By John Rhamstine, CVE

I have been asked to write some comments about my career as I prepare to retire from my nearly 30 years here in Norfolk. Honestly, I have never been really good talking about myself as I have always been more comfortable functioning in the background, supporting someone else such as a director or a City Manager or Mayor. It was never by choice but by happenstance that all of my experiences as a venue manager were in municipal settings. Those experiences taught me much about bureaucracy, politics, and patience.

After graduating from UMASS’ Sport Management program in 1980, I did my internship at RFK Stadium in Washington, D.C., working for the Director, Bob Sigholtz, who generously paid me $4.00/hour for my time there, which was rare for internships at the time. I worked as a groundskeeper, electrician, engineer, parking attendant, and finally helped coordinate the Hall of Stars ceremonies there.

Summertime football came to the country and the USFL was formed. I was able to get a box office job with the Washington Federals, who played their home games at RFK. I was promoted to Box Office Manager for the Federals in year two but as luck would have it, the team and the league went belly up. Nonetheless I learned a lot from my boss with the Federals, Tom Korpiel.

This was the early 1980’s and the stadium concert business was burgeoning. RFK stadium had the Washington Redskins as a prime tenant, but they had no box office of their own to handle the non-football business. I was offered the job and worked for Jim Dalrymple, the GM, and Bob Downey, the Stadium Manager. We hosted every major touring show that was out in the eighties: Rolling Stones, Madonna, Paul McCartney, Billy Joel, Bruce Springsteen, U2, the Grateful Dead, among others. The primary promoter in the market was Cellar Door Concerts, run by Jack Boyle and Dave Williams.

I learned so much during those years from my bosses and promoters alike, but I was looking for more responsibility so in 1989 I applied to be the Assistant Director of Civic Facilities for the City of Norfolk, VA. I was lucky enough to be hired and went to work for Bill Luther, the Director, in October of that year.

Bill was a sage veteran of IAAM at the time and had worked in multiple facilities during his career as well as serving as President of IAAM. Again, I learned a lot from Bill during my eight years with him in Norfolk, but I again found myself looking for a new challenge.

This manifested itself in a job 3,000 miles away in Seattle, WA, in 1997. I went to work at Seattle Center as the Director of Event Production. Seattle Center is the campus that included at the time Key Arena, Mercer Arena, the Opera House, and a variety of other gathering facilities at the base of the Space Needle. My boss in Seattle was a woman named Virginia Anderson who wasn’t really caught up in IAAM or venue management, per se, but was one of the most visionary and inspirational leaders that I ever had the pleasure to work for. I was able to work closely with the Seattle Supersonics, the Seattle Storm, the Seattle Thunderbirds, and the Seattle Sea Dogs. It was also my first exposure to union negotiations.

Heading towards my fifth year in Seattle, I received a phone call from a City Council member in Norfolk,
VA, who told me that Bill Luther was retiring, and that the city would be interested in me applying for the Director’s job. I did and was hired in 2001. I have been in that role until today.

I have been fortunate that from my time at RFK Stadium until 2023, I have been affiliated with IAAM/IAVM. So much of my experience has been shaped by the relationships that I developed in IAVM and the programs that IAVM has offered. From District Meetings to Regional Meetings to Chapter Meetings to Oglebay to VenueConnect, participation in these gatherings helped to shape my career and my views about facility management.

I have looked up to many of my colleagues who, whether they knew it or not, taught me a lot. Bob Hunter, Brad Mayne, Michael Marion, Amy Brown, Kevin Twohig, Jimmy Earl, and Bill Holland are some of the leaders that I have admired from afar but also learned from.

As most of us in this business will attest to, they must have the loving support of their family as there are many days and nights where I was not at home but trying to hone my craft at the office or some faraway meeting. My wife Erin and son JD and daughter Callan put up with a lot throughout my career and
I am most grateful for their love and support.

As important as my family has been, the various people on my staffs who have worked with me and supported me deserve most of the credit for any success I have achieved. Left to my own devices, I doubt that I could have amounted to much, but I have always had great people working for me (too many to mention) who made me look much better than I could have on my own.

I don’t know where the next steps of my life and career will go but I know I will have to find something to keep myself busy. I have enjoyed every step I have taken to this point and look forward to the next
one.

John Rhamstine, CVE, most recently served as Director of Cultural Facilities, Arts and Entertainment, at the Scope Arena in Norfolk, Virginia.

By R.V. Baugus

Kevin Clayton serves as Senior Vice President, Head of Social Impact and Equity for the Cleveland Cavaliers of the NBA. Clayton will also serve as the Opening Keynote Speaker for VenueConnect in Pittsburgh. As one who works in an important role in a public assembly venue, Clayton is among the best-equipped to blend his experience at Rocket Mortgage FieldHouse with a social responsibility that is crucial to the success of every IAVM member venue. In a far-ranging interview in which Clayton was so gracious with his time and his expertise, much was revealed about his own interesting past to where he is today. We share with you this week Part I of the interview with Kevin Clayton.

AS SOMEONE WHO WORKS IN SOCIAL IMPACT AND EQUITY, GIVE OUR AUDIENCE YOUR THOUGHTS ON THOSE SUBJECT MATTERS AND ESPECIALLY WHY DEI IS SO IMPORTANT AND EVEN WHAT MIGHT BE MISUNDERSTOOD ABOUT IT.

I plan for the audience to hear some things they will take away that will set the tone for the rest of the conference. There’s a handful of things out there, one of which is there is so much misinformation and so many people that really don’t understand what the conversation of diversity, equity, and inclusion is. I’m not saying your audience doesn’t. I just know it doesn’t matter if I’m speaking in front of people that have been doing this work for a few years or have never done this work or businesspeople that are leaders that when they hear the word diversity and now when you hear the acronym DE&I is kind of its own word and it’s like no, they’re not.

I want people to really be clear as to what it is we’re talking about. Like, what is this and the reason why is that the work of DE&I on a national basis is under attack and has been the last six to nine months. It’s because it’s been set up to fail by us as practitioners as well as a lack of common understanding. What I’ll share with you is when you think post-George Floyd how many DE&I or directors or leaders just had those titles or jobs. There is no curriculum for this. There is no undergraduate degree. There are a few certifications that are out there. But for the majority of us that are doing this work it was really who has passion, who is a woman or person of color then, ah, you’re our diversity leader.

Is there any position at any facility that you can get just based off of your dimension of diversity? No! So, the reason why it is so important to understand what it is and what it’s about one thing, but I also want people to have enough that they can build strategy to operationalize this work. It is way beyond an HR function. It’s a business strategy and for those organizations that get it and understand that they’re the ones that are going to be further ahead. I tie all of this back into the facilities. We operate Rocket Mortage FieldHouse and I am involved in everything that we do in that building so I’ll be able to talk from how we handle our part-time workers, how we handle our union workers to how we get around with our food service. It’s all connected.

How I do this is the sales side of me and also the training side of me. I give people tools on how to do exactly what I say. I’m not going to say, hey, if you want to know how to do this read my book. I will give people at least five or six different ways for them to begin the processes that will be practical and achievable and with so much practical sense it will be like wait a minute, what’s the catch?

FANTASTIC AND WE CAN’T WAIT! DID YOU HAVE ANY EXPERIENCES GROWING UP THAT HAVE BEEN BENEFICIAL TO YOUR UNDERSTANDING DEI OR PREPARED YOU FOR YOUR CURRENT WORK?

I’m going to give you a personal and professional parallel because it all adds up. I’m from Cleveland, grew up in Cleveland, raised by three women. My mother, my grandmother and my great grandmother. A single mom and we would move from two-family homes to two-family homes because the landlord would go up on our rent. We moved into Shaker Heights. The reason why we moved every year is because she wanted to stay in the school system and at that point it was my first interaction with Jewish people.

