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Read this thoughtful piece on arts and culture nonprofits by Jamie (Schumacher) Kalakaru-Mava. Without arts and culture nonprofits, what would arts access look like? What would our conversations look like? And our relationships?

View profile for Jamie (Schumacher) Kalakaru-Mava, graphic

art + culture + community + comedy

Wrote an opinion piece for last weekend’s Star Tribune on the state of arts and culture nonprofits in Minnesota: A healthy garden of relationships can broaden our perspective, deepen our program work and make a skilled, well-rounded team possible. But those activities that make the relationship side of the work accessible for regular folk are hard to quantify, tricky to fund and harder to make ‘sustainable’ year to year. The creative nonprofits of Minnesota house much of this activity. Measures in annual reports quantify things like the number of performances staged or the number of shows exhibited, but how do we quantify the relational aspect of all that programming? There’s no space on the 990 to track who ran into each other in the lobby and decided to grab a coffee. Though we don’t track it, there is value in those in-between spaces. The beauty of relational work is not unlike the aurora borealis many of us spent the past weekend chasing. We sought to capture in image form the spectacle of light raining over, down and around us. Was the miracle captured in the Instagrammable photo, or was it the moment that stitched us together for a needle in time? And still, we chased northern lights even as our own duly named overnight arts festival - Northern Spark - poetically drew its activity to a close. We are ever hungry for those ephemeral acts of spontaneous beauty.

OPINION EXCHANGE | It's not funny: The disheartening state of creative and cultural nonprofits in Minnesota

OPINION EXCHANGE | It's not funny: The disheartening state of creative and cultural nonprofits in Minnesota

startribune.com

Jamie (Schumacher) Kalakaru-Mava

art + culture + community + comedy

5mo

Thank you for sharing ❤️❤️❤️

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