Ralph Opacic founded the Orange County School of the Arts in 1987 and led it as executive director and president for more than three decades. He now serves as CEO of Orange County Music & Dance, an Irvine-based nonprofit, where he is building out programming that runs from early childhood classes through adult courses. In this Q&A, he talks about how he defines success, and how that definition has changed over the years.
How do you personally define success?
For me, success is about whether something outlasts you. Anyone can start a program. The real test is whether it still matters ten or twenty years later, whether it’s still changing lives after you’ve moved on to something else. That’s the standard I hold myself to now, and it’s different from how I thought about it when I was younger.
Was there a time your definition of success was different?
Early on, I measured success by growth. More students, more programs, more recognition. That’s a natural place to start, especially when you’re building something from nothing. But growth by itself doesn’t tell you much. You can grow a program that doesn’t actually help anyone. I learned to ask a harder question: is this making a real difference for the person in front of me right now?
What does that harder question look like in practice?
It means checking whether a student who couldn’t afford lessons is still in the room. It means noticing if a program looks impressive on paper but only serves families who already had access to the arts. Success, to me, includes the kid who never would have found their way to a stage or a rehearsal room without the door being held open for them.
You’ve said you want Orange County Music & Dance to serve people from “womb to tomb.” Is that part of how you measure success there?
It’s the whole idea. If someone can start with us as a six-month-old in an early childhood music class and still be taking a dance or fitness class as an adult decades later, that’s success. Most arts organizations serve one age group well and lose people once they age out. I think that’s a mistake. A person’s relationship with the arts shouldn’t have an expiration date, and neither should an institution’s relationship with that person.
Financial backing matters for any organization. How does money factor into your idea of success?
Money is a tool, not a scoreboard. We built a $5 million endowment at OCMD so that no student would be priced out of the arts. That endowment isn’t a trophy. It’s a promise we made, and success means keeping it. I’d rather have a smaller organization that keeps its promises than a bigger one that quietly forgets who it’s supposed to serve.
You worked with two other leaders, Doug Freeman and Charlie Zhang, to grow OCMD. Does success ever depend on other people?
Almost always. I think of what we’ve built as a triumvirate. Charlie brought the entrepreneurial push that got the idea off the ground. Doug brought decades of fundraising and philanthropic experience that kept it funded and credible. I brought the piece I know best, which is turning arts education into something structured that can actually scale. None of us could have built this alone, and I don’t think success that depends on only one person is very stable anyway.
If you had to point to one specific moment that captured what success means to you, what would it be?
It’s less a moment than a pattern I look for. It’s the point where a program stops needing me to explain why it matters, because the people in the room already know. When a parent brings a six-month-old to a music class and later enrolls that same child in a conservatory track years down the line, nobody has to sell them on the idea. The work is speaking for itself. That’s when I know something is working the way it should.
What’s one piece of advice you’d give someone chasing success in a field like yours?
Don’t confuse attention with impact. A program can get written up and talked about without actually changing anyone’s life, and a program can change lives quietly for years without much notice at all. I’d rather build the second kind. Filling a void that people didn’t know how to name is worth more than filling a room for one good headline.