Arts Legacy Project Planning

Our primary goal for this phase of the process is to collaborate with our community on an RFP for our CAIR program that directly addresses the needs of the community. We will document this through surveys and exit interviews with our CAP. With thorough documentation and evaluation of Granite Falls CAIR, along with the support of our partners at Southwest Minnesota Housing Partnership, Springboard for the Arts, and Art of the Rural, this innovative and transformative program will act as a national model for arts-based civic engagement in rural communities and put Granite Falls in the forefront as a leader of this growing national dialogue. Because of the iterative and innovative nature of this project, the project coordinator will engage a professional evaluator to create the survey and interview questions to evaluate the planning phase. Evaluation will include project surveys and interviews with the artists, partners, civic leaders, city departments and engaged residents. The pilot project will be a reflexive one – incorporating feedback as we receive it from artists and primary partners to adapt the program to best fit the needs of all a party. The information gathered during the pilot year will be compiled into a complete, multi-media report that will be shared with primary partners. This report, once approved by partners, will be shared on a national level as a replicable model of innovative creative community and civic engagement. We will utilize many creative strategies for evaluation that will be developed with Springboard for the Arts and Art of the Rural artists. We believe in letting the project shape the form of the evaluation and will not necessarily be using traditional survey forms to gather information.