Last Updated
April 5, 2020
Work. Shouldn't. Suck. LIVE: The Morning(ish) Show with special guest Laura Zabel, Executive Director of Springboard for the Arts. [Live show recorded: April 1, 2020.]
Guest: Laura Zabel
Co-Hosts: Tim Cynova & Lauren Ruffin
Guest
LAURA ZABEL is the Executive Director of Springboard for the Arts, an economic and community development agency run by and for artists. Springboard provides programs that help artists make a living and a life, and programs that help communities connect to the creative power of artists. Springboard is a nationally recognized leader in artist-led community development, creative placemaking and cross-sector collaboration. Springboard’s work has been featured by the New York Times, PBS, Wall Street Journal, Stanford Social Innovation Review and The Guardian and directly impacts over 25,000 artists each year in their home state of Minnesota. Through their free toolkits, training and resources Springboard’s programs have been replicated in over 80 communities across the U.S. and internationally.
As Springboard’s executive director, Laura Zabel has been honored with numerous awards, including the YBCA 100, Gard Foundation Award of Excellence and the Bush Foundation Leadership Fellowship for her work with Springboard. Zabel is currently a Common Future Fellow and a creative placemaking policy fellow at Arizona State University.
Transcript
Tim Cynova:
Hi, I'm Tim Cynova, and welcome to Work. Shouldn't. Suck. LIVE: the Morning(ish) Show. On today's episode, Lauren Ruffin and I are joined by Laura Zabel. Laura is currently the executive director of Springboard for the Arts, an economic and community development agency run by and for artists. They're found online at springboardforthearts.org. She was recently, and deservedly, honored as part of the powerhouse YBCA 100 cohort, is currently a Common Future Fellow and a Creative Placemaking Fellow at Arizona State University, and has a deep love and expertise with shoes, which has been externally verified with one of the funniest LinkedIn recommendations I've ever read. Without further ado, Laura, welcome to the show.
Laura Zabel:
Good morning. I'm happy to be here. I feel some pressure now. Although it's nice, you can just all imagine what great shoes I have on.
Lauren Ruffin:
I can guarantee they're better than the shoes I have on. They might be bedroom slippers.
Laura Zabel:
It's like you're here with me. That's exactly what I'm wearing right now.
Lauren Ruffin:
So Laura, how are things going, and how is your community right now?
Laura Zabel:
As we all are, I think, trying to both sort of hold the idea and the gratitude for what is okay, which is that I am okay and my loved ones are okay. And the reality that our community and our communities are really, really struggling right now. It's been a really intense time, I don't need to tell anyone that, for everyone. And in particular for artists, which is Springboard's core constituency and core work. But yeah, I'm okay and I'm grateful for that this morning.
Lauren Ruffin:
Awesome. And can you share a little bit more for the folks who might not know, a bit more about Springboard for the Arts?
Laura Zabel:
So Springboard's based in Minnesota. I'm talking to you today from Minneapolis, that's where my home is. We have both an urban and a rural office. So our urban office is in the Twin Cities in St Paul. And then we have a rural office in Fergus Falls, which is a community about an hour east of Fargo, North Dakota, in west-central Minnesota.
Laura Zabel:
And we do our work from those two contexts, but we work across the whole state with artists here in Minnesota and also share resources and tools nationally. And our work is really all about helping artists make a living and a life. So we work with artists of all disciplines, all stages of their careers, around business skills, training and healthcare and other kinds of resource connection. And then we also make programs that are about how communities connect to artists and what a community gets back from a healthy artist community, engaging artists in big community engagement work or around big community challenges and opportunities. We think those two things belong together, that art and artists are like a natural resource that needs to be tended to and taken care of, and there needs to be infrastructure to support it. And then people also need to be able to plug in to that natural resource, and understand how it builds power and how they can access power from that resource.
Tim Cynova:
One of the amazing resources that Springboard has just put out is around the Personal Emergency Relief Fund, both your own work and a toolkit for other organizations. Can you talk a little bit more about that work?
