 Everybody on our docket, I would classify as an entrepreneur. That idea of stick-to-itiveness and coming up with ideas and really moving them forward. And another person who fits that bill to a T is our next presenter. Laura Zabel is somebody who's worked up and following since I first heard of Springboard for the Arts. And she does amazing work there in empowering artists, which is really what we as arts educators are striving and passionate about doing, empowering young artists to do their best work and enabling that work. So I want to introduce you to Laura Zabel from Springboard for the Arts. And she's going to talk about some creative place-making projects that she has initiated or helped to support in her place. And then I believe she has a little interactive activity for us planned for the rest of the afternoon as well. So Laura Zabel, thank you very much. Thank you. And thank you, Linda, for that introduction and for having me here. I'm just, I'm tremendously excited to be here. I've been a follower of Linda's work for a long time and also I'm not going to lie. They had to de-ice my plane this morning, so I'm feeling pretty good about being in Arizona. I'm from Minnesota. It is cold there still, sadly. Sometimes I think we could have a whole conversation about how weather influences place and our ideas of place and identity. It's certainly a huge part of living in Minnesota and your identity as a Minnesotan. And I imagine the same is true here. So I'm going to talk a little bit about our work and what it looks like and show you a bunch of pictures of happy artists doing fun things and hopefully not get too off on a tangent telling you about all of these people that I love. And then I'll have a little time for questions. We can have a little conversation about what I talk about, what you saw. But then we're going to do some things. Nothing scary, nothing like a creepy game, like a baby shower or anything. Not that kind of interactive activity. I know what you're thinking. You're thinking I'm going to have to talk to someone, ask a weird, awkward question, not like that. They'll be fun things. One of them is an outside walking around thing and one of them is basically a craft project. So I'm particularly excited about that because I got to buy brand new markers. So anyway, springboards work. Springboards based in Minnesota, both in the urban area of the Twin Cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul and also in a more rural area of Fergus Falls which is in west central Minnesota. And our mission is to help artists make a living in a life so that they can contribute more to their communities. Springboard has been around for about 21 years but it's been through a lot of different lifetimes in that 21 years. Most recently in the sort of last eight years we've kind of had a new life and a new, the mission hasn't changed but the way we do it has changed pretty much in all ways. And so we think about our work as work that helps artists make a living in a life and helps artists contribute more to the economy. And that looks like professional development, business skills training, entrepreneurship training for artists. We have a 10 session business skills curriculum called The Work of Art that we take all over the state and teach. We do a lot of one-on-one coaching and consultation and have a physical resource center in our office in both in the Twin Cities and in Fergus Falls. We also have a large healthcare program called Artists Access to Healthcare that grew out of the need for a program like that. Artists in Minnesota are twice as likely to lack health insurance as the general population and that pretty much tracks across the country. We know that's because of a rate of high self employment plus low income or erratic income that creates a certain set of barriers that are really the same as most self employed people have. So we started that program about five years ago. In the last five years, we've helped about 5,000 artists go to the doctor. It's work that I'm particularly passionate about and would be happy to talk more about at a later date. I'm not here to talk about that today. So those are the kind of programs that we feel like contribute to artists' own agency and their ability to make a living, make a life as individual artists as practitioners. And then we have a whole set of programs that are more about helping communities access and better realize the resources that artists can bring to communities. So all of that is really through this lens of reciprocity that we want artists to be better positioned to be visible and valued and communities be better positioned to be able to tap into the power and the natural resource that artists are. And so that work, that those community development programs look like community supported art, which is a program we started based on the community supported agriculture model. So just like in community supported agriculture, you buy in at the beginning of the summer and over the course of the summer, you get a box once a month for three months of fresh local artwork from nine artists in the community. We host events so people can meet the artists and build relationships with the local food community as well. There's so much that's similar about the people who make art, the people who make your things and the people who grow your food. There's similar pieces of the process and I think a similar desire in the community to understand more about what that's like. All the money that we raised from that program goes back to support the artists and becomes a self-sustaining mini-economy. It's the program that doesn't require any outside philanthropy or fundraising. And then that work also looks like community development programs and place-making programs, which is what I'll focus on mostly today. And those are by and large cross-sector partnerships that are both about building agency and equity in communities and also about building agency for artists and helping artists issuing. We talk a lot about the invitation and the charge to artists mobilizing artists in service of their own, the places where they live. Like I said, we do that work in Minnesota and that's where we know how to do the work. And then we share the work with anybody who wants it. In the last couple of years, we've been really focused on developing toolkits and models and then letting people take those ideas and adapt them and make them authentic to their own communities, change them pretty much however they want. And so that's been tremendously exciting to see the work travel and to see people make improvements and to see what it looks like in other contexts. And we don't do any of that work, only the stuff in Minnesota, everywhere else, someone else is doing it, but hopefully with some tools and some help from us. This is what we look like. I like to bring these crazy people with me wherever I go. This is the staff at Springboard. I think a sort of defining piece of our work is we have these seven guiding principles and they're essentially the core values and the ethics behind the work. And that really allows for sort of maximum improv on a daily basis. My background is in theater and particularly in improv and sketch comedy, which is a pretty good basis for running an organization or life really. So, guiding principles. There are seven. I'm gonna share just two of them today that I think are relevant in terms of maybe helping you understand a little bit of how we came to this work of placemaking and community engagement and community development. So there actually happened to be the last two, number six and number seven. Number six is that we operate with a sense of transformational possibility. Jazz hands. Our work is really about an optimism, about the potential contribution of artists and I think a fundamental belief that change is possible and an idea that artists are not victims in need of service. Springboard used to be what people called an artist service organization and we don't call it an artist service organization anymore because artists are not victims in need of service. They're a powerful creative force to be mobilized. I really believe that. So we call it a lot of other things now. And then the last guiding principle is that we're non-judgmental about artists' work and that means that we have a really big idea of who is an artist, pretty much anyone who says they are. And even beyond that, I think we feel like we have an advocacy role to play in helping more people identify themselves as artists, more people access the resources and systems that are available to artists and more people own their creative capacity and understand that there is power that comes with creativity and that there is potential contribution, whether or not that's