Anyone who works or has worked in Berkshire County’s flourishing nonprofit sector in the past decade is likely to be familiar with the name Liana Toscanini—if not indebted to her for helping to navigate some aspect of fundraising or board development—and on top of that, any classical music fan is likely to have heard of her last name.
I decided to learn the story of how Liana came to play such a central role in the Berkshire County economy and what it is like having a music legend as an ancestor.
Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
SHEELA CLARY
Tell me about your family.
LIANA TOSCANINI
My father was born in Italy and came here when he was nine. His name was Walfredo [pronounced Valfredo]. There is a “W” thing in the family. Walter was my grandfather, my father’s father, and his two sisters were Wanda and Wally.
Arturo, my great grandfather, was born in Parma in 1867. He died in 1957, before I was born. He conducted his first concert because the conductor was sick, I think in Buenos Aires, when he was 20-something, in the 1880s or 1890s. He was already very famous by the 1930s.
He originally supported Mussolini, but then when it was apparent that he was a fascist, he spoke out against him and refused to play the Italian national anthem at concerts. After he got beat up one night by some fascist thug, he left Italy. They came to New York and lived in the Ansonia Hotel for a year and then bought a house on the Hudson River. A beautiful Tudor mansion in Riverdale, in the Bronx.
The NBC Symphony Orchestra was created for him. He was like a rock and roll star in the 1950s because he was on the radio, and that’s what everybody listened to, the NBC Symphony. The program would be announced, and everybody would stop everything they were doing and gather around the radio. He was photographed a lot. When my father died, our family biographer said that my father was probably one of the most photographed kids ever, because everywhere Arturo went, my father and grandfather were there, and Arturo would put him on his shoulders. He went on tour in the 1950s around the entire country on a train, so my father got out of college to go on that tour. My father grew up in New York, went to Horace Mann and Yale. He met my mother at Yale. She was in the music school.
CLARY
What did he do for work?
TOSCANINI
He was an architect and a frustrated painter. We lived on the Upper West Side. I was born ’61 and my sisters in ’63 and ’64. My one sister lives in Baltimore, and the other works for ASCAP, the American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers. She’s been in the music business her whole life. She has two kids, so I have nephews, which is great, because I didn’t have children.
My formative years were as a Westchester girl in private school and public school. That’s what I wrote my college essay about, the difference between the two. That’s what got me into Washington University in St. Louis, where I was a French major.
CLARY
Did you ever learn Italian?
TOSCANINI
Not really. My father didn’t speak it. But he had to keep going back to Italy. He spent his life being the grandson of Arturo. I mean, he was a city councilman in New Rochelle, which was a city of like, 70,000 or 80,000. So he had his architecture, politics, and a family, but really, he was the keeper of the history, and he had to do talks and all that stuff. He thought it was depressing, always talking about his dead relatives.
CLARY
Does the name Toscanini open doors?
TOSCANINI
Oh, everywhere. In the medical world, when I had issues and was going to Manhattan doctors, the senior partner would come and see me just because he wanted to meet me. He was the guy who founded the entire medical imaging sector.
There’s certainly plenty of people who know the name, but not the conductor part. Everyone insists that Toscanini conducted at Tanglewood, and he did not. They’re confusing him with Stokowski or someone.
It’s interesting coming from a famous family. It took 22 weekends to clean out my father’s house. We had to wear masks because the Toscanini newspaper clippings were 100 years old.
CLARY
What did you do with all of them?
TOSCANINI
Almost everything of real importance has gone to the New York Public Library and is sitting in the catacombs, and they need a million dollars to hire people to catalog it all.
We still get calls about recordings and re-releasing things and liner notes and all that. And unfortunately, the two men that deal with that are both getting up there in age. One is turning 90, and he’s having a birthday party. Maybe Yoko will be there because he was John Lennon’s manager also.
CLARY
How long have you been here?
TOSCANINI
I was living in Manhattan and knew of the Berkshires because I was a bed-and-breakfast antiquer. I came up in 1996, and it seemed like an affordable place to live, which is funny now. I bought a 1770s house in Sandisfield, and we loved it so much. (I married my grammar school sweetheart.)
We did that for months, but then circling the Upper West Side for parking at midnight on Sunday started getting really old, and we thought, ‘It’s kind of stupid to have two different residences.’ So we gave that up and moved here full time in ‘97. I now have a circa-1900 house, so not nearly as interesting as the 1770s house, but still crooked.
I was working in the home-textiles industry, and previously in cosmetics and publishing, in marketing. I was in my 30s. I was working really hard and had a good salary, and publishing was fun, and textiles was like the nicer version of fashion, right? But I’d climbed the corporate ladder. I was like, ‘Been there, done that.’ That’s sort of my whole work trajectory, to do something entrepreneurial, then to work for a real organization, then do something entrepreneurial. So now I’m in my final entrepreneurial stage with the Nonprofit Center.
CLARY
When you first got here, did you have a nine to five?
TOSCANINI
My company let me work remotely. I was one of the first remote workers. I had dial-up and was running a website that turned into a $25 million website. I worked at Simon’s Rock for a while in PR.
