Activate Rural Workshop: Capital Campaigns for Creative Places
Location: Virtual - Zoom
Date + Time: Wednesday, February 19, 2025, 12PM - 1:30PM CST
Join Department of Public Transformation (DoPT) for our first virtual Activate Rural Workshop in 2025, Capital Campaigns for Creative Places, to hear from two rural artists and activators share their stories of launching capital campaigns to cultivate creative places of connection for their communities.
Participants will learn how each organization navigated capital campaign challenges and opportunities in a rural community and take away lessons learned around community engagement and fundraising. Be inspired by the activation of the two building spaces during a panel discussion moderated by Sarina Otaibi, Activate Rural Program Director, DoPT, with the following guest speakers:
Betsy Roder is the Executive Director of the New York Mills Cultural Center in New York Mills, MN (pop. 1,355). The New York Mills Arts Retreat and Regional Cultural Center, a multidisciplinary arts organization dedicated to expanding the cultural and creative opportunities for rural Americans for more than two and a half decades, is in the middle of launching a multi-phase capital campaign to complete preservation work on its building, significant updates to its retreat house, and adding signage around the community.
Ash Hanson is the Creative Executive Officer of Department of Public Transformation (DoPT) in Granite Falls, MN (pop. 2,685). DoPT recently completed a 5-year Capital Campaign raising over $1M to transform a historic main street building into a creative community gathering place called The YES! House.
This virtual workshop is free, but registration is required. For workshop and registration questions, please contact Benjamin Domask-Ruh, Activate Rural Program Coordinator, at benjamin@publictransformation.org.
This workshop is a part of the Activate Rural Public Workshop Series, workshops and sessions designed to offer support, peer learning, and resources to creative entrepreneurs, artists, organizations and small business owners with creative physical places of connection based in rural Minnesota communities and the Native nations that share this geography, with a population of 20,000 or less.
This program is supported, in part, by the State of Minnesota through a grant from The Office of Small Business Development, Department of Employment and Economic Development.