At this particular concert, Karen noted, the band had decided to perform shirtless, sporting only bright-colored, striped short shorts.

With funding from the Leadership and Arts Policy Initiative (LAPI), an opportunity provided for by the Hart Leadership Program, Karen was spending her summer in New York City, immersing herself in the vibrant arts scene of the city while completing an internship with the New York Arts and Business Council.

The LAPI grant supports innovative arts internships for undergraduate students majoring in Public Policy Studies. Up to three grants are awarded every year to help cover living expenses for students wishing to pursue summer internships with arts policy organizations.

"The Hart Leadership Program has a history of drawing the connections between leadership and the arts," said Andrea Marston, Research Service-Learning Coordinator for the Hart Leadership Program. "In all our programs, we are looking for students who are creative, independent, thoughtful, and tough. The LAPI grant is no different, but the creative connection is more explicit. Leadership is always a dynamic process, and LAPI harnesses that creativity directly."

As for Karen, arts had been an essential part of her life for as long as she can remember. At the age of five, Karen had begun to take piano lessons with encouragement from her mom. At the age of thirteen, she became an indie rock fanatic and at age sixteen, she was taking her first art history class. At Duke, she joined the Duke University Union to help shape the music and arts culture at Duke.

But it was Karen's interest in policy that led her to apply for a LAPI grant, to seek a different way to exercise her passion for the arts. While she had theretofore been intimately involved in the art process, there was another side to be discovered, she realized.

To that end, Karen decided to work with the Arts and Business Council of New York, a division of Americans for the Arts-a nonprofit arts advocacy organization. Specifically, ABC/NY was concerned with bringing the arts community in New York together as well as channeling business resources into the nonprofit arts world. As an intern, Karen worked with the small and eccentric staff of the organization to develop partnerships with other arts organizations, build on its base of support, and survey their constituency about the importance of the arts.

"A lot of what I learned about the nonprofit art world was fundraising," Karen said. "There's a lot of behind-the-scenes work that goes on that you don't necessarily know or hear about."

While learning exactly what it takes to make the wheels of the arts world spin, however, Karen also made the most of her summer in New York City by taking weekend excursions to various arts events in the city, gaining widespread exposure to a variety of art forms. To be precise, fourteen concerts, four museum exhibitions, three gallery openings, a ballet performance, an opera, a spoken word show, a comedy show and two art installations.

"I kind of discovered some of these on my own," Karen says. "It's was really a matter of exploring."

Throughout her summer, she was astonished at what she saw as the ability of art to build community-to bring strangers of different ages, races and ethnicities together in the same room. But at the same time, Karen was also in the process of figuring out her place in the arts world, merging her interest in policy with her passion for the craft, by experiencing both sides first-hand.

"I think through the summer, I saw...that it is possible to make a living working in the arts, that there is fulfillment in it, and that the community around the arts is very strong," she said. "I might not have considered public policy as my major before but now I can see the connections."

"I can see how important it is for the arts to have that voice in government because it does require a lot of funding. One of the ongoing conversations in the art world is, ‘Is the non-profit business model really viable for an arts organization?' I think there definitely will be a place for it."