 Good morning, and welcome to this week's edition of Encompass Live. I am your host, Krista Porter, here at the Nebraska Library Commission. Encompass Live is the commission's weekly webinar series where we cover a variety of topics that may be of interest to libraries. We broadcast the show live every Wednesday morning at 10 a.m. Central Time, but if you're unable to join us on Wednesdays, that's fine. We do record the show as we are doing today and it will be posted to our website for you to watch later at your convenience. And I will show you at the end of today's show where you can access all of our recordings. Both the live show and our recordings are free and open to anyone to watch, so please share with your friends, family, neighbors, colleagues, anyone you think might be interested in any of the topics we have on Encompass Live. For those of you that are not from Nebraska, the Nebraska Library Commission is the agency for libraries in Nebraska, similar to your state library possibly. So we provide services and training and resources to all types of libraries, and so you'll have shows on Encompass Live that could be for all types of libraries. Public, academic, K-12, corrections, museums, archives, historical societies, anything and everything. Really our only criteria is that it's something to do with libraries, something cool libraries are doing. We have a Nebraska Library Commission staff that come on and do presentations about resources and services we offer here. We do book reviews, interviews, mini training sessions, demos of services of products, all sorts of things. But in addition to having commission staff come on and do things, we also bring on guest speakers sometimes, and that's what we have today. Joining us this morning, we're going to talk about your creative aging arts programs for Nebraska libraries. And with us today is from the Nebraska Arts Council, and Austin and Joshua Brown. Good morning Josh. Good morning. Hey, and, well Wendy, she is like, dual kind of, she's the director of public library here in Nebraska, our lead, our lead Lincoln Township Library, but she's also an artist involved in this program so I think she's going to be speaking from that side, or maybe both. So I will hand it over to you all to tell us all about this great new program that our libraries can participate. Yeah, we thought we would start with just very brief introductions and tell you just a little bit about ourselves. As Christa said, thank you by the way Christa for allowing us to be here this morning. I'm Jan Austin, I'm a program specialist at Nebraska Arts Council. I ever see another arts education programs here, as well as programs involved with lifelong learning. And I've been at the Arts Council now for quite a few years. I'll have to count them up maybe 18. Thank you, Josh. I've been here then with the Nebraska Arts Council for just over a year now. I'm really enjoying it. Creative Aging is probably my favorite programs to work on because it's so transformational and it's so juicy. And I can't wait to tell you guys more about it. I'm Linda Kettleson. I'm the director of the Lead Lincoln Township Library in Wasa, Nebraska. And I just recently also took some classes to become a teaching artist with the Creative Aging for the Arts program as well. Yeah, and we'll come back to that in a few minutes. First, we thought it would make sense to share a little bit about the Nebraska Arts Council. For those of you who are unfamiliar with us. The Arts Council is a state agency. Our mission is to cultivate, sustain and promote the arts for Nebraskans. And as such, we manage many different grant programs to advance the arts. And our grants are available to nonprofit organizations, schools, artists, and also to libraries, public libraries in many instances here in Nebraska. As for our Creative Aging Arts program, and the shorthand for that is CAP, C-A-A-P. I want to tell you a little bit about where that began and what that program is overall. There's a national trend in the Creative Aging program development area. This comes with a lot of research and growing recognition about the needs of older adults, as well as the potential in older adults for creative creativity, for learning new things, and opportunities to build their skills and contribute to their communities. The Nebraska Arts Council launched CAP in 2021 to address these kinds of needs and opportunities. There's also growing appreciation for how the arts and culture can invigorate communities and bring people together. And here in Nebraska, we see libraries often as being integral to that, especially in a lot of the smaller communities where they are gathering places. For more than just books, right? So according to the 2020 United States Census, 69 out of Nebraska's 93 counties, mostly rural counties, saw stagnant or declining populations. And we believe that CAP and some of our other grant programs have the potential to play an important role in creative community development. When we launched CAP, one of the things we noticed was that libraries took advantage and we hadn't worked as much with libraries in the past, but that seems to be increasing and we're pretty excited about that. So about CAP itself, the core programming involves interactive workshops for older adult participants, and we define that generally as 55 or older. The residencies or artist series of artist workshops are led by teaching artists. Every residency involves preliminary planning by the artist together with the sponsor organization or library. Each residency includes a series of six or more sequential workshops, as well as a culminating event in which participants showcase their final artwork, or their performance in some cases for families and friends. So our CAP teaching artists have all completed creative aging training that Wendy referenced in the beginning, and they have designed sequential curriculum plans for their residencies. And artists in this program incorporate activities to promote socialization, as well as creative expression and skill building. CAP artists include not just visual artists but musicians, actors, storytellers, and writers. We have quite a few visual artists, so I will add that have expertise in many different areas, from painting, pottery, to printmaking, etc. The CAP training that Wendy referenced was conducted by a national organization called Lifetime Arts. And I would like to point out to everyone who's participating today that this organization may be a resource for librarians as well. So