Then I opened a retail store, a complete switch. It was an extension of the home-textiles business, and it was an experiment. We sold to retailers, then restarted the direct mail business, catalog, and website, and then this was the third part of the synergy, the actual physical space, and it did really well. Originally, it was the Berkshire Slipcover Outlet, and we were in the Prime Outlets. That store was doing the same volume in sales as Bed, Bath and Beyond in New Jersey, one of the biggest retailers in the country. I moved the store to Great Barrington, where Sleepy’s is now [in the Price Chopper plaza]. It became LT Homes, and we started carrying sheets, towels, blankets, tea, candles.
It’s a tough retail world here if you don’t have good fall leaves and you have a muddy spring and there’s no snow for the skiers. It all depends on the weather. I had some meetings with Tom’s Toys and Catherine’s Chocolates people who had been in it for a long time, and they were like, “Some years you just don’t make any money.” And I was like, “Nobody told me that when I opened the store!”
I closed the store in 2007, and the founder of CATA knew it. They needed somebody, and I was already on the board, and they thought that since I got along with everyone on staff and knew the organization that I would be a good hire.
CLARY
Is there a reason you were drawn to CATA? Do you have developmentally disabled people in your life?
TOSCANINI
I do. I have a sister with developmental disabilities. I happened upon CATA by chance, because they were on the second floor of 40 Railroad Street and I was visiting Doone at Body and Soul and CATA was across the way. I ended up meeting Sandy [Newman, founder of CATA]. She’d read about me in The Berkshire Eagle for my work with the Sandisfield Arts Center, as I was involved with that restoration project. It’s how I became known as someone who helps nonprofits, using my marketing background. The story said I was volunteering 30 hours a week, so Sandy thought, ‘Well, there’s my gal, right?’
In addition to my CATA work, people were asking me for help writing grants, because I guess I had a reputation. I thought, ‘This is a full-time job.’ And that’s how I came up with the idea for the Nonprofit Center. It was the end of 2015, and I spent my Christmas vacation figuring out what the NPC was going to look like, and writing a business plan. We launched in April 2016.
I think our first member organization was WAM Theatre. And now we have 200 nonprofit members.
CLARY
How many nonprofits are in Berkshire County?
TOSCANINI
Officially, there are 1,200, and that includes everybody. We rank 27th in nonprofit employment in the country. One in four jobs is a nonprofit job here. Even the Southern Berkshire Chamber of Commerce is nonprofit, but it’s a 501(c)(6), meaning if you donate to the Chamber, you don’t get a tax deduction. [You only get deductions for donating to 501(c)(3)s.] So a more realistic number of nonprofits that raise money the way normal nonprofits do is 400 to 500.
We have one nonprofit per six people, the second highest rate in the Commonwealth. (Only Nantucket has more.) Our membership includes food pantries, even though most of them are unstaffed and probably have less than $50,000 in revenue a year. We also have really big organizations like all the organizations that serve people with disabilities like BCARC, and BFAIR, they all have 300 employees or more. The topic of the year has been health insurance because the costs are rising so phenomenally.
CLARY
What kind of help do people need most from you?
TOSCANINI
There’s a steady stream of emails and phone calls asking for advice or referrals. We host 20 or more workshops and webinars a year. A lot of those revolve around fundraising and board governance, or how to make the best use of your database. Revenue diversification is a big one right now. Then the convening and advocacy roles are important.
The first major projects we did were the Berkshire Nonprofit Awards and the Giving Back guide. Those signature programs help the nonprofits that fly under the radar get a little more exposure, because a lot of them don’t have a marketing background, so they’re not writing press releases, and nobody knows they exist.
CLARY
Who are you particularly proud of helping?
TOSCANINI
I always hold CATA up as the model because of the way they’ve done everything. Succession planning, fundraising, growing. Communicating, right? It’s an organization that people model themselves after.
I’m pretty pleased about making the connection between Wendy Healy and Ventfort Hall, which was just in The New York Times. They were without an executive director for a year. Wendy I knew through her position at Lee Bank, and we went for a walk one day. I’d been to her house and I’d seen all her grandmother’s china and silver and crystal, very shabby chic, peeling pain and salvaged furniture. I thought, ‘This Gilded Age mansion is looking for an executive director, and this might be a great fit.’ Restoration experience, and she knows finance from working at the bank. So I put the two of them together.
She became the executive director, and their annual revenue tripled in two years. She loves her job, and they love her.
What I want to highlight is the power of personal connection, because word of mouth is a big deal in Berkshire County. It’s very on-the-ground work. It takes time. You build your social capital, you build your connections, and then you make stuff happen. There was a lot of skepticism in the beginning. Like, ‘You started another nonprofit to support nonprofits, really?’
People were like, ‘Oh, it’s a front for consulting.’
I’m like, ‘I had no salary for the first five years!’
I think we’ve proven what the model could look like and how it works. Someone has to make those connections, and there are not that many connector-type people. It’s an important thing that doesn’t get recognized. And then there’s so many organizations doing good work. I mean, all the food pantries should be wearing Superman capes.