I am 10 or 11 at this point. I was part of the first busing program in Shaker and at that point that I knew I was being groomed for this work based on my destiny and my life’s purpose. I didn’t know then but as I look back now, I’ve always been thrown in these situations where differences were important and how to overcome those differences and what have you. Where differences were an obstacle, but how you overcome those differences for good.

Fast forward and right out of school I started with Procter & Gamble in sales and marketing. I had 10 years at P&G. Let me back up. So, I played basketball at North Carolina Central, a D1 school and an all-Black school. I was there for a year. The program wasn’t what I thought it was and there was no transfer portal at that time. If I was to transfer, I would have to sit out. I then went to a Division 3 school, Wilmington College in Ohio and had a good career. I then started working at P&G two days after my graduation from college and was sent to inner city Detroit. Now, I’ve got no experience in living in the inner cities. For the leaders of P&G then to say, hey, we’ve got a great section for you and it’s in the inner city of Detroit. That was their own biases of seeing me as a Black man … you must be from the inner city.

P&G then began to in the early 90’s, late 80’s, we began to look at diversity – not DE&I but diversity to leverage our business against Japanese companies and Taiwanese companies that were coming to America. You recall back when the US car industry kind of hit rock bottom and so many Asian car companies were moving in with less quality. So, we decided one way for us to actually protect our business leverage was cultural diversity and gender diversity.

Again, I’m a salesperson and I saw it and understood it and was like, wow, that’s a competitive advantage. Fast forward after a decade at P&G I had a great career and then opened my own consulting firm to help other companies do this. I was 31 years old, and I could use the P&G model to help other companies do that.

I worked with Russell Corporation and then worked with the United States Tennis Association. I was the chief diversity officer for the USTA, then went back to doing my consulting work. I worked in healthcare with Mercy Health and then the Cavaliers.

AS WE KNOW, YOU ARE THE SENIOR VICE PRESIDENT OF SOCIAL IMPACT AND EQUITY. HOW DID THAT TITLE COME ABOUT AND WHAT DOES IT ENCOMPASS?

About my title, I came in as VP of DE&I. My working position got elevated and my CEO and I were like, OK, what’s the position going to be called? I wanted it to be called the Outcome of the Work. I didn’t want to describe it as DEI.

So, community falls under these names — DE&I, community relations, government affairs, our Foundation, everything public-facing within the Cleveland Cavalier Operating Companies and with that as SVP Head of Social Impact, that’s the outcome of our work. It has made an impact. Equity is internal and external so looking at the title, but I also was fortunate enough to understand if I could use a hockey term “where the puck is going.” I knew that if I continued to be connected with DE&I that was going to pigeonhole me although I have done a lot of that work, but I wanted to get away from that to be on the cutting edge of impacting ESG (Environmental, Social & Governance investing). How do we impact social impact? How do we impact corporate responsibility and social responsibility? I can bury DE&I work into my work so that it’s not magnified, and people can relate to impact versus, oh, this is diversity.

By Katarina Dos Santos

The Orange County Convention Center (OCCC) in Orlando, FL, announced the appointment of Anthony “Tony” Camarillo as its new General Manager, and Keri Burns as its new Director of Sales.

“I am pleased to welcome Tony Camarillo and Keri Burns to the OCCC leadership team,” said OCCC Executive Director Mark Tester. “Their extensive leadership abilities will further the growth of the Center through positive relationships and business with our existing and future clients and partners.”

Camarillo’s career spans more than three decades. He brings a wealth of experience in sales, events, and general management to The Center of Hospitality, making him a great fit for the OCCC’s Executive team. Most recently, Camarillo served as the Director of the RP Funding Center Director in Lakeland, Florida – a position he held for eight years. Prior to that he worked in Chicago at McCormick Place and Navy Pier where he held various positions and was instrumental in developing the facilities, standardizing operations, increasing sales, and enhancing event management.

As the OCCC’s General Manager, Camarillo will assist the executive team in the overall management of the building with an emphasis placed on safe and efficient operations. He will also respond to outside organizations’ needs and lead the overall direction, coordination, and evaluation of assigned OCCC divisions.

