 Welcome folks. We're going to get started in just a couple of minutes. Thank you all for joining early, where I guess on time, which feels early to me. Welcome and good morning all my name is Leilani. I use C series pronouns and I am a member of the New England Foundation for the arts, specifically the National Theater Project. If you are on this call, hopefully you intend to be at NTP 2020 to regional convening in New England. If that's not where you plan to be, I'm not sure how you got the zoom link, but I hope you'll stay with us. Really quickly, I wanted to touch on the agenda for today, offer up a land acknowledgement and then hand things over to my colleagues. So first, I'm going to just pull up the actual agenda and make sure I have everything correct. We are in our current welcome and info session portion. The info session is about the National Theater Project and the grants and funding opportunities that we offer that will follow this welcome portion. Our first performance of the day will be from Sage Seeker Productions in Connecticut and we are aiming to begin that at noon, followed by a Q&A session with the artist. From 1pm to 2pm, we do have our first panel, which is a conversation about how we define community theater versus theater in community and what those distinctions are, what makes it professional community, etc. We will then shift into our breakout conversations, and this is a moment where if you require any of our accessibility options captioning, ASL interpretation, etc. Please let me know directly which of the sessions you believe you will be going to so we can make sure you have the appropriate accommodations. Those sessions will be on processing the convening so far. There will be additional questions for NTP time and then unstructured networking. We'll come back from that for our performance with the theater ensemble of color based out of Maine and the closing conversation on defining community. That will be a panel on how we define community, how we find it, how we seek it, how we build it. That was a lot, so just a pause. We will be monitoring the chat throughout the day and shifting gear slightly to our land acknowledgment. So again, my name is Leilani, I work for the New England Foundation for the Arts, and I am a lifelong resident of Maple Nation here on Turtle Island, specifically the New England region. At the New England Foundation for the Arts, we believe that one of the roles of the arts is to make the invisible visible. We also believe that it is not the responsibility of those who have been made invisible to remind us that they are still here. Therefore, as a committed ally, NIFA acknowledges that the ground on which we work is the traditional lands of the Massachusetts and Wampanoag people. We honor their ancestors past, present and future and recognize their continued existence and contributions to our society. NIFA also acknowledges that all the places that are distributed staff, live and work, and where we provide support and hold events are indigenous lands. We offer respect to the elders, past, present and future. Throughout this convening, we will make time to acknowledge the lands, peoples, histories, futures, and indigenous communities of the places we now know as New England. In addition, it is vital that we acknowledge that not only are we tied through the lands that we are on, but we are all tied together because we are consuming resources through our cables and our electricity, through our use of natural gas and heating oils, through our use of water, and through the space we consume while we are gathered virtually, whether we are in our offices or in our homes. The history of technology in the United States is deeply tied to Silicon Valley, which is the traditional and present homeland of the Ohlone people. And so I invite you all to please join me for a moment of silence reflecting on the deep history of these lands, their people, our presence among both. And I do want to up with that it is currently Native American Heritage Month and encourage everyone to research the histories of the people whose lands they are presently on. Thank you for joining me in the holding of this space, and I hope that you will keep it present with you as we move forward. I do realize that I had skipped giving a visual description when I had come on camera so my apologies for that. I am a white woman with long dark hair in a dark outfit and really big red glasses, and usually just circulating pretty aggressively so if the screen gets blurry, it's probably my hands. On that note, I am going to pass the microphone and the camera to my colleague Nina. Thanks Leilani. My name is Mina Malik. I use the she her hers pronouns. Good morning everyone so excited to see your faces. Thank you for the description. I'm a East Asian and South Asian woman with kind of yellowish curry color ish skin with black hair with some pink highlights on the bottom. Black shirt and beaded earrings with green and blue beads that Kita gifted me. I'm very happy to be here. I live on the traditional lands of the kids, Gabrielino Tongva and Chumash peoples here in the South area of Los Angeles. So welcome to the NTP regional convening. This is the sixth year of for NTP to host the regional convening. And this is the first year that we're doing it hybrid, where we are, we were in person for one day and the two remaining days are virtual. The NTP regional convening takes place in areas where we don't receive many applications from. We host a day of gathering with people in the theater ecosystem from the region to learn about the successes, barriers and challenges that come with creating and touring theater, and also to see excerpts of works by local artists. It was a really wonderful opportunity for the NTP panelist advisors, and also the NTP staff to learn about the theater world and ecosystem in that region. And also to foster a space where the local theater community