 I'm delighted to be up here as we begin to draw to the close of our amazing few days together. To do something that's always a really special highlight of the CCAC conference, which is to celebrate the work that's happening in our region, not only through all the workshops and sharing and networking that we've been engaging in over the past few days. To highlight a couple of projects with some Creative Economy awards. So it's our distinct pleasure today we're going to recognize two exemplary organizations and one exemplary Creative Economy project with our awards and each of the award recipients will receive a $2,500 cash award. These highlights from our region are chosen for their clear community development strategies and outcomes, the deep collaboration that they entail, and their innovative use of local assets. And all of them are models for all of us invested in New England's Creative Economy. We're going to be giving one award to a hard-working organization that has built upon its educational roots to become a community and economic driver. One award to an organization that has been steadily galvanizing and championing a crucial voice for the arts within their city government for many years. And one award for a timely and vital effort to raise neighborhood voices and connect generations in the face of gentrification. We're proud to have them all in our region and want to celebrate their successes to date and encourage them to continue and hold them up as examples. So to give our first award, I'd like to invite Todd Trevore from the Rhode Island State Council on the Arts to present. Thank you Kathy. Here on behalf of Randy Rosenbaum, the executive director of the Rhode Island State Council on the Arts, he unfortunately could not be here today and senses love and regard. I am very, I put my chapter wrong. I'm very excited to present this first award to an organization from Rhode Island, the Steel Yard. This award is not for a single project or initiative, but to recognize the exceptional leadership and cumulative work of the organization on behalf of Providence and Rhode Island's Creative Economy. The Steel Yard was founded in 2001 as an industrial arts center in the outskirts of Providence. Today it has grown into a 3.8 acre campus that includes a craft school, a manufacturing studio, and a community venue that is outdoors. As you heard, you attended their workshop here at CCX. They don't just draw people to their own place where individuals, communities, neighbors, businesses, municipalities and institutions experienced to create a process. They also bring their inclusive design and public art process to other communities, training local artists and championing fair pay for creative work. It says on their website, and we agree, the Steel Yard has grown to be more than an arts organization. Their mission attracts community members to the site every day using it day and night as a hub for learning, working, and economic development to earn a living, place votes in local elections, and utilize their open green space, cultural events, and so much more. They are a quintessential example of the community pride and economic impact that results when hardworking artists bring people together to learn and craft beautiful objects. I would like to now invite Tim Berlin and Jenny Farks from the Public Project Department of the States to accept this state of Hollywood. To the Steel Yard, now I would like to introduce Karen Middelman, Executive Director of the Vermont Arts Council, who will present our next award. I just mentioned, Nifa's giving a second Organizational Leadership Award this year. This is not for a single initiative or a single project, but instead it recognizes the exceptional leadership and the cumulative work of an organization that has worked step-fastly on behalf of Vermont and Burlington's Creative Economy. I'm delighted to present this award to Burlington City Arts. You remember that BCA was first established in 1981 by then Mayor Bernie Sanders as the all-volunteer Mayor's Arts Council. Burlington City Arts, as it's now known, or BCA, has evolved from a tiny scrappy festival organizer into a crucial city department that keeps the arts at the heart and the center of Burlington's life. BCA has done it all when it comes to arts-based community development. One of the first departments in the nation to be designated as a cultural planner, they integrate the arts into planning for economic development, education, and urban design. They have renovated and managed city facilities, including Memorial Auditorium and the Firehouse, now or BCA's house. They still produce and partner on events large and small, but also manage a wide range of stunning exhibitions, groundbreaking educational programs, calls for artists, art sales, and other artist resources. And that says nothing of the way that they've elevated the public presence for the arts everywhere in Burlington and beyond through street festivals, concerts, and wonderful events like the Discover Jazz Festival happening right now. And of course, I can't describe the impact of BCA without giving credit to Doreen Kraft, who was the first part-time paid staff person in Mayor Bernie Sanders' office all those years ago, and now leads a staff of 18 and a non-profit foundation that helps raise money for the municipal entity to do its work. Doreen is a tireless champion for the arts. And Doreen, we've been talking a lot over the past few days about what our special powers are. Your superpower is definitely collaboration and partnership that's so vital to keeping the arts alive in Burlington and all across Vermont. Congratulations. I would like to invite Doreen and Sarah Katz, assistant director to the stage to accept this award. Congratulations to Burlington City Arts. Now we're going to give out our project award to a newer but impactful initiative in Massachusetts. And I'd like to introduce Luis Coto, Cultural District's program manager at the Massachusetts Cultural Council to present this year's project award. Yesterday I had on my community collaborator hat founder, so today I'm super proud to be representing the Mass Cultural Council, hence the collar. I'm super psyched to be presenting this next project award to an incredible organization that I've also worked with. And he's lost in Zoomics. This is our project, Constellacion de Historias. Constellacion de Historias was born out of a need to gather community voices around a crucial issue, gentrification in East Boston. Constellacion