Laura Zabel:
Yeah. So Springboard has had an emergency [inaudible 00:03:16] and it typically, in more normal days, supports artists who've had career-threatening emergencies. As you can imagine, those are by and large healthcare emergencies. But we also support artists who've experienced fire or theft after natural disaster. And we also run a Community Emergency Relief Fund that supports artists to do small projects, to respond to community emergencies like police violence or other threats, to immigration or other specific threats to their community, domestic violence, those kinds of things that are less about the personal emergency and more about an artist leading a response in their own community. And so about three weeks ago, when stuff started really being canceled all at once, we realized pretty fast that artists were going to be impacted really early and really severely in that.
Laura Zabel:
We all know the why behind that. Artists are by and large freelancers and contractors, and their work is really dependent on being in the same room with other people. I've been at Springboard 15 years, I never could have imagined that there would be a situation where the bottom would fall out so totally, and so suddenly, for people. You think about all the advice that we give to artists to have diverse income sources. Do school residencies and work in an elder care facility and do community based work and sell your work at markets or perform with a bunch of different companies or perform at events and just... It just all went to zero in about 24 hours here. So we opened up that Personal Emergency Relief Fund because we already had that tool. And we typically get between two and four applications to the fund every month.
Laura Zabel:
And as of yesterday we have over 800 in about two weeks. But I think one of the things I'm super-aware of and that I've been thinking about a lot is that this situation, it just reveals how fragile the ecosystem is for artists. How little net so many artists have. In a way that a lot of us, certainly you all at Fractured Atlas and Springboard and others, have been saying for years, that infrastructure for artists is important, that we need to build systems of support for artists. And I think we have a really terrible example of why that's important now. But I think, in terms of the Emergency Relief Fund, it's a really good example of why that infrastructure matters. Because we already had that system, because Springboard already existed here, we were able to deploy that resource and put it in practice really, really quickly to respond to that community need.
Laura Zabel:
Now we're fundraising for that fund, working our way through the applications. We've distributed about $175,000 in the last two weeks, $500 at a time. So that's put the staff into a situation that has required a lot of work and a lot of attention, and I'm super grateful to them. They've really stepped into this moment in an incredible way.
Lauren Ruffin:
How does that work? I mean one like from a managerial perspective, how do you quickly pivot? I'm assuming that giving out... Again, I had a math completely blank earlier today, I'm going to have another one, but 500 bucks at a time for $175,000 is a lot of work to do and track, and I'm assuming your staff has pretty much dropped everything else and is focusing 100% on doing that?
Laura Zabel:
Yeah.
Lauren Ruffin:
How do you navigate, practically and logistically, doing that?
Laura Zabel:
I think I've been sort of making this a joke lately, that our values were built for this moment, but our accounting system is not built for this moment. So we're having to navigate all of the practicalities and the system pieces of what it means to try and scale up our program that quickly, and especially when it involves distributing money. We're lucky to have an incredible business manager who is an artist himself, and so is really concerned with getting artists money and also is very good at making sure that we're not flagrantly breaking any rules, or making any giant mistakes. So I think one of the things that has served us well in this moment is that Springboard, culturally, is an organization that really values responsiveness. And I think a lot about what it means to be in response and able to be flexible and bend to what the moment needs, or what our constituents need. So I think part of what has sped us through that process of figuring out the systems is that we didn't have to have any of the conversations about whether we should do this.
Laura Zabel:
So we didn't need to take the time that it normally takes to decide. We just, I mean literally in about five minutes, another staff member and I said, "How much money do you think we could put in?" We walked over to a colleague's desk and said, "We're going to put 10,000 in today, let's open it up," and five minutes later it was live on the website. So that part, we are able to move through really quickly. And then I think that buys us a little bit of time to work out the system piece. So we've definitely had to scale that up. That's typically one staff member who runs that program, and we've gradually, over the last 14 plus days, increased that so that more and more staff members are working on the program, and she's able to train them in, my amazing colleague Nikki Hunt, who's both managing the program and training her colleagues to jump in and help.
Laura Zabel:
And we've learned some things too. We typically, because we value responsiveness so much, the typical way that the emergency relief fund works is that we have the maximum possible mechanisms for getting people the money. And because of both the scale of what we're dealing with now, but also some of the realities of the moment, we've had to pare down what those options are. Like for example, one of the options, that in a normal situation is quite popular, is I will you a gift card. But that means that someone has to go to Walgreens and buy a gift card. So we're not doing that right now.