can get together for conversation and relationship building. This year, the region we're focusing on is New England. We're doing a person one day gathering in Hartford, Connecticut on November 1, where we heard vibrant conversations about space ownership, making Connecticut home base for local artists about healing and wellness. And we also were able to view performances by the fatherhood monologues and also Maddie Sayet. Today is the first day of the virtual convening, followed by the second and last day, which will be on the 16th, and we hope you join us for both, if you can. These two days this panel's focus on topics that elevated from the conversations that we had with the theater community leaders in New England. We're also featuring performances by artists from each state as well. So yeah, I hope that you can join us as much as you can for these exciting conversations to come. And please utilize the Huba app to continue or start conversations that are relevant to you. We really want it to be something that's useful to you. I'll see you here and we look forward to sharing these two days with you. Thank you for being with us. And I'll pass it to Keita and Derek. Hi, this is Derek speaking. I am a upper 20s white man with kind of poofy brown hair. I look a little bit like Jimmy Neutron, I think if that means anything to anyone. And I'm wearing clear classes and a sweatshirt that matches my white background so I look like a floating head. And we are going to do a quick PowerPoint about NTP and I think Keita is having some tech issues so mean if you are able to tap in and take Keita's parts that would be amazing. And really quick before we move on I just wanted to give an access note which is that we do have live captioning from Sherry Majeski, who has captioned many NTP meetings and feels like a part of our team. So you can access those by clicking live transcript on the bottom of your screen, or by clicking the link that I just posted in the chat. And that link will be used for the entirety of the regional convening, and we will continue to share that. And now let's see if I can share our PowerPoint. Sorry. Are folks seeing the presentation. Yes. And Mina, do you want to take Keita's slide? Sorry we are dealing with tech issues in real time as things, you know, you know how things are these days. Yes, thanks everyone for seeing our facilitation very publicly here. Yeah, so welcome to this convening again and we're going to do a brief kind of NTP creation and touring grant process info session. So that you all can learn about the grant if you're not aware that you can consider applying, since we do want more New England artists to apply. So, and we'll have, I think moments for Q&A at the end. Is that right, Derek? Yeah, we will have some time for Q&A. And if we don't have enough time, there's also a, like Leonie said, an NTP Q&A session at three o'clock that you can join. Okay, awesome. So we'll like to. So my name is Mina, as I said, I have been with NTP for eight years, but now I'm a consultant with the team and I get to continue work with this amazing team of three people now, which is really exciting. Yeah, I guess we did our intro so are we doing the next slide? Awesome. So this information should be useful, whether you are new to NTP or you're a seasoned veteran of the NTP process. And we hope we can provide you with the information that you need going forward with the creation and touring grant. So what we're going to cover today is first, who is NIFA? An overview of the National Theater Project. What does a creation and touring grant support? NIFA's EDIA statement, our criteria, our COVID response. And this question that we get most often, which is what is a development partner? And NTP advisors. Thanks, Mina. And before we go into the NTP grant, we want to just give a little bit of context about the New England Foundation for the Arts. NIFA is a service organization that also acts as a funder and invests in artists and creative communities. NIFA invests in artists and communities and fosters equitable access to the arts, enriching the cultural landscape in New England and the nation. NIFA accomplishes this by granting funds to artists and cultural organizations, connecting them to each other and their audiences, and analyzing their economic contributions. NIFA serves as a regional partner for the National Endowment for the Arts, New England State Arts Agencies, and private foundations. I will just give a quick note that even though the National Theater Project is run by the New England Foundation for the Arts, and we're based in the NIFA offices, it is a national program. We do not have any, there's no preference for New England artists. It is a completely national program, although, of course, today and next Wednesday, we will be looking at the state of theater in New England. But overall, the grant is a national grant. And so, again, we're here to talk about the National Theater Project. NTP promotes the development of artists led ensemble and devised theater work, and also extends the reach and life of these projects through touring. Our lead funding comes from the Mellon Foundation and additional support comes from the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation, and we are really grateful for that support in order to do this work. So how NTP began, it was created in 2010, following our sister program, the National Dance Project, which has been around much longer than us, to explore if the model that exists for the National Dance Project could also support devised ensemble theater creation and touring of devised ensemble theater in the United States. And so that's how it started. Along with the grant that goes towards the development of the work and the touring of the work, there are also artist development grants that we have been given for the past several years to a handful of finalists who do not receive the full creation