Past IAVM board chair Robyn Williams is the winner of IAVM’s highest honor this year, the McElravy Award. (Courtesy Portland’5 Center for the Arts)
Robyn Williams, executive director of Portland’5 Centers for the Arts in Oregon, believes she received the Charles A. McElravy Award two years too early.
That’s because the International Association of Venue Managers’ most prestigious award come less than a year into her work as vice chair of the Diversity and Inclusive Leadership Committee. “I feel this is the work that’s going to make a difference in IAVM,” Williams told VenuesNow. She will receive the award during IAVM’s VenueConnect in Toronto July 22-25.
The reaction from membership clearly shows this initiative is important, Williams said. Accomplishments to date include the first Facility Manager magazine without a photo on the cover, just the words #WeBelong, followed by content wholly about diversity and inclusion. “The feedback is amazing,” Williams said.
The committee’s mandate is to create more diversity in the leadership roles at IAVM and the industry as a whole. “We need more people of color and women and LGBTQ members and people with disabilities in our venues working and then those people become involved in IAVM. I was distressed at one point to look at the pictures of IAVM boards and winners and seeing a bunch of white men. I think, ‘This is not representative of our membership,’” she said.
At IAVM’s Venue Management School at Oglebay in Wheeling, W.Va., Williams sees a lot of diversity, and wonders why that’s not represented in the organization’s leadership positions. “I think that is because the opportunities to get there are offered to you by people that typically look like you. I’m a classic beneficiary of that. It was white people, largely men in power, who took a shine to me; 95 percent of being involved in anything is being asked,” Williams believes. Bob Mayer of Tulsa was the first to put her on a committee years ago, and look what happened.
Once asked, you’re asked again and again. It takes a conscious effort to get started, though, and that’s what the new committee is dedicated to, asking people to the table and getting them there. “This committee is to make sure the leadership of IAVM looks like our membership,” Williams said.
Williams and others have been researching the best and brightest members that fit the bill and have begun the process. “I just felt it was a sad state of affairs that I didn’t know all this talent in the room because they looked different from me. … That’s what has got to change,” she said.
Results should be obvious at VenueConnect this year, but there is still a long way to go. And that will be Williams’ legacy, though there have been plenty of amazing accomplishment to date in yet other endeavors.
Williams has been in venue management since 1980, following a couple of years as a stagehand. She started at the Lubbock (Texas) Memorial Civic Center, Auditorium and Coliseum, then went to the theater district in Houston, which included the Wortham, Jones Hall and the old Music Hall and Coliseum. She spent a brief three years at the Blumenthal Performing Arts Center in Charlotte, N.C., before moving to Portland in December 2000.
Her first introduction to IAVM was at operations seminars in Texas, even before she became a member. It was her oh-my-gosh, there-are-people-doing-what-I-do moment. “As venue manager in your city, you’re the only venue except in big markets. It was so wonderful to have a network suddenly. That got me interested in IAVM.”
Williams admits to flailing about for a career choice while in production, given her artistic bent and being easily bored. “I was an artiste. When I was doing lighting design, I liked it, but when I was lighting a show or scene, I didn’t want to do it again. I was glad it was over.”
She realized in short order that venue management was what she wanted to do because it was changing all the time.
And she likes the business side now that she’s at the top of her game. “Even in the arts, where we have a mission of supporting the arts, at the end of the day you have to keep the building open, keep it maintained and train the staff. That requires a business brain. Our business has gotten quite sophisticated. These are multimillion-dollar venues with complex systems that take a lot of money to maintain and operate.”
Williams has volunteered to serve on numerous committees at IAVM, taught at VMS for 18 years, and made her way through the chairs, becoming chair of IAVM in 2008-09.
IAVM is “absolutely the leader in operational-type training, particularly in the arena of safety and security,” Williams said. “I think they own that category. I think basically we’re about professional development for venue managers. There is no one who does it better. Part of it has to do with the fact it is so member-driven. The members don’t want the same thing over and over and want more sophisticated information.”
Her mentors in this industry are numerous, quite a few of them in the performing arts. She helped organize the first Performing Arts Managers Conference with that group. The late Rodney Smith, last at San Antonio, was one of those mentors. She admired his willingness to innovate.
“We always talked about wouldn’t it be great if we could have drinks in the theater. Rodney Smith finally stood up and said, ‘I’m letting water in the theater.’ The symphony and musicians were sending him all this hate mail that he was ruining the show, and he called me and said this is what I did and started forwarding the emails he was getting. But he was the first. The audiences loved it and nobody died. Now everybody does it, even alcoholic everything, even for the opera, which we never would have done years ago. When people like him do that benchmarking work, you think, wow, I can, too, and there we go.”
Like all McElravy Award winners, Williams has paid it forward. She is most proud that Freddy Chavez, who worked for her in Lubbock, became general manager of the convention center. He since retired.
Likewise with Mario Ariza in Houston, originally a contractor who oversaw the custodial folks, in whom she saw potential and promoted and mentored. He recently retired from his director of theater district facilities.
“All my folks are retiring before me. What’s wrong with that?” she wonders.
She was quite surprised when Tammy Koolbeck of Ames, Iowa, called to tell her she had been selected the McElravy winner.
So she won’t be waiting two more years. She’s thrilled about the award. But still, there is the next chapter, always a next chapter. “What drove it home for me was when I was asked to be on leadership committee to help pick the next person to go through the IAVM chairs. I said I would if we could figure out how to change what was happening. Karen Totaro, head of the committee, created a subcommittee of myself, Michael Marion and Jimmy Earl, and that’s how this committee evolved, one that’s there every year and owns this.”
That’s the thing about Williams. When she takes it on, she owns it.