 Hi, I'm Karen Middleton from the Arts Council, and I'm very happy to be here to welcome you all. This is the session about Vermont's creative economy. And I've been here for a little under two years, and I've been traveling around the state of Vermont. I think last weekend I made it to East Arlington and Marlboro, and I've topped 80 towns and villages. And I have been kind of bowled over every work that I've visited in Vermont, every town, every village, by what you already know in this room, which is just how vibrant and healthy and strong Vermont's creative economy is. And at the same time, just how much untapped potential there is. In other words, that we need to figure out ways to give that creative economy a boost if it's going to remain healthy and strong. So let me give you a couple of numbers that I'll introduce today's panel. There's a pretty significant body of research telling us that the creative sector is a powerful economic driver. And particularly that in rural places like Vermont, it can be the key to rural economic prosperity. Across our state in 2015, you just look at arts and culture. Arts and culture alone contributed 3.2% of Vermont's GDP. That's about $960 million. And along with outdoor recreation and fall foliage, we also know that the arts drive tourism. Our nonprofit arts and culture sector leveraged $44 million in event related spending in that same year in 2015. Those are audiences who went to the theater, attended music festivals and other arts events. In a study that the Arts Council recently completed with just one region of Vermont, the Northeast Kingdom, the broader creative sector in the NK accounted for 9.4% of the jobs in that region. We're about to launch a statewide study. So I hope a year from now we'll be giving you an even equally or more impressive number for the creative economies impact on the economy of the entire state of Vermont. But what's clear from this, from about a decade of research is that at a time when our state is facing significant economic challenges, the creative sector might very well be, hold the key to some of those solutions. It can be a very powerful catalyst for change, particularly in rural places like Vermont. And in today's session, we're gonna be looking at what does that look like on the community level. When leaders mobilize behind the creative economy in their own communities, what does that look like? Bless you. When we mobilize to make the creative economy a catalyst for change. All of the three speakers today are individuals who have played a leadership role when it comes to advancing the creative economy in their own communities. And so our goal today is to share experiences and success stories, but also hopefully talk about some of the hurdles and the challenges. Kayleigh Galloway-Kane is here, the Executive Director of Wonder Arts, Vermont, which serves the communities of Craftsbury and Greensboro with a wide range of arts education programming. Katherine Levinsky is here, Executive Director of the Grassroots Arts and Community Effort, or GRACE, a hard work organization that builds and strengthens community through art-making experiences. And Mary Lacey, a visual artist living in Burlington, who paints large-scale murals that are both works of art and experiences in community building. Their full bios are in your program, so I'm not gonna read them aloud, but I've asked them to kick us off this morning by talking about themselves a bit and their own projects for about five minutes each, so we'll hear from each one of them, and then we'll circle back to a discussion where the panelists get to hear from each other and ask questions, and then, of course, we'll open it up and hear from all of you. So Kayleigh, would you start us off? Thanks. All right, thank you, Karen, and welcome, everyone. It's pronounced Kayleigh. It looks a little weird on paper. I respond to anything and everything. I like to say that my parents didn't make me out for public office, but here I am today, and I'm so happy to be here. I'm also really excited because Katherine and I actually grew up less than a mile away from each other in East Harvick. So, yeah, for rural America and cultural creativity. So I grew up in Harvick. I graduated from Hayden, which is our public high school, in 2007, and I went away. I went to Smith College and got a degree in art history because I didn't think that the studio arts would provide me with a career, and I don't know why I chose art history as an alternative. So I kind of traveled around New England and I realized why am I, why am I not in Vermont? I love my family, I love the mountains, and so I moved back to the area six years ago because I think, in particular, Northeast Kingdom is kind of the land of opportunity. There's just enough population where people will show up, usually, and there's not too much where you can't pitch different projects and try different things. So five years ago, I was offered a job as the executive director of the art house, which was a shock because I had very little experience. I had been an American member with Catamount, hi, Jody, and had really loved the arts and had always connected with arts nonprofits, but I didn't feel like I had, I felt like an imposter, like what Monique was talking about this morning, but I went for it because I love my community and I thought that I could bring all kinds of creative ideas and more than anything, really lift up other creative ideas. And that moment really built itself into what is now Wonder Arts, which is remarkable. We're an organization that serves Craspery, Greensville, and Hardwick, as Karen said, from everything from preschool programs to afterschool programs to almost all of the schools in our district to entrepreneurship programs for high school students, community events, classes, workshops for seniors, the list goes on, it's truly amazing. And our most recent project, which is what I wanted to talk about today, is Spark. And Spark, right here, is a creative incubator space slash coworking space slash maker space that we started when the art house just started merged with Wonder and Wisdom two years ago to form Wonder Arts. And during that process, we really asked ourselves a lot of deep questions. How are we serving our mission? How are we supporting the creative economy of the Northeast Kingdom? What does that look like? How are we measuring that? And so we really saw, okay, we're serving kids really, really well. We're serving older adults really, really well, but we're not actually serving my generation. We're making that promise to be serving all ages. So what would it look like if we were to start serving young people, if we were to start serving artists and entrepreneurs and creatives? We're trying to make it work, trying to make their side hustle, as we call it, into something that actually brought some economic development. So we pitched the idea to a lot of different funders. We wrote a grant to USDA and received a rural business development grant to buy equipment, which was really, really