Thank you to all of you who helped make 2007 The Present Company's best year ever. I hope y'all don't feel like I always say that. Perhaps I do, and if that is true, then I am a very, very fortunate person.

Throughout the pages of this Annual Report, we celebrate our donors, funders, sponsors, vendors, vendor partners and venues. But it occurs to me that I haven’t provided adequate space to discuss the FringeNYC Family – our volunteers and volunteer staff.

We have an enormous family of people who have stumbled upon this festival and because of the energy and spirit of FringeNYC their first reaction is “what can I do to help?” You cannot even imagine the strength, warmth, energy, creativity, intelligence and passion you will discover from our volunteer staff and the venue directors, box office managers and production staff of FringeNYC. They are some of the most extraordinary people that I have ever had the privilege to work with and they make amazing things happen for our participants.

Here are just a few examples:

Up until the fall, our webmaster was completely volunteer. In 2007, Jeff, a new access guru, established a participants' database that allowed us to see the information regarding a show in a format other than a 400 column spreadsheet. We use Topica to distribute our email newsletters because we’ve used them since 1998 when we locked in our price of $75 a year. Emphas!s Design, our graphic designers, have been billing us at a tiny percentage of their normal rate since 1997 when they designed our logo (and consequently nicknamed the festival FringeNYC – rather than the NYIFF we were sneezing out in the early days). Our domain name was registered by a guy named Josh that I still, to this day, have never met. When I needed someone to be in charge of ticketing – lots of little tiny scraps of paper and their organization and proper filing - here came Stephanie Rogers, an actor who had just spent the prior year counting hanging chads after the presidential election in Florida. Stephanie comes over to FringeCENTRAL just as soon as she can get out of the law firm that she works at. Jeff and Charlie from Minimum Wage are participants who have found a way to give back to this festival by putting their extraordinary talent toward the Variety Power Hour where you can promote your show at FringeCLUB. And to make sure that that promotion gets heard, Norm Sutaria, who teaches podcasting and computer stuff to kids via the New Jersey public school system, has made podcasting at FringeNYC a reality. Amanda Pekoe, who interned for us in the year between her undergrad and graduate degrees now works in marketing and is putting her connections to work for this festival. Meggan is a prosecutor who last year did everything, including some pro-bono legal stuff for me and has an interest in theatre for young people and so is now running FringeHIGH. Amanda Herel teaches kindergarten and is our FringeJR Director. And there are so many more…so many more now and so many more over the years that have dedicated their skills and talents to this festival. The dot com bust was a total boon for this festival because all of these brilliant people suddenly had a lot of free time! We have volunteer bookkeepers, real estate people, database people, marketing people, and lawyers. John Peterson does not come to our office without bringing office supplies from his day job (and he gets those really big binders that are so expensive!).

This festival did not just happen. It was carefully crafted and strategically planned and sacrificed for. By a lot of people. And it’s very precious to all of them. And to me. An enormous number of people have been stewards of this festival for a long time – and we owe them an enormous debt. This is a handmade community. It was not manufactured. It was not mass-produced. And it has never been replicated.

I am fiercely loyal to these people – they are my FringeNYC Family. And perhaps because I feel that way, my Southern upbringing prevents me from publicly acknowledging them, though it is richly deserved. So I’m dedicating these pages to the FringeNYC Volunteer Staff. These people have created a home for me – and for emerging artists in New York City – often with their bare hands and their last dollar and their sweat and time. Some of them were there when the lights went out. Some of them were there when we had two days to build and open a FringeCENTRAL in 2006. We rely upon their collective knowledge - they are a vital part of this organization and they are our institutional memory and our most valuable asset. I’m so proud of the way we’ve built this organization. One of my favorite arts management quotes is “an arts organization is not a problem to be managed, but an instrument to be played” and we’ve got some really wonderful music happening at The Present Company.

Thank you, on behalf of all of us, for helping make FringeNYC happen.

Elena K. Holy
Producing Artistic Director
The Present Company