Creative Pinellas CEO Barbara St. Clair to retire

Barbara St. Clair, CEO of the umbrella arts organization Creative Pinellas, will retire at the end of 2023.

Although Creative Pinellas began in 2011, St. Clair, brought in during the early months of 2016, was its first full-time executive director.

“I joined Creative Pinellas with the internal point of view that this would be the last full-time professional job on my career trajectory,” she said. “And it was very exciting and wonderful to be in a leadership role in an organization that had so much potential, but that was sort of undefined.”

Even with an annual stipend of $150,000 from the county, Creative Pinellas had, St. Clair recalled, “no programming and an extremely poor website.” The board of directors and the small staff held foundational public meetings to ask the community what the organization’s goals should be.

“They said Creative Pinellas should have a grant program, they should be doing workshops, and they should have a good website that really promoted the arts. When I came on board, there were those three goals and objectives for the organization.”

In other words, support the rich community of artists who call Pinellas County home.

“The county asked for those deliverables,” St. Clair said. “I came with a 90-day road map, and said ‘This is how I will do it.’”

One of her first tasks was to hire full-time employees, rather than contract workers. “I convinced the board that no one was going to fund an organization that didn’t have professional staff.”

At the time, Creative Pinellas was a 501(c)(4) – defined as a “social welfare organization,” to which donations were not tax deductible. Under St. Clair’s leadership, this was changed to the more nonprofit-friendly 501(c)(3) designation.

She was instrumental in the conversion of the one-mothballed Gulf Coast Art Museum, on Walsingham Road, into the vibrant Gallery at Creative Pinellas. Today, there are exhibit opening receptions and music and dance performances at the venue.

During the most trying stretch of the Covid-19 pandemic, Creative Pinellas partnered with other local nonprofits to create the Arts Community Relief Fund and distribute financial aid to area artists.

The organization worked with the Board of County Commissioners to provide more than $3M in CARES Act Funding.

Creative Pinellas acquired a National Endowment for the Arts grant to provide $450,000 in direct funds to Pinellas County artists and arts and cultural organizations.

Its grant programs, in fact, are among the most generous in Florida. Last month, 10 artists received $5,000 each in Professional Artist grants.

And the website is much improved.

Today, Creative Pinellas funded by the Pinellas County Board of County Commissioners, Visit St. Pete/Clearwater, the State of Florida, Department of State, Division of Cultural Affairs and through the sales of the State of the Arts specialty license plates in Pinellas County.

St. Clair came to Pinellas County in 1999 as a marketing manager for Time Warner Cable, which became Bright House Networks in 2002. She was Bright House’s Director of Marketing, Communications and Advertising, all over the country but based in Pinellas, for the next nine years.

She directed marketing communications and branding activities for CONMED, a medical device manufacturer, before turning her attention to nonprofit administration “to be a force for positive change.”

Because Creative Pinellas was still in its infancy, St. Clair said, she was intrigued by its potential. “We weren’t constrained by ‘This is how it’s always been done.’ I really did not have a preconceived notion of what it should be.”

Along with Visit St. Pete/Clearwater, Creative Pinellas is formulating a thorough cultural plan for the county, “evidence based, aspirational and achievable,” in order to “establish a road map for sustainable, equitable and vibrant development of the arts and cultural sectors for the next five to 10 years.”

As one of the architects of the vision for this ambitious, multi-agency project, St. Clair said she’d be willing to volunteer in an advisory capacity, as it moves forward. She doesn’t plan to leave the area.

Until then, “Sometimes people who help found a nonprofit stay too long. So when I took the position, it was very much in my mind that I would stay the right amount of time. I did know what that would be.”

Turns out it was now. “I sort of felt my sell-by date. And I really feel like I brought a lot to the organization; I took it through quite a number of evolutions.”

She believes, she explained, that Creative Pinellas would benefit from “a fresh point of view, and from somebody who has experience with local arts agencies.”

Equipped with a Masters in Creative Writing – she’s written several plays and a couple of unpublished novels – St. Clair hopes to scratch the creative itch by returning to the writing she simply hasn’t had time for in the last seven years.

She’ll be walking away with the confidence that the organization is very, very different from when she first opened the door in 2016.

“Anyone who knew about Creative Pinellas didn’t take it seriously. And I think now that people are really happy Creative Pinellas exists. And they feel like the organization is contributing and making a difference.

“I think  that’s my proudest accomplishment – that I’m part of an organization that matters, that brings some positive impact.”