exciting. So over the past two years, we've purchased everything from a high quality, large format printer, which can do chiclet quality prints to large banners. We have 3D printers and laser cutters, IMAX, a lending library, which is free to members. The list goes on. We're in the basement of the church in Greensboro, which is also, that happens a lot in Vermont. We're using spaces that aren't really utilized. And we have 45 members to date. We've been open since January and we provide everything from classes to access to that equipment. We have HighSeed Internet, which is really amazing and that was something that the organization just decided to invest in because we knew it was important. We knew that the community needed it. And what we see from starting this project is that there are all kinds of different people who use it. And it really is the full spectrum of individuals and creatives who are, as I said, trying to make it work. We have retired artists who come and they're walking from senior housing in Greensboro to come make prints of pieces that they made when they were in their 30s. We have people who are just hobbyists and trying things out and they're taking photographs and they're laser cutting them and they're then teaching that skill to young people. We have inventors who have been working out of their garage for the past 30 years and they really wanna feel like they're a part of a community. So this project has really helped us start to see how we can be a hub, how we can be connecting individuals and also how we can be supporting creatives throughout the region. I don't know how I'm doing on time. Okay. So I particularly wanted to kind of speak to Spark today but then also speak to all the different creative things that are going on in the Northeast Kingdom. So I'm happy to be here. Thank you. And no worries, we'll have a lot more time this year from each of the panelists side of. Catherine, Lou, and Steve, it's nice to be here. Thank you. Oh, sure. Thanks. I'm gonna talk. So it's funny that Kaylee mentioned that we grew up right down the street because we did. And I actually have kind of a similar story. I graduated from Hazen, went to college and then took some time off discovering myself as most of us do in our early 20s. And then I ended up going to school and I got a master's in art therapy. And I was living down in Washington, D.C. and thought for sure I was gonna stay there. And then I came home after I finished my degree program and I was in Vermont for I think a week or two in August. And if anybody knows Washington, D.C., that time of year it's about 150 degrees with 175% humidity. And I was like, I'm out of there. So I made the decision to move back to Vermont as well, sort of around the same time, actually, I think. And I had several different positions. I worked in community mental health and private residential mental health. And then an opportunity came up at Grace Arts Grassroots Art and Community Effort. And it was really powerful for me because one of the reasons that I first became interested in art therapy was an experience through this organization with my grandmother. And so I have been the director there for four years, just about. And through that time, we have really kind of revamped the organization. We had to sort of evolve. If anybody is aware of Grace, it's been around for almost 45 years. So there's a lot of things that needed to change, a lot of things that were very inherent in the structure that we wanted to stay true to. But we also found that we were really missing a lot of opportunities in the community. And that we really felt like we had a responsibility almost to our community to meet needs of people that we really hadn't been meeting. So I wanted to share this promotional video that we just had done that sort of speaks, it's a little overview of our whole organization. And then I'll just touch on the one project that I wanted to talk about today. The project that I wanted to focus on today, we have a lot of relatively new initiatives. We just created a community mural project, which was very exciting. And we have a bunch of new programming. We're partnering with the Portable Housing and Lemuel County to offer family and senior housing workshops for free to the community in Lemuel County and Hardwick. But then one of the other initiatives that we're particularly excited about is called Explore. And all this information, the video is also on our website. So if you wanna go look at it after without the dubbing, hopefully, please do so. But Explore is actually an instructional arts program that we started in the spring of 2017. And it was kind of a big deal for Grace because as I mentioned, after four decades of being a specific type of organization, it can be challenging to really change your whole vision and focus. We actually ended up rewriting our mission statement because our mission was pretty narrowly focused on outsider or self-taught art. And that was something that by deciding to offer instructional educational art classes was really not in line with our previous mission statement. And what we had found is that there was a huge population in our community and surrounding communities that really wanted arts education opportunities and there was not a place for that. Wonder Arts was doing some of that work, so I shouldn't say. We kind of started at the same time. So all of a sudden, both our organizations, I think, were offering similar opportunities, which was really exciting for our communities. And so we started this project in spring of 2017 and we've been working to build it up and sort of evolving our organization to meet needs of community members in a way that we really hadn't been able to do anymore. Great. Yeah, I got the sound. It exists. I'm sorry if it's a little hard to hear. We'll just have to quiet it, but we'll check it out. Thanks, appreciate it. I'll stick that in the middle. All right, so if you want to like count us in, we'll just go like one, two, three, click or something like that. Sure. All right, rock and roll. Are you leading it? I can go. One, two, three, click. To create without judgment is very unusual in our society. I mean, it's very rewarding when you make something all while building new friendships and connections in the community. Everybody out there, it's really a good idea. Grassroots Art and Community Effort, known as Grace, is a small art stone profit in the Northeast Kingdom, providing quality art experiences to Northern Vermont for over 40 years. Grace is focused on empowering individuals through transformative art experiences, which lead to creative growth and self-discovery. Grace's contribution is really taking one on their own self-discovery of themselves through art. It's very common for people to go to a gallery and look at somebody else's paintings and not have the experience of mixing paint, getting something down and finding out how easy it is to do that if you just try. And then when you make something that you feel very good about, it just