the slide here shows a screenshot of their website and their website address. Not only does Lifetime Arts offer training for teaching artists about how to craft their instructions so that it is appropriate for older adults. It's different than teaching children or younger people. Point being that incorporating socialization is a priority, as well as skill building instruction. The website though for Lifetime Arts includes resources that could be useful to libraries related to your own services for the older adults in your communities. Anyway, good resource that I'd like to share with everyone. So this leads us to a short video that we want to share, and it comes from our friends at the Delaware Arts Council. We in Nebraska don't yet have our own video produced, hopefully coming soon, but we really enjoyed this short video and think that it captures some of the joy that comes out of these kinds of programs and it helps to illustrate a program that is actually quite a bit like our own program here in Nebraska. So with special thanks to Delaware, enjoy this little video. Josh, you want to take it from there? Can you hear it okay? Is there any sound yet or is it just, I don't hear sound yet? I'm not hearing sound. But you can hear my voice. Right. That's interesting. You said it just comes through my, from my speakers to the audio. Is that right, Krista? It should come out, yeah, from your speakers to your microphone that's on your computer there, yeah. Nice to hear. It's coming through my computer speakers here. Here we go. I have it on my computer here. Hold on a sec. I'm going to briefly pull presenter control back to my screen. And there's the video from the Delaware Earth page. Are you hearing the music now? It's kind of faint, but we can hear it a little bit. We are a retirement destination. And you have to think about what are the needs of retirees? One, they have finally been able to walk away from doing the things that they've had to do. And now they're getting to do the things that they want to do. The other thing, because people are retiring here, they are often leaving their communities behind. And they're leaving their. So it may sound great, like, oh yeah, I'm going to retire to the beach. It's going to be awesome. And then you get down here and you realize, oh, my friends are here. You know, the people that I'm used to being with the connections that I have are no longer here. So it's important that we provide some type of programming that allows them to connect to one another. And this particular type of workshop where it's being offered over several weeks, it's a small group, really allows them to make connections with each other. And that was a good thing. And because it was free and open to everyone, I didn't feel that I had any standards or anything that I had to meet in order to be part of the group. So I was really excited to just buy it out. So they're coming in 60, 70, 50, you know, whatever it is, having never done art and for a lifetime being a creative class is really about creating an environment. That helps them develop and sphere to reach whatever artistic ability they have, or understanding they can gain in order to bring joy to themselves through art. And at the same time, if you can find friends in it, that's great. It would be all over people. So I wouldn't be embarrassed by being unable to do things. And it's a lot of fun hanging out with your own generation because all of your cultural references are the same. My office is clear across the library. I could hear them all laughing and having such a good time each week that you can hear the happiness that they're making here. People are very enthusiastic about learning something new. And across the board in every class I've taught, they were almost convinced they couldn't do it. This is too complicated. I'll never get there. And I said, trust me, we're both doing step by step. The whole point of the creative aging programming is that it is progressive in that you start with a basic skill and you build on that, build on that, build on that across the weeks. Creative aging, the idea is not that different from how you teach any class. If you're approaching it from a space of seeing the students, noticing who and what they are and what they do and what they need. And so with that center on being a student, the way that you teach a dance class is different for a preschooler as compared to a middle schooler as compared to a professional dancer as compared to an older adult. But my job as an instructor is to say, hello, student, what is it that you need? Why are you here? And then walking forward from there. You know, having a dance instructor tell you to think of something and you can move your body that way, feels nice. So I think the arts really have improved my life. It is something that we would never be able to offer if it hadn't been for the Delaware division of the arts. Without that money from Access Creative Aging, we would not have been able to offer that. One of the focuses on top of bringing arts into the community for people of a certain age was the fact that the artists were to be behaved fairly, which as much as people love the arts can be difficult sometimes. And so it made it worthwhile to spend a lot of time on getting these projects ready and present them. And you've seen some really incredible friendships for me. They'll start by chatting with each other and then next thing you know they're going out for like coffee or a quick bite afterwards. And then you hear that they're going on vacation together and just these really, and they're supporting each other as they get older because also there are life changes as partners get sick, partners die. And they're able to get that kind of support that they need and it kind of starts by just getting to know each other through things like programs at the library. It's all about the rules. Like I can be a little rock and I can get the water and send out a few of the crystals. I'm going to be a big rock in a lot of ponds and make a lot of really positive rules. Because in my head, my other philosophy is everybody did that. If everybody had a mindset to help each other. So the world changes pretty quickly and it makes them feel part of something. I would definitely recommend this program to anyone, honestly, because it was very liberating. It was very, you know, we just went in fact none of us wanted to leave after an hour. We wanted to stay there and keep going every single time because we were having so much fun. So we