how you wanna make your living. There are ways to bring your creative skills to the benefit of the place where you live. I think that our interest in place making and in this community work really grew out of those conversations we were having around the idea of reciprocity and that historically, Springboard did a good job with professional development and business skills training and then healthcare. But we only really worked on the artist side of that equation. We had this deep belief that artists had, that communities need creative thinking and that artists have contributions that they can make, but we never really worked on that side of the coin before and we finally kind of decided that if that's what our mission was about, was about helping artists be more visible and valued so that they can make contributions to the community, that there were places where there were mechanisms that were missing in terms of making that connection and helping giving communities the opportunity to work with their artists and helping communities understand how to find and engage with their artists. I think definitely in our community supported art program in the CSA program, we learned so much about how opaque the art world is and that people need mechanisms. I mean, any of those 50 shareholders could connect with any of those nine artists any of the day of the week, but they don't because those shareholders aren't people who go to art openings or gallery shows and certainly don't call artists for studio visits, but they are people who have a sense that they wanna know who's in their community and if you provide the mechanism, that can happen. So I feel like a lot of our work is about mechanisms, is about how do we make the bridge that connects artists with the whole of the community, whether that's healthcare or community development, agencies or education or local food. Definitions are really important to us as well. This is our definition of placemaking, which is that it is about the act of people coming together to change overlooked and undervalued public and shared spaces into welcoming places where community gather, supports one another and thrives. So our work in placemaking is really about social capital and about people. We're not a public art agency. We're not developers, although sometimes we work with both of those kinds of entities. Our work is really about social interaction and how we build and map, social capital and build on existing assets that are in a neighborhood. What inspires us? Shared experience, a real sense of localness, I feel like that is a real core value for Springboard's work and agency for communities. So experiences that bring people together, that give people a special sense of a shared experience and experiences that are fundamentally about what's possible for a community, what's possible when we do come together and share experiences. These are just some things I love. So I think placemaking can look like big public art, but only if it prompts interaction. To me, people ask me a lot what the difference between public art and placemaking is, and I think it's the interaction. If there isn't the interaction and the sense of community or the way that you as an individual see yourself in a relationship to that, then I think that's perhaps one way to look at it. Those two on the bottom, this one on the bottom left is in South Beach in Miami. It's the New World Symphony. I always like to show that one because it's a really good example of an institutional organization. I mean, it's a symphony orchestra, right? That has really figured out ways of engaging with the community, ways of doing things differently. They built this fancy new building, but the whole outside of the building is outfitted for projection. So they do one concert a month. That's a wall cast concert. People can come sit in the park for free, watch the concert, there's food trucks. Just a very different way of engaging with an art form and with your own community. This one on the bottom right is Parking Day. It's an initiative that was started by a group of designers and urban planners in the Bay Area called Rebar. And really based on the idea of taking ownership of space. So the idea is that at any parking meter, you put quarters in the parking meter, and then after you do that, you own that space because you've rented it. And you can do whatever you want to with it. You can park a car there, which is what we normally do, or you can make it into a park as long as you have quarters. So they do this once a year. It's turned into a national and kind of international phenomenon parking day where people go and just do some kind of creative intervention and claim their public space and share it with people. Our work in place making is also really influenced by this quote from Alan Capro, who is an artist in the 60s who kind of invented the idea of happenings. But it is about how we infuse art and artists into the everyday and how we make it less of a special thing that you go and do and more something you stumble into or is just a part of how you walk in the world. Perhaps on the other end of the spectrum in terms of influencers, we have Alan Capro, founder of happenings. Then we have the Knight Foundation, Gallup, Soul of the Community Research. It's a big spectrum. This research is also really influential in our work. Knight Foundation engaged Gallup and they did this big national study about what attaches people to community. And the study's called the Soul of the Community. And in every community, the result was that it was social offerings, openness and aesthetics. So how welcoming a place is, what it looks like and are there fun things to do, interesting things to do. If you're interested, you can learn more about that study or read more about it. There's charts like this for every community that they worked in. This happens to be Wichita, Kansas, which is close to where I grew up. So even in Kansas, this is true. I think quite surprisingly those things about what attach people to community rate much higher than the things we might think like safety and civic involvement. It's not that those things aren't important, but they aren't the reason that you stay in a place. So our work. The very first project we did was this project. It was a block party project and it was a partnership with a district council, which is a neighborhood-based place-based organization in St. Paul that wanted to do friendly streets, complete streets plan, which is about traffic calming and bike and pedestrian friendliness and wanted to engage the neighborhood, but knew that they didn't wanna just have a sort of set of community meetings in a church basement because they really wanted to get feedback from the whole neighborhood, not just from people who like to go to community meetings in church basements, which is a certain set of people really enjoy that. Perhaps not the people you're most interested in hearing from at least after a while. So we worked with a group of artists who designed artist-led block parties. So they were block parties, just like you do on National Night Out or Other Nights, but they had these artistic activities that were designed to, first of all, get people to show up to the block party and then to create creative ways of engaging conversation and getting feedback from the neighborhood about what they wanted to see happen. This artist on the bottom designed these ring-toss benches and so anybody who came could make a bench when they were free, but you had to agree to put the bench in your front yard. So the neighborhood had then these set of benches that invited people to sit in each other's lawns to share space and to think maybe about space differently. These are a couple of projects from our office in Fergus Falls, which, like I said, is a more rural community. The sort of core issue in Fergus Falls or one of the core issues is that they have, it's a community of 13,000 people and they have a historic regional mental health facility there that's been vacant for about five years and it is 750,000 square feet. 13,000 people, 750,000 square foot historic building. It's a beautiful building. It looks like a castle. It's an incredible redevelopment challenge and it has really important and tender relationship with the community in terms of people who live in the community whose relatives worked there or who were housed there. It's about a hundred years old and as you can imagine, our ideas of mental health have changed a lot in a hundred years. So there are people who have some really difficult and traumatic memories and relationship with this building. The city owns it and it's just been a real point of contention in the community what to do with it, tear it down, redevelopment, but then what. And