ORDER-2021-89 : Acceptance of the Fiscal 2021 Local Cultural Council Grant from the Mass Cultural Council in the amount of $13,000.00. Funds will be deposited into fund number 2543 for grants awarded by the Melrose Cultural Council.

Transcript (~9 min @ 40:00)

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▶ 40:00 Speaker 1: Yeah, president. Yes.

▶ 40:04 Jeff McNaught: 11 yes, motion passes. Thank you very much.

▶ 40:10 Jeff McNaught: Thank you. Mr. next we have order 2021 dash 89 acceptance of the fiscal 2021. Local cultural council grant from the mass cultural council in the amount of 13,000 dollars funds will be deposited into fund number 2543 for grants awarded by the Melrose cultural council.

▶ 40:34 Speaker 1: Bring in chief of staff and Jason web of the Melrose cultural council.

▶ 40:49 Speaker 4: Good evening everybody. It's great to see everyone. I hope I can be heard without issue. Really, the whole point of my being here tonight is to introduce Mr. Webb, who serves as treasurer of the local cultural council chapter. As many of you probably know, the Massachusetts State Cultural Council appropriates funds according to a formula to every other council in the Commonwealth. I believe there's close to 351 of them. Probably just shy of that. Many of you are already familiar with the tremendous work that our local cultural council does. I'd like Mr. Webb to kind of expound on that. Before I do, I think one of the priorities for Mayor Broder has been and will be making sure that we are highlighting the arts, using the arts as an economic development tool, Celebrating the artists that are already here and reimagining public space. To invite the community to think of new possibilities of how they can move about the city and how they call this place home. This will be especially important as we move through. Full vaccination of our city, and how we kind of bounce back and demonstrate our resilience in the months and years to come. The cultural council will be a very important part in that process. And so really, this is just to highlight the great work that they do. So I hope for a moment you might be able to hear from Mr. Webb and ask any questions you might have subsequently. So with that, I will turn it over to Mr. Webb. Great. Thanks very much, Patrick. I appreciate the introduction. Can everybody hear me okay? We can hear you. Great. Thank you for the opportunity to come here and speak before you. And I really appreciate on behalf of the Melrose Cultural Council the support from you and from the mayor's office for the arts in Melrose. It's really important work. I'm pleased to be here to represent the Cultural Council. If we have a minute or two, I can give a brief update and then I can answer any questions that you might have. For the past several years prior to the pandemic, I would say the cultural council would primarily meet later in the year to determine grant recipients and we would conduct a community survey every three years. Generally, there were not too many surprises and we would work with the grant recipients and we would work with the city to ensure that everybody was paid according to the rules. and that was a large portion of what the focus of the council was. With the pandemic, with COVID, this was all thrown into chaos. The majority of the grant applications are predicated on the notion of an in-person gathering, and so I think as everybody's well aware, the arts community writ large was really thrown into chaos with this pandemic. Immediately, the majority of the grant applications could not be fulfilled as they were originally designed. Fortunately, the Massachusetts Cultural Council granted a fair amount of leniency to allow grant recipients to modify their grant applications, and we were able to work with the majority of them to modify their applications to work under pandemic restrictions. A few of them were not able to meet any alterations in their grants, Um, and so that money did carry over into the fiscal year 2021. so in fiscal year 2021, we're fortunate to have a healthy amount of funding. Um, and we were also happy to see that many of the grant applications were very creative and found ways to deliver on the mission of supporting arts and culture in Melrose, even under the restrictions imposed by the pandemic and uncertainty. imposed by what we don't have a certain timeline, but they have contingencies within a lot of their proposals to deal with that. For anyone who may be interested in knowing the details of how the funding has been allocated in fiscal year 2021, I just want to take a minute to highlight the website that we have, which is a relatively website. I'll just post a link to the chat there. Actually, let me post it to everybody. That has a lot of information on the site. Even on the landing page, there is a listing or a link to a listing of all of the grants. Then there's a news section which actually has also, you can see the podcast that the mayor did with the two high school students that we added to the board this year. So there's a lot of good information out there about some of the people that we, some of the grantees that we work with. And since it is a new website, we would definitely welcome any feedback from you all as to what we could potentially do to continue to make that a useful tool for everybody. A couple of additional items to mention. We did complete a community survey this summer which was helpful in guiding our decision making on the grants. A couple of findings worth mentioning and perhaps not too surprising. There was a strong interest in funding youth and educational programming. There was a strong interest in outdoor events, public art, and in having more diversity and inclusion. Our grant making decision decision making reflects this. For example, we funded public art in the parklets, Melrose Dance Festival, and several outdoor events such as music at the farmers market the popular porch fest and blues at the bb the melrose symphony orchestra is also a grant recipient and personally as a violinist in the orchestra desperate to be able to play again i'm i'm really counting on us having a strong return in the fall so looking forward to that um so the pandemic coupled with recent economic and social events have caused i think many community groups the melrose cultural council included to become aware of a need for change in our society and as a result the council is now meeting more frequently than it ever has in the recent past and to help us make this change we've also recently added two new members to the council from the melrose high school uh ruby robich show and nirvana ragland those are the two that are in the mayor's podcast and we're really looking forward to their energy and enthusiasm and helping us create positive change in melrose with the arts so with that i'll stop and take any questions uh that you might have uh yes uh mr eccles thanks um i just

▶ 47:50 Jack Eccles: didn't see the website come through in the chat and for anyone who's watching at home what's the

▶ 47:57 Speaker 4: what could you say that loud oh sure it's um sorry if it didn't come through it's melroseculture.org but if you also just do an organic search on any of the web browsers i believe the search engine optimization it'll come up pretty quickly if you just do melrose cultural council it'll be one of the top hits you'll see it on the you know the first page there

▶ 48:18 Jack Eccles: so that was my only question thank you very much for coming here sure happy to be here i don't

▶ 48:23 Jeff McNaught: see any other hands raised did i miss anyone seeing none what is the will of the committee

▶ 48:40 Jeff McNaught: motion to recommend second second motion to recommend for passage by council Tramontozzi seconded by councillor Grigoraitis madam clerk will you please call the role chair mcnaught yes vice

▶ 48:48 Speaker 1: chair eccles yes councillor Tramontozzi yes councillor mcmaster yes councillor Garipay yes

▶ 49:00 Speaker 1: Yes, Councilor Grigoraitis. Yes. Councilor Migliorelli? Yes. Councilor Stewart? Yes. Councilor Thomas? Yes. Councilor Jamaleddine? Yes. President Sinella? Yes.

▶ 49:19 Jeff McNaught: 11 yes. The motion passes. Thank you very much. Mr. Prendergast, Mr. Webb for your attendance and presentation tonight. We appreciate it.