helps your self-esteem. It makes you want to get up in the morning and maybe go back and make something else. It enables people to create something of great value to themselves, the way they feel about themselves. I can think about a lot of consumers' artwork that is very telling of the journey that life has brought them on. We're here to support them, but it's their journey. Our traditional Grace workshops are the ones that have sustained the organization for decades. The workshops are led by professional artists who are available to support and also to discover alongside participants in their journeys. My program has contracted with Grace for the past decade. People with developmental disabilities want a typical life. They want to belong to their community and Grace provides that experience. Our Thursday afternoon classes report of people who are having a great time. There's a lot of communication, a lot of laughter, and you can see it's important. Recently, Grace has undergone an evolution to expand programming, services, and community outreach. In the spring of 2017, Grace launched Explore, a new program of instructional studio art classes in response to community requests. This program is exciting because it allows us to provide quality, educational arts programming for play artists and also bring people together in a learning and exploratory environment. You're sitting around with other people. You're kind of chit-chatting and there's a sense of a small community and you connect with people in a very important way and you're creating together. Just to get out and find out new things about yourself and delve a little deeper and, you know, get stuck down on paper, it's pretty darn amazing. Grace also partners with a number of arts and non-arts organizations to provide a variety of programming and also community outreach and most recently, public art initiatives. As you travel around, a lot of towns are doing public art now. What it tells me is that people care about where they live. Grace's mission is to, through the use of art, add value to various constituents in the community. We are offering free family workshops twice a month in several communities, on-site workshops for seniors living in affordable housing residences, community drop-in hours, open studio times, instructional classes, and the traditional workshops. Grace is focused on evolving to meet the needs of the community and we look forward to seeing you. So, like I said, it's just really an overview of sort of all of our programs and we have a lot of our traditional, grace workshops are non-instructional, what we call traditional, and the divergence really came when we did the instructional workshops, but we still offer all of them sort of together, so that's an overview of the organization. That's probably my time. So, thank you. What am I searching for? A few search, Vimeo, Bethel, Mary, Lacy. So, of course, organizations like Wonder Arts and Grace do their work in creative collaboration with artists. So, next we're gonna hear from Mary Lacy about her work. Here, go to her, Bethel. Yes. Great, got it. That was your fish that I saw on the way in. Yeah. Oh. Did you get the hummingbird? So, first of all, I'm a little nervous. I've like never been to a conference before, let alone spoken at home, so, yeah, nice. Yeah. I do work in public a lot though, but it's very different in talking. So, first I'm just gonna run through a couple photos of my murals to like familiarize myself. You guys with my work, and then I'll talk about my two main goals with my work. So, this is in Burlington, Vermont. This is in Greenwood, Mississippi. I went, I took the, and then you go to the last photo, sorry. That's my bucket truck. I'm actually in the process of selling it now, but five years ago, I bought that a week before I was doing the hummingbird, and they told me the budget wouldn't pass if I didn't provide my own lift. So, I did that. And I was able to, you know, work in use of my truck and went into the budget. But I drove that across the country in 2016 and 17 to nine cities, and spent a month in each place and partnered with on the ground arts organizations, or small businesses, much like Gracie Wonder Arts, to get access to a local community and keep going. These are all examples from that trip that last one was in New York City. This is in Chester, Pennsylvania. And then the last one I did, this is very brief, I'll regroup my work. The last one I did on that tour was here in Bethel, Vermont. So, that was really amazing to come home to Vermont after doing that work across the country and to like see a community here with a new lens. And also, I mean, just to partner with, I mean, I'm from a group in Jericho, Vermont, and now I live in Burlington. So, while Bethel, you know, is very familiar to me in the sense that it's a rural Vermont community, it was also very new to me. And I didn't know any of the people that I was, started to work with there. So, this one is in Chicago. I'll talk more about the Bethel intersection. This one is in Chicago that I did last summer, so I'm not part of the mural tour, but a very similar structure to it where I was working with a nonprofit or a foundation, this is a rebuild foundation. I was able to work with the artist, Fiasca Gates, I don't know if any of you are businessmen. But he was my hero, still is. And so, this one really speaks to one of my main goals with my art is building relationships. For this mural, it was a little different than a lot of mine. It was in a residential neighborhood, so there was usually, I'm like going for the biggest wall, you know, that can make the biggest statement with the most cars passing by or whatever. But this was in a very quiet spot. And it was really cool that it was really outside people's portraits of this mural next to their house. So, people were really curious about what was going on. And we, I borrowed some lawn chairs with you, and we're just like making an effort to pick up a six pack or have some chips around. And for three weeks, every single day, there was, you know, the same kind of contingency of 20 different people, but depending on the time or the day, different people at different time, that just like set up this hangout spot on the sidewalk. And it was supernatural, like it could be one-on-one with somebody or it could be like one person and then two more people would stop by and then somebody would just pull out their grill and we would barbecue. We had two barbecues right on the sidewalk there. There was like so many, we just started having like pads of paper just out on the ground and kids in the neighborhood just started painting. We made like such a mess on the sidewalk. And so there was all these neighbors that were literally next door, but hadn't met or hadn't really spent, you know, sincere time together. There was a couple new people to the block and they hadn't met anybody and so they really took advantage of that time. And those three weeks were just the most precious shared space. And so when you're