and touring grant. And all the creation and touring grantees also attend the cohort meeting, which are meetings between grantees and advisors. We'll go more in depth later. And we also provide travel grants for presenters to see the work that received the creation and touring grant, because sometimes it's much easier to see the work than to read the description of it to really understand what it is. Each year, the National Theater Project is able to give 10 creation and touring grants. These grants are given to US based devised theater ensembles and individual artists who have identified collaborators. Projects vary greatly in timeline scale and touring interests. All of these projects must have one committed development partner, and we'll talk more about what a development partner is in a little bit. But the nature of those relationships varies greatly depending on the needs of the project. The grant award ranges from $80,000 to $130,000 per project with some portion of that money allocated to development funds and the rest allocated for touring support, which we will talk about in just a second. And then in addition to that, each project is given $10,000, which is set aside for touring admin support slash general operating support. After receiving the grant grantees must submit a tour plan to NIFA within two years outlines where they will be touring the work and using their NTP subsidies. So, like I just mentioned, the NTP funding is divided into two categories. There's creation funds and touring funds. And after the creation and touring grant is awarded NTP staff to conduct conversations with grantees and NTP advisors to decide how to divide that money into those two buckets. And it's pretty early in the history of this project that giving every project the same amount of money and splitting it the same way was not actually an equitable way of dividing the money. And so now we are really put in a lot of effort into having conversations with the artists and making sure that the way that we're organizing the support works for each project. And each project is different, but typically will allocate $30,000 to $80,000 for creation and that money is issued as pretty much unrestricted payments for the artists to spend to create the work. The remaining grant money is set aside as artists directed allocations which will be distributed directly to presenters. These funds can support up to 50% of the artist fee for any given engagement. That money is paid directly to the presenter, but the funds are released at the discretion of the artists. And this is another example of times where we're having conversations directly with artists and allowing artists to tell us how to spend the money. So if you were a creation and touring grant recipient, you would tell us how much of your touring subsidy you would want to give to each organization that presents your work. This funding reduces the cost to presenters who want to present your work, which can open all sorts of possibilities for how the work towards people use different strategies for allocating that funding. So some folks might give large subsidies to a handful of presenters, or you might decide to give smaller subsidies to every tour site. That funding is intentionally flexible and the NTP staff and advisors are available as a resource to help grantees decide how to split their touring funds and to offer reference for how other artists have used the funding in the past. In addition to helping you tour in new ways, we hope this funding can help subvert the power dynamics that often exists between presenters and artists and give artists more agency and power in those negotiations. We recognize that this kind of negotiation requires labor. And like I mentioned a minute ago, we to assign $10,000 that goes towards tour admin support for every project that receives a creation and touring grant. In order to be eligible for the grant, the applicant must be a U.S. based theater ensemble or individual artist, oh thank you, with identified collaborators. It should have nonprofit status or a nonprofit fiscal sponsor. So individual artists, you know, artists can apply even if they're not nonprofit as long as they have a fiscal sponsor. They should have one committed development partner relationship, which will go into depth later. We ask you to allocate the funds among tour sites within two years of receiving the grant and fulfill the requirements and reports if awarded. And for returning artists, we do have this guideline now that we are in our 12 year, 12th year grant making. There are returning artists who are reapplying and who are receiving our grant. So the criteria that we came up with was that all NTP supported presentations from the prior grant are completed. And it has been one year since the last NTP supported presentation. And there is an equity reason around that criteria for returning artists, particularly when you run an organized grant program that only gives 10 grants. You really have to balance the grants for new artists and cannot always support the same artists, but we also know and acknowledge that, you know, artists and ensembles grow and change and shift and push their own boundaries in different ways. And we really want to be able to support those ensembles that are doing that for themselves. So that's why we came up with this criteria. In the next portion of this webinar, we're going to discuss the grant criteria. But before we do that, I wanted to read NIFA's equity diversity, inclusivity and accessibility value statement. A lot of our grant criteria was built around this statement, and it really serves as a lens that all the other criteria are examined through. When the grant panelists, who we call advisors, have their grant discussions, they start by reading this statement, and then the advisors return to this value statement constantly during the discussions. So here it is. NIFA values an equitable, diverse