so the conversation had sort of degenerated into this angry, no you can't tear it down, yes we have to tear it down. And so an artist named Naomi Schlesman designed this chalkboard. It's a silhouette of the building and the project was called What Else Is Possible. They just took the chalkboard around and asked people to write and draw on the chalkboard about what they would like to see happen with that building. Not an effort to fix this problem, but an effort to turn the conversation enough that it became productive. To turn the conversation towards a shared sense of what's possible and away from just you're wrong, I'm right. Those bottom photos are from a bike parade that we did in Fergus Falls with the Public Health Advocacy Agency there. That's exactly what it sounds like, a parade of bikes. And this is our biggest project, at least so far. Eurigate is a project that we've been working on for about 18 months in St. Paul. And it's a partnership between Springboard and Twin Cities Local Initiative Support Corporation which is a chapter of a national community development support and lending agency and the city of St. Paul, primarily through the mayor's office. That's Mayor Chris Coleman right there, stenciling a wall. And this project really grew out of, we had done a number of those other projects, smaller projects like I'd shown you, like I just showed you, and had really started thinking about what happens, what does that work look like at scale? What does it look like if artists everywhere feel empowered and feel invited to do that kind of work in their own neighborhoods? And can you create a culture around that? Can you create a cultural shift in a neighborhood so that the culture becomes about doing? We talk a lot about the idea of a culture of doing. And concurrent to those conversations about what this could look like, our community had a very big challenge. We're building a light rail corridor right through the middle of the city. It's the biggest infrastructure investment from a financial perspective. The state has ever made, it's about a billion dollar project. That's what it looks like, or that's what it looked like last summer. This corridor goes through some of the most diverse and some of the most disinvested neighborhoods in St. Paul. They are neighborhoods that have a high concentration of first and second generation immigrant-owned restaurants and shops. And they're also neighborhoods that have real historic reasons to be worried about displacement. There's a history of, as there are in a lot of cities, an interstate development about 30 years ago that went through the historically African-American community and pretty much destroyed it. So those are real fears. And there is an echo of that in this project that I think it was particularly troubling. And to the city's great credit, I think they realized that and realized that they wanted to learn from the mistakes that had been made in the past and they wanted to figure out different ways of dealing with this challenge of construction. Because of course the hope and the expectation is that with transit comes development and health and connectivity for a community, the reality of living through this construction period is incredibly challenging, especially if you're a small business or a neighborhood that is worried about change. That picture on the bottom is actually the building where our office is. There's a restaurant there somewhere. You can't see their sign or their door. It's the Black Dog Cafe. It's a lovely, lovely little coffee shop and restaurant. So we were kind of witnessing this challenge firsthand and thinking, well, we wanted to do something at a larger scale that really was more about comprehensive community development and how to artist participate in a whole set of activities that contribute to their community. And we seem to have this big challenge right outside our door. And so we decided that we would give it a go. We partnered with the city at their invitation and partnered with LISC, who has real community development, particularly in affordable housing and in the built environment, real chops in that area. And we invited artists to the table, local artists, artists who live in the neighborhoods already. So the only restriction to participation in this project is that you have to call yourself an artist or you have to agree to call yourself an artist after we yell at you for a while and you have to live, work or have a significant relationship with the neighborhood. So this isn't about people coming into a neighborhood. It's about the assets that already exist in a neighborhood and how do we help neighborhoods understand and see the assets that they have in their creative people who already live there. And we think that the reason we think artists are particularly well suited to do this work is because artists see opportunity in challenge and they see the beauty in chaos and because they have these very practical skills that can bring people and attention and dollars to an area. So we start by hosting workshops. We do one day workshops on placemaking and community engagement. They're taught by our staff, should have said at the beginning, our whole staff is made up of practicing artists, in partnership with the community organizers who work in the place based organizations in the neighborhoods. So it's a partnership between those organizations too. So you're an artist, you come to the workshop, you learn a little more about the neighborhood, you meet the organizer if you don't know them already. And we teach basic community organizing skills, how to do a one-on-one, which is pretty much how to listen to what someone else is saying. How to think about your own leadership capacity and what you're good at. And we think about what kinds of things you might like to change or work on in your neighborhood, what things matter to you. Then after you go to that workshop, you are set loose to go find a partner. And then we support small artist-led projects. They're usually about $1,000. And the only restriction on getting that money is that you have to have a partner that's a small business or a neighborhood organization on the corridor, so that in some way it is addressing an issue that they have or that you have been invited. So we started that about 18 months ago and so far, well, we thought we would have about 100 artists, that seemed pretty big to us. In the first 18 months, we've had about 450 artists go through the program. And they've created about 180 projects together, some of them in partnership with each other. So now I'm just gonna kinda talk about a couple of these projects. And again, I'm gonna try not to get too excited. Yes, Michael? Sure, yes. So Michael's asking what's the invitation and the charge to the artists, both as they come into the workshop and then as they are set loose to go find that collaborator. I think we hope the invitation and the charge is, hey, there's a big hot mess outside your door. Do you wanna help? I think realistically, some of them come because they know there's money. So then I hope they at least leave the workshop with that charge, even if they don't come in with it. I think that what we found is that that common cause is incredibly motivating to people. And particularly for artists who maybe don't feel empowered or feel like they have the agency to do this work on a daily basis or never considered it before. We joke a lot about how powerful t-shirts could be. Everybody gets a t-shirt when they come. And the artists tell us over and over again that they put the t-shirt on to go and talk to the businesses and the neighborhood organizations. Like, I'm a part of something. I'm not just one crazy loon who lives in the neighborhood who wants to perform a flamenco in your convenience store. I, we'll see a picture of that later. I'm a part of Irrigate. I'm an Irrigate artist. Which was honestly something that we never, it was sort of accidental. We didn't really understand the power of that label going in. And the artists have really built this network with each other and they call themselves Irrigate artists. I remember about two or three months in, Jun Lee, who's the community organizer on our staff who runs this program, called me and she said, they're calling themselves Irrigate Artists. Is that okay with you? And I was like, oh, that is awesome. But I think that that bond and sense that this small thing that they're doing combines with all of these other small things and actually adds up to something meaningful. And that you can do something small and that can be enough. I think that's been a big part of, as we've looked at what is the mechanism here that we think works, it's in large part that. So these are some artists performing in businesses. Some