Arts Access
ACHF Arts Access
Northern Lights Music Festival creates a database of assisted living facility staff on the Range. Staff can assist in identifying interested residents and help manage their concerns about leaving their facility. In a year, we should be able to identify almost every Assisted Living Facility on the Iron Range and to make contact with staff. If there are barriers to participation, our organization should have worked with the staff to help create access for at least 150 persons. 2: Assisted living facility staff inform us that proximity to toilets is the most serious concern of residents who would like to attend Northern Lights Music Festival concerts. Transportation is a secondary concern. We must know locations of bathrooms in each theatre and how many stalls are accessible. We must seat clients with concerns in the back of the theatre on aisles near staff so that they can quickly be moved without disturbing other clients. We will arrange efficient transportation.
We were able to identify more than a dozen assisted living facilities throughout the Iron Range, including the Vermilion Range and the Mesabi Range. We have become acquainted with the varying functions of each of these entities and the administrators in charge of each. This allows us to bypass some facilities whose residents are too infirm to venture out for a day or evening at a concert or opera. We recognize that over the years, some of these facilities will change their focus but on the relative short term--a period of perhaps three years--we can proceed with our plans without re-tracing our steps annually to ascertain the type of resident in each facility. We have built sound relationships with the administrators in each facility. 2: We learned about accessibility to each of our theaters: Identifying sufficient rest rooms near to the stages to be prepared for the numbers of attendees on walkers and in wheelchairs, along with their caretakers. Partially as a result of our activities, we can report that Chisholm will remove some seats in this year to allow for greater numbers of wheelchairs. Last season, we found that many persons in assisted living facilities were hungry for activities--and our lectures before the events were well-attended and invoked audience participation in the form of questions from the listeners. Knowing how frail some of the residents are, we were gratified that so many made the effort to leave the comfort of their homes to come to join us at the opera performances. We also recognized that many family members of residents took the responsibility to take their relatives to the performances--we provided them with opportunities for time with their families outside of the facilities.
Other, local or private