thinking about like an economy and a creative economy, I mean, as you guys have all talked about the jobs that are available in the arts, I hate the term starving artist. I think it's self free enforces. I think people then can take advantage of an artist if they're like, oh, you're supposed to be starving, right? And also like, there is so much opportunity in the arts. So for parents who are scared their kids you know, go into the art or whatever, there's like, it's not just the artist, there's like the videographers and the photographers and the program directors and like the event planners. There's like this whole network around the artist. So there's just like millions of jobs in the arts. But also when you're thinking about economy, wealth and resource management, to think about it not in terms of money, but for wealth, but in terms of relationships, how strong are your relationships in your neighborhood or in terms of your resources, just like the people that are available right there and what they have and to really develop them and to develop a sense of curiosity with amongst people around those, you know, our own different wealth. So that's one of my main goals is building relationships. I used to be really insecure that my murals took so long, I thought that was a weakness. There's people that can show up and do a mural in a day, but I've learned that the length of time it takes to do a mural for me is actually a huge gift in relationship building. So I love that it takes me a month to do a mural. And I think that's what people have pride in that. So could you? Yeah, so now back to Bethel. Bethel is really my example for like my second main goal, which is place making. And, you know, if there's a lot of things that go into that term, place making, and one of the biggest things for me is creating a sense of imagination. So, you know, this place you wouldn't, you don't, I mean, I don't know if you guys saw this wall before the fish on it, but, you know, it was like pretty ugly. 600 foot wall, but didn't have much going for it. And it had a lot of, you know, erosion happening on it. It was structurally sound, which people didn't really believe, but three feet deep, the wall, so it's the surface that was really crumbling. So the state was like, yeah, that, you know, we're not actually, it's not high at our list because it's structurally sound. But the perception of Bethel and the video that was shown in the show actually talked to this from somebody from Bethel, you know, is that, you know, it's a rural town, maybe there's not that much going on there, but when you take advantage of a big wall, like that, there actually is a lot going on in Bethel. So one, that's not true. And two, but like that wasn't really a public perception of the place. And so to take advantage of this big public wall and to just throw something on there that could really change the perception as you pass by. So I think, and not only for outsiders, but for inside, for people in the town, you know, it's like to turn on your sense of imagination of what this wall could be, what we as a community could be, what we could accomplish here in our town. We did these four fish on that wall and we had about 150 people that got their hands on it at a certain time. This was more of like a, you know, we promoted an event and had 100 something people show up. And there was smaller sessions of that as well. We brought it to the summer camp at the school so the kids there were participating. Whereas the one that I just talked about, Chicago, felt like it was just this open space for three weeks entirely. So it was a little different. Couldn't really have people just showing up to that wall where the fish are because everything goes through there. But we did have about 10 volunteers that helped install it, which is... And then I can play the video from Bethel that'll tell us the story there. Yeah. Easy, we can just start in the beginning. I can get to it in time, Sam. Let's see how far you go. Forty. Forty one? One. Great, I'm there. One, two, three, click. Mia, that's been in our minds for quite a number of years. I chose to volunteer my time for this project because I was pretty committed to what I think this type of art and this type of energy and movement around Bethel can do for the town in the long run. Bethel was really hammered by a tropical storm I mean a few years ago and the White River showed its power. And in recent years, I think the community has realized they want to increase our connections to the river. A lot of people here are just willing to help each other out. They want to be part of something. They want to know their neighbors. I think even more, I see Vermont as a place where people just band together and get things done. When you go anywhere and lots turned around. Now this is a place where people have pride. People think anything's possible and bring all kinds of community ideas, creative ideas to the forefront and step up to say, I'll do it. You have oppression right when you're driving into town and many communities feel that way. So it's so powerful to see this project that will instantly bring life and beauty to it. I like working in the medium of wood but it's also, it's a constant puzzle and you're constantly problem solving and thinking through how to do it. There are hundreds of ways to approach the same exact problem. This particular project is exactly that. It was a big puzzle. You know, Mary did a huge portion of the puzzle and she figured out all the math and the geometric shapes but then we got to figure out how do we get this thing on the wall so it stays on the wall. We'll get transformational for Bethel. So many community development projects do years to do and they may not even be that visible when they're done but this is instantly going to bring life and quality to our ministry. And for a lot of years there hasn't really been a reason to stop. So we very much hope these art projects will make them think twice and change their perception to Bethel and we can stop and stay a while and maybe decide to stick with it. One something Mary just said about art as the creative economy and relationship building. Each at both of your projects at both Grace and Wonder Arts, I know that one of the hallmarks of your projects is that you brought really diverse members of your community together. Kaylee, I was in the basement of the church for one of your community meetings and at the break I talked to an inventor who was working out of his local garage, a high school student who had come with his mom because she told him there were cool things happening at Spark. A digital artist, a librarian and two painters and I think a musician who taught music at the local school. What's, this is not necessarily for you but for all of you, what's the ingredient in your project that you feel helped create those bridges and bring diverse people in your community together to see that they had a common goal. And that's for any of you. Can you start? One of the things that we really value