Saturday, July 23, 2016

Email [excerpts] from JB Berkow, Benzaiten Center for Creative Arts, to Lake Worth's elected and City officials:*

Dear Madame Mayor, Esteemed City Commissioners and City Officials,

 A lot of you have been intimately involved in the goings on at the Benzaiten Center for Creative Arts. However, some of you we have not seen yet. [emphasis added] We hope that next season you will all make some time to discover all the wonderful things that we are accomplishing at the old train depot!

 Please take the time to check out some of our newly posted videos: "Marlene Rose Visits the Benzaiten Center," "Kid's Programing," and "Benzaiten Buildout".

[and. . .]

Thanks to a Grant that we received from the Cultural Council, our children's programming has already served 280 children. We have also received two Florida State Cultural Facilities Grants, totaling $270,000, which we will use to do some more major improvements to the building such as replace the roof, fix the rest of the bay doors, remove the asbestos, and complete the front entryway, etc. We have already put $1.25M into making the Benzaiten Center for Creative Arts a success, and we are looking forward towards doing so much more to help make Lake Worth become known, far and wide, as the City Where Art is Made! We are already attracting artists from as far north as Ft. Pierce and as far south as Miami, so this is not an outlandish statement.

 We want you to be proud and pleased with the faith that you've placed in us and be more fully aware of all the many things that we are trying to accomplish.

 JB Berkow, Founder
Benzaiten Center for Creative Arts
561-310-9371

*The Benzaiten is an excellent venue for panel discussions and meetings. The Palm Beach County Planning Congress held a panel discussion there on redevelopment and the arts last year. Lake Worth's Dir. of Community Sustainability, William Waters, gave a presentation and another one was by Sherryl Muriente, an Instructor at the School of Urban and Regional Planning at Florida Atlantic University. A video of her presentation follows: