Archive: 2025 Meetings & Activities
Archive: 2025 Meetings & Activities
JOIN US FOR OUR NEXT EVENT
Leveraging Guest Artists
Collaboration, Cost-Savings,
and Community Engagement
Friday, February 27, 2026
3 pm Eastern US / 2 pm Central US /
1 pm Mountain US / 12 pm Pacific US
a free, hour-long Gathering
Time translated to other time zones
>>Registration Now Open Join your NETMCDO+ peers for lively conversations on up-leveling guest artists’ visits to enhance your career development programs.
December 4, 2025 Gathering Recap
Branching Beyond Boundaries: Career Paths & Possibilities
A curated conversation on the expanding spectrum of our work — and how we stay focused amid competing needs and priorities — featuring our newest Ground Crew members:
>>Hope-building strategies for students from high school through college
>>Viewing and discussion of visual metaphors to illustrate branching pathways and frameworks for rewarding careers in the arts and beyond.
It’s low-prep, high-impact, free, and built for conversation.
October 21 Gathering Recap
Balancing the Big Picture and the Day-to-Day
With the semester in full swing, it’s easy to get caught up in the day-to-day. This session offered a chance to (re)focus goals — taking time to pause, reflect, and plan meaningful actions in three key areas:
- Your personal well-being and leadership energy — how you want to show up through the turbulence.
- Your own professional goals — what you want to accomplish or introduce this term and/or into 2026
- Your department or institution’s expectations — what success looks like in the eyes of your community
Guided reflection and small-group discussions helped surface insights, “a-ha” moments, and shared strategies for staying grounded and practical, especially in toggling between long-term vision and immediate action.
June 18 Gathering Recap
Entrepreneurship & Creativity — a winning combination: Tracy Wong, Interim Assistant Director of Colburn's Center for Innovation and Community Impact, facilitated this online Gathering. As many schools further develop career development and arts entrepreneurship offerings into full-fledged courses, questions arise, including:
- Lively, community-driven conversations exploring how institutions are integrating arts entrepreneurship into the curriculum without sacrificing the creative heart of the work.
- What should meaningful, creative, and authentically arts-based entrepreneurship education really look like?
- How do we quantify something inherently experiential and fluid—without reducing it to a mini-MBA?
- What pitfalls are avoidable when shaping curriculum and what innovations are emerging across our Network?
OPEN SPACE: Summaries of the June 18 sessions created by participants can be found here.
April 10 Gathering Recap
John Steinmetz facilitated this event, addressing timely issues related to the intersections of music, community, and the economy, including:
- Have we absorbed false narratives about competition and success?
- Micro-communities' power in trying times: nourishing artistic + business networks.
- Alternatives to zero-sum thinking.
- Capitalism’s effects on individual musicians and institutions.
- How do supply and demand work for artists?
- As we all face global uncertainty, this is an opportunity to create and deepen bonds that will benefit your professional well-being.
OPEN SPACE: Summaries of the April 10 sessions created by participants can be found here.
NETMCDO+ Gatherings, free Zoom meetings, are now held three to four times per year.
- These Gatherings are opportunities to share ideas and solutions that address what matters most in helping musicians forge successful careers.
- In 2024, NETMCDO+ experimented with a new schedule and format to meet the needs of our members: bi-monthly gatherings lasting one hour each. The format sought to maximize the sharing of ideas and solutions, getting at what matters most in helping musicians forge successful careers, and helping career development professionals find solutions to their problems (and colleagial support).
Some attendees at a previous Zoom Gathering.