is listening and also making all of our programs as accessible as possible. So that means all kinds of different things. That means in terms of how we get people to our space or to our programs, that's word of mouth, that's marketing in all kinds of different places. That's also showing up in spaces that we don't necessarily always reach through programs that they come to us for. That's really important that we're meeting the community where they are and also engaging in conversations that we know are gonna go in many different places. Spark in particular has been designed by a lot of community members. We have a Spark crew that started with almost 30 individuals with a list that Karen mentioned and more. Really with the purpose of developing a project that reflected the needs of the community. We know that our personal interpretation of that is not actually with the community needs. So we really wanted to build a project from the ground up and provide a space for those conversations. So that's sort of how we get people to the room. And we also really open questions for the way that we facilitate whenever we're having a community meeting or asking people for their thoughts, for their advice. We're not inserting our thoughts. We're really asking what's going on? How can we help you? If we can't help you, what are the challenges that you're facing? How can those be opportunities? We like to include as much student voices as we can as well and also thinking across sectors too. I think it's really easy sometimes to be solely focused on the creative world, but the creative economy includes farmers. It includes librarians to really try and make sure that everyone in the community feels like they can have a place on the table if they want it. I think one powerful thing that can get people going, showing up is momentum. And I think that art can be a big facilitator in that initial spark of momentum. I think that, I mean, a lot of places that I work and towns that I work in, there are a lot of, or when I'm pitching a project, there's a lot of excuses. Like, oh, well, it won't last forever out there on that wall or won't it just get tagged or what if people don't like it? There's just endless excuses. And I think is really the thing for getting that momentum is just the yes, like that first yes. And the risk that goes into that yes, there's people have taken big risks on me as an artist, and their time in their community. And so once, I think once there's like a, the movement of a yes. And that doesn't have to be from an artist that can be from a property owner who has a wall or a business that could help support it or anybody. It was the one in Bethel started just from a guy that he's like a contractor in the neighborhood. Well, actually it was, he was the first person I landed a conversation with and first shared the daydream with. And then he connected me with the Bethel Revitalization Initiative and where they had a network of volunteers. So just like taking the risk on that first yes is like. It's really kind of funny because we started our floor program, the instructional program, pretty shortly after the BCRD community visit to Hardwick. It was one of the things that came out of that visit was a lot of people feeling like there was a lack of the art education. And so we were a part of that and we really heard of that. And took a lot of what we heard and tried to create new programming to meet community needs. And we've also done a lot in the past four years to just be more present in the community. Grace, as you saw in the video, owns this historic firehouse building right in the center of town. But there's so many people that live in the community that had no idea that we were there or what it was or that it was even open. And so a lot of the work that we've done over the past few years is just going out into the community. We go to farmers markets and offer free art activities. We're a part of the downtown. They did First Fridays for a number of years where the First Fridays every month, people town have different events going on. So that's been one of the main things for us is instead of just expecting people to come to us and take the step to walk through the door on their own into this like unknown, because nobody knows what's in the historic firehouse that really going out and approaching people where they're more comfortable has been a really positive thing for us in terms of offering things to community members in their own comfortable spaces and then inviting them to come in and join us. And also it's been really positive for us with this program because we've been able to employ a number of artists and a lot of our artists are somewhat local to the area, but we also have people that live much further away that bring people that have a loyal people that find out more about our programming through this connection that they've made because they follow a specific Mosaic artist on Instagram and now they're seeing that she's doing a classic race and they say, oh my gosh, you guys have classes? So that's been a really positive thing for us as well in just terms of getting people to come and realize that we have new programming. And then they sort of realize that we have all this other programming as well. Great, thank you. All right, one more question for me and then I hope you all are taking up your questions and ideas. What is the biggest risk you've had to take to make your project? I'm gonna start since I'm the last. I'll just keep it on the roll. I think one of the biggest risks for us is something that I mentioned before, which is that Grace as an organization was started in 1975 and the founder was a very incredible man and he had a really pretty significant following of people and so there's a community of people, not just in Vermont, but actually nationally that know of Grace, know of work, know of significant artists and they know Grace as a specific entity, as an organization that has always fostered self-taught artists and we've never really gone into the realm of educational art, never done community art initiatives and it was always this very specific sort of box that Grace lived in, I like to think of it that way. And so in order to break out of that and in order to really evolve the organization, we really had to just trust that enough people would come along with us. That was one of the biggest conversations that we had at board meetings and community discussions, which was really, well, what if people were upset with you for doing something different? And so it was a huge risk and like I said, we ended up reworking our mission statement and it was one of several new initiatives so I think that there was enough interest in the new activities, there was enough recognition that the community really needed this change and that Grace as an organization needed the change that so far so good. There hasn't really been any major dissent, I don't think. But I think that it was a big risk, it was sort of this precipice when we talked about it and we