 The CEO of the National Performance Network and Visual Artists Network. I just want to make sure that's clear. The second speaker will be Jose Torres-Tama, who is an artist and cultural worker from New Orleans, Louisiana. Art de Torturo Productions. The next speaker will be Sarayuki Iguchi, who is the Secretary General of Arts, NPO, based out of Kyoto, Japan. And finally, we're going to have Molly Quinlan-Hays, who's from South Arts, and they have a program called Arts Ready, which she'll talk about. Some things that she'll talk about that program, which actually really addresses these issues in a holistic way. You ready, M.K.? I'm just wondering why this isn't connected, and it was up before. Brian, do you know where the guy is? I'll find the guy. I will talk first. Why don't you start, M.K.? Yes, I'll talk first. You're going to give me a time signal. What I have is some examples of some artist projects. I just want to back up and say that NPN fans' experience with, in our case in New Orleans, man-made disasters, because while Hurricane Katrina was an extremely strong storm, it was what we referred to as the Fezal floods, the levees bursting, which were poorly constructed by the Army Corps of Engineers. They caused the damage and the devastation that took place in New Orleans. So, from our observation, among the first responders, if you will, of people who came back to New Orleans, because the city literally emptied out after Katrina, there were about 100,000 people who did not evacuate and who could not evacuate, and those are the ones that you saw in the Superdome and in the Convention Center. And it was about a month after Katrina when they started letting people back into New Orleans. People in the Convention Center and the people in the Superdome were eventually evacuated and dispersed and we have a New Orleans diaspora now across the United States because there are many people who went to different places and a substantial portion of poor people, majority African-American who were evacuated, have not been able to come back and I think that is a political issue that we all need to be aware of and that is because primarily of poverty, the impact of poverty. And Jose I know will refer to some other aspects of it. But as people came back, it was artists who were among the very first to come back and artists came back not just to take care of themselves but to lend their skills and to engage their skills as artists, their creativity, their ability to collect stories and do storytelling, their visual abilities, to work with communities everywhere as volunteers in order to engage in recovery. So I have some examples of, let me see if it comes up, two specific projects. Okay, great. So the first project that I want to describe was called Transforma. And Transforma was initiated by a team of artists, two of whom were from outside of New Orleans and one was from inside New Orleans. And Rick Lowe, Project Row Houses, which is a band partner, and Rick is an artist and he's the founder of Project Row House. And Sam Durand, who's another visual artist, came to New Orleans to offer their help and what distinguished their approach to working, and I think this is an important value of people coming from the outside to a place is they didn't come in to do their project. They came in to work with people already on the ground, and in this case artists who were already in the city and already on the ground and support their work in whatever way possible. And so Transforma Project which had a discrete beginning and end. And the information here, there was a publication and this website which is transformaprojectsplural.org is an archive of the publication that documented the work that Transforma did and it's sunsetted in 2010. So unlike what may happen in other circumstances where something gets started and then people don't seem to know how to end it or want to end it because it's doing great work and an institution or organization can drift on and on for a long time but the fact of having a defined time period I think made this project more effective. So there were two major aspects of what Transforma did. They had pilot projects and they had a mini grant re-granting program. So the three pilot projects focused on different aspects of how artists and communities worked together to achieve, in this case, recovery and relief. The first was called Home New Orleans and I'm going to go in a little bit more into that. Home New Orleans worked in a variety of different neighborhoods and as that project evolved, the opportunity to bridge the differences between neighborhoods because like in any city, neighborhoods often see themselves as so distinct from one another that they have nothing in common. When in fact, of course, when you live in a city in particular there's much that particular individual neighborhoods have in common. So Home New Orleans evolved to having individual projects in different areas of the city such as Lakeview and Central City and the Lower Ninth Ward and found ways to bring the cultural workers and the artists from those communities together at the end of the project so that they can learn from one another and be a learning community in addition to succeeding with their projects. The second project that Transforma supported was Operation Per Paydirt which you heard some of from yesterday if you heard Mel Chin's keynote project. And Mel Chin continues to work in New Orleans and work with NPN to achieve the funding, the dollar bills that they are creating with young people and you heard yesterday they still have about 100,000 more that they want to create and the plan is to take that pallet of $100 bills that have been created by young people in schools primarily but by artists as well. And of course in the process of going to the schools they are educating young people about the dangers of lead in the soil and the fact is that every major city in the United States that has any history has contaminated soil from lead pollution which is primarily from automobile exhaust over the years before we put different kinds of emission controls. And where there is for instance, you cannot put a vegetable garden in the ground in an inner city backyard anywhere in the United States. You need to have a raised bed if you are going to plant something that you are going to consume because plants absorb the lead from the soil. And ironically, not ironically, part of Mel Chin's approach is working with scientists to discover natural ways to remediate the soil and one of those is another kind of plant and I don't know the details that actually the plant absorbs the lead from the soil and cleans the soil and then that plant can be gone away and you end up with clean soil which is sort of an amazing thing. Now it's much bigger than that and I don't know the details but Mel Chin's was the second project and that was really a case of an individual artist