of them performing at My Village Restaurant, which is a Vietnamese restaurant, a really sort of gem of a restaurant, a really important kind of cultural anchor on the corridor. And a restaurant that really was suffering during the construction. And who told us as a business owner that they had been approached by artists in the past and just never thought it would fit or weren't quite sure what that would be like. But again, because there was a mechanism in a t-shirt that gave people some credibility. And because what have they got to lose? Things really suck. So you might as well say yes, there's a great advantage in working during a time of disruption. It makes people more open. So they have hosted a number of artists, including artists who then started a monthly jazz night at My Village. And she tells us that when they have the artists perform, they have a 40 to 50% night on night sales increase. So it's all lovely and I love that people fall in love, but it also really helps her business. And it's also kind of amazing to be in that restaurant. I don't know if you can really see very well, but down here, that's My Village. And think about that it is this beautiful space for performing. It's like the restaurant was built to have performances. And so for her to realize that there are people who live in the neighborhood who want to help and people she now has relationships with all on her own and that have continued totally without our intervention. I think that's what success looks like. This is an artist named Kristin Murray who appointed herself artist in residence of this bus stop. And she sat out there for two weeks and just talked to her neighbors, talked to the people in the neighborhood about what they cared about, what they wanted to see happen once this bus stop becomes a train stop and also participated in other community things that were happening in the neighborhood like city-wide cleanup. They did this project where they put little flip-cam video cameras on helium balloons and floated them up over the neighborhood just as a sort of mapping exercise and an alternative perspective on what the neighborhood could and might look like. This is a project that we did with a new business on the corridor, a business that had rented a really key intersection and a new development with affordable housing. It's gonna be a restaurant right at this really critical intersection. But because of the construction, they didn't wanna open the restaurant for like nine months. So that can be a really difficult sort of energy suck for an intersection to just have this vacant space or to have signs that say coming soon that then three months later are yellowed and sort of half falling off and people start to wonder if that's ever gonna happen. So they gathered a group of irrigate artists together and talked to them about sort of what the restaurant was and its mission and then they commissioned four different temporary murals so the murals changed every six weeks. There's paper murals from different artists and the project was called Make It Mysterious and the idea was that every six weeks the murals would get a little more literally connected to what that restaurant was gonna be. So at the beginning it was this, the Jaguar. Just doesn't have anything to do with the restaurant. And as it went on, they got more and more explicit about what this restaurant was gonna be and it just animated that corner. It gave people a sense of motion and momentum. This is a project by an artist named Amanda Lovely and Pete Fetch. Amanda built this table. It's called the Really Big Table. It folds up and then she carries it on her bike. It's biking past the state capital there and sets it up in the middle of downtown. One of the neighborhoods on this corridor is the downtown area. And it's really about the idea that people work downtown but they don't really think of it as a neighborhood. And so what happens if you set up a really big table and have coffee and invite people to take a coffee break and just sit down and talk and draw with each other? Do people think about their neighborhood differently? Do they engage with each other or do they just stop and take a moment to sort of consider where they are? So projects like murals, maybe what people sort of think of the most when we talk about this. It's a mural collective called Dim Media that did that mural for a restaurant called Senior Wongs. One of my favorite projects and maybe appropriate here to talk about with all of the theater connections is one of the neighborhoods on the corridor is called Frogtown. And so this theater group did a production of Aristophanes the Frogs in a parking lot in Frogtown. And it was a lovely summer night and I'm sitting out there. There's huge construction diggers right next to you and you're in a parking lot. And suddenly I'm thinking about sort of the ritual of theater and then number of times and places that this play has been performed. These words have been spoken and here we are in this community during this big challenge, sitting in a parking lot and hearing those words again. It's incredibly moving. It's an artist that did a fashion show of found, made from found objects along the corridor. And this picture on the left is Diana Lane. I'm probably not supposed to have favorites but she's totally my favorite project. It's just an amazing project. So Diane's a Zumba teacher and a dancer and a writer and a singer, lives in the neighborhood. And she started teaching Zumba at Arnella's Bar which is a really important African-American owned bar on the corridor during the day. And then she wrote a song called the Light Rail Shuffle that they did as a Zumba flash mob outside Arnella's which is what they're doing there. And the Light Rail Shuffle is a happy, joyful song about the Light Rail. And it is also in equal measure about the construction of the 94 Highway and what happened to the black community because of that and that she has this desire for people to be a part of the change this time. And to me it's just a really good example of how, of that piece that artists can bring. That it isn't about ignoring or denying the problems that have and continue to exist in the community but it's about what she as an individual can personally do about it and it's how she can think creatively about it and how she can bring that energy and joy and productivity to her neighborhood. After she did this, she's now, community groups now hired Diane to do the Light Rail Shuffle at their events all the time. So it's become this sort of, it's kind of a little cottage industry for her which has been really exciting to see. It's a wayfinding bike, a group of artists decorated these bikes and worked with local businesses to kind of help provide navigation and wayfinding in the neighborhood when it was really hard to find your way around. So it tells you like how many minutes and how many miles it'll take you to walk to the next sort of set of shops or to a convenience store. We've done pop up art gallery type things, art shows, more performing. This is an artist named Steve Bougie who did this stained glass installation in a chain link fence. So it's one of the very first projects. There's a woman journalist who wrote about this project who described it as the broken windows theory in reverse that if you see signs of taking care and tending your neighborhood, that perhaps that gives you a different sense of your own agency and your own ability to just change something, make something happen. This is a project called Light the Victoria where an artist named Nick Klassen projected a video onto the facade of a beautiful little historic and vacant theater and then invited his collaborators, I&E Asian Dance to dance on the sidewalk in kind of unison with the video. It was really beautiful performance. But almost more than the performance, I remember the audience. We sat on the half constructed tracks like right in the dirt in the middle of the street. Like that's the median in the street. It was a beautiful evening and I sat there with people in the dirt and watched this amazing kind of magical performance and saw people hanging out of their windows to watch and people pulling their cars over the side of the road to watch. And to me, that's what this work is about. It's about changing people's relationship to place and that sense of what's possible. I know that every time I drive past there, I have a different sense of that neighborhood, of that place. And I think it's a good example of how even temporary activity can shift and change the way people think. There's Flamenco in a convenience store. They did, it was like a mashup of flamenco dancing and caroling. So they just show up at places and do a little dance for you. It was around the