members of the community poor, but the region is poor in terms of cultural understanding and investment by corporations.

An obstacle, that was also a benefit, was that to the adult leadership community at the time, the arts were seen as an in-home activity, whether it was quilting, carving or furniture-making, and there was no arts education in the schools when they were growing up. So, the leadership age level did not experience arts in the school. There were no performance opportunities or galleries, it was seen as something you did in the home or in church and you didn't publicly share your family's craft. That is the traditional culture that Pocosin celebrates, and so the obstacle was bringing the arts out of the home and out of the church and sharing it from church to town, home to school, home to town, and so on.

Overall, we've had to stay light on our feet because of changes in the community. We've had so many changes come at us along the way, and we're still standing.

Q. What, if anything, would you change about your approach?

A. I'll be able to tell more when I have some distance, but I probably would have relied more on our board of directors along the way. We have artists, businesspeople, accountants, lawyers, and all kinds of talented and dedicated people on our board. The combination of the visionary concept and my own inexperience in management, allowed the board to emerge even stronger to carry the project and compensate for my personal weaknesses. I would like to turn over more to the board, so I can begin to back away. The vision is already embedded, and now it's about management.

Q. What's the future look like for Pocosin Arts?

A. We've just approved the design concept for our new education center, which will be built on the lot across the street from us. And right now we're still developing the campaign and raising funds for that.

Sometimes we take baby steps, and sometimes we take giant steps. If Pocosin Arts wants to be the component of arts and crafts skill development to feed the regional tourism economy, we need to take a few giant steps now. It's time to be bold.

We will have to get the money for these giant steps from Eastern NC and from Columbia, but also from outside the region. We need big money this time, which is difficult because most people don't even know that Columbia exists. I feel that the strength of a state is reflection of its weakest community, so we need money from people who want to keep the whole state strong.

Looking outward to the state level, we're working to convince people that it's a benefit to the entire state. You can count the number of outsiders in Columbia on two, maybe four, hands. The people who live in this part of NC have been here forever and are the keepers of the traditional way of life and of North Carolina's history. Pocosin Arts is a heritage site that is a benefit to the state, and would benefit greatly by annual operating support from the state. We would like to secure state funding, so Pocosin's fundraising efforts can go directly toward programming.