Consultant
HOLLY SIDFORD is president of Helicon Collaborative, a consulting team that develops strategy, research and innovative ideas to propel change through arts and culture (www.heliconcollab.net). She is a strategic planner, program developer and fundraiser with more than 30 years' experience leading and developing nonprofit cultural and philanthropic organizations. She has worked as a funder at the state, regional and national levels; and has developed programming and management systems at a range of nonprofit arts and cultural organizations in the U.S. and U.K.
Prior to founding Helicon, Holly was a principal at AEA Consulting, an international consulting firm where she worked on strategic planning, research and organizational development projects in the U.S. and the United Kingdom, including cultural redevelopment planning in New Orleans following Hurricane Katrina. She also was the founding president of Leveraging Investments in Creativity (LINC), a ten-year national initiative to expand support for creative artists and she spearheaded the national research and planning effort that preceded the creation of LINC. Holly was program director for arts, urban parks and adult literacy at the Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest Fund, and held leadership positions at the Ford Foundation, The Howard Gilman Foundation, the New England Foundation for the Arts and the Massachusetts Council on the Arts and Humanities.
Holly holds a bachelor's degree from Mount Holyoke College and a management certificate from Columbia University. She lives in Brooklyn, N.Y. with her husband and daughter.
