Invited Experts

Shannon Rodriguez, Executive Director, Skidmore College Career Development Center

Saratoga AI will hire three Skidmore seniors to assist in the development of ten audio tours on Voices of Saratoga starting May 20. We’d like to explore how best to approach this, while also exploring a host of questions. Are the job prospects for graduates as bleak as we’re reading about? What’s your sense of AI’s impact on hiring? What strategies should young people and their families be adopting?

Maire Masterson, Executive Director, Business for Good Foundation

We think we should organize Saratoga AI as a public benefit corporation, but what does that really mean? Might a company like Saratoga AI fit within the Business for Good umbrella? Where do you see AI taking BFG? Which BFG stories might we be of most help in telling through a series of Civic Conversations?

While everyone is rightfully focusing on the nation’s sesquicentennial on July 4, we
want to be sure you’re aware of another very special anniversary that will follow just two
weeks later: the 100th anniversary of the day that Peter Finley filed the complaint with Governor Al Smith that would bring down the Saratoga District Attorney, Sheriff, and Commissioner of Public Safety for derelection of duty: July 23, 1926. We’re cooking up with Greg Veitch an appropriate way to observe it.

In PMCF’s tenth anniversary year, we propose to talk to you both about developing a self-guided audio tour at Pitney Meadows Community Farm that we propose to title John Pitney’s Farm—a narrative experience that brings the land’s history to life through Field’s research and storytelling, shaped into a series of GPS-triggered stops that allow visitors to hear the story of John Pitney and the evolution of the farm as they move through the landscape. And of course we’ll tell the story of Pitney Meadows Community Farm today and in the future.

Jamie Parillo, Executive Director
Saratoga Springs History Museum

Jennifer Allen, Executive Director
Friends of the Saratoga Springs Public Library

We’re working with Greg Veitch on developing an audio tour that chronicles for visitors the remarkable events of 1926, when Saratoga finally had to explain what it had become: a city operating under the thumb of the mob. At the Saratoga Book Festival, we might host a session on spatial storytelling as a way to further monetize the extensive research that authors invest in a book. Or we might team up with both FSSPL and the History Museum in appropriately noting our Centenial Observation of Peter Finley’s Complaint.

Field Horne, Historian