Leadership Spotlight: Catching Up with Alorie Clark
An interview with our placement, Alorie Clark, Executive Director at the DC Arts and Humanities
By Edie Demas
When Alorie Clark stepped into the role of Executive Director at the DC Arts and Humanities Education Collaborative in January 2023 following our national search at TOC Arts Partners, the organization was navigating a post-pandemic identity crisis. Known for years as the go-to resource for school field trips, the Collaborative had lost members, lost visibility, and needed to find its footing in a sector that had fundamentally changed. Three years later, Clark has led the organization through a strategic repositioning, expanding its mission as a service organization, launching a teaching artist network, and building new partnerships across the DC arts and culture community. She sat down with Edie Demas, VP of Organizational Strategy at TOC Arts Partners, to reflect on that journey and what lies ahead.
The opportunities and challenges facing the DC Arts and Humanities Education Collaborative when Alorie Clark took the helm in January 2023 will sound familiar to many cultural leaders today: a post-pandemic identity crisis, lost members, diminished visibility, and the need to reimagine relevance in a sector that had fundamentally changed. Following our national search at TOC Arts Partners, Clark stepped into that complexity and has spent three years leading a strategic repositioning, expanding the Collaborative's mission as a service organization, launching a teaching artist network, and building new partnerships across DC's arts and culture community. This is the kind of leadership transition and outcome our work is built around. She sat down with Edie Demas, VP of Organizational Strategy at TOC Arts Partners, to reflect on that journey and what lies ahead.
Alorie Clark, Executive Director of DC Arts and Humanities Education Collaborative
Edie Demas: To start, will you tell us a bit about your work?
Alorie Clark: I'm Alorie Clark, Executive Director of DC Arts and Humanities Education Collaborative. The Collaborative is a service organization in the local arts and humanities sector in Washington, DC. We offer various services to help artists, arts organizations, and community partners have the most impact possible when engaging young people.
Edie Demas: I've been watching your work over the last three years, and it's been really fun to be a cheerleader on the sidelines. Is there one thing you're proudest of since you began?
Alorie Clark: Tangibly, I'm most proud of our new strategic plan. When I was hired, the Collaborative hadn't had one for some time. Over the last two years, as the sector has shifted, I felt we needed to clarify some things moving forward. I worked with one of our board members, and she helped facilitate that process. Beyond that, I'm proud of how we've shifted the Collaborative's brand and how we're perceived in the community.
Edie Demas: Can you speak a little about that brand shift?
Alorie Clark: Prior to the pandemic, the Collaborative was known as the "field trip company." If you needed to plan a field trip and bring students to an arts experience, you called us. After the pandemic, many schools and partners paused field trips, so we lost members who needed to shift their funds elsewhere. The perception was that we provided something they no longer needed.
I've worked to refocus the Collaborative according to the reasons we were founded: to be a service organization, a member organization, and a conduit. By centering the needs of our members, we can be more effective and expansive in how we help them serve DC’s young people. We're exploring how we can be a conduit across the entire DC community, including non-arts entities that may want to support our overall efforts. Investing in DC youth is really an investment in the city, so we’re reassessing who are critical partners in achieving that goal.
Edie Demas: The funding landscape for arts education has shifted dramatically since 2023. How has that shown up in your day-to-day work?
Alorie Clark: We're seeing a real supply and demand mismatch right now. In this post-pandemic era, schools are recognizing the increased need to engage their students in unique opportunities that support learning. So we're getting many more teacher requests than we have programs to help facilitate.
On the other side, due to funding cuts and other pressures, the arts community hasn't quite gotten back to pre-pandemic levels. Historically, we've waited for the arts partner to come to us with a program, but now we're thinking about how we can be more proactive in that relationship, such as pursuing grants or contracts that allow us to hire artists directly. That's a definite shift.
The rest of our work, our data collection and professional development offerings, has always been responsive to the field. There are topics specific to this moment that are emerging, but that side of the work doesn't feel dramatically different.
Edie Demas: That supply and demand dynamic sounds like a real opening. Looking ahead, what excites you about the coming year?
Alorie Clark: I'm excited about really leaning into what it means to be a service organization. I think that role holds a lot of opportunities for sustainability, revenue, and impact across the city. We started a teaching artist network to support individual artists and hire them for different opportunities, and I want to keep expanding that.
I also see an opportunity to expand our work with non-arts partners who want to support youth engagement. People are looking for spaces for community, for collaboration, for ideation. I want to make sure we can continue to position ourselves to be that space.
Edie Demas: Alorie, thank you so much for taking the time. We're so impressed with everything you're doing at the Collaborative, and I can't wait to see what this next year brings.
Alorie Clark: Thank you. It was good to see you, and I love keeping in touch.
Alorie Clark was placed as Executive Director of the DC Arts and Humanities Education Collaborative by TOC Arts Partners (then Tom O’Connor Consulting Group) in 2023. The Leadership Spotlight series features conversations with leaders we've placed, exploring how they're shaping their organizations and the broader cultural sector.
Edie Demas is the Vice President, Organizational Strategy of TOC Arts Partners. Edie has led organizational strategy and change projects for a range of artistic genres and settings, including producing, presenting, and academic institutions; she has also led Executive and Senior leadership searches for a range of organizations and has spent 20+ year in arts leadership across a variety of art forms and settings, ranging from performing arts venues to festivals to community and academic/school environments.