and inclusive world, which we interpret as all people having fair access to the tools and resources they need to realize creative and community endeavors. We acknowledge structural inequities that have excluded individuals and communities from opportunity based on race, gender, disability, sexual orientation, class, age, geography, culture, nation of origin and language, and strive to counter those inequities in our work. Okay, now we are going to move into the criteria specific to the NTP creation and touring grants. And I would say maybe the number one piece of advice I would give to people who are applying to this grant is to have this list open and refer to it. We're going to read through it word to word right now, because this is what you're going to look at when you're filling out the application. And these criteria are used in all of our decision making. And the advisors again are constantly referring back to this and using this to inform their decisions. And I'll also just say that this criteria is available on our website. And yeah, I suggest looking through it if you're applying. So NTP creation and touring grants support the creation and development and us touring virtual or in person of new artists led devised ensemble theater work that demonstrates excellence in the artist practice. NTP uses the following definitions and consideration of grant applications ensemble, a group of two or more people committing to work committed to working together over time to develop a distinct practice and body of work devised a process of co creation and joint discovery that prioritizes generative artists, which may include but does not prioritize playwrights is iterative and results in original work, support work that contributes to the cultural and aesthetic diversities of today's theater. Reflect meaningful partnerships with presenters producers and other organizations that are involved in the development performance engagement and or touring and promotion virtual or in person of the new work. Offer the potential to deepen engagement because of the works relevance originality and or timeliness produce a viable plan for touring virtual or in person, the supported work in multiple communities in the US and its territories. And I will also just note that NIFA defines us as all 50 of the United States, as well as Puerto Rico, Guam, Northern Mariana Islands, the US Virgin Islands, and American Samoa. And the last thing I'll say about this is I really highly recommend again if you're applying for a grant. We always have office hours leading up to the application deadline. And that's a really great opportunity to bring us your thoughts about your project and say does this sound like it meets the criteria, because we will tell you if we don't think it's a good fit for this grant it doesn't mean that's not a good project. But we are really looking really closely at this criteria. And it's a pretty long application so we don't want you to spend, you know, all those hours working on an application if you don't fit our definition of ensemble and devised or whatever it is. So yeah, definitely recommend getting in touch with us before apply. Derek and Nina is online and said that she's able to jump in if you'd like her to from this point. Sure. Yeah, do you want to jump in Kira or do you want I think there's only a couple more slides left. Feel free to take them. But I at some point I probably should introduce myself maybe at the end. Okay, sounds good. Good to see you. And I do want to reiterate what Derek said the team does actually like respond to email answer phones like all those stuff so if you contact them they will respond to you, which apparently is really rare for grant organizations, which is kind of wild but they will respond to you. So please reach out. So what is a development partner, which is the hot question that we always get to development partners provide a variety of resources during the development of work. And we, through our 12 years have found that a development partner is fundamental to making this work happen. The deeper and the better the relationship is with the development partner the more likely it is that the work is going to come together in a way that feels successful for the artists. And development partners can provide many things and not limited to this list that we have here, but some of the examples are, you know they can offer residency spaces. They can bring in audience or community members to participate in a work in progress showing, which could be virtual or in person. They can give the artists administrative guidance or support sometimes they're the fiscal agent for the ensemble. They can do marketplace advocacy tour planning assistance. They can also leverage to find additional funding for the project and more and more and more. Please note that the development partner is not required to present the finished work at any time, although many do if they do have access to, you know, a theater or presenting location. And it is understood that the need and level of assistance between development partners and artists varies from artist to artist. But we believe strongly that partnerships greatly benefit the development and distribution of devised ensemble theater. And the other question that we get a lot is, you know, what type of organization could be development partners and development partners do not necessarily mean a presenter. Sometimes not even a performing arts organization. It could be an incubator space, it could be like a service organization, it could be an organization that work with a community that you're hoping to reach or any other types of organizations. We've had refugee relocation centers being really incredible development partner for a project that we supported where they created deep relationship over a long period of time that really was crucial in creating the work. So reach out to the team if you have any