Laura Zabel:
And we've also just tried to pare back and be a little more transparent with our community about which things work best for us. So one of the things we've done recently is just said, "A cheque or PayPal is what's easiest for us. If you need it another way we will figure it out. But what would be super helpful to us, and to the other artists in your community right now, is if one of these options could work for you because they're the easiest for us to manage."
Tim Cynova:
One of the ways that you just immediately responded to what was going on, and it made it into a recent podcast that Laura and I did when we talked about South by Southwest, was the principles for ethical cancellation. Within minutes, it seemed, that conferences were starting to be canceled and you and Springboard put out, like, "Here are some things to think about as you cancel conferences, and as you wrestle with whether you should cancel conferences." Can you break down some of those points a bit for people?
Laura Zabel:
I think we wrote that piece because we know it's human nature, right? When we're scared, when we're threatened, we're all worried about the economy, about what it means for our organizations and our businesses. And when we're in that fear place, we contract and try and grab onto whatever we have. And the people who usually end up losing in that scenario are the people who are the contractors, who are the folks who aren't on the paid staff. Those are the first people to lose out in that situation. And so pretty early on, I think we had a sense that, as it was becoming clearer and clearer that a lot of things are going to be canceled for a long time, and a lot of people are going to lose in that situation, we just wanted to help people, in that kind of fear moment, think about, "Okay, but how can I do this in line with my values, and what are the things that I might be able to put in place that help support my creative community in a different way?"
Laura Zabel:
Or, where are there opportunities to work with artists in new ways? So that piece has really practical stuff, like really asking folks to think about, if you've hired an artist for an event and they've already put in some work, trying to figure out how to compensate them for the work that's already gone into that, even if the actual event isn't going to happen.
Laura Zabel:
And also trying to help people think creatively about how might you pivot. There's a lot of new opportunity and interest in creating content, or online. So could you ask an artist to do something different for you? Could you ask them to make some graphics that you can use online, or could you contract with them for something that could happen in the future so they know that income will be there at some point? Just, I think, kind of challenging and trying to help people think through, when you're in that crisis mentality, how do you make sure you're making decisions that still are aligned with your values and are still supportive of your community? And don't allow yourself to just get in that mindset where you just pull everything back and hoard the resources that you have because you're worried about the future.
Lauren Ruffin:
Yeah. I was really grateful for that resource, mostly because I was talking about it and then I was like, "Oh, I'm going to have to write this thing." And then I finished that conversation and looked, and I was like, "Oh, Zabel got it." I was like, "It's done."
Laura Zabel:
I'm sure there's more things. I wrote that pretty quickly, and I think there's probably... I feel like the situation, we're learning stuff every day, so I think people probably have more ideas that we could add to it at this point. Which maybe we should do.
Lauren Ruffin:
Yeah, South-by was really wild. I mean I was wearing, I was going to go with two hats on, a Fractured Atlas hat and then a Crux hat on and, I mean, the cancellation with no funds back... I can imagine... I'm pretty privileged, but the impact that an Airbnb, after the fact, setting March 15th as the date they would allow cancellations with refunds, to obviously allow for folks not to have to refund South-by, was [crosstalk 00:12:37]. So I'm so grateful for that resource. Oh, go on.
Laura Zabel:
Oh no, go, that's all right.
Tim Cynova:
This is going to be the rest of the episode, "No, no. You." [crosstalk 00:12:45] It's like we're on an [inaudible 00:12:47] call.
Laura Zabel:
I am from Minnesota, I do a lot of [crosstalk 00:12:50].
Lauren Ruffin:
Talk on the phone, remember those days? Do we want to get Diane in, with her question?
Tim Cynova:
Yeah. We have a question from a viewer: "If this pandemic is an opportunity to rebuild in a new way, what changes would you like to see in the sector, in addition to support systems for artists?"
Lauren Ruffin:
That's a great question from Diane. Always a smart question from Diane.
