Practice English Speaking&Listening with: Springboard for the Arts receives Nonprofit Excellence Award
[music and poetry]
Natalie: My work is about my experience as a queer person.
It’s about gender and sexuality; love and romance. A lot of the work deals with power.
Ta-coumba: I’m a public artist and I’m a painter.
I try to use my art to get people to talk to each other; to create a dialogue.
Laura: We are an economic development organization for individual artists.
Our mission is to help artists make a living and a life.
They contribute a lot to the quality of life, to our education system,
to the economy, to their community.
They often do so at the expense of their own quality of life,
so we’re sort of here to fill that gap.
We have a whole vetting process, a whole sort of criteria,
where new programs and existing programs get ranked
based on how well they match up
with what we said we wanted to do in our strategic plan.
So that keeps us pretty honest about going back to that document pretty frequently.
Ta-coumba: Maybe Springboard doesn’t know it,
but just existing is like somebody holding your hand.
Laura: Artists are twice as likely in Minnesota
to lack health insurance as the general population.
Natalie: Springboard provided this amazing bridge from me;
from being this uninsured person to being a currently insured person.
Laura: We didn’t know anything about healthcare. But we knew that we had to figure it out.
Natalie: Springboard provided this entry point into the healthcare system.
Laura: We didn’t have to create health care resources
we just had to figure out how to help artists access existing resources.
Natalie: I applied to Springboard’s Work of Art series, which are business classes for artists.
Ta-coumba: I use Springboard for trying to figure out
how to use a computer and how to do my business plan.
People that are taking it are serious about their business.
Laura: The budget and the staff have more than doubled in the last four years.
Natalie: I’ve been so much more productive creatively
in the last six months than I have in the last couple years.
Ta-coumba: You become a little braver. You feel like you have advocates.
