Business Savvy Singer Soothes Area Youth Through Arts Education

Business Savvy Singer Soothes Area Youth Through Arts Education

Business Courier, March 2001

     The funny thing about talent is, it never knows where to stop. Celebrated blues/jazz vocalist and Cincinnati native Kathy Wade is a perfect example. She has opened for Nancy Wilson, Anita Baker, Kenny G., George Benson, Al Jarreau and Whitney Houston. She has performed at The Kennedy Center and entertained audiences on tour throughout the world. She has collected EMMYs, TELLYs and three International Film and Television Festival Awards. Her music has found its way onto the Internet. So what does she do off stage? Run a business, of course.

     Nine years ago she and her late husband founded Learning Through Art Inc., a non-profit performing arts education program. As Executive Director, Kathy oversees and participates in variety of educational performing arts programs that have already reached over 300,000 participants. Through this structure she has created entertaining but profound continuing education programs directed at audiences from pre-school to adults, teaching respect, decision making, reading, music education and creative thinking.

     Learning Through Art is the presenting organization for four primary programs that Kathy has developed. Among them, are Books Alive! For Kids^TM, a literary performing arts program, and The Hood is Bigger Than You Think^TM summertime neighborhood tour. Also included is the In-School Touring Educational Program, which teaches cultural and environmental awareness through two offerings: A Black Anthology of Music, and Rhythms...Common Bonds.

     Of course making all this happen takes money, and money comes from investors. This lesson Kathy Wade learned a long time ago, when she was a junior at Withrow High School. She had already been singing professionally for three years, when she enrolled in a program offered by the Greater Cincinnati and Northern Kentucky Chapter of Junior Achievement (JA). Because her group met on Tuesday evening and off
site, she took a bus from her school to Silverton, and afterwards back to her home in East Walnut Hills. While not convenient, she decided to join JA because she wanted to be one of the people who were making things happen. She wanted to be someone who was doing things.

     Junior Achievement, a non-profit organization which describes its mission as showing students how business works, will mark its 50th anniversary this year. During that time more than a half-million local kids have gone through its curriculum. Kathy's JA project was the manufacture and sale of coat hangers. I remember that we made a profit and I got money back for my stock. It was a good lesson.

     She continued performing while earning her bachelors degree in sociology from Edgecliff College, and a Masters of Arts degree from the College-Conservatory of Music, University of Cincinnati.

     Yet through all those changes Kathy Wade never lost her determination to be one of the people who makes things happen, and is still mixing together her own concoction of business and musical successes. And when talking to her about her interactions with prospective underwriters and supporters, it becomes difficult to tell where her greatest talent really lies: in music or business? The answer, clearly, is both.

     There is a rhythm in business too, she explains, and certainly an element of performance. Kathy credits part of her success in dealing with area corporations and foundations to skills she gained in over three decades on the performance stage.

      You need to read your audience in order to connect with them, she said. Sometimes that means modifying your performance to what they are responding to. Of course in true entrepreneurial fashion, once Kathy cracked this code she distilled what she has learned into a workshop for artists, called Art of the Sale.

      You're your own manager, Kathy explained. I tell performers who are just starting out, don't go back stage and sit in a corner alone between sets. Get out and work the room. Meet people, because guess what? Your next gig is sitting out there in the audience.

      Kathy's current project is to launch her newest set of tours, and a new
fund raising effort to track down $250,000 for her literacy program, Books Alive! For Kids™. She hopes to reach three times as many kids from pre-school through third grade next year.

     Now thirty years into a miraculous career, Kathy Wade's talent shows no signs of slowing down, or a willingness to be directed into one direction at the expense of another. It has written a strange song indeed, woven in melodies from sociology, creative performances, and innate entrepreneurial business skills, emanating from a girl who started singing professionally when she was 14 years old and learning about the principals of business through JA at 17.

     One critic called Kathy Wade The first voice of a new era. And in many ways she is. She is a woman who has become a Cincinnati homegrown phenomenon. She has been featured in Essence magazine, been presented the prestigious Cincinnati Post-Corbett Award for Performing Artist, and named a YWCA Career Woman of Achievement. And while receiving these honors for what she has done, she has also earned the admiration of her community, the respect of her peers, and the devotion of hundreds of
thousands of children throughout Greater Cincinnati whose lives she has enriched with her Learning Through Art in-school programs.

     Talent never knows where to stop. But in the case of Kathy Wade and the hundreds of thousands of lives she has touched, that is a good thing.