Laura Zabel:
One of the kind of bright spots in the world of support for artists right now, I think, is that we have seen so many folks stepping into this moment and wanting to create, particularly emergency relief funds for artists. So after we opened our fund, we started getting inquiries from people all over the country about how to do that. So one of Springboard's other practices is that we share everything that we do. So we, in the midst of trying to handle our own emergency relief fund, wrote a really quick guide for how it works, just to try and help give people a headstart. And we've seen just tons and tons of people pick that up and develop stuff on their own and make it relevant to their own community. That's a place where I'm drawing some optimism, that it does feel to me like there is a kind of emergent network all of a sudden, of people who recognize the need for support systems for artists and want to build them.
Laura Zabel:
And so one thing I'm really interested in is how we connect that group of people and stay connected, so that we can work on the what's next question. That there's this urgent emergency need, and then I think there's a mid-term need for what's next for artists, and then there's the bigger picture, like what might be built out of this. And I think I've had more conversations in the last two weeks about what, for lack of a better term, what a new WPA would look like, than anyone's ever been interested in having with me before. When I think there's some cause for optimism there, I think there will be, and should be, opportunities for artists be deployed in the kind of repair that will be needed. Both the economic repair and the repair of our social fabric and meaning-making. And I think if that can be combined with this new sense of will and momentum around systems, so that artists could actually be compensated and valued for that work, then I think there's a light there that I feel like really has some possibility.
Laura Zabel:
I guess I will temper that with saying that that's my most optimistic take on things. And then, sometimes... Well, like yesterday, I'll just explicitly say it, yesterday the WHO and the UN launched a call for art for this moment. And you have to submit completed work that will be judged by a panel unnamed panel, and you will receive no compensation. Just exposure. Which, particularly in this moment, I think exposure is a thing we can all agree is not what anyone needs. So I think that I want to stay in that optimistic place, but I also think it's important to acknowledge that that will take a lot of work, to undo our norms around how we value creative production, how we value meaning-making. And that these kinds of crises, if you aren't, and if we aren't collectively as a community, really intentional about what we rebuild, then they just reinforce existing systemic disparities.
Laura Zabel:
So, particularly artists of color and indigenous and native artists, artists in rural places, artists with disabilities, queer and trans artists. They're already more impacted than other folks because they're already dealing with the disparities that existed before the crisis, and a crisis just makes those things worse. So I think there's an opportunity to really think about how we rebuild, and in that idea of, if I'm just thinking about what my biggest wish is, isn't the idea of a new kind of workforce of artists that goes to work. I think it is about rebuilding from this crisis, but also addressing some of those big systemic disparities. Really thinking about how we rebuild in a way that is the future we want to see, versus just getting back to what we thought was normal a month ago.
Tim Cynova:
We have another viewer question: "Since there are so many areas of need in this moment, how do you and your team decide where and how to focus your energy and resources?" This is actually a two part question. The second part is, "Also, how do you decide what not to do?"
Lauren Ruffin:
That's a good question, Andrew.
Laura Zabel:
I think Springboard has a set of guiding principles that we really use and really, I think, are really internalized for all of us, and that guides a lot of our decision making. I think, just for me personally, I feel like one of the things that I care a lot is that, all the time, but in moments like this we lean into the practical. What is the thing that we can actually do right now? So for example, I would like to challenge everyone in our community to not do any more surveys. But think about, instead, what you could do. What resources you have to offer, how you might be able to get those to folks quickly, and maybe there's a way to collect data or to learn something through that process of doing. But I think in our sector, a lot of times the inclination is to want to study the problem first, or want to get some kind of outside validation.
Laura Zabel:
Springboard is, at its heart, a really practical organization. What we want to do is get help to people quickly. So for us, the Emergency Relief Fund was a really logical thing for us to lean into and it felt sort of intuitive. I think in terms of, then, the additional needs, I think a lot of our work in the last few weeks has been focused on how do we connect people to other resources. So we know the emergency relief fund is a thing we can do. That's in our core competency. But how do we reach out to lawyers, to the mental health practitioners, to folks who are working on housing and food, and be able to refer the people that we work with into those other systems, help them navigate those other systems, rather than us trying to develop all of that capacity in house.
