Project Grant

Tuesdays with Morrie will create a unique experience, using the local arts community as a way to create awareness and stress the importance to start early conversations about the need for advance health care directives and living wills. The Tuesdays with Morrie production will also serve as a catalyst to launch a community end-of-life discussion, featuring a panel of professionals in the medical community, the financial sector and community leaders specializing in hospice and palliative care. In addition to this community-wide discussion with local community and business leaders regarding the important of end-of-life care, the Tuesdays with Morrie play will also work in partnership with the new Honoring Choices initiative in St Cloud named, æLight the LegacyÆ. It is the mission of Light the Legacy to make end-of-life discussions common practice with families, removing the fear and stigma associated with having these types of conversations. Outcomes we aim to achieve with the community roundtable discussions from the Tuesdays with Morrie are: Educate the public about advance care planning: planning for future medical care when you are unable to make your own decisions. Inform individuals how to choose a health care spokesperson (the agent" specified in the "Health Care Proxy") and what to do which ensure wishes are understood and honored. Increase families comfort level in discussing death and dying, while promoting conversations and appropriate actions that will lead to the completion or an update of the Health Care Proxy form. On the artistic front, part of the mission for Pioneer Place Productions is to produce plays that are seldom seen in the Central Minnesota area and to bring to their stage to a caliber of talent and performance that local patrons would certainly otherwise see only at a venue in the Twin Cities. The Tuesdays with Morrie production will highlight the very best that the Pioneer Place venue has to offer the community û a smaller, intimate setting that brings the actors into such close physical distance from the patrons that the only natural result is for the patrons to be intensely engaged in the production. In that regard, this production is the quintessential Pioneer Place type of show. The nature of the Tuesdays with Morrie production, coupled with the intimacy to hold a community roundtable discussion on such a sensitive topic, will be a perfect match for the Pioneer Place venue.Quantitative evaluation plans for this particular project are difficult to measure, as the process of end-of-life discussions is a gradual one, using a multi-faceted approach to inform and educate a variety of constituents. By using the Tuesdays with Morrie play, we hope to use art as a medium to reach out to audiences who may not typically engaged in these conversations at health care offices. Additionally, using art as a medium which is accessible and entertaining to most, we are able to offer heightened community awareness surrounding the issue to generate end of life discussions amongst the general public. Expected impact on the community is to supplement efforts made by the Light the Legacy coalition to raise awareness, and increase the number of community members who have advanced health care directives on file at their local medical clinics. Since the Light the Legacy movement is in its Phase 1 pilot stage, data and measurement results will not be forthcoming until the initiative is able to mature. On an artistic front, we will be able to measure the impact of the Tuesdays with Morrie performance by: analyze ticket sales data; review financial sales data; Identify number who attended talk back sessions (with performers); identify number of community members who attended roundtable discussions."