Art Project Legacy

1: "Regional residents experience increased access to the arts via a reduction in geographic, cultural and/or physical barriers." The CAIR project will invite local residents to engage with the arts on a personal level through radically inclusive programming that places the community's needs and active civic participation at the forefront of high-quality artistic collaboration, creation, and exhibition. Residents of Granite Falls who don't necessarily self-identify as artists or art-lovers -- including folks of all ages, women, people of color, our new American community members and our Indigenous Dakota neighbors, and those struggling financially -- will be affected by the deep and intentional inclusivity of the CAIR program and its artistic projects. 2: "Regional residents experience a change in knowledge, attitude, behavior or condition due to public art, arts festivals or arts events." Residents will recognize that the arts have the potential to drive community engagement, civic participation, and economic growth, leading to higher quality of life for the entire community. Every resident of Granite Falls has the potential to be affected by this change, from the current decision-makers to the deeply underserved and underrepresented. 3: "The capacity of those providing arts experiences is increased or strengthened by changing, expanding, or enriching the ways in which they connect to their communities through the arts." Artists selected as CAIRs will explore the power of collaborative work that's driven by a community's articulated needs. DoPT will continue to nourish the positive feedback loop of hearing a community's voices with equity, supporting practicing artists, and developing creative solutions to complex, long-standing challenges. The immediate effect will be felt by DoPT artists and collaborators, the selected CAIRs, Granite Falls City Staff, and local residents, students, businesses and community groups. However, artists and arts organizations in rural settings across the country have the potential to be affected as our replicable model and CAIR Resource Guide is shared widely. Once the CAIR and other programs are underway, we plan to collect and assess data about their effectiveness under the guidance of an Evaluator, Rachel Engh with Metris Arts, a consulting organization whose mission is to ?improve and measure cultural vitality? and who has extensive experience working in the field of creative placemaking. To establish a baseline for this evaluation, we plan to work with Granite Falls officials to distribute a survey to all town residents in early 2020 to assess their current feelings about their community, including sentiments about the town's overall potential, sense of promise, economic and social viability, and long-term livability, as well as the connectedness residents feel to their neighbors and to city processes. As the CAIR program matures over the next five years, we will ask the same questions periodically to identify any collective shifts in perception that may have been spurred by our work. With our first City Artist in Residence on site by fall 2020, we will have collected our baseline data as well as participant numbers, geographic reach, and representative demographics by mid-2021. Our organization is also committed to documentation and evaluation - including surveys and participatory evaluation strategies at all of our events. We will continue this practice with our CAIR program, especially as it relates to sharing out our findings with the broader region and field through our CAIR Resource Guide. Additionally, we plan to distribute the CAIR Resource Guide to other rural areas across the country in spring 2021; data about adoption / adaptation, implementation, and effects of this resource in other communities will be collected in the years to come, to establish the applicability and effectiveness of our community-designed CAIR process in other contexts.