Community Arts

We believe we did achieve our artistic goals. Our goals were as follows: 1. Provide high quality artistic experiences within our budget limitations. We believe we met this goal, although the attendance was not as high as anticipated in some of the events. The comic classes were cancelled due to lack of registrations. These were among the very few events that required a fee. 2. We targeted 50% of the artists would be local Rosemount or Dakota County artists. This goal was nearly met with 46% being local artists. 3. Provide a wide variety of arts experiences. We believe we met this goal. However, due to budget constraints, we were not able to sponsor the fiddle contest or the multi-cultural day. We did, however, add an art and author fair with 24 participant artists, 90% of which reported high satisfaction with this first time event. 4. Provide educational opportunities to attendees. We believe we achieved this goal in having provided 23 hands-on artistic experiences to groups of all ages. 5. Enable artists to work locally, building their local presence and building a higher profile of the arts in Rosemount. Since we nearly met our goal of having 50% local artists, we believe we also met this goal. The strengths of our process was to have several artists from several artistic disciplines selecting and vetting the participating artists. We were also able to draw on some of the more popular artists from prior ArtBlast years (e.g. "brought back by popular demand"). We believe that focusing on a broad variety of arts presented and the educational opportunities were positive aspects of our process. Once again, we identified that we need more discipline around our time tables. We need to begin earlier with our fundraising and our marketing. We had these things right in our plan, but life seemed to get in the way, and we ran behind, creating a huge rush and lots of stress at the end of the process. Some of this is a function of having to rely totally on volunteer help. In our debrief, we recommitted to keeping to our schedule in the future. We did reach much of our intended community as far as audience/participants. We were able to observe that much of our audience/participants were older adults. We estimate that approximately 25% of our participants were in this older category. Rosemount is 81% white, 6 Black, 5% Asian, 5% Hispanic. We probably attracted 90-95% white participants. In debriefing with our diversity consultant, we did discuss that the younger people in our community (especially elementary school age) are more diverse than the adult population. It is the adult population that generally make the decisions on family entertainment. We have identified this as an area where we need to continue to work on better outcomes. We planned to have 5 individual artists of color and were only able to engage one artist of color. We have also identified this as an area we need to work on. We were able to attract approximately 5% disabled persons. With respect to our expected Populations Benefitting, we did not attract as many young adults as anticipated. We did have about 25% children and 25% older adults. This was probably due to the programming. We really, in retrospect, did not pay a lot of attention to providing programming specifically to young adults. We did focus on providing programming specifically geared to children and older adults. One metric we could not measure was how many people of lower income we were able to attract as this is not a metric that can be observed. We did market to the Rosemount Family Resource Center and 360 Communities, so we are assuming that the word did get out to that community. We were able to meet our goals of having most of our events free of charge, making ArtBlast accessible to lower income families. We also had very accessible venues where all people would be comfortable and feel welcome -- Central Park Amphitheater, the local library and the Steeple Center, which is a community gathering place, and also houses the Rosemount Area Seniors group. Our most significant outcome was being able to offer a wide variety of arts to about 2500 people, including about 25% older adults and 5% disabled people. By exit interviews, we estimate that more than 90% of participants were satisfied with their experiences at ArtBlast. Of all the artists represented, we only had two who were not satisfied with their experience. Most were very satisfied.