working in a really large way to achieve his project. And then the third project was to create Plessy Park and to have the place where Homer Plessy got on the railroad car that led to segregation, official segregation in the United States happened in New Orleans at what had been a railroad station and so there's now a memorial and the greatest aspect of that project was that the artists working with two student populations one NOCA which is our Audition Entry Arts High School which is an excellent school and which draws from all over the state and Frederick Douglass High School which was a predominantly African American high school and the two arrivals because you know the dynamics of magnet schools are audition schools versus kids that are stuck in a really terrible public school that don't have the freedom to actually go and enter that kind of a system so the kids were actually had a rivalry among themselves and this project helped bring those two schools together to achieve the Plessy Park project. So then the second aspect was the mini-grants and I don't have the website, I can't get the archived website which has more details so I'm sorry I apologize for this tiny print but these were, there were three rounds of mini-grants and these were grants in the $500 to $1,000 range, tiny some of them were $250, I mean they were very small grants it went to and they were, it was a very very very simple proposal process that artists in the community or cultural workers could apply for and some of the examples of the kinds of projects were a community garden and a lot of story collecting and I think that's one of the points, I think many of the other panelists will have specific stories to tell but particularly for young people the ability to talk about or illustrate or demonstrate their experience is an essential tool I believe led by artists to help them deal with the experience because the trauma of experiences like this for young people can often just be buried in their consciousness and not manifest itself for years and so projects which bring artists to work with young people to tell their stories or to illustrate their stories or to make films about their stories I mean all the different creative processes that can help people to tell their own stories and to talk out loud so to speak and analyze what they've gone through is an incredible aspect of healing so as you can see the first round had five grants and they were I think five in the second round and then round three had substantial war funding and so there were more and some of these were for instance Junebug, Jabbo, Jones, John O'Neill, this is an African-American theater company that's over 30 years old based in New Orleans Mardi Gras history and bead sharing so I'm sorry the Mardi Gras Indian tradition of beading costumes was an important way for cultural bearers in New Orleans to be supported through these projects and so it's really to me evidence of how far tiny bits of money can go particularly when you're working in communities and it's not that the artists didn't necessarily get paid for their work in these things these were not all volunteer projects on the part of the artists but the tiny bits of money helped leverage opportunities for a lot of people so how am I doing? great thank you the other project that I want to just quickly mention is the more detail about the home the world's project and that's going to take a minute to load so I think rather than do that I just want to mention another project that I don't have media to show and that is a project that a New Orleans based artist Donald Harrison who is an internationally recognized jazz musician did in Japan after the tsunami and the earthquake and he has, those of you who were at the NPN annual meeting last year the NPN ban annual meeting Donald Harrison, his sister Cherise Harrison Nelson were the keynote at last year's annual meeting and Donald organized with the Japan Foundation a youth jazz orchestra in Japan as well as one that had been organized in the United States after Katrina and they went back and forth so the young people actually traveled from New Orleans to Japan performed there, worked with their young cohorts there and then following that the youth orchestra from Japan came to New Orleans and performed and did workshops and worked with the young people that were part of the group in New Orleans and that was just a wonderful example of an artist who had the experience of participating in recovery after Katrina of reaching out and our ability to take what we have learned and bring it to another place of disaster and share the resources and the knowledge of another community and I think that's another important aspect about disaster relief and recovery from the perspective of artists is how we can not just serve ourselves but how we can offer what we have to the world so I think I'll stop there. Thank you. Can we ask a question or all at the end? If you don't mind holding because there should be a series of folks who are going to do that and that would be great. Jose. So I escaped on a stolen school bus three days after the levees reached I was on the same bus that the iconic African American composer the Septinarian I think 70 plus years old Alan Tussaud was on so literally I escaped on a stolen school bus three days after the levees breached I was trapped pre Katrina I had no car I had given up my car I was touring a lot through the NPN grateful to be here as well this is my 20 year anniversary engagement with the NPN and a lot of my work post Katrina was about trauma my own personal trauma of having to deal with the escape on a stolen school bus that was rescuing African American families and we just happened to be in a position and Alan Tussaud was the iconic composer many many projects have been supported by the NPN recently the visual arts network I'm just going to as a performance artist and multidisciplinary train individual arts and literature as well I used all my skills to be to do whatever I could to deal not only with my own personal trauma but also the trauma of two communities predominantly the Latino American community that was reconstructing the Orleans that wasn't becoming part of the post Katrina narratives and even still you find you're hard pressed to find that out on a larger level then I also got engaged with creating Latino youth theater projects as well with undocumented youth photographic exhibits and I'll mention those but I'm going to just give you a little excerpt of how I deal with performance trauma for me personally it's in relationship because I came back a month after the storm and the first thing that I began doing as soon as I got out I was in Andrei Kudrescu's house on the fourth day on September 1st we got out three days after the federal leverage of cyber essays and that's all I spent the first couple of weeks doing cyber essays until I got back to New Orleans on