An alumnus of the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign, Camarillo is looking forward to making an impact on the OCCC’s efforts to create Transformational Experiences for its clients, partners, stakeholders, and guests.

Burns is a proven leader in the hospitality industry, bringing more than 15 years of experience to the OCCC. Most recently, she served as the Central Florida Regional Director for the Florida Restaurant and Lodging Association (FRLA).

As Director of Sales for the OCCC, Burns will oversee daily operations of the Sales Division, providing leadership and development for the staff. She will also coordinate with other OCCC divisions and external organizations such as Visit Orlando, I-Drive Chamber, and the hotel community to drive business to The Center of Hospitality.

Burns also manages a 501©3 organization called Ladies in Leadership and Community (LILAC) dedicated to supporting causes related to women and making a community impact. She earned her bachelor’s degree from Liberty University, and her Master of Business Administration from Southern New Hampshire University.

Katarina Dos Santos is Marketing and Communications Manager for the Orange County Convention Center.

By Andra Bennett, APR

Christopher J. Roden has been promoted to Senior Public Events Manager (Operations Manager) for the Will Rogers Memorial Center (WRMC), the 120-acre entertainment, sports, equestrian, and livestock complex in Fort Worth’s Cultural District.

Roden has steadily increased his responsibilities in the City of Fort Worth’s Public Events Department, beginning work as an entry-level service attendant in 2014. Over the years, he was promoted to field operations supervisor and served as interim Operations Manager during the COVID-19 pandemic. During that time, he led the Global Biorisk Advisory Council (GBAC) initiative for Will Rogers and served as Deputy Incident Commander during the overflow homeless shelter operations at the Fort Worth Convention Center.

“Chris Roden is a stellar example of how a motivated employee can propel their career by taking on new challenges,” said Mike Crum, director of Public Events. “He has proven himself to be a servant leader that our team looks to for personal inspiration as well as professional direction.”

The WRMC complex is operational 24/7 year-round, with the exception of Christmas Day.

“Will Rogers is a unique venue with multiple events and various types of shows running concurrently which requires logistical expertise and staff leadership,” said Kevin Kemp, General Manager of WRMC. “Chris tackles every project we task him with and always excels.”

Roden has been in hospitality in some form since he was 14 years old, he said. He has been employed in food and beverage service roles as well as owned a few small businesses. His goal for WRMC is to build a culture of continuous improvement.

“I like analyzing puzzles and finding solutions,” Roden said. “With technology, evaluation and training, we can create innovative solutions and a better experience for staff, clients, guests, and partners.”

A World War II history and a baseball buff, Roden holds a B.S. in Criminal Justice from Texas Christian University and will complete his master’s in public administration from Tarleton State University later this year. He is also a graduate of the IAVM Venue Management School and has a Lean Yellow Belt Certification. He is a Fort Worth native and graduate of South Hills High School.

Andra Bennett, APR is Marketing Communications | Public Events Department.

By Kevin Kurtt

The Minneapolis Convention Center (MCC) announced that it has achieved Gold Level certification for the Events Industry Council (EIC) Sustainable Event Standards.

The EIC Sustainable Event Standards are specific standards for environmental and social responsibility within the events industry. Created by the EIC Sustainability Committee in partnership with industry professionals and leading sustainability practitioners, the requirements provide event planners and suppliers with prescriptive actions for producing and delivering sustainable events.

“This is great news for the Minneapolis Convention Center and all of us working to make Minneapolis the sustainable destination choice for meeting and event planners,” said Jeff Johnson, MCC Executive Director. “Achieving this not only recognizes our industry-leading sustainability efforts, but also provides a roadmap for measuring and improving our sustainable event programs on an ongoing basis.”

