Re: [Organizers] What is the main goal of your dance series or organization?

The Bay Area Country Dance Society has the following mission statement: Promoting, preserving, performing and teaching traditional English and American music and dance. (BACDS sponsors multiple English dance and contra dance series, multiple display dance teams, three summer dance camps, a spring and a fall residential dance weekend, an urban contra weekend, two dress-up English balls, one festive-dress contra evening.) (An earlier draft had "in the San Francisco Bay Area and beyond" at the end, but this was deemed superfluous.) It took a year to get to a fairly anodyne mission statement that the board was willing to adopt. Earlier versions included things like "promoting community through ..." Part of the point of the restriction was that we didn't really want to find ourselves sponsoring international folk dance, Irish sets, or blues dance evenings, so part of this mission statement exercise (adopted after the organization had been around 20 years or so) was to identify what we don't do. I am the (unofficial, since it's an unofficial organization) artistic director for the Bay Area English Regency Society, which has dance events themed around historical events and Jane Austen's novels; we have three balls this year ("Duchess of Richmond's Ball" commemorating Waterloo, "Congress of Vienna", and "Emma".) My purpose as dancing master of the balls and 10 monthly dance parties is to act as a gateway bringing country dance to new people. which guides me both in programming (entry level dances or dances I can put across to entry-level crowds)and in learning more and more over the years how to put things across to newcomers. -- Alan