Meet Kai Degner
Quick Facts about Kai Degner
- Member of Harrisonburg’s Board of Zoning Appeals
- Graduate of the Harrisonburg Citizen Academy’s Inaugural Class
- Executive Director of the Arts Council of the Valley
- Small Business Owner
- Member of the Harrisonburg-Massanutten Rotary Club
- Advisory Board Member of the Harrisonburg Downtown Renaissance
- Member of Harrisonburg’s Downtown Design Committee
- Co-founder of The OrangeBand Initiative
- Masters in Business Administration (MBA) and Bachelors of Science from JMU
Leadership Experience
Currently, Kai serves as the Executive Director of the Arts Council of the Valley, where he facilitates collaborative partnerships between business leaders, philanthropists, community leaders, educators and artists in Harrisonburg and Rockingham County. Under Kai’s direction, the Arts Council administers a grants program to fund art-related projects, coordinates the Museum and Gallery Walk, and operates Court Square Theater.
Before taking his current position with the Arts Council of the Valley, Kai founded and operated a small business in Harrisonburg for three years. His business, Converging Voices LLC, focused on a combination of innovative facilitation and conference design, project management, and technology consulting. Kai contracted with the Department of Conservation and Recreation, the Shenandoah Valley Pure Water Forum, James Madison University, Eastern Mennonite University’s student government, and other regional clients. As part of this work, he served on the Shenandoah River Fish Kill Task Force, which continues to investigate the causes of annual fish deaths in the Shenandoah.
While self-employed, Kai served on the steering committee for the 2006 National Conference on Dialogue and Deliberation. Here, he entered the dialogue on developing and implementing strategies for local communities and governments to enable diverse stake-holders to collaboratively develop and implement sustainable solutions to complex problems. This experience provides him the experience to effectively initiate city-driven programs to meaningfully involve the Harrisonburg community in decisions that impact the city’s future.
Community Involvement
In 2003, Kai co-founded The OrangeBand Initiative, a movement to get more people talking respectfully about what they care about most. OrangeBands are strips of fabric that people can tie somewhere to use as a conversation starter about an issue they feel is important to discuss. A major goal of OrangeBand is to bring together people with differing opinions to discuss issues that matter to them, and promote civil discourse and problem-solving. In addition to distributing thousands of OrangeBands in Harrisonburg, the Initiative organized over 100 public discussions on issues ranging from local immigration, to the Iraq war, to healthcare policies. This OrangeBand model has since been adopted at over a dozen universities and high schools around the country.
Kai has personally organized, promoted, and/or moderated hundreds of discussion and/or community events in the Harrisonburg-Rockingham community. Ranging from one-hour panel discussions to three-day conferences, these events were designed to either educate the audience on an issue, spark an informed discussion or debate, build community between the attendees, or develop and prioritize steps towards solutions. Most recently, in his Arts Council role, he convened a series of discussions for area property owners, business owners, and artists working to repurpose a historic downtown building into an arts center.
Higher Education
Kai Degner earned a Masters in Business Administration and a Bachelors of Science in Integrated Science and Technology (ISAT) from James Madison University, where he was an Honors Scholar. While studying for his MBA, he focused on applying the coursework to nonprofit and small business administration. In ISAT, he concentrated on a combination of environmental studies and geography in the Shenandoah River watershed.
