 I'm here with a CTN member highlight and this time we're featuring the city, specifically their Art at Work project that they're doing with TerraMoto. And I have with me, Marty Pottinger, who is the executive and artistic director of TerraMoto. And we're wanting to know a little bit about, really, first of all, what is Art at Work? Art at Work started, it's a national initiative and it's actually been piloted here in Portland, Maine with the city government in a partnership for the last seven years. And during that time, 70 artists, local professional artists, photographers, poets, painters, drummers have offered their art and their creativity to help lead workshops with city officials, with public service workers, with police officers, with neighborhood residents, to actually tackle non-arts problems. So we figure out problems that actually don't have an arts base and figure out and design an arts project that could make a difference and go ahead and do it. So the longest project has been a couple of years, that was with the police, called Thin Blue Lines, and a recent project that people might've heard about is called Meeting Place, and it was with four neighborhoods here in the city. Now the police one, there was quite a lot done with policemen doing poetry and that sort of thing. Yeah, that's where we started. They had historic Loma Rale and one of the officers died accidentally and it turned out in his eulogy, his wife shared that he had written poetry which no one knew, and that was after I had already been building relationships with them for about a year, but that was the deciding factor where they agreed to write poetry and they found out that it not only didn't turn them gay unless they already were, which was news, in writing poetry, but they also found out that they were actually really powerful poets and when I first announced the project or when their lieutenant announced it, one of the officers wrote a rhyming limerick and read it at roll call about the fact that his cruiser and the sky and his uniform and his balls were all blue. It was the first roll call I attended so I just sat there and I come from a construction background so I felt right at home, but a year later he actually volunteered to be one of the poets unexpectedly and a year later he wrote a poem called Jenny and I, which is comparing his services of Marine and his meeting and experience with a young two-year-old girl who was battered who he'd met on a call. It's called Jenny and I and for me it's like that's the difference art can make, that's the kind of power we're talking about. Now you have a couple of projects that are coming up but in order to support that, you're starting on a fundraiser right now, an Indiegogo fundraiser, right? Indiegogo, yes. How does that work? Indiegogo, it's very similar to crowdsource funding and it's similar to Kickstarter but a different site and we have just last week launched an Indiegogo campaign to raise $25,000 in 25 days and you don't try things like art at work and not be used to taking risks. So we'll see if we succeed but we really worked hard and it's a great place to go, it's indiegogo.com and I think people search on art at work all spelled out those three words and you could see videos about the projects, you can see Portland police officers reading poems including that officer, you can see Portland police officers excerpts from a performance they did on stage for all the high schools and just lots more. So now when they support this, there are two projects that you're doing that they'll be funding, what are those? Yes, one is called, we've already started working on one and we have some good partners. It's called All the Way Home and it's a story exchange project for veterans and it's for veterans who are facing PTSD and also battling suicide but also it's for veterans who are not. So there's kind of an explicit and implicit buddy, buddy situation there and it's a story exchange and it may or may not lead to public performances but it certainly will lead to story exchanges at Togus and at veteran centers and our partners are Portland Vet Center and Main Military Community Network and then the other project is called Hearts, Minds and Homes and it's a two-year performance project, community performance project which I've done several in my life and it's focusing on the issues around gentrification and homelessness which obviously all of us here in Portland know are two critical issues and we haven't gotten the money to start it yet so we haven't, the other, the veterans project we just got an NEA grant which we have to match for 20,000 so hopefully we'll raise enough money for Hearts, Minds and Homes as well and get to start it. I think that will involve elected officials it'll involve certainly homeless voices for justice and Preble Street but also the real estate community means how to really have a deep and kind of potentially transformative city-wide conversation and several of them in dialogues to really get a chance to see where's new thinking gonna come for what's this gonna look like five or 10 years out? How do we do this better? This greater Portland community has such a rich arts community that it seems really great that you're matching up that resource with basic services that people get in the issues. Is there any favorite story or anything that you have that comes to mind with all the work that you've done? Oh, there's so many but when comes to mind in Libbytown we had the Libbytown fair they were one of the meeting place neighborhoods and a woman in her 90s came and we had gathered at Maine Historical Society had several story nights where residents came and share stories. People got to meet each other they hadn't seen each other since third grade in the different neighborhoods and you know, kindergarten and they'd worked together or their parents had been friends and just every night it was West End, Libbytown Bayside and East Bayside were the four neighborhoods so everyone was completely unique and just kind of heart openly mesmerizing and so they said the Libbytown fair outside Tony's doughnuts a 90 year old woman came up and she opened this kind of like candy bag storage plastic and she took out letters that had been written to her and from her when she lived in Libbytown as a young one and she read them to us and I got to hold the microphone. How nice, how nice. Well, now can you just repeat again so now the people heard what they're supporting what they need to do to support us. We're hoping folks spend a little bit of time at Indiegogo, I-N-D-I-E-G-O-G-O dot com, Indiegogo campaign and that they search on art at work and there's a bunch of videos and stories there and then our website is simply art at work dot US. Great, great. I'll spell it out. Thanks, Tom. Well thanks very much and thanks for all the great work you're doing. Yeah, absolutely, bye bye.