October 1st and actually sneaked back into the Maroney neighborhood because the Maroney neighborhood was still not we were not being allowed to come back in you know because of the nature of my intrepid ways we got back into the Maroney and only the French quarter was possible so this is part of the lowering morning ritual I went down to St. James infirmary saw my caramel brown baby there she was an undocumented immigrant worker she had cleaned out the Superdome and convention center but nobody nobody nobody was there to cry for her sin papeles se murió trabajando por una miseria de dólares su sudor y su sangre regalando she was living in a parallel universe in a bizarre science fiction reality ubiquitous and invisible simultaneously reconstructing the city that care and bush forgot but like much of her brown latino family her pain and suffering doesn't mean a lot to the likes of you and you and gringos generally era una mujer mestiza invisible para los blancos en general como mucha desuja to tell her story and those of my paperback people because it's my destiny I could sing my caramel brown baby there dead at St. James infirmary I went down to the river and cried some more with tears I applauded this performance for her revenge I went down to St. James infirmary because I create from pain so nine years plus I've been dedicating my life to telling the untold story and this is part of an essay that's in the book it's called because I dare to remember in the united states of amnesia I believe you remember people's shoots I believe that the writers and artists can be instrumental in creating work that serves as the conscious of our times I believe in chronicling the personal experience to counter the official accounts that inevitably cultivate historical lies to silence and control and render some people invisible those seem to be seedless by disappearing them through the control mainstream media tentacles of misinformation in the latin-american cultural tradition the latin the playwright the poet the performer has a responsibility to tell the people's story that in whatever ways after coming back the first thing that I saw like I had never seen ever in New Orleans were thousands of latinos everywhere immigrant workers on the rooftops putting up the blue tarps transforming the city reconstructing like a sort of locus of reconstruction angels that were back and I found it to be incredible but you should know that New Orleans has this long Spanish colonial legacy there's a latino community before this storm there's a Vietnamese community before this storm as well and these two communities basically got what I call browned out and yellowed out we didn't become part of the Post-Catrine because as much as I'm deeply connected to the African-American community and the Anglo community that supports a lot of my work in the alternative aspects of the visual arts and theater in New Orleans Post-Catrine in New Orleans was defined as a purely black and white city and that was to me that was an utter mistake in addition to the fact that we were coming back and you should know Latinos didn't just descend and converge the city was under martial law I couldn't escape, we couldn't get out three days after Levy's Breach I was there, I didn't watch it on TV I became the first refugee to actually put together a performance and that was the invitation by Leo Garcia of Highways after he read my first cyber essay called Hurricane Katrina in the Chaos of New Orleans in Spain and also Ariel Dorfman at Duke University and the NPN folks they sent that out through cyberspace and it got printed and published in all kinds of places but I talked about the trauma of being trapped in the city that was under martial law no one would talk about the fact that it was under martial law you couldn't get in, not even the Red Cross was allowed to come in and help us but we got out on the Stone School bus so I began writing cyber essays that led me to be an artist in residency I was touring at the time but we were exiled, we were forced into exile so I come back and all of a sudden I'm wondering if we're forced into exile and the city has been under martial law how is it that all these Latinos have converged here they were corporate coyotes you all know the word coyotes maybe some of you don't I'm a conceptual coyote I have a license to transport diverse performance art across state lines and international waters I'm a Juan Boncana persona and also the new one Obi-Wan Kenobi looking towards a new future but they were brought in Halliburton got the first no big contract the same organization that got the first no big contract to reconstruct Iraq after the same Bush and Cheney family destroyed Iraq and look at the mess that we've left behind so you could see the pattern so they brought in because I began interviewing the first interview I did just informing on the streets on October of 2005 when I get back I'm at Mali's and the bars became community centers the bars became community centers because the bars were the stores, anyone who would open we were there telling each other stories I come back I interview a Puerto Rican gentleman a Puerto Rican US citizen he tells me a story Halloween October 2005 he had been working for three weeks he had been promised on the third Friday to be paid the 1200 per week that is $3,600 from working from 7am to 7pm he was there with another Mexican young man and they had been homeless because they were never paid but I'll give you the exact sum that so he's promised that they're going to be paid 1200 per week 7am to 7pm working and even further he tells me that on that Thursday before that Friday payday that mythic big payday because that's the way they would hold out the immigrants and say oh we're going to pay you next week oh we're going to pay you next week and 300 of them were actually housed and had started out factory warehouse because there was living spaces where very few 70% to 80% of the city was devastated and flooded and that Thursday before the payday the Neon Police Department happens to raid their encounter like the migra with the sirens they all scatter no one gets paid he being a US citizen he's Puerto Rican with very limited Spanish now I mean very limited English because he's from the farmlands in Puerto Rico right goes to the trailer part so Halliburton subcontractor subcontractor he goes to the subcontractor in a trailer to ask for his money he's not thinking so well and that was advantageous to a lot of people who were undocumented immigrants because it became the great 21st century slave labor fiesta you know brown black became the new brown in terms of labor importation with the Arche Cultural Art Center a lot around the issue of black and brown you know labor and wage tax exploitation right so he comes back and he asks at the trailer for his money and he's told no the companies in Birmingham you could walk there by the