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Is it time to get creative? Consistent involvement in the arts offers multiple benefits, including for your health and well-being. Our guest, Teresa Bonner, Executive Director of Aroha Philanthropies, explains how creative pursuits in retirement can enrich your life.

We discuss:

Her mission in her encore career

Gene Cohen’s work at George Washington University on aging and creativity

The range of artistic endeavors she sees people engaging with in mid-to-later life

The challenges people face when they leave the workplace and how involvement with the arts is useful

The benefits of intergenerational arts programs

How getting involved with the arts can help caregivers

Her advice for someone who doesn't think they're a creative person

The benefit of being a novice in an artistic activity

How to get started with a creative activity

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Bio

Teresa Bonner is a frequent speaker on philanthropy, most recently to California and Minnesota affiliates of the Family Firm Institute, estate planning councils and planned giving councils. For Aroha Philanthropies, Teresa leads the foundation and directs efforts to seed, develop, expand and advocate for creative aging programs across the country. She has created cohorts of arts organizations and senior-serving organizations that have developed creative aging programs and managed the evaluation of these programs nationally. Teresa has spoken about creative aging at conferences of Grantmakers in the Arts, Grantmakers in Aging, the American Society on Aging, the Gerontological Society of America, the National Assembly of State Arts Agencies, the National Guild for Community Arts Education and other organizations.

Prior to joining Family Philanthropy Advisors in 2008, Teresa was Senior Vice President and head of Business Development and Charitable Services for U.S. Bank’s Private Client Group, where she oversaw new business development and services offered to high-net-worth clients, including private foundation services, grantmaking, endowment management and charitable services.

In addition to her foundation management roles, Teresa has served as Executive Director of Milkweed Editions, an acclaimed nonprofit literary publisher, and as Executive Director of the Library Foundation of Hennepin County, where she directed planning and implementation of marketing, fundraising, promotional, programming, public relations, grant administration and volunteer functions for one of the country’s largest library systems.  Prior to her work in the nonprofit and philanthropic sector, Teresa was a partner in the Minneapolis law firm of Lindquist and Vennum.

Between 2001 and 2007, Teresa chaired the board of directors of MacPhail Center for Music, one of the country’s largest community music schools, where she led the transformation of that organization’s governance, successfully completed a major capital campaign for the creation of a new flagship facility, and chaired the Center’s grand opening celebrations.  She has served on several other nonprofit boards and has been a frequent panelist for the National Endowment for the Arts.  Teresa won the “Woman Changemaker” award from the Minneapolis St. Paul Business Journal in 2004.

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For More on Teresa Bonner

Aroha Philanthropies

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Wise Quotes 

On Creativity & Aging

"Gene Cohen was such a proponent of the concept that as we get older our capacity for creativity increases. It doesn't decrease as so many of us were taught when we were younger. And so what he did working with The National Endowment for the Arts, [was] a major study on what happened to older adults who participated in s...