holidays. So, you know, you want a convenience store? All of a sudden you've got Minnesotans in winter coats doing flamenco dance. There is the light rail shuffle again at some other event, which I love this photo because it includes several irrigate artists, the children of the man who owned the building where this was happening and an employee of the Regional Rail Authority all doing the light rail shuffle together because it's super fun. There's the Black Dog, that building I showed you in the first slide with the restaurant in it where our office is. During that time, when there was all that scaffolding and construction and it was really hard to get to the door and couldn't see their sign, they worked with a puppeteer named Chris Lattergardella, that's him right there, to build this beautiful two-person puppet of a Black Dog. And it roams around the neighborhood and they go along with it and sometimes they hand out information about the business. So if people can't see your sign, then take the sign to them. That's that kind of reframing skill that I think artists can bring. And so as we've done this work, we of course, like everyone, have started to try and figure out what it adds up to, what the impact is, what, how do you measure 180 moments of surprise and joy? And here's what we think it adds up to. You might have different ideas, I'm sure you do. One thing it adds up to is a different narrative. So the benefit of doing lots and lots of small projects is that that has also meant about 150 positive media stories about those neighborhoods. And where the media narrative, especially during a big disruption like construction, can be incredibly negative and about what's wrong and how angry people are and how hot it is and how frustrating the traffic is and how the businesses are failing, which then becomes this like self-reinforcing, self-fulfilling prophecy about how all the businesses are failing. So if I'm reading that in the paper, why would I wanna go there? So this provided these opportunities to have hundreds of stories about what was cool and interesting and weird and bizarre and because the projects are so diverse and the artists are so diverse, the projects were covered by everything from the traffic reporter on our local Fox affiliate to public radio, to the culturally specific newspapers in the neighborhoods, to the city beat reporter, the arts reporters. So it just provided and continues to provide this sort of constant stream of content that is about these interesting, crazy things that are happening all the time. This is a word cloud I made of the headlines about the central corridor. And I think any city would be happy to have a giant construction project word cloud that includes fairly largely the word happy. And then the other big impact is in the social capital, is in the web of connections that have gotten made, the ways that people have connected to each other. This is my feeble attempt at trying to visualize that. I'm a visual learner. So these orange dots are artists and they come to that one workshop and they get connected to us and to the city and to the district council and the organizer and to LISC and then they go out and they build relationships with small businesses and neighborhood organizations and each of those projects then has an audience of people from the community and pretty soon it looks like that. I'm really interested in this part of the work and I'm gonna talk about it a little bit later when we get to one of the projects about the kind of idea of the ways that we can make the impact visual and map that social connectedness or how do we leave artifacts that indicate to people that we've made those connections kind of like the front yard bench, like that communicates something about the neighborhood. So I'm really interested in that and I think both of those things, both the relationships that develop that are about individual agency but also being part of a common cause and seeing the connection to your neighbors and the narrative that's about a different idea of what's possible and what's doable in a neighborhood and a different sense of the place where you live. To me, those are the roots of all the things that people point to as success indicators for place making. I feel like you can't start with development. You have to start with the people who are in the place and strengthening the social ties and the sense of the place and people's commitment to a place. And so I guess that's the place on that continuum where we see our work falling. In terms of how this work goes forward, we're continuing the work in the central quarter but we've just launched a new program that is a program of artist community organizers where artists are being rooted in non-arts organizations, particularly to help them address some big community engagement challenge. They'll have year long appointments in those organizations and be charged with doing their own work but also mobilizing other artists in the neighborhood to do small projects. And so that's sort of how that work is traveling now and what it's looking like. And then we've also, out of this, developed the sort of one day, we call them place making action workshops that are about training people, giving people enough of the tools to feel like they have agency and power to go out and change their place and to make their place better. So that's what I'll say about our work. I would love to take a few questions if you have some and then we'll get on with some stuff. Michael, good. I'm a good repeater. Or I guess we'll find out if I am. That's a great question. And I think my best guess is that it's about half and half and that then of course that is also a continuum. Like some people, a very small number of artists come into the workshop with an idea of what they already wanna do. And we actually start the workshop by kind of saying, some of you may already have an idea and we're gonna ask you to just set that to the side for now and kind of be open to the possibility that you may discover something while you're here or in your conversations in the community that might change that. I think that's actually a pretty small number of people come in saying, I wanna, well, actually Chris with a puppet is a good example. I mean, he knew, like, I wanna work with a black dog and I'm gonna build a big puppet. They would have expressed, but he came in already sensing that need and was responding to it. Well, and they had already had some conversations about it too. I think some of the projects artists already have relationships or are patrons of those businesses or it's their own neighborhood and they already have a relationship with the organizer there. And some of them are much more responsive. And some of them really go out, one of the very first projects an artist told me put his t-shirt on and he just walked up and down and went in businesses and asked them, he said, here's what I'm a painter, do you need anything? And so his project ended up being very responsive to the needs of that particular business that he ended up working with. So yeah, I think as a continuum, I would say it probably breaks down roughly half and half. The other thing in terms of how the projects break down, when I look at those 180 projects, I would say it's also a continuum, but also roughly kind of split whether I feel like the biggest impact of the project was on the community's agency and equity or whether it was on that individual artist's agency and equity. Obviously, there are many of them that do both. Some of them, I think people, at least people in the art world, would look at and say, no, or say that's not art, but I feel like the process of that artist discovering that they have this creative capacity and can do something for their community, I'm just as interested and moved by that. Roberto. Yeah, we'll be back on that question. How do you address people of your artist community or your partner community who are asking for professional development? Meaning like the artist community in my context is like I need to be better at knowing the skill set of community organizers. And then the community organizers say I need to understand better what the artist community can do with me. So how do you address the professional development kind of knocks that you get at the door? Right, well, one thing, I mean the kind of awesome part about, oh, so I didn't do it. Am I still repeating the question? No, you had a microphone. All right, never mind. One awesome thing is that that's what Springboard does. Our whole history has been about professional development for artists. And I think it's something that, given that history, we were still surprised by the amount of help with capacity and sort of tools and for some artists relationship building