In addition to its EIC certification, previous sustainability recognition for the MCC includes:

Leader in Sustainability by the Green Meeting Industry Council (GMIC)
LEED v4 Certification for Existing Building Operations and Maintenance
Silver certification under the Sustainable SITES Initiative rating system for achievement in landscape sustainability for the redesigned MCC Plaza – the nation’s first SITES certified project to be located at a convention center and the first ever SITES certified project in the Upper Midwest

The MCC is a proud and proven industry leader in sustainability. Highlights include:

A stormwater catchment system that annually prevents up to 5 million gallons of rainwater runoff from entering the Mississippi River by redirecting it to an underground storage system used for the facility’s irrigation
More than 2,600 solar panels on the MCC’s rooftop which supply 5% of the 100% renewable energy used – the other remaining 95% comes from Xcel Energy’s locally sourced wind and solar energy
The 2.5-acre MCC Plaza, downtown Minneapolis’ most sustainable public green space, built on top of an underground parking deck and features an urban meadow planted with native tree, wildflower, and prairie grass species to create downtown’s largest pollinator refuge

“We are delighted to see a major facility such as Minneapolis Convention Center continue its commitment to sustainability,” said Amy Calvert, EIC CEO. “This certification demonstrates a strong commitment to the environmentally and socially responsible practices that are needed to support long-term sustainability in our industry.”

The EIC Sustainable Event Standards specify performance criteria in the areas of organizational management, marketing, communications and engagement, climate action, water management, materials and circularity, supply chain management, diversity, equity and inclusion, accessibility, and social impact.

BPA iCompli Sustainability, a division of BPA Worldwide, a nonprofit international auditing organization headquartered in Shelton, Conn., developed the certification protocols for EIC Sustainable Event Standards and performed the independent third-party certification of the MCC’s compliance with the Venue standard.

“Our certification to the event sustainability standards created by EIC and now adopted by the Minneapolis Convention Center continues our long-standing commitment to promote transparency in the events industry,” noted Richard Murphy, President and CEO of BPA Worldwide.

Kevin Kurtt PR & Communications Manager at Meet Minneapolis.

ABOUT THE MINNEAPOLIS CONVENTION CENTER

The Minneapolis Convention Center (MCC) is owned by the City of Minneapolis and marketed through Meet Minneapolis. The 1.6 million square foot facility features 475,000 square feet of exhibit space, a 3,400 fixed-seat auditorium, 87 meeting rooms and two ballrooms. The MCC works to serve its constituencies and stakeholders as the face of Minneapolis to visitors and has been GBAC STAR, LEED, SITES and GMIC certified. Learn more about the MCC here.

ABOUT THE EVENTS INDUSTRY COUNCIL

The Events Industry Council’s more than 30 member organizations represent over 103,500 individuals and 19,500 firms and properties involved in the events industry. The Events Industry Council’s vision is to be the global champion for event professionals and event industry excellence. It promotes high standards and professionalism in the events industry with the Certified Meeting Professional (CMP) program and signature program activities. The CMP credential is recognized globally as the badge of excellence in the events industry. The qualifications for certification are based on professional experience, education and a rigorous exam. The four signature programs – Sustainability and Social Impact, Accepted Practices Exchange (APEX), Knowledge and Leadership – represent the key initiatives, assets, services and products for the Events Industry Council. Learn more at www.eventscouncil.org.

ABOUT BPA ICOMPLI SUSTAINABILITY

BPA iCompli Sustainability, a division of BPA Worldwide, is a not-for-profit auditing organization established in 1931 to audit audience metrics for publishers, advertisers and their agencies. Today, BPA’s audit services have expanded to include external assurance of government and industry standards and independent verification of technology and service claims. BPA iCompli Sustainability provides third-party certification to Events Industry Council’s (EIC) Sustainable Events Standards (SES), sustainability framework services, and verification of sustainability data including GHG emissions, waste diversion, water withdrawal, safety performance and more. Learn more at www.bpaww.com.

MEDIA CONTACT

Kevin Kurtt, PR & Communications Manager, 612-767-8118 (o)/952-288-9319 (c), KevinK@minneapolis.org

Kevin Kurtt​
Public Relations and Communications Manager
Meet Minneapolis
, Convention & Visitors Association
801 Marquette Ave S, Suite 100
Minneapolis, Minnesota 55402