Lisa Carnevale has more than 11 years of experience in public relations, advocacy and nonprofit organizational development. Yet, none of it would have happened if she weren’t rejected for a job she wanted years ago.
She is executive director of Rhode Island Citizens for the Arts, a position she has held since February 2009. Membership has grown by 200 percent since she took over.
She has played a key role at the Statehouse to increase funding for the arts and to protect arts-related legislation, including tax-free arts districts and the “1 percent for the Arts” public program.
She began her career in public relations in Seattle, relocating to Rhode Island in 2001 and starting her own consulting business. From 2002 to 2009, she worked as a consultant to Rhode Island Citizens for the Arts, then an all-volunteer organization. Through her efforts, the group began investigating artist displacements, mostly in Providence where loft-dwellers where evicted when old mills were converted to residential or retail use.
In 2004, she co-founded the Partnership for Creative Industrial Space. In partnership with Struever Bros. Eccles & Rouse and Licht Properties, she created the tenant relocation program at the former American Locomotive Works off Valley Street.
The program resulted in the enactment of a Providence city ordinance establishing a mandatory stipend and 90-day notice for the relocation of commercial tenants, including artists, displaced when a structure is renovated for other uses.
But none of this would have happened, Carnevale says, if she had not been rejected for a job she wanted as an executive assistant.
At the end of her final interview, the company president told her he would not hire her because she needed to “do something great with your life.” It was advice for which she couldn’t be more thankful. •