time I meet him he's homeless and that and ironically enough and there's a couple of manifestations of it you know now I'm doing these drawings based on the congress of day labor five minutes yeah good I gave myself a five minute thank you good I gave myself a five minutes as well one of the manifestations that recently has happened for me is this immigrant dreams and alien nightmares it's a collection of 25 years of performance poems but many sections are actually about the post Katrina the alien immigrants and other evildoers the piece that has been commissioned through the creation fund process which now gave me the funds to actually formally interview day laborers and work with the congress of day laborers and the stories honestly when I filled them the first time I went in 2010 when I began more you know I was going to Dave labor pickup points eventually we got a grant from roots when we actually presented the show at a shame we brought in the day labor community to bring in come and see the show right and so doing a lot with especially with a shake is with black brown alliances but when I was filming I would go to day labor pickup points just to hear the stories because the stories were choices but I mean they were difficult I mean you know the stories of ways that one worker immigrant labor Honduran was brought in at the age of 19 he came in two weeks after the storm and I have to close my eyes to really kind of think about the details and I have the honor of performing his story in peace he gets his hand cut in one of these jobs he gets his dumpster slices his left hand in two right and it's like bleeding it's you know fingers are falling that you know finally gets to an ambulance that the contractor would even call an ambulance fortunately his partner his compiler because it was just two of them on that day labor day where they were getting picked up takes them to the University Hospital and African American doctor connects with him because he's 19 years old at this point and he says no it's traumatizing for you to cut your arm off because the other nurses and doctors and said oh we got to prevent infection we got to cut your arm off right and this African American doctor connects with him because he's 19 years old he said no we're going to reconstruct your hand so I recon you know they're reconstructing his hand over a three month period many surgeries and he becomes one of the most amazing leaders of the Congress of day labor epic art really beautiful right and so there's some amazing study because the Congress of day laborers to this day the media in New Orleans will not they're forced to cover them now but basically there's been a media brown out so a lot of people even New Orleans they know everyone no one can deny New Orleans that the reconstruction had tremendous great support the new New Orleans tremendous great support of Latino immigrant workers predominantly most undocumented there are fighting for their right to remain right now so as a visual artist I've done this series with Space 11 called Somos Humanos we are human based on the photographs that I take of the manifestations and the public demonstrations of art manifestations or installations I also put together a Latino theater project with Quentin New Orleans to work with there's a plethora of immigrant children there many and now 30% the statistic is 30% the new children being born in New Orleans are of Latino immigrant parents right so a lot of dreamers there as well but Precatrina has also been a large immigrant community but working with undocumented youth and using performance in theater for them to tell and cultivate their own stories and that's what Quentin New Orleans with the support of the Jazz and Heritage Foundation it's been launched we weren't hiatus last year because they're going through leadership transitions I also put together a really big project at National Press for the 5th anniversary called Los Invisibles there was nine photographers with beautiful fine art photography of photographs of immigrant workers and you know received National Press so Doug McCash wrote about it for the 5th anniversary we have 300 people at the opening at the opening people gave me testimonials I work with Batteries Gallery they've been the gallery right you know right down the block for me because I live at the corner I live at St. Claude in Maroney and I have to be interesting distinction is owning a house as well because you know with my ex-wife we're able to purchase a home for our boys and I have I've also contributed to the rebirth in a real big way I have two children that are part of that rebirth and eight soon and he's going to the international school you know it's a charter school that's a really good one and also Diego Arjuna my little boy is five so you know I never thought I was going to have children right so post Katrina the trauma the mortality facing we had children and they're beautiful and you know part of that big contribution the next project that's happening it's called the aliens talk about the other project and it's being particularly with the support of living arts of Tulsa and of handgear world theater and we're trying to transform a used vehicle to actually have the the day laborers be protagonist for their own stories I'm just a catalyst artist I'm just trying to get the funding to make it because we're going to move you know want to bring the stories through cities in the Gulf South that have actually you know have been reconstructed post not only Katrina but Vita and then shoot up to the Mississippi to deal with the issue between New Orleans Tulsa and Minneapolis up to Mississippi in terms of stories of immigrant laborers because the most dehumanized people right now across the country are the immigrant laborers and not only we've not only not prepared in New Orleans but they prepared you know cities like Houston post post the other storm I think it was I that he used them really badly so yeah that's just been my basic crusade to tell the story of the Latino immigrant workers and our contributions to the reconstruction Thank you I am very happy to be able to share my experience with yours related to the disaster relief we cannot do my presentation in English so Kyoko Yoshida at the end will help to convey my story my organization ArtsMPO link is a collective or coalition of arts non-profit organizations in Japan 23 including about 40 organizations 23 board members and as an individual about 200 individuals are always actively working with the organization and we have a forum and we get together have discussed issues correctly and then we also collect data from different organizations and analyze that and make a report so that we can make a suggestions or proposals to the government to make cultural policies regarding the great earthquake and tsunami I just want to recap the devastation in some numbers it's written there magnitude 9.0 