learned, but at the same time we were being empowered to be to really explore our own inner potential. We hope the funding continues so that we can continue to offer this really amazing service. Well, Krista, thank you for coming to the rescue. Sorry, the sound there was a little wonky everyone didn't quite come across where we hope it's still I hope it got the idea across. We have different artists, we have different libraries, different venues back here in Nebraska, we've got a really vibrant program going so we're happy to share it with you. And that brings us to Wendy who's going to tell you about personal experiences and what you've been doing, Wendy, in wasa in the past couple of years. So take it away. Sure. Basically it started when I received an email about the creative aging for the arts grant and I'm always looking for grant ideas, especially for my older adult community. I had been offering art classes myself at the library sporadically but not regularly by any means, and I knew that people in the community would really love this program. So, but before I applied for the grant I reached out to our local assisted living facility and I talked to the director there to see if any of the residents would be interested in this program and she thought it was a great idea. So I let her know that if I did get the grant that I would have the residents sign up first and so they'd get first chance at being in the classes. And then I reached out to some of our older library patrons that were coming in and asked them if they were interested. And some recently retired people that were looking for things to do I asked them if they were interested in the program and basically kind of started a list of people that were interested if I would happen to get the grant. And so then I went on to the Nebraska Arts Council website to start the application process and when I was on there I was looking at the list of creative aging for the arts artists that they have on there that you could pick from to get for your library. And the very first two artists listed on that site on that list were both in my general area they were kind of closer by, and they both had classes that I really thought my patrons would like. So the first artist that I reached out to was Carolyn Albrecht, and Carolyn teaches art education at Wayne State College and also has her own art studio in Wayne called blue cat gallery and studio. So Carolyn's program was listed as mixed media paint draw cut and sculpt. So I emailed Carolyn and talked to her a little bit she emailed back and said she was willing to do a residency at our library. So I got all of her information and started that grant process. Around that time that was working on the grant I had some questions so I talked to called and and talk to her. And in our conversation I found out that I could apply if I wanted to for a second residency at the library so I had so many people on my list interested in an art class that I went ahead and I decided to do a second application as well. So I reached out to the second artist on the creative aging for the arts program artists list, and her name was airy odd me all break. She's got a hard name to pronounce, but she calls herself airy for short. So airy is an artist in vermilion South Dakota and her program was listed as our barn quilts histories painted. And this also sounded like a class that my patrons would really love to have so I reached out to her to see if she was interested. And she was and so I started coordinating dates and times with both artists. So I could finish the grant writing process. I sent in my grants and then I found out that I was approved for both grants. So I contacted both artists and let them know that we were on for the classes. We set up times for each artist to come to the library and so we could discuss details about the classes and also so they could see the space we had to see if they needed anything. I met with Carolyn. She had a long list of art supplies, because she does mixed media. And we went through the list and I let her know that if she had anything on the list that she didn't. I looked through our art closet basically and I told her that, you know, if there's anything on the list she could use, she could have it. We just get about $200 for art supplies, but you know art supplies are kind of expensive so sometimes that doesn't go really far, you know. So we used a lot of the resources in the library craft supply room as much as we could. When I met with Ari, it was a little different. I didn't have as much as what she needed for her class. Because she mostly had a canvas project, big canvas project. So, so I didn't use up anything from the library for that particular project. With both artists we also discussed like what we wanted to do for the culminating event at the end of the series. We decided with Carolyn's to have an open house at the end, and Ari wanted to make a video presentation that to put on social media and that's what she kind of wanted to do. So we went ahead and set that up. When we had all the details arranged and I made some posters and flyers for our community and I put it in our local paper. Then I contacted the assisted living and let them know that we were on and that they could have their patrons sign up. And then I also had library patrons that I had on my list, I called them, let them know. And I also just put it out there for anybody to sign up if they wanted to. Both artists told me they'd like to limit it to about 15 people, just so I didn't get overwhelming. So I had a list for each class that people could sign up for and I kind of had it on a first come first serve basis. So the first class we had was with Carolyn Albright. And it ran from March 4 to March 26 with the open house set for April 2. The classes were on Friday and Saturday mornings from 10am to 1130am. At her first class, the participants introduced themselves, they told what their favorite hobbies were, what drew them to take this class. And each class was focused on several different mixed media techniques. They did things like watercolor and jelly plates and collaging and image transfers. Carolyn had everyone try each technique and then they shared with the class what they had created and what they thought of that medium. During the class, the library was open, so I was downstairs working during this time, but I would try and sneak up whenever I could to take pictures and to see what everybody was working on. I heard comments from a few students about the different things