Every so often we will be introducing you to the team behind Creative Flagstaff. We’re kicking this series off with our Board President, Ron Borkan!

Originally from New Jersey, I moved to Arizona in 1982, first for work with the National Park Service, then for graduate school in Tucson.  There, I met my future wife and started work for SWCA, an environmental consulting firm where I would spend my next 27 years.  We first moved to Flagstaff in 1990, and then after a short stint in Phoenix, relocated to Portland, Oregon.  Following retirement in 2012, we decided to relocate back to Flagstaff, where we now reside.  We have three adult offspring, one of which is married with our first grandchild.  When not volunteering for various local organizations (I am on three other Boards in town: FALA, Friends of Flagstaff’s Future, and the Martin-Springer Institute at NAU), we spend our time hiking and enjoying our two dogs, travelling the US and Canada in our Sprinter Van and visiting our kids scattered around the country, and attending theatre, opera and musicals here and elsewhere.

My passion for theatre started at an early age, including plays, musicals, and most of all opera.  When we moved back to Flagstaff, I got involved with the Flagstaff Shakespeare Festival.  I was super excited that Flagstaff had a Shakespeare Festival, as my wife and I had been regular attendees at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in Ashland.  While Flagstaff perhaps wouldn’t want something quite so large as that, the potential was here for something much greater, and I wanted to help make that happen, as the benefits to the community are enormous.  Through my work with FlagShakes I became familiar with Flagstaff Arts Council, now Creative Flagstaff, and shortly thereafter joined the Board, and am now honored to be its President.

Creative Flagstaff’s strategic plan, Discover Creativity, Discover Opportunity, envisions an exciting future for the organization, but more importantly for Flagstaff’s cultural sector.  Personally, I am most excited about two things, the Arts and Ideas Festival proposed for 2023 and our collaborative fundraising and investment initiatives.  Both will help Flagstaff become a greater Arts community, something that I see as necessary and important for the evolution of Flagstaff from being a place where visitors stop on their way to the Grand Canyon or other natural wonders that are nearby on the Colorado Plateau, to a place that has a thriving and regionally renowned cultural sector.  Having a dedicated fundraising effort for all the Arts organizations is something that I believe is desperately needed to achieve this goal, as so many of our local organizations need help with fundraising.

And, to those of you who are interested in becoming more involved in Flagstaff’s cultural sector as volunteer leaders and board members, many organizations need help implementing their missions.  I encourage you to get involved with organizations with missions that match your passions.  If you don’t know a Board member personally, just get online and it is pretty easy to find out who is on a Board and to contact them. I expect that most, if not all, current Board members would welcome your interest!