unprecedented in Japan the highest of the tsunami reached 233 feet and the devastated area spread 500 kilometers more than 300 miles that's all you see is 1580-89 the mistake still to this day is 2598 people this as you know called 311 earthquake and tsunami was March 11th, 2011 we planned this annual forum meeting annually it was scheduled right one week after March 11th of this year actually a number of people belonging to the my organization were at the time of the tsunami so we were very very concerned if they are alive or not and we were concerned if we should go ahead and hold this meeting or not this was in the midst of the confusion of different news media coverage about of course including the devastating nuclear plants explosion and the fear of what's going to happen throughout Japan our NPO members sent email asking to go ahead and please have this meeting so we changed the agenda and what we did was to talk what we can do now as Japan being seismic country there have been major earthquakes in the past too more recently in 1995 there was a hanshin earthquake and then there were artists who were involved in the recovery efforts so we invited those artists to this convening as well one week after the devastation we reached the conclusion that there is actually nothing we can do right at this point the most important thing is to save lives but looking back at the 1995 earthquake when things got back to slowly normal so many people killed themselves so this is a reminder that in addition to to live in addition to where eat and live in a house people need something more something that give them power to continue their life so it may be true that artists and arts no-profits there may be nothing that we can do right at this particular moment but there will be projects that can help people very soon so we should think about that so as my organization ArtsNPO link decided to build this ArtsNPO 8 with four areas of key activities one thing that we thought is important again looking back to the 1995 earthquake that there have been no record of what artists did to help the release of the disaster and therefore again when this happened there was no way that people can reference what has been going on so that people can reference what has been learned in the past we really thought we should put some resources and efforts into documentation this time because earthquake this is not the last earthquake so with this in mind we had 52 pieces of reports or documentation with visual audio including interviews we have 52 pieces on the website the other thing we did was to fundraise so that artists can create work this is because Japan in a way was kind of everything seized no funding continued a lot of the theaters and shows programmed got cancelled there was a whole lot of restraint in this kind of atmosphere to do shows not to do shows so for this reason we collected money donation for about $70,000 out of which $52,000 approximately distributed to the artists to do projects related to disaster relief the other thing we were able to put together was get a PA system donation from TOA cooperation and we were able to deliver that to some of the areas to do programs also we are coordinating between the areas of these devastated areas with artists or artists MPO no profits so that we were kind of doing the match so that a right person go to the right place so these are some of the areas that we matched and we went in and provided supports I want to give you some examples of actual programs we did visual slash conceptual artists Endo Ichiro was in the area went into the devastated area two months after the tsunami he went not as an artist to create work but he just went there to help as a volunteer to take out the rush but the local community people came to him and said well you are an artist can you please do something that can cheer us up because we are so depressed and so sad so he the artist reached out to his resources and that included the arts and PO link so of course we were able to provide him some small fun to just to begin with so that he can continue to be there and do his work and the idea was to create a community slash street festival called Matsuri in Japan the community celebration so that included street food vendors and that was particular area that arts and PO link wanted to get involved because we are an arts organization and that was the request from the community he brought in the food artist and many people said food transportable food that included pasta but you need to make hot water and make pasta so there were like a small mountain of pasta piling up no electric speed no gas how okay so what the food artist did was to use those pasta but make it with the taste of the local so he made for 300 people 1000 people came so we had to make more and we had to augment it with other kind of food as well and is very good at reaching out to other people and getting them involved too so he reached out to because people were contained in a very small space and opened up they had those massage therapies also this street community festival one of the programs he did was the performance by about local traditional folk arts this is a Kagura dance which has about 400 years history also he had this series of work that to fly into the sky a lot of them because children will write their hope and dreams on the kite so concentrary of course even with this devastated and depressing situation we cannot lose dream and hope for the future for the children another program that I want to share with you is this one this is a village called Jusanama which is really about population of about 250 ish very small village and there was a local organization by the name of Harsik which was trying to help disaster relief efforts this was a kind of a social facilitation organization that in order to reach the consensus of what should be done in terms of changes of the design whether the village which is totally devastated should go up to the hill and just move or to build higher what do you call it bars or the elevators to prevent the land walls to prevent that so something like that yeah and Harsik reached out to arts and fielding this is because in this little village there was this traditional folk art which has been performed there for the past 400 years but in 3 days only the head was in the sea and they were so the villagers saw that and decided we have to not let this go we're going to do this again because this kind of traditional festival and performances can connect everyone's heart again to one so however Harsik does not specialize in the art so that's why they reached out to the arts in fielding first in order to make this happen make this restore the performance he tried to reach or find a craftsman person who can rebuild and create the head first he looked in Tokyo but the whole Tokyo was actually bombarded by lots of requests to help the devastation