they were learning and how they were learning so many new things they didn't know if they remember them all. Some of the things that I observed during the class were people really working together and encouraging each other, especially with the person that they shared a table with. We have several tables in our meeting room and I think there was about two artists per table. They would wander around and see how everybody else was doing and really encouraging each other. I only heard positive comments about each other's work. One of the surprising things that developed besides the camaraderie between everyone was they started bringing snacks in, which was we have a kitchen up in our meeting room and they had pretty soon they were bringing and they had a pretty nice spread up there of food. I would sneak up and grab a little snack myself. It was really fun because it really created a really social situation. They were eating and talking and visiting and it was just more of a kind of a lighthearted atmosphere. The class technically was supposed to be from 10 a.m. to 11 30 a.m., but the students really wanted to keep going. Sometimes they would stay and keep working on their projects even after Caroline left sometimes until 12 30 or even one o'clock when we close. They'd still be up there working so I'd have to let them know we were closing. They also came and asked me if it would be possible for them to come in on the weekdays when the library was open and keep working on their projects. They wanted to keep practicing and trying different things and and I didn't see any problem with that. So I said that was just fine with me. I was very fortunate at that time that our meeting room wasn't reserved for any other groups. So for that entire month, I was they were able to leave all their projects laid out on the tables, all the supplies, everything they didn't have to pack it all up and then take it all back out every time they worked on something. They could have their things laid out on their tables and just leave it there. So that was kind of a nice situation. Yeah, I think I had at least two or three people every single day the library was open that was up there working in there on their projects. When I was in the main library, I could occasionally hear them laughing about something upstairs and I had people in the library checking out books and they were well what's going on up there. And I told them about the class and so sometimes they would go up there and just see what they were doing. And they would see the progress and visit with the people and I really think the people working on the art kind of liked all the attention they were getting for their projects and like showing off what they were working on. Because these classes were on four consecutive weekends, we did have a few people who had to miss a class or here and there because of weddings or things going on. But with the extra days during the week, they were pretty much able to keep up with everybody. The students all helped each other with projects left they missed something they tell them what they missed. So that was kind of nice. The last class Carolyn had focused on mounting the artwork and creating their artist statements for the open house. So we had them get that all ready to go. We set up tables throughout the library. The main part of the library with two artists per table. We had their main artwork on an easel a table easel and other smaller artworks around it with their artist statements in front. We invited the community we put ads in the paper we put flyers around town. And we served coffee and cookies we had a great turnout. The students were just beaming I mean they were just so they just they were very proud of what they had accomplished. It was a great opportunity for their friends and family to see what they'd been working on for the last month. And it was I think a wonderful confidence booster for for all the students. A few days after the open house. Some of the people that were in the class decided to take a road trip to Carolyn's art studio in Wayne. And when they came back they said they had they loved her fused art jewelry. And they said I should have her back for a class on on that because they would love to take that. So I called Carolyn and we set up like a one night only class where people could come and they could pay just enough for the supplies. I think it was like $12 to make a glass fused jewelry piece. And I really think she made an impression on them. They still hang out together to this day. So that was kind of neat. Our second class started not long after that we had. I'm Ari Adney Albright come from April 18th to May 12th with the culminating event on May 16th. And these classes were on Mondays and Thursdays from 3pm to 5pm. Once again the classes were held during library hours so I would pop in when I could to see what they were doing and to take pictures. Ari had the students work on small projects to learn about basic painting techniques first before they really started on their big project. And so they made a lot of really neat little projects before they got to their big one. She had students pair up and brainstorm about ideas about like what personal symbols they can incorporate into their final project. And I think she also videoed them explaining like why they picked what they did, what it meant to them. So that was kind of an interesting take on that. Each student designed and painted their own personal barn quilt on a two foot by two foot canvas. But we had one gentleman who had a, I think it was three foot by three foot or four foot by four foot. I'm not sure how big it was. He had a big piece of wood that he wanted to do his final project on. He had been in the library much earlier than this looking for information on barn quilts and because he wanted one on his garage and he was trying to figure out how he could get one made for him possibly. And I told him about the class and I encouraged him to just sign up for it and make one himself. And so he did. He wasn't sure how good he'd be at it with straight lines and things, but with the help of some painters tape, he did a he did a really nice barn quilt for his garage. He is the gentleman standing right in the middle of picture there. So yeah, it turned out really nice, I think each barn quilt was so unique and so well done. Ari made a video of the final for the final culminating event to share on social media and it had pictures and videos of students sharing their experiences. But I talked to the