de Historias used the Zoomics radio platform in partnerships with local advocacy groups and youth journalists to produce radio stories and events that gave a voice to local citizens during the city of Boston's comprehensive planning process for East Boston. Project elements included an audio challenge to teach teams of youth and adults the elements of an audio story, a block party to share the collective stories through art installations, a sound block that mapped these stories around crucial spaces undergoing change, and a story loft of live storytelling performance and z-making. All live broadcasts in Spanish on the Zoomics radio. Constellacion de Historias is more than a storytelling project about the community's past. It is an effort to impart the existing community and strategy with youths in order to reflect with inevitable change. Connecting citizens to a city planning process and galvanizing them around creative activity might not prevent electrification, but reinforcing the importance of free speech and intergenerational story-gathering is sure to have a positive, possibly mitigating effect. I'd like to invite Brittany Thomas, director of paid media and technology at the NEDongo Radio Station Manager at Zoomics on the stage to accept this award for Constellacion de Historias. Congratulations to all of the amazing award recipients. If you did not get the opportunity to attend the workshops of these recipients, you will be able to see video of their workshops courtesy of the staff at Onion River Community Access and NIFA will be sure to share the video links in our follow-up and on our social media in the weeks to come. This is my last turn at the podium, so I am both going to reintroduce Dee, but I also just want to personally thank everyone for being here and it's been such a wonderful opportunity to hear from all of you who shared your projects and your workshops with us. I am so inspired, but we still have more and to tell us about more and next is Dee Schneidman. Thank you Kathy, and yes, an additional private congratulations from me, the award recipients. I don't get to give out grants that NIFA regularly. That is unusual. The vast majority of our staff give out grants. That's, you know, we run a lot of grant programs, so this is my opportunity to give out cash. Thank you. So, we are transitioning to a little early, but that's cool because we're all here and we want to get up on this beautiful day and enjoy Montpelier and Vermont. So I'm starting to transition us into our final special session together. We wanted to have kind of an arc of activities that we all share together as we mentioned around the value of inclusive creative communities. And obviously, a really important reason for us all gathering together at a peer exchange is that we all have so much to exchange. We are resources for each other. So we've sort of entitled this final session, reimagining resources round up because I like alliteration. And you probably noticed the names of the special sessions all have some alliteration. So to kind of kick us off and start off with some resources that are in this room, but came from maybe further than New England. We have some friends from some national organizations who are going to give you a couple minutes of some important resources that you should know about why and how you can make use of them. And our first resource of many is Axel from PolicyLink. Good evening everybody, can you hear me? My name is Axel Santana, coming to you from Oakland, California. I'm pretty sure I traveled far this, so I should get an award for that. Yeah, so I'm here representing PolicyLink based out of Oakland, California. PolicyLink is a national research and action institute advancing racial and economic equity by looking at what works. As a part of our arts and culture and equitable development work, we've developed a tool called Building a Cultural Equity Plan. Through this primary, the online tool, we have adapted a form of planning that explicitly focuses on cultural equity as a dynamic regular practice, hoping to inspire a wave of cultural equity plans. This tool provides guidance and resources for agencies and communities who would like to complete a plan that is dedicated to accomplishing cultural equity in their neighborhood, city, county, or region. By pointing to equity-focused approaches of cities engaging in this practice, it serves to promote equitable development through arts and culture. For those of you wondering what even it is cultural equity, to us, cultural equity explicitly values the unique and collective cultures of diverse communities and supports their existence in physical spaces in public and policies and investments and in their expressions within civic and spiritual life. A cultural equity plan values interculturality, the recognition and support of diverse and distinct cultures and the bridging and sharing of those cultures to build an interconnected communities, towns, and cities. It explicitly addresses legacies of structural racial discrimination and remedying of institutionalized norms that have systematically disadvantaged categories of people based on identity. Cultural equity reverses economic disinvestment to ensure healthy and living and thriving communities where people feel a sense of belonging. So with that frame in mind, some opportunities for policies in the arts and culture sector to deliver on equitable development include investing in artists of culture and artists of color and cultural organizations serving communities of color and realigning public arts and culture investments for racial equity. Also creating strong alignment between investments by public arts and culture agencies and demographic share of the populations as well as creating collaborations between artists and culture agencies and commissions and other key sectors to co-design, invest, and deliver on equitable development. So the tool we've developed includes some helpful considerations when planning for cultural equity as well as links to valuable resources and examples of promising practices. Again, the goal is to help communities think about how to utilize their existing assets to improve the lives of all residents regardless of race, ethnicity, customs, gender identity, sexual orientation, age, religion, disability, and socioeconomic or citizenship status. Key sections of this tool include resources for cultural asset mapping, tips and tools for incorporating disaggregated data, and considerations for aligning policies to