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 develop cultures of collaboration to achieve their strategic goals. Now, he’s bringing those same methodologies into community development.
Jason has also been doing this work here already, for free, for years. He served on the Town of Cornwall Economic Development Advisory Committee. 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. 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 his 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 do hard things badly and I have watched it do hard things beautifully. The beautiful version looks like a room where people who did not agree sat down with the same facts and argued their way to something they could all live with. I know how to run that room. So I am going to run it, for free, for as long as Cornwall wants it.”
Said plainly, so nobody has to go looking. Jason served on the Town’s Economic Development Advisory Committee and has worked alongside Town, Village, school district and Chamber leadership over the past several years. The Cornwall Collaboratory is a public service initiative of his company, 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 something at stake, he would say so before the collaboratory opened or bring in someone else to run it.
Elizabeth Bruschi — Storm King Theater
The Storm King 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 argued, 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 building came back. She would like to see that happen more often.
- $4.5M
- Awarded to Cornwall and Cornwall-on-Hudson, 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.
The theater
Storm King Theater
2 Idlewild Avenue, Cornwall-on-Hudson, New York