students and although they love the video they also wanted to have their own open house. So we set up another open house about the same way we did the first one with tables and easels and place cards with the artist names and we had another great turnout. They all stood proudly by their artworks and talked to friends and family about the classes and you can tell they all had a really great time. Some of the themes I you can see in here. And some that aren't in there are they had one lady so her her theme was thread schools and that was her pattern. There was Bruce in the middle there had a family crest that's on there. Ari actually did one with the class and she did one on that was Swedish from our dollar horses that she saw around our library. There was the abstract barn which was one of my favorites I really loved that one. The acorns that had something to do with her childhood her her childhood home I believe. And another artist did a color wheel and another one did some flowers so there was all kinds of different styles of barn quilts and I was really impressed with the work that they did. Still a year later. Now, I have had people come to the library regularly asking when am I going to have another art class and which I've got some in the works. And I still hear about how much fun they had and how much they appreciated us offering them and to this day this is one of the most successful adult programs I've had the library. Well, thank you. I, you know what Wendy, we've talked about these residences before but I just learned all kinds of things I didn't know that it happened. I think we need time for Josh to talk because he wants to share a lot about the grants themselves because he's the man you talk to when you're applying for the grant to work out all the details so take, go, go at it, Josh. Okay, we had a couple of other slides just talking about some of the other locations that have had hosted programs. You can see just from this list it's really all over the state and we're looking forward to adding more stars to the map. My mouse seems a little possessed today. I think the mouse wheel is sending me through through my slides. Here's another one that took place a storytelling workshop with Kevin Williams. But I mostly want to spend time talking to you today about how to apply. This is our landing page for our website and there's some really great resources here. I encourage you to check out the explore arts in Nebraska and discover arts education areas because there's a ton of resources in there. But I really want to focus on applying for the grant today and navigating the cap website. I'm going to go ahead and this is kind of what the landing page looks like but I'm actually going to take you there and show you what it looks like. So if you go to the Arts Council website that we were just looking at here and go down to apply for a grant, you'll see the creative aging arts program right here and it's going to take you to that landing page. This page has a lot of information about how the program works, who it's for, who can participate as an instructor, and then some information about eligibility for a sponsor. That would be important information for you all as librarians who are program sponsors. Eligibility and talked about this a little bit, libraries, public agencies, nonprofits, churches, synagogues, mosques, any of those places we can host creative aging programming. Deadlines are floating, which means that there's no no hard and fast deadline. It's not March 15 or October 1 or anything like that. This is six weeks before the program itself starts so that gives us time to check, check through the details of the application and get payments organized. We do need six weeks. If you apply for a date sooner than that I'll ask that you get back in touch with the artists and see if we can get later dates scheduled. At the top of this page as well. Right now all of our 22 grants are closed. So that means no, no new applications for the time between now and and June. But you can apply for programs after July 1 right now. And what we're not right at the moment is that we're only taking one application at a time for that July through June period and 2023 to 2024 one per site right now during this time period after July 1. We're going to kind of assess how many we can give for each library but right now we're looking for one application until July 1. So we're going to take that in mind for now and then we can move forward after that. There's a $3,000 maximum on this grant which I don't really think is a very helpful way of thinking about the budget for this program. I'd rather talk about what this covers, and it covers artists fees for up to 10 sessions, one to two hour long sessions. It also covers supplies to the tune of $200 like Wendy said, and it also covers a little bit of the stipend for the library to help cover any hours that you might have to stay open outside of your regular schedule to keep the lights on whatever it is. It's just $200 as well for the library. So with that, if you want to get Ariadne to come and do a program at your library in Omaha, we provide travel stipends for that as well. So that makes it a lot easier for artists from across the state to take advantage of this program, especially in areas where population is less dense, you can get somebody from Carney to come or somebody from Lincoln to come out and do a program and that money covers their driving expenses. Hotels if they need it, really, it's quite a generous grant in that way. Applying is easy. We really try to keep this application simple enough because we knew a lot of first timers would be using it. Maybe not first time grant applicants, but first timers with us here at the Nebraska Arts Council. So it is a pretty easy application. And that's another reason why we're asking for just one at a time until July 1 is because I have to process them all. And that takes me some time to and I want to make sure I have time to do that as well as I can. To go ahead and apply, you can do it from this page, the creative aging arts program page clicking apply now there's another way to do that here and we'll come back to that just in a moment. I want to I'm going to survey some of our teaching artists just briefly kind of talk through some of the awesome program participants that we have for teaching artists. We talked about Carolyn and Ariadne a little bit already. And as you can see, Wendy really just did get lucky with the first couple being right in her area. All the contact