so he couldn't find someone who can help in Tokyo so he reached out to Iwate prefecture which is also in the Tohoku area and finally found a craft artist who can do it this was actually wonderful because the people of this village when they looked at the new mask created by the Iwate craftsman said this looks like our guy, our lion because this looks like Tohoku the northeastern face so the arts and fielding itself gave about $2,000 from their own fund but also passed on all the information of possible funders to Karsik so the fundraising took about two years but in 2013 we were able to restore this traditional program so what's next is where they are what can you do from here this is really the time to actually prepare for the next big disaster what should we keep in mind what has been done and what can we pass on when this disaster happens next time therefore I'm very happy to be here to share my experience here about yours and your wisdom and experience collectively we can prepare for the future disaster that was fascinating I had not been familiar with the Japanese organization but in many ways it paralleled a national coalition for arts preparedness and emergency response which has evolved here in the U.S. and which I'll start by talking about so the coalition again was begun after Katrina and Rita Bob Lynch from Americans for the Arts and Bruce Walker Powell at the endowment pulled together just as you all did on the country to say what do we need to do now and out of that emergency fundraising and assistance program really evolved the coalition I'm going to go in a slightly different direction than our other speakers but in the end I think you'll see it's all going to tie together so the coalition was really designed as a safety net for artists and arts organizations it's been funded by the National Endowment for the Arts and the Joan Mitchell Foundation members across the country the key activities if I could turn this I know I'm blocking some people's views some of the activities that have been undertaken by the coalition the arts responder handbook the bad news is that crises of all kinds are happening more and more frequently the good news is that we're learning and we're building up some capacities and some best practices in terms of responding to them the funder handbook which will be published next year is really a collection of advice and best practices by those who've been through it from 9-11 to Sandy and all kinds of crises in between it's really for it's created for the point of view of funders and arts service organizations but we're actively working on I'm advocating for two additional pieces one is for state and local arts agencies there's a lot of capacity if not funding at least as a convener and also the work of individual artists because there are a lot of best practices coming out of the work of individual artists and communities so I'm here to say that if something happens in your community you don't have to be alone and you don't have to start from scratch call on the coalition because we have tools and the connectivity to help you work with people who've been through situations before and these are groups of funders and service organizations in communities who then are able to respond they already put their plans in action and I'm going to be talking a lot about the preparedness side of this so in southern California and in it's called the SOCal respondent network and then in New York culture aid have come together as networks so that they're ready if a crisis happens they can collectively work on assessment so then they each completed their strengths and they're not missing needs and opportunities and they're working collaboratively also an advocacy there's an arm of the coalition that's been working really hard particularly with FEMA and the small business administration because individually employed artists as well as other self-employed artisans and tradesmen are totally left out of a lot of the ways that you can get compensated or get loans or for instance lose your studio after a disaster so we're working to fill in those gaps with the federal agencies some of the other member activities that you should just be aware of I won't go in-depth studioprotector.org is a project of SERF Craft and Market Superleaf Fund and it is designed for craft artists but it really is great for any individual practicing artists with tools on how to prepare your space, protect your work document your work and then what to do in the event of a crisis it has great tools you need to you know evacuate in 20 minutes what you take with you artsready.org I'll talk a little bit more about at the end that's a tool for organizations so we kind of divvied it up studio protectors for artists, artsready.org for organizations the actorsfund.org they have an incredible array as does NYFA source on their website of tools particularly for recovery for artists and artist-run organizations a lot of social service and mental health options are there for you and you can search them by where you are and they're not just for members of these organizations and they're not just for actors, they're for artists of all disciplines so to talk a little bit about the continuum we've talked a lot here about response and recovery those parts of it I'm going to talk a little bit more about preparedness but this really is a continuum and if you have some type of crisis you know you're going to loop back and forth on this what I thought I'd do is share some basic readiness principles that might help those of you in this community here's reasons why to be ready the first is that readiness is just honestly less expensive the big Oxfam and the World Bank have done estimates with natural disasters and it's somewhere I've heard anywhere from 3 to 19 dollars in preparation is saved in a disaster it would be that much more expensive to recover of course it protects unique cultural and artistic assets your work doesn't exist if it's destroyed we all have a responsible responsibility to steward our own creative investment and so it protects those assets and it also provides peace of mind you know we're doing kind of my organization and it's just good to get your fears out on the table and say if this happens what are we going to do when you have an answer you feel a lot better some basic response facts first of all human life and safety come first so anything that I talk about presumes that we're talking about kind of the business operations or your artistic practice this is after you and your family and your home are safe or you're where you can be safe secondly as has been said today artisan arts organizations often respond first and independently which is great that's the spirit of this community but you shouldn't have to do it alone and you shouldn't have to do it uncompensated you should also be prepared because again you're often left out of the formal response