and hand-holding that needed to happen. So that's one thing. The other thing I would say about that is that this project in particular, the Irrigate Project, and really a lot of our work is designed to be professional development through doing. So that's partly why they're so small. I feel like this work in particular, work in community, work in place making, it's really hard to learn it in a class. You have to go try it out and see what it's like and figure out what are, I mean, we struggle a lot with, sometimes I do this presentation and people ask me a question like, how do you build those relationships outside of the art sector? I don't know, you just do, you talk to people. So it's a hard thing to teach, but if I can give people the permission and a little boost to go and try it, especially at a low risk, there's small projects and there's 180 of them. So no one of those artists or no one of those business owners is responsible for fixing the entire issue of construction mitigation. So I think they're very intentionally scaled small. They're also scaled small because we hope that they are happening at a scale that can reasonably then be continued without intervention. So we talk a lot about the idea that we want them to be at a scale that a business can say, well, we used to spend $500 on printing a bajillion flyers and putting them under people's windshield wipers or we could spend $500 and have a show or have some art activity for people. And so that scale is intentional in a number of ways, but they're designed to be learning opportunities. And then I think now we're in the process of building some of those deeper opportunities, both for the organizations, the organizers, and for the artists who wanna do the work in a more ongoing or deeper way. Hi, Laura, my name's Sonia and I'm actually from Minneapolis. And I feel like I've been hearing about the irrigate project on the corners of my radar. And I feel like I have to come here to really know what it's about. So thank you for that. And also I'm glad I've been here all week instead of in Minneapolis. Just for this week though, because of the snow. But my question is I've been working with a lot of artists who are actually irrigate artists in the Creative Community Leadership Institute through Intermedia. And I love the way that you're articulating how it takes up some of the challenges of the light rail system and how that's connected to this historical way that civic quote unquote improvement projects are often at the expense of low income neighborhoods. And I'm curious though about in the whole, this is a kind of bigger creative placemaking question. And it builds on some of the things that Roberto was, I think, trying to bring to our attention. And some of the critiques of creative placemaking that I've heard from my indigenous friends, like Dakota people saying, well don't forget who was in this place to begin with. And how do you grapple with not only placemaking which is about kind of space and space in the now, but maybe looking at micro histories of a place over time and doing more, I don't know if it's kind of genealogical work to bring attention to how that place came into being to begin with. Is that something that you feel that Spring Ward has done or might do and how might it intersect with some of the other kinds of things you're talking about in terms of the responsibility of artists in relationship to civic engagement? Yeah, that's a great question. I guess there's two things I would say about that. And certainly it comes up in the central corridor as it does in other areas of the Twin Cities, like Ann talked about earlier. I mean, especially in historic Rondo, which is now Little Mekong. And there's quite a bit of tension around which name we call that neighborhood. Who's banners on the light pole? So it definitely comes up. One thing I would say in terms of how we address it or have chosen to address it is that in some ways it's a core value, but it's also a cheat. We only work with artists who live there. So it's their experience of living there and their experience as neighbors and as artists, which I feel like makes it tremendously easier than if you're trying to come into a community and understand all of that history. Also, I think the scale helps with that too. There isn't any one of these projects that's claiming a whole neighborhood and saying this is who we are. They're small and they're about one person or a person in that relationship with the business or the neighborhood organization about a fairly small number of people in their relationships and their experience together. So I think that is one way that we address it. The other thing I'll say about that is that I actually think, I was thinking about this when Ann was talking about the native community and the Somali community in Minneapolis earlier, I think that it's a challenge that I think artists are particularly well positioned to help with because part of that challenge is about people's experience when they go into a community. So if I'm visiting Little Mekong on the central quarter, which is a neighborhood on the central quarter that has a high concentration of Asian-owned restaurants, Hmong and Vietnamese primarily, then that's my experience when I go there. I am not necessarily thinking about historic Rondo because that isn't the experience of walking around that neighborhood now. So I think that artists are particularly well positioned at actually creating activities that communicate something. Like neighborhoods have identity because of people's actual experience there a lot of times. And so how do you create experiences that give people a sense of that history, that give people, that make visible the sort of anthropology of a place? I think that there are ways to do that. And I think that that's part of, in Fergus, that's part of that project we're doing with the historic mental hospital. It's about making that history visible so that it isn't just a big empty building, but this is about a set of community stories that we can illuminate, that we can activate, that we can make visible. So that that place maybe means something different and those histories aren't lost. It's a tricky issue though. I certainly don't have all the answers. I have a quick question about the sort of the evidence of impact of all of these different projects. And I think as insiders we understand and hold high the experiential, the stories of impact and of everyone working in their neighborhood. But I wonder how, if you've ever been called upon to provide, okay show me some hard data and how your organization might speak to outsiders who don't quite understand everything in the way that we're talking about it now. Right, two things I would say about that also. One is that the only pushback we've had on this project is from arts organizations. People in the city, people in non-arts organizations, people in the neighborhood organizations, small businesses, they're super on board and understand. I think there is a difference in approaching that relationship about what you can offer rather than what you're asking from them. So just in the relationship piece I think that's helped. Also I would say like from the city's perspective, I think for them, 150 positive stories about a construction ditch is about as tangible as it gets. And it's pretty powerful. I mean in terms of being able to change and reframe a challenge, that's really what, I mean that's the business of a city is about trying to create a narrative about a place that's desirable and attractive. So I think we have measured it in some ways and we're actually doing a deeper piece of measurement around that narrative piece measuring, measuring the sort of content and sentiment analysis of those articles and in contrast to other articles about the construction and to see if we can figure out, like is there a tipping point where all of a sudden that changed and what is the ripple effect of that and how do people, do people think about it differently? Do they think, hey, that's a great place to go now or do they at least think, well it might be worth it even if it's gonna be difficult. So that's one piece that I think we have been able to put some real numbers around. Also on a case by case basis being able to say that the businesses, they measure their nightly, daily receipts and they know that their business increases when they have those creative projects. So that's another kind of tangible way. I continue to be really interested and kind of baffled by how to quantify the social capital piece. To me it's the juiciest piece, it's the most important piece of the work and it's really, oh did I leave this the whole time I was talking? Oh I'm so embarrassed. I was just gonna show that as an example of why