Internship

Community Engagement Internship – UNR – Spring Semester 2025 – https://renophil.com/

Title: Community Engagement Liaison

Manager: Kylie Howard, Director of Education, Community Engagement, & Inclusion

The Reno Phil is a 501C3 non-profit focused on bringing music to the Reno Community.

Mission: To produce inspirational symphonic performances of the highest quality for diverse audiences and support exceptional education, outreach and engagement programs.

Vision: To create exceptional musical experiences that enrich, connect and shape our community, and inspire orchestras nationwide.

Values:

Inclusion – We seek to engage, serve and inspire the entire northern Nevada community while also supporting and growing communities of musicians and music-lovers.

Excellence – We aspire to excel in all that we do, conducting all aspects of our work with impeccable integrity and presenting authentic and inspiring performances.

Innovation – We embrace creativity, experimentation, learning and growth.

Internship Focus: Under the guidance of Kylie Howard, Director of Education and Community Engagement and Inclusion my role was to learn the structure of non-profits in the arts community, learn about grant writing, and to conduct and support operations for two events, Classics 5 and Play for a Day.

Play and Sing for a Day

4th Annual Play & Sing For A Day, hosted by the Reno Phil!

This free event brings together local musicians and singers from all walks of life, with all levels of experience, and all ages, and grants them the opportunity to play with the Reno Phil Orchestra and Chorus. Together we gathered at Billinghust Middle School on Sunday, April 27th to play and sing together and celebrate our passion for music!

Play & Sing For A Day is a great opportunity to further expand the experience of music in our community. We believe that music brings community together, and with events like this we can continue to support the general public with a new generation of musicians and singers.

Given that this event occurred after the assigned date of this deliverable I was unable to source pictures or report on the event itself. For all that, I functioned as primary operator for this event, and leading up to it conducted:

Event Timeline
- Created a time line of steps for the event including outreach, PR, ordering, signage, placement, registration and communications for participants.
New Contact Outreach
- Created emails introducing the event – sent out to anyone who has purchased a ticket to the Reno Phil who isn’t a dedicated subscriber, plus all in-town choirs and orchestras not already associated with the Reno Phil.
Donor and Subscriber Outreach
- Create emails introducing the event to our subscribers and donors.
Formatted Registration through both FormAssembly and SalesForce
- Registration step 1 was to sign up through Form Assembly, step 2 to confirm that registration through Salesforce. I created a spreadsheet collating those two forms to ensure total coverage of all registries’. Includes lines for t-shirt, experience, instrument and age to be used for data collection later.
Participant Communication
- Regular updated emails to all who registered on timeline, location, ect.
Press Release
- Sent to various Reno Newspapers, along with out reach to Reno Midtown (they opted to promote our event through their Podcast).
Music print and accessibility for participants
- Printed music for participants to pick up if they were unable to navigate a computer (participant age 7-70 years old).
Event Flyering (music stores, repair stores, schools, classes)
- Picked up flyers and dropped them with music stores and music schools.
Review safety procedures
- Fire map for the venue along with permitting review from the City of Reno
Pre-Production and Operations meetings
- Created with the assistance of the Operations Manager and Kylie (my manager) a scope and behind the scenes timeline, food order, t-shirt order, registration key, volunteer management.
Event actual (4/27): Set up registration, chairs, guest area, snacks, manage volunteers, manage participants, breakdown and clean up – Billinghurst Middle School. Additionally made and posted signage at the venue for guests and picked up lunch for the participants. Lastly, sang with the Choir.
Post-event Survey – FormAssembly
- Created a survey for demographic info for the state. All Reno Events are based on Grants so Grant reporting is a necessary final step.

Reflection:

This internship was a door into the world of community arts non-profits, and one I am so glad to have had the opportunity to engage with. I have worked for non-profits in the arts in the past, but none that were so focused on the general public. I found the staff of the RenoPhil to be kind, friendly, compassionate, intelligent, capable, and genuinely caring of not just the music, but of the community at large. Institutions like this bring light and life into the world, make life worth living, and because of this internship I am now motivated to continue my studies in pursuit of supporting the arts in community for the betterment of all.

Professionally the biggest boon I achieved here was learning about grant writing. Non-profits live and die by their supporters, donors, and the grants they receive from the public and private sectors. Learning how grants are written and structured has been the information I’ve been looking for in understanding how I can do altruistic work in an industry I care about. Additionally, learning about how industries like this operate and engage with other public service entities has been an enlightening process. Specifically in learning tone, personability and professionalism. I hope that these experiences help guide me into future engagements in the arts non-profit sector as supporting the arts in a core component of my lifes work.

The focus of my internship was Play and Sing for a Day and where that event has been awesome in learning all the behind the scenes aspects of production and meeting and engaging with the community at large, the real experience which impacted me the most was listening to the “Sacrifice of Prometheus” by Marco Bajzer live at the Classics 5 performance held at the Pioneer Center in mid-March (pictures below). I attended this event as exposure to how the Reno Phil throws a big event. My goals at this event were look around, meet the staff, learn the event space, greet donors, set up dinner and to observe subscription renewal. Where I wasn’t technically working the event in a formal capacity it was enlightening to attend. For a long time I have been curious about the music people have been making with nature and it was awe inspiring to see Marco hook up electrodes to a living tree at the Wilbur D. May Arboretum pre-talk and listen to the notes which he translated from electrical impulses into sounds, in person. Later hearing those sounds of nature interwoven into the fabric of a symphony was unlike anything I have ever imagined. It was like listening to the song of the universe, and it touched me deeply. I have loved the arts all my life and have done my utmost to support and engage with them, but nothing I have ever heard or seen or witnessed came close to the majesty of this piece. It has truly been a gift to be with the Reno Phil.