information for artists where they live. We have been darling who's a painting instructor all the way out West. We've got dance with Ruth, David Han here at Eastern Nebraska. There's theater their storytelling, songwriting and recording. There are a lot of different art forms here we really focused on visual arts today, because that's what worked really well for Wendy. But if you if you have a perfect space for a dance program for a little theater workshop, we have people to do that as well. Ceramics guitar ukulele there's just there's a really a lot of depth in this list. And I really encourage all of you to kind of ripple through it there's about 25 to 30 artists right now. We're going to continue to train artists for this program. Mason on the list there to the. That's right. He's a gym. Oh, he is awesome. So fun. He's fun and easy to work with and you can pay him to come and work with seniors and older adults at your libraries. And he's just, you don't you don't have to worry too much when Matt's at the wheel that's for sure. I have a couple of questions. This will take you to and all stand. That's a great place to start she, she is the one that is the final word on everything in this program, but if you need help. I'm your guy, I'm the person that will reach out to it. I have a question about the budget and they did say that they think you kind of answered the question but I wanted to make sure we clarify. So as far as the budget and the grant amounts. Do the artists have set fees, or do they set their own fees how do you plan for the budget with each of these artists. Yes, we do have a set fee. It's $50 an hour. There are situations where there, there needs, there's more need for supply money. A lot of different adaptations have taken place. I think the easiest one is just asking for a small stipend to for program participation. That's doesn't that doesn't work at every library or every program location. You can do some fundraising on your own there. You can dip into the administrative fee if you if that seems to be the best way to spend that. So there are some different ways to get more money to your supplies but yes the artists are at a fixed rate of $50 an hour there. Could I add something about the budgets to as Josh pointed out the grants maybe up to $3,000. Most are not that much. What you will find when you apply for a grant is that there is a very simple budget form that's a fillable form. And it guides you through like how many hours are you hiring the artists for how many planning hours and there are some requirements about planning hours. So the budget form is very simple. It guides you through how to calculate the total budget. And that is your total request for the grant. And I believe Josh mentioned it, but I'll say it again. There's no match required. The one area where sometimes the group, the library may have to contribute some funds one way or another. It has to do with art supplies. But otherwise there's no match to this grant. Nice. And I would estimate for grants where a library is hiring artists who don't have to travel a long distance they're local. Typically the budget is going to come to 12 or $1,600 and that but that that's more at that's more like an average budget, but now and then if there are hotels and lodging required. And it does add up and our grants covered that. So, yeah, thank you, and that is that is the case. Just kind of diving back and kind of cover this a little bit. That's if you go from the homepage, getting to be grant system grant system is the interface that you'll use to submit your grant application. You know, and it's a pretty good one, I would say the once you click on that grant system login or hit apply for a grant on that creative aging arts program page that we were just at. It's going to take you to our grant grant system to grant management system. It's called founded but it's not going to say that don't worry about that at all. The other purposes is just Nebraska Arts Council grant portal, so it'll take you here. If you've never applied for one of our grants before you're going to want to create an account. If anyone runs into any issues. This is often where it is because there are a couple of important numbers that you need to create an account here with us at Arts Council. The next ID number that's easy, you can Google that one. The other one is a Sam dot gov number which is a UI universal entity identifier number and that's just a federal government jargon word for a kind of a serial number for organizations. Libraries have had to get those recently because of applying to fit for federal funds through us the commission. So, some of our libraries have one already. So if you have one you're good to go if not, we can help you get one to and figure out how to get it basically go to Sam dot gov and it guides you through what you need to do to apply for one doesn't cost anything it's just in order to receive federal funds that and now their funds trickle down from fed federal government so to ours. The grants they need that is your ID number with them. Yeah. Right, some of the funds that are supporting this program are provided with federal dollars so it is key that we get this number on there, and it can take a couple of weeks for you to get it after you apply for that number so that would be the first thing that I would do if you're interested in getting involved in this program, just create an account on our site. I'm going to explore a little bit. If you run into issues we have a tremendous grant and data administrator Jennifer dry bulb us. You can see her email on this page right here and if you're having any issues with same.gov or the UI number, give her a call she is great she will help you out. Once you get in. This is kind of this is just the header. This is a zoomed in part of the header. If you run into issues with your dashboard or once you log into your account. You'll have all of your information and then below it any active projects that you might have. But the place to go for a new application is that apply button up here with the red circle on it so that's where you want to go I've had some questions about in the past I just wanted to punch that and make sure that everyone sees. If you're getting lost in dashboard just go to the header and look for apply. That's where that lives. And then here is our information so if this is something that you'd like to pursue screen chat us here go to the arts council website, pick up the phone and give us call. We're always happy to talk. If you've