network the coalition and our partners are really advocating with community leaders about how in any disaster response process in a community they need to bring in artists and creatives as part of that process because you all have some of the best thinking to offer but also that other aid workers I mean there are certainly wonderful volunteers in VOAS and the Red Cross but other cultural responders are more compensated and so those of us who are in the funding cycle need to be actively advocating for you all to be brought in as professionals in this process some basic recovery facts right so we've moved through response which is right after into recovery recovery can often be a really long term prospect months and years I mean New Orleans is still I couldn't say the percentage of recovery but it's nowhere near 100% so there's opportunity to continue this work donor fatigue is common so that's also something to fight against and to just kind of keep things on the radar artists and arts organizations are often prone to serving the community at their own expense so I just want to warn you about that take care of yourself put the oxygen mask on first before the person next to you make sure that you are well and you have what you need from specialized training and expertise in order to do this you know the Colorado council for the arts supported the work of poetry and filmmakers for the students at Columbine after the shootings you don't just pick an artist off a roster for something like that you really need someone who's going to be able to adequately deal with that kind of trauma Craig Nutt, great artist out of Nashville after the Nashville floods was commissioned along with seven other artists to do pieces for a project called Watermarks that dealt with the floods in community and he said that his on my piece I envisioned it as a bench a place that people could gather to remember the event and relate stories about it, very powerful and my main idea was the bench depicting the flood zone but one committee member was a psychologist my first design was a lot more literally connected with people's stories and she felt that some of the images I recommended had the danger of re-traumatizing the children so as an artist we're really focused on creating as powerful a piece as possible but it could be too powerful so again, you know, don't walk in to a situation that you may not be able to handle at least without getting some context insistence I'm going to run really fast because I want you to be able to take home something and do it, you know, Friday when you get back to your studio or your office some basic readiness and preparedness principles number one is redundancy and have copies of stuff have it all over the place in all kinds, right paper, digital, all kinds of stuff also disperse it both the digital and the hard copies Three Like a Dog is a performance in a theater company out of New York you may know and they actually were part of our design team for the arts ready tool and they had data in three different places oh, thank you very much so they had stuff on discs in the office they also, as you should, have an off-site regular data-based backup on an off-site server their server was in World Center Tower number one so their third desk was in like their costume directors underwear drawer in the Bronx and it was safe and that's what they used so they have spreading it around you know, try to get stuff out of state if you can just do regular dispersal of your key information have multiple communication methods don't rely on just one know how you can reach people by text by personal email not just a work email, phones you're gonna have to have multiple communication methods text often works when cell phones don't if you're in an organization have one central coordinator they don't have to make all those decisions but just make sure that somebody has all the information going in and out because otherwise people can spend and waste time and in a crisis time wasted cross-training and just making sure that other people have some sense of what to do in your absence I know particularly in small organizations or if you're an individual artist this is really hard but just think about elements where you can make sure that others have some access to information or could pick up if you left off have control of your technology we were setting up for this session and it's like where's Joe, the guy who came in because many of us are held hostage I'm just saying, so don't make sure multiple people have the passwords know how to update your website have access to your database all that stuff have the right connections also this is kind of about south arts what I see our role is and NPN band and other service organizations be a beacon for the arts in an emergency there are lots of stories that the media is going to get drawn to and often the arts are left out of that story because we don't want to be pushy we want to help we'll be in the background and we'll do this but we really need to advocate for ourselves and say we are part of the solution we are part of what makes communities resilient and so we need to speak up for that I'm going to take just a minute or two how many minutes do I have left to be you have two and a half minutes perfect, I'm going to do this fast and it sounds like a commercial but it's kind of more of a public service announcement because when we got into this work at south arts back in 2006 we went out there and not only did no artists or arts organizations have ready this plan but when we talked to them they had no idea how to start them I don't know what to do so thanks to an initial investment by the Andrew W. Mellon foundation and they were followed by gifts from the Doris Duke turtle foundation and the endowment an online planning tool called arts ready I'm going to run through it really fast I'm around all day today I'm really pleased to say that NPN Van came on board as one of our first partners offering access to this tool as a member benefit and so you can get information from me on how you can join in a discount and this really it was developed for organizations particularly presenters but we found in the four years since this has been launched that there are elements that really do work and it ensembles as well so basically we have a website artsready.org there's lots of information on it this is free you can go there and get tips and tools we have a library of resources again you can join basic membership for free if you want to drop your card with me I'll make sure you get signed up for that the paid membership is at a discount for you as an NPN Van member our library the whole idea here is that people have been unfortunately going through situations and you don't need to start from scratch so we have gathered wherever we can the best material templates case studies articles example policies so that you can find