Cultural Council Agenda and Packet 2023 10 19

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Lity ql, Louisville Cultural council City of Louisville Art Program Grant Evaluation Congratulations on receiving a Louisville Art Grant! We appreciate your efforts in advocating for and supporting greater diversity of the artistic experiences within the Louisville community. Within 60 days of the completion of your event, please provide written answers to the following questions. We appreciate a candid assessment of your event, the impact upon the Louisville community, and how you assess your overall community reach. Name of Organization or Artist: Ellen Rice Collaborative Partners (if applicable): Title of Event/Program: Amount of Art Grant Award: $ $1,990 Program Goal(s): N/A Not All Men: A Songwriters' Series for the Rest of Us This program series aimed to reach local songwriters and aspiring songwriters who may not always feel welcome or comfortable in the cis male -dominated spaces of local open mics. My primary goal was to provide opportunities for women, nonbinary people, and other trans folks to create community and gain experience and confidence with songwriting and performing their original songs. I also think that it is important to provide paid opportunities for songwriters to share their work with the broader community through performance, so I also wanted to provide a chance for songwriters in the group to be paid to perform. Please describe the impact vour event had on the commun Numbers of individuals reached:15 participants; 20 audience members: 35 people total How did you attract your target audience? I worked to reach participants by putting up physical posters with QR codes to the event series in local coffeeshops, music stores, and other local businesses in Louisville and Lafayette. I also used Facebook events, facebook and instagram posts, and invited songwriters I already knew who I thought might be interested in participating. I shared the online media with a number of music facebook groups used by musicians for networking. Did the activity generate any unexpected outcomes or impacts? Songwriters were really appreciative of the classes, and it was interesting that each class had a slightly different audience. The classes with more didactic content were more popular than the open ended song -share class, which surprised me! It was also more challenging to get participants to participate in the performances than I thought it would be, but the folks who do perform seemed to really enjoy it and were surprised (and happy!) that we were able to pay them. The only surprising negative impact I observed was during the advertising phase I had a hard time with a local organization not liking the name of the event series because they thought it was negative towards men ("not all men") and a local LGBTQ+ organization (Out Boulder) had a different complaint about the name of the event not making it clear that the event includes trans men and nonbinary folks. I thought this was really odd since the whole premise of the event was intended to be as inclusive as possible, but maybe I could have chosen a better name for this project and avoided these issues. Was your organization able to achieve your program goals? If yes, how? If not, what improvements can be made for future programs/events? I felt like overall we were able to make good progress towards the goals and the project went well as a whole, however, it was a very ambitious undertaking. I think it could have been even more successful if it had reached more people, both songwriters and audience members. Because I wasn't able to get buy -in from LGBTQ organizations at the outset it didn't get shared with as many people from that community as I was hoping. As a result the songwriter group was primarily women, as well as a few cis men, and one other non - binary trans person who only attended one session. I think it was successful in creating a space where (especially) women's voices were centered and everyone in the group seemed to feel more comfortable with each other over time which was great, however, there weren't as many other trans or queer people as I was hoping for. There were also not as many community attendees from outside the group at our performances as I was hoping for. I think part of it might have been the performance timing during summer weekends when people were away or lots of other events were happening, but my advertising of the performances also could have been better to get more people in the door to see the group members perform. If I were to do this again, I would choose just one element to focus on (either performance or classes) instead of trying to do both. While participants appreciated it, I felt spread too thin in terms of the execution, and I think the marketing of the performances suffered a bit as a result, because I just did not have enough time to do it all as well as I wanted to.