About
Who is behind this?
Fair question, and here is the whole answer.
Jason Burnham
Jason Burnham grew up in the Village of Cornwall-on-Hudson and lives in the Town of Cornwall. He has spent twenty-five years helping organizations make hard decisions together, for Fortune 500 companies, for the United Nations Development Programme as an adviser on social innovation and leadership, and most recently on strategic planning for the City of Philadelphia’s Office of Innovation and Technology. He founded Culture Design, LLC to help organizations achieve their strategic goals through guided facilitation. Now, he’s bringing those same methodologies into community development.
Jason has also been doing this work here already. He served on the Town of Cornwall Economic Development Advisory Committee and helped secure the $4.5 million NY Forward grant. He helped run the Chamber of Commerce’s strategic planning workshop. He facilitated policy workshops for the Cornwall Central School District. And he served on the Town’s Comprehensive Plan committee.
All of that is finished. Other than designing Town surveys to support community outreach efforts, he holds no committee seat, no municipal role and no appointment of any kind now. Stepping away is what makes this possible.
The Cornwall Collaboratory is Jason's own idea and his own time. He takes no fee for Cornwall workshops, holds no office, and has no party affiliation.
“I have watched this town deal with complex issues badly and I have watched it deal with them beautifully. The beautiful version looks like a room where people who did not agree sat down with the same information and debated their way to something they could each live with for the betterment of all. I know how to facilitate that kind of workshop. So I am going to do it, for free, for as long as Cornwall wants me too. None of us have all the answers, but together, we have the solution.”
The Cornwall Collaboratory is a public service initiative, self-funded through his consultancy, Culture Design, LLC, which is why the copyright at the bottom of this site carries that name. Culture Design charges Cornwall nothing for any of this. Jason holds no seat or role now, takes no fee for Cornwall Collabs, and has nothing to gain from anything a Collab might recommend, other than the mutual benefit of being a Cornwall resident. If a topic ever came up where he did have a conflict of interest, he would say so before the collaboratory opened or bring in someone else to facilitate it.
Elizabeth Yanonne Bruschi
Elizabeth Yanonne and her family own The Storm King Theater. The Theater opened on the third of July, 1935. Six hundred seats, art deco, the best heating and cooling money could buy at the time. It showed Stagecoach in 1939. In the sixties it was run by Ella Marion Katz, once a Yiddish theater actress and a translator, and mother to the painter Alex Katz. It became a dinner theater, then briefly a cinema again, and the last film it showed was Prime Cut on the first of October, 1972. For most of the next twenty-five years it was an auction house. Her father, Ray Yannone, bought it in 1997 and spent close to thirty years keeping the roof on.
In 2022 the Town of Cornwall and the Village of Cornwall-on-Hudson went after a New York State grant together, through a program called NY Forward. Thirteen residents, business owners, school and Chamber people and municipal staff sat on a planning committee. Community feedback surveys were deployed yielding hundreds of responses from community members. There were two public workshops, facilitated by Jason Burnham. People stood in front of poster boards and put colored dots next to the things they wanted most. They debated, and then a prioritized list came out of that work.
In February 2023 the State announced that Cornwall had won $4.5 million. In May 2024 that money went to seven projects. One of them was $773,000 to bring the Storm King Theater back to life.
That is why the theater is open, and it is why Elizabeth offered it. A community worked something out together, in public, and a staple of the community came back to life. She would like to see that happen more often. The Storm King Theater is a symbol that represents what is possible when we collaborate towards a common goal. The Theater serves as a beacon of hope and possibility for the future we are designing together.
- $4.5M
- Awarded to Cornwall, February 2023
- $773K
- Toward the Storm King Theater
- 1935
- The year the theater first opened its doors
NY Forward awards announced by New York State Homes and Community Renewal, May 22, 2024. Project list and amounts from the Cornwall Strategic Investment Plan, Mid-Hudson Regional Economic Development Council, December 2023.
In October 2026, the theater returns as a nonprofit and a place for everyone, with free public programming. Hosting the Cornwall Collaboratory is part of that mission.
Location
Storm King Theater
2 Idlewild Avenue, Cornwall-on-Hudson, New York