I don't like to talk about it. But it's so ugly, let's look at that for this, yay. Maybe it's just a matter of working with a more qualified designer than I am to look at that but I think there is something in that. There's something in the connections and particularly those person to person sort of unlikely collaborator, what does it mean to sit on a construction ditch and watch a performance on the sidewalk in the middle of August. So I don't really have the answers clearly. But I'm really interested in it. Maybe Roberto has the answers. I don't have an answer, we're trying to do that with our place initiative. We're using sort of Mark Stearns and Susan Seaford's a network analysis as a kind of model and so when you had all the circles, that's what we do. So we have this particular project did that with tolerance and this one dealt with health and this one dealt with youth and then we can kind of get a sense of activity, high of activity, sort of get once again and start to tell that story and elect it's like it. I mean it's not the economic impact story but you can sort of look at like these values and the networks that come out of it and you can sort of like oh this particular project dealt with this many communities around this type of subject matter. My colleague Eric Takashita who works for LISC often says this thing partly in answer to that question and partly in answer to the question about gentrification that it has to be about people and places thriving so if you only work on the place then the people who live there will get pushed out. If you only work on the people then they will leave and leave the place to turn over to the next group of disinvested people so you have to work on those things like footsteps, the people in the place all the time if you're gonna be able to build health and vibrancy and vitality in a community and have that be for the people who already live there. Hi, my question is about that one day training and who is offering that training? What if you have one day are the important things to communicate and then how does that training relate to any sort of curation of the projects or what's the relationship between the training and then how your organization serves the artists and partners after that day? So the training it's offered by us through us and our staff and particularly our staff who have a background both as artists and as organizers teach it in partnership with the neighborhood organizers. So we kind of provide some of the placemaking and some of what I showed you today like here's examples from other places all around the world that are interesting and unique and it doesn't have to be big, you know, it can be temporary all the just kind of breaking up on the idea of what this work can look like and the organizers talk in really practical terms about what they would like to see happen in the neighborhood, what they feel like the neighbors, what some of their challenges are, what the structure of the neighborhood organizations is and how do you navigate that and how do you kind of understand where to go if you need help or need help building a relationship and then we do some practice of one-on-ones, how to sit down and talk with somebody. We do an activity that we're gonna do in just a minute called the observation tour and then we talk a little bit about the mechanism of how to develop the project. They go away, they find a partner. There isn't any aesthetic curation at all. The process by which they access the funds or get their project approved is that they go find their partner, they write a little like one page description of the project they wanna do and then we do every other week, we have Study Hall that's essentially a peer review process where you bring your project to whoever shows up to Study Hall, other irrigate artists and they give feedback and talk about it and then that's it. I'm super uninterested in bureaucracy. And so we wanted and it was also important that these things happen quickly and so we just wanted to get as many things going and out in the world as possible. When I say that the only pushback we've had is from arts organizations, it's on that point of curation. It really bothers some people and I understand that. It just doesn't bother me. See, I'm willful too. I was just curious about, in terms of relationships through this project, there's sort of the relationships of the artists to the small businesses and then through that to the community. I'm curious about how you saw and where you saw people within a neighborhood that live in that neighborhood connecting to each other through the project that may not necessarily have known each other or kind of in the way that the large table or the benches did, but through this sort of other avenue. Yeah, I think that project, certainly that bus stop residency was about people. I mean, in that picture, I showed off all that crazy group of people doing the light rail shuffle together. There was an artist named Brenda Bell Brown who did a cake walk project where people essentially did a cake walk together and I have pictures of that that have like the mayor and some other people who just happened to be doing a cake walk. And then there are also, so those are the ones where, there's a whole set of projects where that happens intentionally as part of the project and I love that. I'm almost more interested in the ways that happens kind of accidentally on its own. So one of the very first projects was a mural on a furniture liquidator store. It's a project we affectionately called Bears and Chairs because that's what it's a mural of. And that project happened and then a couple weeks later I drove past or my colleague, June Lee, maybe called me and said, there's more bears. Someone painted more bears. So the idea that somehow someone else felt empowered on this blank wall to add some bears to those, there were already some bears and chairs. Someone else thought, hey, I also like bears. I would like to see more bears here. I think, and that's that piece that I wanna be able to measure. Like I can see the benefit and I can at least in some ways quantify the benefit of people sitting around the table and having coffee together. But how does it change your idea of your own agency and your own ability, like this project in particular, I think what does this mean to drive past and think, or to drive past and see the artist for two weeks, pains-takingly installing little pieces of stained glass in this really ugly chain link fence? What does that make you feel about your own ability to say, I hate that fence. Maybe I'll do something about it. I have this gut sense that it does and I wanna be able to show it to demonstrate it or to put it in an infographic. Hi. My question is that, well, it's a fascinating, really, really fascinating project to me. It's also, I think, a collection of lots of projects, as you've indicated, right? And so I'm just curious, and it takes place, and it unfolds over, it seems to me, a substantial geographic area through a lot of diversity in different kinds of communities. And so I'm just curious if you observed any variation across the geographical territory that you're operating in. And if so, what might account for the relative success or engagement across those different communities? I think it's only been successful because it has been vastly different. Different in each project, but vastly different in each neighborhood. There's sort of six defined neighborhoods in St. Paul along this corridor in six miles, so fairly compact, but they're very, very different from each other. And in addition to this outward-facing work, which is sort of what I feel like is the public face of this community engagement and placemaking, we've done all of this work with the neighborhood partners on other community development strategies, and that work especially is incredibly different. So in Lower Town, which is a downtown neighborhood that has a really high concentration of residential live workspace for artists, it's the first neighborhood that art space developed and has been essentially stable housing for artists for almost 25 years. They have a train, they have a minor league baseball stadium and the renovation of a huge transit train station, all happening at once. So that neighborhood's primary concern is how do we shore up and preserve resources that allow this artist community to stay here through this change. And so in addition to the small artist projects in that neighborhood, we've done a lot of work with businesses that present artists, helping them buy equipment and helping them sort of make their space better for artists to perform or work, supporting small theater companies in long-term leases so that they can stay in the neighborhood. Those kinds