Northern Lights.mn CI Report – Final

What has been most instrumenta to your progress?

The neighborhood-based partnerships we developed to produce Northern Spark 2017 along the Green Line were incredible learning experiences. We worked closely with Twin Cities LISC, African Economic Development Solutions (AEDS), Asian Economic Development Association (AEDA), Aurora St. Anthony Neighborhood Dev. Corp (ASANDC) and West Bank Business Association (WBBA). We met monthly to discuss programming, artist and audience outreach, climate themes and resource sharing.
These relationships were critical to our goals of engaging broader communities and artists in conversations about climate change because we realized how these individuals and organizations were our most direct connection to the African, African-American and Asian communities we wanted to engage. We could not build those social connections on our own. These partners were also critical to connecting us to artists, business and property owners we engaged to produce the festival.

The formation of a Program Council (PC) was an innovative process for us. Through our Partner and Outreach Coordinator we brought together 9 artists with cultural connections to the 4 Green Line neighborhoods home to communities of color we planned to engage. In addition to being artists, these individuals are activists with deep care for their communities. Their primary job was to re-write the Open Call for artists of color and indigenous artists, to promote and jury that call and to help promote the festival and other opportunities (volunteering, night-of paid jobs). Inviting a group of individuals outside of festival staff to jury artist project was a big step of openness for us, and in doing so we learned about the ways our artist opportunities still contain barriers.
This work was important because we developed enough trust with the PC to hear constructive criticism of what it means to reach out into communities of color who’ve historically been ignored by white-led arts institutions or used by them.

Artist projects were a critical way to engage people of color and bring forward new ways of talking about climate change. We commissioned two projects that would span both climate themed festivals: Chris Bauemler’s Backyard Phenology and Marina Zurkow’s Making the Best of It. These were important anchor projects that brought complex climate change ideas to the festival (food systems, everyday attention). The first year we were very hands-on in their process, but after the 2016 festival they launched into self-sufficiency with their own community connections.
The Program Council juried projects were instrumental in giving visible support to artists of color and brought in culturally nuanced connections to climate change. Some examples: the connection between refugees and climate was present in many projects; the role of water in Asian cultures intertwined with commentary about immigration issues, and air quality-induced health problems in low-income neighborhoods. According to an artist: “I added to the diversity of the artist roster which I think allows audiences who are POCs to feel represented and hopefully will also encourage more POC artists to participate in the future.’

Key lessons learned

We learned a lot of lessons in our partnerships with the core Neighborhood Partners (AEDA, WBBA, AEDS, ASANDC). We stumbled in communication and assumptions about staff time and financial resources, and we learned about the challenges that small, underfunded, immigrant-led organizations face that are different than the challenges of small, underfunded white-led organizations such as ourselves. We dealt with this through honest and at times difficult conversation to reach a common understanding and in most cases, mutual respect. We ended up shifting our model of partnership from one where partners contribute financially to be part of NS to sharing our resources by contributing funding for neighborhood partners to produce their NS projects and partially compensate their participation.
The primary lesson we learned is to involve core partners from the beginning of the project to design an outcome (festival) that aligns with existing resources and initiatives and responds to community-driven themes. Even with our intention to work together to build these opportunities, we learned that we made too many decisions about the festival before inviting in their expert

The Program Council taught us key lessons:
1. Individuals such as the members of the PC are deeply tied to their communities but they are not THE community. Bringing in their participation doesn’t mean an entire community group comes along.
2. The PC held connections to artists we likely could not have forged on our own, and now that we’ve connected, we need to tend them.
3. The PC members hold unique skills sets, knowledge bases and goals that could have been more deeply tapped if we had more time and started with them earlier.
4. The workshops we organized for artists of color and indigenous artists to learn about the open call process and climate change were instrumental in engaging with a diverse pool of artists, and should be part of our ongoing work regardless of theme.
5. We can be more experimental in how we invite artists into Northern Spark. Ideas such as a poetry slam “audition” were discussed — an event that both builds community and programs the festival at the same time.
6. A huge part of this work is showing up in the communities you want to engage for events outside of the festival we were building together. This has to be factored into staff time.

