Country Dance & Song Society > Resources

Category: Resources

Recruiting and Keeping Volunteers!

March 7, 2023

An online discussion to support organizers of dance, music, and song groups

In our mostly volunteer-powered community, we’ve long faced challenges when it comes to finding and keeping the people who make our organization’s dance, music, and song activities possible. The COVID pandemic exacerbated those challenges and impacted both our organizations and the environment in which we work.

CDSS Executive Director Katy German hosted this Web Chat to discuss volunteer management and address key volunteer-related questions, such as:

Where do we find new volunteers?
How do we appreciate the volunteers we have and help them avoid burn-out?
How do we create processes for training volunteers and planning for position turn-over?

Building Cultural Equity in Communities

October 25, 2022

An online discussion to support organizers of dance, music, and song groups

This Web Chat provided firsthand experiences from organizers who have used CDSS grants to provide diversity, equity, and inclusion training for their groups. We heard about ways they have been applying what they’ve learned from these valuable workshops, and what’s next for their groups. We also included plenty of time for Q&A. Our special guests were:

Cindy Culbert and Rich Dempsey: Country Dancers of Rochester (Rochester, NY)
Janet Yeracaris and Vince O’Donnell: New England Folk Festival Association (New England region)
Lauren Keeley: DanceFlurry Organization (Albany, NY)

Make Every Space Safer in Trad Music Communities

Nasons, VA
Creating a set of community agreements that people in our music communities can commit to

Ideas for Weathering the Winter Together

During the CDSS Web Chat on November 1, 2021, participants brainstormed ideas for keeping their music, dance, and song groups engaged and connected through the coming months. See below for a compilation of their suggestions for organizers to try out with their communities. We’re happy to continue adding to this list, so please send your thoughts to resources@cdss.org. All ideas welcome!

Reentry Resources for Organizers

Originally published September 2021.

Introduction

One key question that keeps cropping up as we prepare for restarting in-person activities is: How will we know when the time is right? All music, dance, and song groups need to chart their own course based on their location, state and local public health guidance, type of event, and community needs. We hope the following set of resources will help organizers navigate the myriad decisions involved with safely resuming in-person events.

CDSS Community Culture & Safety Toolkit

The CDSS Community Culture and Safety Task Group (CCSTG) aims to support local communities in their efforts to provide a safe environment for music, song, and dance events. We are working to provide advice and resources that will help organizers develop the policies, procedures, and supporting documents needed to understand and facilitate safety in their communities.

CDSS is not prescriptive in regard to what your community ‘should be doing.’ We recognize and value the range of living traditions practiced by our communities.

As such, we are working to develop a toolkit of resources.

Sharing the Vision: Themes and Practical Ideas for Vibrant Dance Communities

A pithy article from Max Newman on the importance of a vision, how to create one and how to share it.

From the CDSS News

Lissa Schneckenburger’s Tune A Week

Square Dance History with David Millstone

Experience the rich history and regional variety of square dancing in this in-depth, three part video series.

With photographs, audio, and video, we’ll travel:

from 17^th century France to Civil War ballrooms
from New England Grange halls to Texas cowboy balls
and from Newfoundland to New Mexico

to explore and discuss how this dance form became a staple of American popular culture.

Shared Weight: Positional Calling Discussion List

This list is for anyone interested in exploring positional calling within traditional dance (contra, squares, ECD, community, family dance, Irish ceili, Scottish ceilidh, etc).

Our goal is to support each other by discussing topics of interest to callers specifically in relation to positional calling. We encourage callers to also join some of the other Shared Weight lists as those communities are valuable resources for other aspects of calling.