formulated the ideas and then finally we got to a place where we launched it and it's been a really positive change but it sort of speaks to the idea that change is scary and it would have been easy for us to not do that. It would have been a lot less scary to just stay in the box of what Grace had always done and what we'd always been and we decided to break out of it so positive, I think so. I would say that by buying a rocket truck, risk. One of the biggest risks that continues to show in most projects is just the act of making something in a public space. So the, for example, the Hummingbird mural, I started that on the first day of the farmer's market of 2015 and so there was thousands of people right there, it's right next to the farmer's market and it was the first time I had done a mural that was off the ground where I couldn't, like nothing, my feet were not on the ground so I was learning, it was the first one with my truck so I realized that I couldn't measure, I'm 20 feet up in the air and I can't measure 20 feet to the edge of the wall because your tape measure snaps and so people are like taking pictures of me and there's thousands of people around and I just have no idea what I'm doing and I spent the whole entire first day just faking measurements, I can't. I'm pretending to write and sing, sing and make things happen. And then I went home and had to Google search, like how do you paint a mural? I thought I'd been a muralist for two years or whatever and so I learned that you can make a grid. It's like a different way of going about it than I had done because then you can measure just within your own eight foot by eight foot square. So the act of doing something that you don't know how you're gonna totally accomplish it but in a space where there's just commentators constantly, like I get a lot of people coming up and giving their two cents about the design or about what materials I'm using. And so there's so much room to fail in that space too in the public, I'd say that was really scary and just opening yourself up to opinions like that is really hard but it is also really cool to see people at the beginning, the skeptics get converted. One thing I was gonna say in the last one but I forgot was that the people who doubted projects at the beginning have often come up at the end and been like, actually I have a wall over here that would you consider doing something? They were so uninterested in the beginning but with that moment. I would say it's Spark as a project was a huge risk for our organization. Greensboro is a town of 700, according to the last U.S. Census and most like co-working creative incubator spaces are in places where people live within walking distance of some sort of downtown. Greensboro has Willys which is awesome but beyond that there's not a lot. So it took us a long time to really figure out how are we gonna do this? How are we gonna do this in a way that gets the community excited but also sets us up for being able to see what fails and fix it rather than just banking on one thing and writing it until it ends. So we had a almost a year long beta phase which really helped our project. So we had a bunch of people volunteer to leave classes. We tried open hours at different times. We had some equipment. We tested out service models and you're very clear that my friend Paul Gamble uses this great phrase which is forgive the ambiguity period. We were in the ambiguity period and we wanted to be because we wanted to figure out what actually the community needed. We had some ideas from Spark Crew and volunteers but we didn't know like absolutely everything and how the project would shake out. So that beta phase was really, really important for our project. We got a lot of data. We figured out what worked and what didn't. We were still able to be really flexible. That also is huge in the risk-taking. If a class doesn't work, it's okay. We see that failure as an opportunity to try something different, to try a different time, to figure out why. So we're constantly asking ourselves what's working and what's not working and constantly kind of adapting to the ever-changing needs of our members. Thank you. Okay, that's a terrific set of ingredients for community leadership right there. What else would you all like to hear about? Questions? Yes? I have a question for you and for Mary. So having been a person who interviewed the old, ancient, modernist way back, and I saw that she's still on the website, I was just curious, and organizations have to grow to sustain themselves, obviously. I'm just curious what place that outsider are if it does still has with your organization? Yeah, absolutely. So all of our traditional workshops follow the same model that was the original model that Don Sincere started in the 70s. So that includes the Thursday workshop which was featured in the video, all the people playing music in the firehouse. The affordable housing workshops and the family workshops also follow that model. So none of those are instructional. Those aren't very much self-directed. Each workshop is two hours. Participants are free to come and go. The affordable housing workshops are paid for by grants and donations, so the family workshops are free. We also still have a pretty significant gallery and exhibition program. We have a gallery in Grace, and then we have shows around the state and also outside of the state. We had, most recently, last year or the year before, we had a show of retrospective show of Grace Artist at the Amy Terran Gallery at Glyn Center and Vermont Folklife Center. So we still promote the artist of the history of Grace. It's a huge part of who we are and where we've come from and we still have a huge part of our programming, is that same sort of self-exploratory workshop model where there's no instruction, there's no lesson plan. So we still are very true to the outsider art piece or the self-taught art. And so the new program that I talked about here, the Explore Program, is really in addition to. So that was one of the things that we wanted to make sure that we did not just reinvent the organization so much that we really went away from what Grace has always been and what's made it a really important staple in the community, but really, and why we took so long to launch the program was really we wanted to make sure that it didn't take away from the Grace model that had always been there and who we were really, but that it just was able to add to the community and offer something different because the people that come to the instructional classes, most of them aren't the same, it's not the same population that accesses the other programming that we have. And we've also, we've gotten grant funding to be able to offer just open studios and community hours and community drop-ins. So we really tried to just expand the programming that we have instead of taking anything away from the traditional sort of roots of what Grace has been. Well, who are you looking to interview in the hard scene video? Yeah, we were, I