achieve cultural equity goals. The City of Oakland's cultural plan is a great example of equity-focused planning, and it was adopted in July of 2018. A notable part of this plan was to build the infrastructure needed to achieve cultural equity, which included the reanimation of a cultural affairs commission focused on the vision of cultural equity. As part of the implementation process, the city has hired a handful of artists, fellows, from within the community to work directly with various departments to integrate creative strategies in their work. Our tool includes references and links to the Oakland plan and others like it from across the country. Although the most useful time to use this tool would be at the outset of your town, city, or community's cultural or comprehensive planning processes, it can also be useful in evaluating an existing plan and its effectiveness. So the earlier you start considering equity implications in your work, the better the outcomes will be for all residents of your community. So if you think your community could benefit from a cultural equity planning process, please visit plcylk.org slash cultural equity and or come up to me after this, and I can provide you with a palm card with more information. So thank you, and I look forward to connecting, and up next we have Mara Brown from Art Place. How's everyone doing? Going? I'm just coffee. We'll see you running for the coffee after this. So is Mara coffee? I'm here representing Art Plates America. How many folks are familiar with Art Place? Yeah. Okay, awesome. So then you probably already know that Art Place is a 10-year, thunder collaborative. We really care about creative place making, and we define that in a few ways. A meaningful definition has been artists as allies and equitable community development. In our mandate many years ago, we were tasked with this activity called field building. One of the ways that we have done that is through knowledge, right, and network weaving. My wonderful colleague Jamie Hand is our director of research strategies, and she's the one who has all the tools that you all, I think maybe have used in our goal to your tools that will be useful to you in the coming years that Art Place is here. I wanted to say a little bit about what those field scans are. That's the tool that I'm sharing with you all today. So we think about arts and equitable community development in a sector sort of way. Many of you have probably seen this matrix on the Art Plates website. So what we've been doing is gathering people at the intersection of these matrices. So what does arts do for food and agricultural systems? What does arts do for public safety? What can arts do for the environment? All of us in this room know that there's a lot that we can do in all of those sectors. What these field scans do is help us translate when we're partnering right across sectors. So on our website, if you go to, I don't have it memorized away. But we can go to artplaceamerica.org, we have a research strategy section, and a whole suite of all the field scans that exist right now. Again, those field scans are about art and these other sectors of community development. Most recently, we launched a field scan around food and agricultural systems. The Town and Family Farm, they're still here. We're a part of that work. Shout out to the Town and Family Farm for a month. And there you can read things that say you were trying to partner with folks in your region. That field scan would give you five or six outcomes, right, that you could go to your city officials, for example, and maybe you don't get that arts and food and agrar thing. You could say, well, look, here's the scan that artplates made in collaboration with all these great folks. And here are five things that we could do together. Another quick flood that artplates launched recently in collaboration with policy links. I only have one of these because I don't always have my app together. But the website always has this app together. Communitydevelopment.art is this really rad new website that categorizes a lot of the projects that we know are beautiful and important and are throwing our communities in beautiful ways. It's a repository of stories. It's a repository for documentation beyond stories. It's a repository of data as well. So I certainly encourage you to visit communitydevelopment.art to see some of those stories. And that's the first one was artplacemarca.org and our research strategies, Portfolio, our various field scans with a particular plug to the food and agricultural field scan. And I'm going to introduce a beautiful, wonderful, Sonya Whitman, Whitman from National Arts Archies. How's everybody doing? And more mentioned, my name is Sunny. I'm director at National Arts Strategies, and we are a national and international organization. And we support creative leaders who are changing the status quo in their careers, companies, and communities. And we do that through programs and through creating networks. So we have a program here in New England called Creative Community Fellows, which some of you may have heard of. We even have some creative community fellows in the room, I believe. You know what you're doing? But actually what I'm going to talk to you about is the resources that we have that are free and on demand and immediately available and applicable to your work. So the one I want to highlight is our Arts and Strategy Coursera course. So it's available on Coursera.com. Does everybody know about Coursera? We're the online educational resources. And it's also available on our website artsstrategies.org. So Arts and Culture Strategy, the course, it's something that you can do at 2 a.m. in the past. If that's the only time that you have available, that's true for me. And it's a course that is great for anybody who's starting up a project or someone who's in the middle, who's been running an organization for 10 years and wants to do some really fresh on how you are coping and powerful and describing the value that your work creates for your community and giving you frameworks that you can do to create a shared understanding of your partners on what the objectives and the steps towards achieving those objectives are in the partnership. I heard a lot of us talking about that yesterday. Tools for achieving great partnerships are definitely in demand. So this course is offered in collaboration with University of Pennsylvania. So I encourage everybody to go check it out. Great. That's all I have to say.