of, because we know it's not enough just to have an affordable space to live, like you have to have the other assets if you wanna live in that neighborhood in Frogtown, which is a much different neighborhood. They have probably in the city the highest rate of vacancy in terms of housing. And so we've done a bunch of home ownership and housing work with them. Actually, I'm trying not to get too much in the weeds because this can be a very long conversation. I'll suffice it to say, if you had told me at the beginning of this work that one of the outcomes would be that Springboard would pay for part of a city housing coordinator, that might not have sounded like creative place making, but that's what the neighborhood wants and needs and that's what we did. So I think that part especially about sort of what happens after these small projects, what are the deeper relationships that get formed and what do the community wanna do next? If you think about this as sort of the gateway of like being able to see the value of creative thinking around some of your community challenges, then what they wanna do next is vastly different with that creative power that they've found in their neighborhood. A question about aesthetic vocabularies. Did- Oh, no. Well, no. I'm probably not gonna be able to answer that. No, no, no, it's, so the, did you ever run into any, you all quit it right now. Did you ever run into any moments where, like a mural went up and then other residents within the community were like, I don't like that. That's ugly. Just to frame that, I live in an urban neighborhood where the city will give you money to repaint your building, but not all of it, just the public facing part of it. That's nice. Right, right, it makes sense. So that, so a building just repainted the front and the side, but the back was a completely different color. So a local artist said, oh, well we would love to paint a mural there. And so the artists and the business agreed and the artists started on the mural and then other residents in my neighborhood were like, oh, that is effin' ugly. And it's only in the alley, right? So only the residents see it, but it started a big fight. And it was a really interesting moment to me that the fight was over the vocabulary of this dead end alley. Yeah, none that have resulted in fights. I'm sure there are people who hate some of the things. Yeah. I think because they're all on private property and because they're all at the request of the business owner and because they're done by people who live in the neighborhood, there is some insulation against, I mean, you can say you don't like it, but it's harder to say it doesn't belong here or it's not of this place. People from outside of the neighborhood have asked me that. Actually, someone asked me if I was worried about driving property values down by supporting bad art. Not bad. So here's how we talk about it. We have this, so I'm from Kansas. And in Kansas, we have native tallgrass prairie. And that people sometimes turn their lawn into a tallgrass prairie because it's more sustainable and it's more of the place. But sometimes you have to give them that little sign to put in front of it that says, hey, this is a native tallgrass prairie because otherwise everyone just thinks they didn't mother lawn and it's weeds. So there's something in that analogy here, I think, that you could plant a beautiful garden down the middle of the central quarter and everyone would go, oh, lovely. I see why you are doing that. That makes this place more beautiful. And then that would die because that doesn't live there. Or you can support the roots and build the roots of the community and the relationship and support what grows naturally from that and that I believe is more sustainable and more of the place. Sometimes you have to put a little sign in front of it that says, this is what we're doing here because it isn't as visible and it isn't as obvious. Could you talk a little bit about your organization's relationship with the regional rail organization? Like, I'm wondering if they have a really liberal risk manager. I mean, when the rail was built here, I mean, any activity near the construction site was really discouraged. I mean, and so. We have much more of a relationship with the Met Council which is the rail overseeing organization now than we did when we started. I think they've kind of seen that it's harmless. And that it's, you know, the business mitigation piece is huge. Like, that's a huge challenge for a city or for rail authority and they're looking for ways to help small businesses. They don't want the story of this and they don't want the reality of this to be, oh, we built this train and it put everyone out of business. So that piece I think is an attractive opening to that relationship that this is about. It isn't about people playing around in the construction. This is about how do we actually help these businesses survive and thrive through this construction. I will also say, I think it's a rebar that talks about the need for rogue bureaucrats. And our city is no different than any other city in terms of the bureaucracy and policy and rules that it has, but we do have a high concentration of rogue bureaucrats and that has been, I don't know if I'm supposed to say this out loud, but in large part, the city's partnership in this is about saying, having a place that we can call and say, what do you think of this? And them feeling free to say, just do it and don't tell me about it. And I think it is in part about communicating that to residents that we all have a pretty good internal sense of what is kind of within balance. And sometimes you can just do it. The reality is that the vast majority of the projects are on private property. They're with private business owners. They're not interfering with the construction in any way. I don't know if we were supposed to be sitting on the construction, but we sat there in the dirt for 20 minutes and then we left and nobody tried to build a clubhouse there. So I think there is a sort of sense of just go and do it and that also the scale of the projects mitigates some of that risk too. We're not asking anybody to build a $40,000 piece of public art in the middle of the construction. So if something has to come down, it comes down. If we have to change something, we can change it. Should we do something now? I'm tired of talking. You must be tired of listening to me. Those were excellent questions and super, super interesting questions and conversation. So, oops. Why are we back to this again? No, dandelions. So like we talked about just now, I'm really interested in this idea of how do we map social connections? How do we see what's possible? How do we make visible our relationships with place and places where we've been in social ties? So this is somewhat of an experiment. I've never done these two things together, but we're gonna try it. The first thing we're gonna do is go outside. But before you go outside, I'm going to give you some instructions. This is called the observation tour and it is kind of inspired by Alan Capro and his happenings and it is inspired by the idea of that idea that art can be about making meaning out of our daily lives, out of the mundane. So we're going to get up from here and we're going to walk out that direction and out the front door where you came in and into the parking lot. And you're gonna take 10 minutes to walk quietly by yourself without looking at your phone and without chatting or whatever and just focus on the place and look with intention at the place. I like to think about this as going forth with affection and like you are a positive Martian who just landed here and everything is fascinating. Look around and see where are there places that you could imagine a little title card or found painting or an accidental art installation. Focus on surfaces, buildings, sidewalks, boundaries, streets, patterns, natural, human. Recognize spaces, interior and exterior, negative spaces between buildings and windows. Find incongruities, things that seem out of place, things that might suggest a narrative or a starting point for further curiosity and think about connection, the relationship between the things you see, the context for the whole scene. So as a solo activity of 10 minutes of walking, I think, I walked around earlier, I think if you just go out and kind of consider the visual boundary of going into the parking lot and just still being able to see the door, I think you won't get too far or too absorbed in your observation that then you will not come back. So 10 minutes of solo walking and observing and then come back into this room and we will talk about that. Yes, you may leave your things in this room. Well, I'll stay here with the things.