rachel colbert / development resources

Fundraising Consultant in New York

rachel colbert / development resources

Fundraising Consultant in New York

Hello - welcome to my little online shingle! No website, no socials, nothing fancy, just the basics.

I’ve worked in the arts and culture field for over 35 years, in institutional roles like General Manager (The Kitchen) and Director of Development (Academy of American Poets) and in independent roles as a producer and project manager.

As a consultant I’ve raised over $45M in project, capital, and capacity building funds for small nonprofits and individual artists. Institutional clients have ranged from The National Jazz Museum in Harlem to the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, from The Apollo Theater to Under the Radar, and from Bronx Council on the Arts to Transform 1012 North Main Street, a restorative justice initiative that's turning a former KKK meeting house into a cultural center.

Artist clients have included an extraordinary range of writers, choreographers, composers, photographers, puppeteers, filmmakers, including MacArthur Award-winners Barbara Kopple, Ralph Lemon, Meredith Monk, and Okwui Okpokwasili.

Favorite projects include Save the Savory, a National Jazz Museum initiative to preserve hundreds of hours of lost jazz recordings from 1936-1940… UnseenAmerica, an SEIU/1199 initiative that distributed cameras and led photography workshops for thousands of everyday workers, ultimately becoming a HarperCollins coffee table book… The Flea Theater's new state-of-the-art three-theater facility at 20 Thomas Street… incoporating the Raíces Latin Music Museum in East Harlem, to preserve its precious artifacts documenting the evolution of salsa… and commissioning 50 brilliant composers as part of Liaisons: Re-Imagining Sondheim from the Piano, Anthony de Mare's landmark homage to Stephen Sondheim, now available on Avie and ECM Records.

That’s just a small sampling of the impossible, brilliant, weird, uncategorizable projects I love to work on. But enough about me - how can I help you?