15
JF: That makes me think about stuff
so you’re trying to identify into which community you want to go into, so how long is that process? You guys invest a lot. So I say to my community how does that come about in an organization likes yours where you are putting artists as the main thing?
LM: Right right, so we’re only 4 years
in so i say we’re still figuring that out honestly and so what we did for the first time on 3 years, so the program I’m running has been around for almost 20 years so we have about 350 people in the region that have been through the program and that are doing work actively in the region and so we are able to identify critical massive graduates of the program, people who are living or working or otherwise heavily invested in our neighborhoods and have been through our programs so they knew what it was about and they were great resources to reach out to, to say is this relevant and to make connections and to make decision with the community. The process was a lot faster in those neighborhoods and it’s only now we sort off done the loafing through. And it also was a good partner for us to start testing this model and get some feedback if this is really working and what works and what needs to be changed. So now we’re looking at the other neighborhoods that we don’t have that critical mass in and so uh this year what we did we actually changed the way that we run the place based institute, this neighborhood based institute rather than having one neighborhood with 16 people from it we were recognizing that we did not
yet have the relationships built in other neighborhoods to really make a decision if this is right? to do a deep dive in this neighborhood. So we identified 4 neighborhoods that had come up through sourcing our alumni and the relationships we had and by 4 people from each of those neighborhoods to come in. We did a hybridized version where we have this regional model so we did like place space theme within 4 places so it could be a regional focus and through that we are getting some feedback from them on how it’s all working and would this be relevant in your neighborhood and like could we come there in the future and so now we would have people there that would help us within and so it’s like a multi-step process for us getting it to that and even beyond that, years of the conversationing.
JF: It’s interesting because your model is very specific in St. Louis and is a national model. So I’m wondering, you talk about what specific obstacles with each one of you would maybe overlap, I’m not sure but maybe mentioning the obstacle we’ll find out similarities.
LP: I think every community is
different and every community has similar issues so I think that’s kind of an obstacle that sometimes goes back to the question of government. Maria Rosario Jackson is part of a senior advisor of arts and culture and did a lot of research for the urban institute 15 years ago. She talks about the time it takes to do the work and kind of touching on in a little bit but one my frustrations being the government