mean, that's why I would talk about it being such a big risk because it really, it was, it was sort of a situation where if we went too far away from what Grace had been and that was partly also what was really scary about changing our mission statement because the previous mission statement really just spoke to self-taught art, but we wanted to be more inclusive because we realized that we were actually by only focusing on one small population, we were really excluding a lot of other people which we didn't want to do that. So our goal was really to be more inclusive and have something to offer to more community members at large. And my question for Mary is, well, first, thank you for the fish. My son's in college in New York and we never like to get in there. Mostly is by bus or by car and sometimes we have to take in there. So after five hours of driving back to either Montpelier or Waterbury, when I get to Bethel and the fish, I'm like, I know I'm in the zone because I'm almost there. So I'm always thankful to see the fish. But I'm just curious like about your process of doing some of these projects. Are you getting grants and then going to a community or are you going to a community and finding a funding? And that's a huge question, but just like a little peek into it. It's different, every single project is different. I have gotten a few grants. I got one from the, we got the, for the Bethel, it was from the Rant Arts Council, the Animating Infrastructure Grant. I was one of three artists that were granted that. And then with BCA, Brunsett City Arts, I've gotten two community grants. Those are $3,000 grants that are offered every year to 10 people. And a couple other grants. I also bridge a lot into my commercial connections. So the mural tour that I did across the country was sponsored by Benjamin Horne. And I met them through Vermont Paint Company, which is a local paint store and they sell Benjamin Horne paint. And so through them, I made the corporate connection. And I maintained control over, they covered the costs of the whole tour. So the maintenance on my truck, the gas, my food, you know, I did not receive a surplus of money. I chose to maintain more authenticity around where I went, who I worked with and what I painted. They had no control over that at all. And then they paid to get videos made that my friend made them and I owned them, but they licensed three years' use of it. So the ones that I did across the country were sponsored in that way. And I also have relationships with dealer.com in Burlington. They've just changed a little bit of their corporate social responsibility structure within their company, but for a while they had a, I mean it's still strong, but it's a little different. So in Burlington, they're a big sponsor of projects, of art projects, you know, in that area. So bridging businesses into it. Other questions? Yes. I have a question about, first of all, thank you all for what you do. I mean, it's very moving to see your work and to hear your stories. And it's very much appreciative, appreciator. My question is more about how do you feel the state, the Vermont tourism and marketing supports the promotion of the arts? And if so, in what way, and if not, how can the state improve its outreach to gather people to Vermont for this kind of economy? I can get frustrated with really Vermont-y art. People think there's like a, that Vermont art needs to be cows and fields. And I really, and they have a vision of who it is already that is the artist too. And I will, I get rid of, yeah, I would love for there to be more promotion and support of artists that don't really fit that mold of Vermont-y art. And that I think there could be spark more, like a totally different, just like a different taste from a different artist can spark more curiosity than something that fits the love landscape art. But I just, yeah, I think that's a challenge that I put out to Vermont in general. Yeah, I would just add, I think the state could do, the state does a lot in terms of advertising for recreation and food and ag. I think the creative economy, which had a lot of work in the Northeast Kingdom around how all three, recreation, ag, and creativity all intersect and help lift all three. Because as we know, creativity is ingrained in all of those, whether it's through graphic design or entertainment. And so it seems like the arts have a lot of space to grow in an arena and to be recognized in a different way. And I think the arts council has done a great job in highlighting different artists that are all throughout the state. I think that the agency on tourism could do the same. There are other states, the state could celebrate all the diversity and all the different kinds of creativity that we have. And there are a lot of different ideas, there are a lot of people working on that, which is really exciting. I know in the Northeast Kingdom, we have an organization called the NEK Collaborative, which has really convened a lot of leaders from cross sectors to really figure out how do we market what's happening in the Northeast Kingdom, how do we market it in an authentic way that really shows what's happening in the ground and also what's happening regionally. So I think there's just, there's a lot of work that needs to be done. I don't know if that answers your question. I don't feel necessarily like the state is, I think that there's not, there's so much opportunity, we have so much creativity that could be sourced to help come up with some creative solutions for that. I pretty much agree with Dan. I was gonna say something similar, so. I will reiterate. And I will put a plug in for a series of e-newsletters called I Am A Vermont Artist. If you go to the Vermont Arts Council website, or if you just Google I Am A Vermont Artist, I think you'll be pleasantly surprised at the really diverse range of Vermont artists that are being featured there. And I agree, a lot more work needs to be done. Other questions, yes. Aren't they also doing like a series on public art in all of the towns? The Arts Council? Yeah. So if you'd like, if you have art in your town that you would like more attention to, there's a hashtag VTR 251, post on social media using that hashtag, we will repost it. And we are actually sharing the VTR 251 stories that come up with the Department of Tourism and Marketing in the hopes that that'll incorporate some of those stories on their website. So yes, help us to surface the stories of art and creativity in your town. Can you repeat that hashtag? It's VTRs 251. Like the 251 block. Yeah. Other questions for our panel? Yes. So back to your statement about people kind of saying, oh, they're going to tag this artwork, they're going to destroy it, what should we draw there? Because I'm running into a lot of that with art group. People saying that? Or it actually happening? Well, people saying it. So they're not willing to pie in completely because they're concerned something might happen to it. So why would we want to do that? We should say it destroyed. And