got a question about any of the details of the guidelines on this program any of the rules about compliance artists things like that. My number is right here, and I love to talk to you about it and oversees the program and works with training teaching artists. If anything higher level comes up will definitely bring her in and and problem solve. And that's something else I want to talk about with these applications. They're terribly competitive. As long as as you meet the requirements that are laid out, you're going to get the grant. You do have to meet all the requirements for eligibility, but these are not competitive. So I want to encourage you that if you put the time in and I would say a couple of hours will get you there, more or less between talking to the artist and getting registered with us getting your application through. It's just, it's a wonderful investment of your time, and it went well worth it. And if you have any questions or issues like I said, please, please give me a call. I'm about out of words here, but you might have a couple more things to say and Krista I know you do so I'm going to turn the floor back. We have a question that did pop up that I want to get to right now regarding the Sam dot gov number. And so the question is, can we use our cities, Sam number. And I know for us at the library commission. That's perfectly fine. It's whoever is officially receiving the money. I guess. If you know if your city receives money for you, then that's okay to use theirs you don't have to have a separate one for your library. But if you have a library. If the library has its own like bank account that it's using, you would need your own so it's going to depend on your situation and where the money is actually kind of ending up. Yeah, I think that's about right. And then I would also point back to Josh mentioned our grants and data administrator Jennifer drive all this. Jennifer is kind of the, the queen of all things, Sam dot gov she she will also help guide you with that kind of technical information. Josh and I are much more involved in the overall programming and budgeting, but Jennifer can help with that technical information. Yeah, so and speaking of Josh mentioned that our grants have a six week deadline and that's true. If you do not yet have an account in our system. I would encourage you to plan further in advance, maybe a couple of months out because it might take a few days to even get your, your account set up. So, try not to bump right up against that six week deadline. Allow a little time to set up your account. Talk to Josh or Jennifer about any questions about getting set up. Yeah, if you're looking for if you're just even thinking that maybe this might be something at some point your library might want to do, go and set up an account right now. As soon as you're done watching this webinar. And then, then you know you're ready to go whenever it does come up into your, you know, schedule and time that now we can, you know, four months from now. We're ready. We figured it all out. We know what we want to do. And then you know, you know, you're all set. And the person asked that question with the same governor says great. That's my question. Yes, our city does handle our money. So it's perfect for them. Yep. Perfect. Um, well, are there any other questions that we need to hear about because we have a few minutes left. We have questions. Yeah, so it does anyone have any questions. You can type into the questions section of your go to webinar interface. Yeah, we have at least five minutes or more left of the session. But if you have questions or if. And Josh or Wendy or so need to share something we don't get cut off at 11 or anything that will go as long as it takes reference questions that get asked and everything to be presented. So definitely people type in your questions or comments for either Josh and about the program or Wendy about what she did at her library, either as an as an artist hosting one of these programs. I know we didn't have questions. So about the video and the slides, if you always ask about this, I didn't mention it earlier. I always usually try to apologize. The slides will be available for you afterwards. When we get the archive up for this, Josh will send those to me so any of that information you will have. And I will also include the link to the video on the Delaware site is within those slides as well. We can add it as a link in our event page to so you have a quick link to that if you want to go and rewatch that video and see what Delaware has done with this same kind of program. So so now we do have an interesting question it's kind of probably not the kind of thing we're thinking of going in but if someone is an artist and they want to become involved as the as the artist side of this. That's a good question. That question sometimes that's how I think we got Wendy on board. Send me an email right now. For the time being we don't have any future trainings planned, but we hope to it's all dependent on budgets. I think we're going to in the coming year have more training for more artists so we'll be hopefully within the coming year soliciting more artists to go through the training with lifetime arts. So email me let me know. We are limiting the cap grants to those artists who've gone through the training. One nice thing is that the artists in our cohort I think they're 32 or 33 artists right now in the cohort. We have certainly we have a handful and Omaha and Lincoln but we also have artists we have several artists as far west as Sydney and Scott's bluff. We have several others in the northeast corner of the state we have a few in the south central part of the state. To be honest we'd like to have more artists from the central and north central part I don't have any artists in the cohort right now from say Valentine or bass or Gordon but hopefully down the road we will. But we do have artists who are scattered around the state if you're looking for someone who's closer to where your library is, and they're there. The communities where they're from are listed in that list on our website when you scroll through that. Yeah email me if you're interested in being an artist on the road just tell me a little bit about yourself. And I'll at least put you on our list of people to contact once we're able to do more training. Okay, so here's another question about the artists sessions, the actual events themselves. So for planning how long should an artist session last each one of those sessions. We recommend