what you're looking for and not have to google it yourself really quickly what the tool does is allow you to do an assessment of your organization based on whatever types of activities you're active in you're about an hour and there are links to help you all along the way all of your answers move over to a project management to-do list and it says I'm going to within a month I'm going to get my crisis communications plan together and here's a sample in the library that I can copy from you store your critical stuff this is not your data backup but this is the stuff that if you can't get to your computer you need to get your insurance policy and your board list how do you do your online banking you also can even put stuff in here like oh I took that slide out I'm sorry here's how to turn off the main water if there's a flood so that if you're not there somebody can just quickly look it up and this is cloud based and it's always accessible to you and then the last is the battle buddy network this was created for the situations where people mean well but there's a mountain of pasta or in new town there were mountains of teddy bears and that's really sweet but that doesn't help so what this is is for the arts community we can match make what the needs are when they're needed with the type of response and material that's there so that's my feel for arts ready and there's information on it but I want to applaud the work of my other speakers and I've learned a lot today and thanks for your time so we're a little bit over time but I'd like to just ask two things one is if you need to lead take care of yourself but do it quietly there may be a few people want to stay for a few questions I think our presenters are willing to stay so if there are any other questions or comments from folks that are here we're going to stay for a few minutes if you need to leave we understand just leave quietly evaluations please please do do an evaluation did you have a question Eric very briefly MK the transformer came in did they bring their funding with them did they first assess and then go to funding what is the time lag okay well we were very fortunate in New Orleans that many national funders jumped in right away with very little it wasn't well our next deadline is in October and you can submit a proposal then and we make our decisions at our February board meeting it was not like that so there was definitely financial resources that came in transformer fundraise for itself all along before yeah well no they they came in without any funding but they did have relationships with some funders and the Andy Warhol Foundation was the first that responded for Transformer truthfully I think Rick Lowe was on the board of Warhol at the time but the fact is that many many national foundations Mellon Ford Rockefeller the National Endowment for the Arts really came in quickly and then others more slowly so Transformer fundraise for itself as it went along and things like Open Society Institute came in the Annenberg Foundation a lot of not traditional arts funders saw the value of this project and and just to full disclosure NPN was the intermediary for it so it didn't have to get its own 501C3 it didn't have to set up an infrastructure to manage the money NPN provided office space telephone the project bought its own computer so it paid for itself but our infrastructure was there to support it any other questions it's not the only project that we supported of this kind but Transformer was one of the biggest yes Susan thank you for the presentation the principles of preparedness seem to be about office records and communications could you speak a bit about collections and materials of artists and how one compares to that sure that's a great question and I have to be honest I'm not an expert on that because of our work being very organizationally based there are good collections management tools out there and we actually are talking about how to connect that to these kinds of preparedness assessments but that we just haven't had the capacity to you showed the slide SERV Plus it's one of the ones who do that you know SERV Plus that's an organization that's doing it specifically for certain kinds of artists but it actually translates to lots of kind of visual artists it does and also some writers we have found that other studio artists can access that so studioprotector.org is the website and I would say for individual artists I think the big question of readiness for collections management we're in conversation with heritage preservation which does a lot of that for cultural more historical sites and so they are as we're in conversation they're more and more alert to the fact that we need to be having these conversations together with the arts community so I think that's probably the best big way thanks for the question anybody else yes I have a question for Sadie I really enjoyed the presentation I noticed that in several cases with the examples there was a community member or an artist that decided to call upon this work for support so my question is how do you make it known that that work is available for support how do you make it known that there is that resource and so uh um um um um um um um um um um um um um um um um um um um um It's kind of the instance, or we should ask Sada Yuji for a call arts briefing. In terms of larger reach, they created a website or a web page specifically for this kind of a service or matching, and this is how he made it known. Thank you. How will they promote that website? So what do we do with the web page? Do we promote it? Introduce it? Introduce it? I mean, if a person gets it right away, for example, if they Google it as an art, it's like it's being published. Well, a lot of middle-class companies have developed similar programs, so they're not only in terms of efficiency, but they share information with each other so that various people can easily access it, and that's how they were born. Naturally? Naturally. What do you think, or can I have a question? There were similar intermediary organizations and airports who were trying to connect the artist resources with disaster needs. They naturally noticed that they should work together so they did the cold minking with each other, and that way it did work that people, once they, for example, Google the disaster relief arts, that one of those intermediaries will be coming up on the talk, so that. For example, if we have a serious competition, we will introduce information to each other, and if we have 3331 in other art groups, we will introduce it to each other. Yes, so really co-promoting with the founder of association of corporations or another intermediary called 3331, they all link and co-promote. I think we're good. I think we're running behind. Thank you so much, everybody, for coming and staying. We do fill out the evaluation forms. You can drop it out of registration. Thank you.