questions about that. And who are these people that are making these decisions so it's not the NTP team that is making the decision. These are the staff that's to wording the process of the application, but the people who are actually making the decisions are called the advisors. NTP advisors provide critical guidance to the applicants in proposal preparation. So when applicants move from the preliminary round to the final round they're assigned an advisor to work with to prepare their final application. They guide the project selection once we're in the panel process, and they also serve as kind of consultants and ambassadors for the program. They support kind of, you know, shifts in the program itself. They also go out into the theater field and spread the word of NTP project and the grant. They represent presenters, producing theaters, festivals, service organizations, theater artists, also former grantees. And the selection of advisors takes into account as many kind of demographic pockets as we possibly can think of. So we look at geography, gender, you know, culture and racial equity. And we tend to include both new and established leaders in the field, acknowledging that 12 cannot really, you know, encompass all the diversity that exists in our world. We do constantly try to do our best in that. And they are staggering rotation on rotation every three years. And the list of our current advisors can be viewed on our website. This is not a secret for us. We want to be really transparent with you who are who's reading your application who's making those decisions. And this maybe now is a good time for Kita to jump in. That's okay. Sure. Absolutely. So we really do want to emphasize the importance of communication and ask that you stay in touch with us during during your process. We welcome you to send email, pick up a phone. That's dated, isn't it most people don't pick up their phones anymore. But if you have questions that come up, we are here during the application process. We also have office hours, which we post on our on Nifa's website under events. And this picture is pretty accurate. That's us. That's me Derek and and Leilani. Just for introductions sake. My name is Kita Sullivan. I am the senior program director for theater at Nifa. I apologize for the technical difficulties. I have ray hair, crazy looking blue glasses on earrings that are white and colorful flower shaped. Thank you Mina. And I'm wearing a turquoise shirt in front of a picture of Montauk point, which are my homelands and both I am Montauk and and so those are our phone numbers. Those are our email addresses. Please, please feel free to reach out to us. And I really want to say thank you to our funders, both the Andrew W. Mellon foundation and the doors do charitable foundation have been longtime supporters and continue to be supporters of this project, and we certainly wouldn't be doing it without them. Thank you all for bearing with us as we do our last minute tech issues as all of these new meetings. It seems inevitable at this point. But we have a little bit of time at the end. So I'm wondering if there are any questions about NTP or about what's coming later today, or anything that we can help with. I want to take a second and uplift a question from the chat just in case people didn't get a chance to see it. Karen asked if we have or have had advisors who identify as disabled and I did want to affirm that yes, we have and have had folks who identify as disabled as our advisors for NTP. We'll continue to monitor the chat throughout the day and respond there and when appropriate uplift to audio and visual as well. And there's another question, what size organizations tend to be funded either by organization budget size or by staff size. And we're pretty deliberate about wanting a range of sizes we, you know, look for, you know, diversity in every sense of the word. Our funding we do not ask for an organizational budget with the application. It's a project specific grant so we asked for a project budget. So, yeah, we try. I don't know if I would say that there is a size that tends to be prioritized I think we do a good job of having a range of sizes. Okay, if there aren't any last minute questions, I think we can end three minutes early. So, yeah, maybe you all can have a extra a couple of water before the next meeting. Oh yeah, I wonder if I can ask, you know, because device theater is a pretty broad kind of spectrum definition right of the theater. There can be done in a very, very different ways. Do you specify this in, in terms of the relationship between the ensemble and director. I assume that device theater also have a director right, or maybe some groups do not have a director, they direct themselves but you know there's a, there's a some some kind of criteria do you have some kind of criteria which clear it. Explain it a little bit more. We, we consider directors to be a part of the ensemble. If the definition of ensemble is two or more people who are committed to working together over time that may or may not include a director but it is very definitely considered a part of the ensemble. We don't prioritize a playwright or a director over any other ensemble member. So if you, if you do not have if you're bringing in someone into your ensemble to be a director because you don't currently have anyone who's willing to serve that function within the ensemble. That is fine if you have a director within the ensemble, who is part of the co creation of the work with the other members of the ensemble that is also fine. I see so I understand that this just the matter of the choice of the ensemble what is relationship between director or ensemble right so this agreement and culture of the ensemble built by the, by the people. Yes, correct. Thank you. Okay, thank you all so much for joining us and we hope to see you throughout the day. Our next session is at noon and it is a performance.