Reflections on the community innovation process

Our work on Northern Spark 2017 fell into two general areas: building community relationships and working with artists around climate change. These were entwined along the way. In looking at the diagram now, it seems as though we were moving along the spiral back and forth constantly, between learning about how artists, communities, and individuals within communities relate to climate change as a theme and testing the use of a “big idea” on our largest platform of NS.
The most important lesson we learned is that the theme (climate change) was not the most important element of the overall project; it was the community building process. We got an important introduction to the ways our process falls in and out of sync with the processes of community partners, artists and individuals. Learning to hold all of these together to work in better partnership is the invaluable lesson. That is reflected in multiple parts of the diagram, particularly the “community processes” section.

Other key elements of Community Innovation

Reflective of the answer immediately above, the activities involved in establishing artist, partner and community relationships — “community process” on the diagram — became the work of this festival. We ambitiously and perhaps foolishly attempted to do this across a vast geography and set of cultural communities. The diagram as a whole seems to operate from a position that there is one community doing the work, or at least that the community is known. How can this diagram reflect a process by which a community comes into being, however temporary, due to a common goal, like a one-night festival?

Progress toward an innovation

We began this process having built an annual event that engages tens of thousands of Minnesotans in art in public space. We have always described Northern Spark as a platform — a container that artists and partners can use to bring forward their ideas and missions. This is still true, but applying the climate theme to the festival along with the intense process of community work have left us with an altered understanding of what it means to be a platform. How we can be more open and allow more decision making to come from our partners and collaborators? This was not the innovation we started out towards, but it is an important one in building a process of engagement for an event that has the potential to be more community-centric and to more powerfully address contemporary issues of importance. We feel both closer and farther away from this goal. On one hand, even after a year of meeting and building, we are just at the beginning of these community-based partnerships. Many years of continued engagement are necessary to be more powerful together. We have had our eyes opened by this process and now understand our work in a really different way. Humbling as it is, it a big start.

What it will take to reach an innovation?

The process of developing and working with the Northern Spark Program Council was transformative to our work with Northern Spark and our understanding of our work and organizational identity as a whole. In this sense we see it as an innovation.
That said, we also know that it is only an innovation if it continues, which we’re actively planning.

What’s next?

We are working to make the Program Council an ongoing program of our work to inform themes, locations and artists for Northern Spark, for our other programs as it makes sense, and to leave space open for collaborations and community building outside of our existing platforms. As this work grows and changes, the roles and responsibilities of the Northern Lights Program Council will also shift, but we see these shifts happening in communication with the members themselves.
We also plan to stay and are already in conversation with our core neighborhood partners, towards starting earlier engagement for future Northern Sparks and to identify other opportunities for collaboration and resource sharing.
The theme of climate change remains important to NL but may not remain a theme of future Northern Spark festivals. Whether it headlines this way or not, we are motivated to continue improving ecological sustainability in the process of producing NS, regardless of the theme.

If you could do it all over again…

Easily the advice we’d give ourselves is: bring key collaborators from the beginning a project. In our feedback and evaluations sessions with both Partner organizations and members of the Program Council we heard an amount of frustration that significant decisions about Northern Spark had already been made by the time they came into the process. Specifically the theme and the locations of the festival. We heard clearly that the Partners and PC members would like to be part of a process from the beginning, to make more meaningful connections to their communities and bring interests and issues forward as festival themes. There was discussion among partners about using NS to build on their long-term neighborhood goals and community structures, but only if they are included at the start of the festival’s planning and with extensive conversation about resources and expectations.

One last thought

Very much appreciate the support to try something big and new for us. We are continually learning and hope to keep this work going to share with other cultural producers.