there's a lot of sculptures and murals around here that are fine. But how do you go about talking to them, how do you know if you have a process that they're not as worried about? Often a mural doesn't get tagged. It's the things that don't have murals that do. It's when there's something often offensive about a mural that someone could use that means of tagging it to show a sense of, you know, the mural in Burlington being a big one. You guys are aware of that. So while I am a fan of graffiti, I often will use that in a diplomatic way of telling somebody who is scared of it that often a mural is a way of preventing it in the first place. But also public art is out in public. Like that is its place. And so it's never, like it's gonna weather, you know? There's like, it's things change. I think that, I mean, you just can't expect anything to be permanent that's out there. And so to even try to sell that thing of this could be permanent is like shooting yourself in the foot because, but it's, I think it's like a, there's beauty to that that it is about change, that you are ushering in change when you're doing this thing that will just like go forward. You know, the next thing can come and you don't know who you're gonna inspire with that. And like I said, usually at the end of a lot of the ones I did across the country in rural towns and in Bethel, didn't, you know, the first mural of the big public piece like that. And at the end, I, almost every single town had some other property owner coming up to me asking if we could do another one. So it's a catalyst, really. And so to, I think to like, to talk about it in that way, not about, I'm trying to make this one permanent piece. Can I add some mural quick too? Because we actually just completed a mural project as well. And I think that there's a couple practical applications. There's actually a varnish that you can put on that makes it graffiti proof, which I'm sure you know about. So that was an option. And then there's other, one of the things that we found that was super helpful and you did this in Bethel too, was getting as much community buy-in as possible. The mural project that we had, we started the process, I think probably two or two and a half years before we even started actually painting anything. We went to a couple of different two town meetings in a row. We pulled people, we asked for opinions on what they wanted to see, what was important in the community. We had community paint days. So I think getting as many people involved in the whole process really gives people a feeling of sort of mutual ownership over it. If it's in their town and they're sort of part of the process, I think it really helps people to feel invested in protecting it as much as anyone else. And also definitely about you can't make any promises really, you know, something could have happened. But that's the beauty of art in public. That's part of that. We have time for one more question. So just a quick comment for the question. Just when you have those barriers, it's really find out what they are and then find an answer for each one. We did the same thing we had the anti-recruiting covering that we put on the new mural that is on Storm Street in Barrie. So that alleviated one of the concerns. The other one was the safety of the wall. So as long as the city had been keeping it, the wall was gonna be safe. That alleviated the other concern. The other was using taxpayer dollars to make the mural when we have other items that are really concerning. On the project in Barrie, it was actually due to the very early, so it was all going to your hours and all donations that came from it to me. So it did create more of that, we'll be seeing this from a community that would support a project like that. The one question though is, in the projects that you worked on, what was the leading organization or point person? So in your projects, if you're doing the mural, are you the one that's going out and gaining the volume of peers and writing the grants, or is there another organization that's doing that? It depends on the project. Everyone's different. The series that I keep referring to, like the mural tour, one that finished in Bethel, I partnered in every town and city with, and that was also to my, you know, I'm an outsider going to a new place, so to get local engagement, I really had to have allies in that way, but it also was a way of, I mean, getting volunteers and grant applications and everything, but I also do that on my own at different jobs too. For us, I would say that usually we're the lead organization in a public art project specifically. Or we're a strong partner. So sometimes a town will really want something like a sign project. For example, the VCRD process in Craftsbury, one of the things that came out of it was really wanting to talk about ways that we can shift transportation and breakfast driving and some of the strategies were, why don't we make a sincere part project that could be around transportation. So we worked heavily with the town, but we ended up being the kind of fiscal agent for that project, so we received the grants, they worked with the town to make sure that those happened. So really usually we're the lead organization, but sometimes we're just in direct partnership with another organization. For our mural project, we actually had a community member, so the wallet it's featured on is right, as you come into town from like the St. John's for a Dandel area, and there's a community member who lives in East Hardwick, he was featured in the video, and he actually approached us about it, and he came in one day and he said, I just hate that wall, it's so ugly, I don't know where to start, how to do it, but would you guys wanna work with me to try to do that? And we were like, yeah, that sounds great. So that sort of started the ball rolling relatively slowly at the beginning, like I mentioned. And so that process, we started by going into the community and getting people interested, getting input, and then Grace sort of took it on as a project, but it was really initiated by the community actually, which is really powerful, I think, of somebody coming in and saying, like we want something to change, can you help us? And so the wall is actually owned by the town, and we finally get the town to help us power watch the wall, and there's always logistical issues, the plow scrapes at the bottom, so we put it on panels up above the wall. I think that there's always a solution, but it's sort of a common theme of you just kind of have to keep going. But definitely, I think having the nonprofit piece, Grace definitely took it on as a project. I did the grant writing, and then through one of the processes of processes of community engagement, we actually had two mural artists that we paid to create designs that would have a town vote on them. So our process is very different in that we knew that we wanted to do this project, and then we went out and asked for people to submit ideas and then through one from there.