between an hour and two hours long up to two hours, and it sort of depends on the population. Perhaps sometimes these residencies take place for instance in nursing homes or assisted living facilities where maybe two hours would be too long. Within their scheduling and what they do yeah. So there's that but it also depends on what the artist does. I mean Wendy, I think that you've found with visual arts with art and making whether it's print making or mixed media. Sometimes that full two hours is needed. Whereas writer or a storyteller an hour and a half maybe sufficient. It depends. Wendy, did you want to share about your. Yeah, so I believe, especially with painting and I'm an artist myself that way so I think two hours is is really needed for something like that to really to get anything really done. So, like I said, the people taking these classes actually stayed even a little longer which was fine with me but may not work for everybody's library. So I would say two hours is what we kind of aim for. So, yeah. Awesome. All right. And I don't know if you mentioned this earlier. There's a lot of information which is great. Is there someone wants to know. Is there an end to this program to when this funding is available or to be used how long do libraries have to join up and we mentioned set up your account now and then a few months. Like, is there an end date of when this particular grant funding has to be used by kind of. Well, we'll keep running it until we run out of funds for this year. I think each year we kind of have a different set of guidelines and a different budget. So we're committed to continuing to work on creative aging. And as an agency, the particulars are going to vary. And I will add that to clarify when we talk about our, our fiscal year is from July one to June 30. So right now the grant applications that we're accepting can take for our four projects that can take place anytime between July one of 2023 and June 30 2024. Yeah, that's our budget too. That's a state thing. Yep. Sounds familiar. I don't see any other questions right now. And we're almost at 11 o'clock. So we might start working on wrapping up today's webinar. If you do have any other questions just got a few more minutes here we'll do wrap up, you know, desperate things you want to ask right now, get it into your questions section there for Ann Wendy or Josh. Otherwise you've got their contact info as well here you can reach out to them. So thank you everybody for being here today thank you so much and Josh and Wendy this is a really good program as you mentioned we were surprised kind of that libraries had jumped on it when you would offer that first round of grants and I remember. They reached out to me and said, Hey, can you hear this with libraries are doing a new thing. And I just put it out on our we have a grants for libraries websites that I try and provide results of funding that libraries can apply for from all sorts of places and push it out into our mailing lists and blog and whatnot. I just put it out there and I'm just so glad that libraries actually. I never know sometimes if they are actually applying for some of the things that I share I just put it out there and hope, hope for the best and I thought I'm so glad to hear that they did and that it's even being expanded. Lots more libraries for participating in this. All right, I am going to bring presenter control back to my screen again to do Milo wrap up here. Okay, come up there we go. So this is the session page for today show. There's a link already right here to the Nebraska Arts Council's main website and then a specific one that goes right to the creative aging arts program. You'll have that right there when you get the recording link as well and it has all that info and everything that Josh was showing the recording should be available and ready by the end of the day tomorrow at the latest, as long as go to webinar and YouTube cooperate with me. Everyone who attended today's show and registered for a show again email from me letting you know when it's ready to go ahead and watch. Here's the information out as I mentioned in a very social media with our mailing lists, Twitter, Instagram. We also have there's a link here you can see it a Facebook page for encompass live so we will promote it here as well. My now sit here and there here as well here's a reminder to log in today's show. We did our, this might have been what your daughter saw we did our little meet the presenters, we always do that as promoting the show. So, look here as well if you like to use Facebook it was like, otherwise we do use this a little abbreviated hashtag and come live everywhere else we try and post things about the show. And as I said I will add I don't have it on here yet, but I've got the page right over here, Delaware is creative aging program where that video is. So I'm going to add a link to this page from this page here. So when we, when you get the archive and everything that will be all available for you. So, thank you everybody for being here. Josh and or Wendy any last words before I totally wrap things up for today. I just want to extend a giant thank you to you Christa for making this happen, and to all the participants who joined us today thank you for your time, really appreciate it, and we have to hear from you. Awesome. Alright, so that'll wrap it up for today show. I'm going to go to our main encompass live page here we've got our upcoming shows for the next few months already filled in. So you can sign up for any of those. Next week, it will be pretty sweet tech day. The last Wednesday of every month is pretty sweet tech it's a session where Amanda sweet our technology Innovation Library and comes on and talks about something tech related. Our show is about techie things other times sometimes but you can always depend on the last Wednesday of the month, you're into tech at your library. This is the one show to attend, and she's going to talk about the most recent computers and libraries conference. That happened at the end of March last week in March, she attended and was there in Washington DC so I'm going to talk about some of the cool things she learned at this year's computers and libraries conference. Definitely sign up for that if you're interested and any of the other shows we have coming up on encompass live. Other than that that is it for today's show thank you everybody for being here. Good to see you and and Wendy and Josh, and we'll see you all on a future episode of this live. Bye bye. Thank you.