Community Art Support

The inaugural Youth Chorale of Central Minnesota Women’s Choir Festival will reach 200+ Central Minnesota female high school singers and their choral directors this spring as well as 250+ new audience members who attend the Festival Concert at the end of the day. Fifty (50) Central Minnesota high school and middle school choral directors will be reached with new audition materials for themselves and their school choirs in anticipation of our annual spring auditions which we hope will bring in more singers. Because of an improved recruitment campaign, seventy-five (75) copies of a new promotional video will be made and will be expected to reach the 50 area middle school and high school choral directors as well as prospective corporate and private donors in order to fulfill board goals of marketing and development. Two outreach sessions will be conducted with current choir members to elicit viewpoints on community outreach and ways of increasing visibility in the community. With these grant funds, the Artistic Staff will also look to increase the number of singers in the Leadership Team groups from four (4) to six (6). Adding an office intern to help with smaller day-to-day office tasks will help the Executive Director reduce the amount of hours spent on administrative tasks like creating labels mailings, and focus more on larger, strategic activities.Conducting a Women’s Choir Festival will meet a need in the community as there are currently no all-day women’s choir festivals for high school girls in Central Minnesota. We will evaluate the success of this festival by singer attendance, participation in sectionals and group rehearsals (both directors and singers), size of audience and ticket sales at the end-of-festival concert, and using online and paper formats to survey festival participants. We can continue to evaluate our two ensembles by the number of registered auditions. As our current singers have positive experiences while being a part of the Youth Chorale, they are ambassadors to others in their schools, all while promoting an interest in Youth Chorale of Central Minnesota. Middle School and High School directors will receive updated audition materials to distribute to their choral programs. Our new promotional video will be distributed with these packets and will also be used for Development purposes such as for a speaker’s bureau and when meeting with potential private and corporate sponsors. We can evaluate the effectiveness of this video by the number of new sponsors. Singers have expressed an interest in more outreach opportunities during the season. These outreach sessions will give the Youth Chorale of Central Minnesota Board and Staff and idea of what our singers would like to do in the community, from singing at local nursing homes to collecting food for the local food shelf. The Board and Staff will discuss what options are viable and proceed with making connections based on singers’ viewpoints. Evaluation of this process will include interviewing singers beforehand, surveying them afterwards, and observing whether our goal for outreach and more visibility elicits more collaborations and/or gain audience recognition. The Artistic Staff will establish a clear structure for the Student Leadership Team that meets regularly, is sustainable, and assists in organizational development. Increased interaction and shared experiences between all members of varied singing abilities will take place. The primary focus of the Student Leadership Team is to assist the conductors in making sure that their peers (singers) are satisfied with how the choir is functioning, as well as making sure that the choirs are operating cohesively. At the end of the season, we expect an increase in the number of Youth Chorale of Central Minnesota singers who wish to be a part of the Student Leadership Team. By adding a student intern to the office staff, the Executive Director will be able to focus on larger responsibilities that require more time. Also, the student intern can take on some concert preparation responsibilities like mailings or concert set-up, freeing up the Executive Director to spend more time getting volunteers settled or even greeting concert patrons without having to be spread thin at the events. At the end of the season, the Board and Executive Director will evaluate the time spent on projects compared with the past two years of not having extra help.