Community Arts Access Project

Poet's Reading attendance of 250 and workshop attendance of 50 for the Brainerd events; the morning event at Long Prairie High School will involve 250+ students, as well as attending faculty, staff, and community members and families. Increase in non-student attendance by 15% over previous event. 3. 85% of workshop attendees who respond to the survey will agree or strongly agree that the reading and workshop has added value to their lives and changed attitudes about literary art. Also, we intend to enhance media coverage of the Verse Like Water events. We will measure our goals by the following: Taking attendance and participation counts at the reading and workshop. We will survey audience members/workshop participants and ask them if they are a student of the college, area high school, or a member of the community at large, then tally the results. On the aforementioned mentioned survey, we will enlist the Likert scale. There will also be questions, both numerical and open-ended, to see if audience members might have been changed regarding how they feel about the arts, poets, and poetry, which is what this entire project is trying to illuminate as well as quality of life. A second evaluation tool will be designed for the students of Long Prairie-Eagle High School, as well as the community members that come. The auditorium provides nearly 600 seats, and there are 250 students (35% of which are Latino). This means we will have room for many community members that could come from this area, as well as Melrose. Surveys will be distributed to community members after the event, as well as in classrooms, and assistance will be provided by Mr. Michael Guiemela, an English teacher and poetry enthusiast there. We will track and document media coverage. This is likely to be state-wide news, we anticipate coverage by MPR, as well as Lakeland Public Television. Lakeland Public Television is creating a Common Ground documentary on Verse Like Water, which will include this event as well as the Terrance Hayes event of October 2015.