Laura Zabel:
So rather than the whole team trying to become therapists in two weeks, which is a terrible idea, how do we find the therapists that are interested in working with the population that we work with, that we have some trust with and can refer people directly to those resources? So a lot of what I think we do, particularly in a crisis situation, is system navigation. In terms of how do we know what not to do... I don't know that we're always particularly good at that. I think part of how we decide what to do, or a part of what I think pushes us to do something, is if we feel like no one else is doing this right now. If there's any way that we can say, "Here's a resource that already exists, let's help people find that," then we're pretty much not interested in recreating that, just for the sake of having it in-house. But if there's a gap, then I feel like our kind of collective culture and inclination is to step to that gap and to try and figure it out.
Laura Zabel:
I think a challenge for us in this moment, and a challenge we've been working through as a staff and having some conversation around, is somebody said to me yesterday, "It's a marathon and a sprint." There is this urgency, and we can't ignore that and just sort of proceed at a pace that might've been normal before. But we're also, I think we're all aware the longer this goes on, that it's going to be a long haul and people are going to continue to need things. And so we do need to protect, just our human capacity, and try to share the load with each other and find ways to set some boundaries for ourselves and for the organization. So, completely honestly, that's not a thing we're particularly good.
Lauren Ruffin:
I don't know if you could tell that really resonated with me, around surveying. You're so right. I feel like there are people who think the world is a House episode, an episode of House, and actually sometimes the dent in someone's head was [crosstalk 00:21:03] trauma. It wasn't anything else. So it's an interesting time. But in that same vein, I'm curious, there's so much information coming out from the government right now, and so much money that's flowing to the government. And my personal worry is that artists and independent contractors and freelancers are going to think that $1,200 that's automatically going to be deposited into people's bank account is all they're qualified for. But there're these huge expansions of... You can actually access loans and emergency funding. Have you started to parse through that, and do you have any plans to roll anything out in terms of information that we can share with our audience, our members yet?
Laura Zabel:
Yeah, we're trying to really parse through that. I agree. I think I both really want people to be able to connect to the resources that they're eligible for, and a lot of really great advocacy went into making sure that, both at federal and state levels, that contractors and freelancers were included in those relief packages. Which I think is fantastic and work that is super-necessary in the arts, but in all kinds of other sectors too. And I think that's a place... Another learning that I think we can take from this moment is that, as artists, I think it's important for us to build solidarity with those other sectors, that sometimes our strongest allies are maybe outside of the arts, are other folks who are in those freelance and contract worker communities. And I have a healthy skepticism about just how those systems are going to work, and how well they might work for contractors and freelancers and particularly folks like artists and creative makers who have really irregular income streams, and aren't able to say, like, "Well, my contract was for $1,000 a month for a year. It was for this residency and these two shows."
Laura Zabel:
So I think we're working on trying to understand what's available, and that's a place where we're also trying to connect to some really great attorneys and folks who can read the minutia of the language a little more clearly. I think we're in this hard space right now where there's been this policy win of inclusion, but there aren't a lot of guidelines yet. So people are just waiting to see how those might roll out. And there's also state-specific resources, and I think that's another place that really points to how fragile it is to make your living as a contractor, that things like unemployment insurance are really important, or being able to take unemployment are really important, if you can make it to the application period. And as an example in the... We were able to gather some data from the first 500 people who applied to the Emergency Relief Fund, and we're able to say that 88% of them needed the money for basic needs and particularly to pay rent on April 1st, which is today.
Laura Zabel:
So there's this real gap between when the bottom fell out and when you might be able to get that $1,200 or see some money from unemployment. And I think we both have to solve for that gap and set people up to be able to navigate those systems in the long-term.
Tim Cynova:
"Laura, I will second these. So smart, so inspiring," from our friends who've been on online. I love that there's just a community who is online having a chat while we're doing this every morning. Also, there is a question that came through, one last question. Let's see. It's someone who is a fellow Minnesotan, [inaudible 00:24:17] Minnesota shoe question because shoes were mentioned earlier, so active listener: "How many Sven Clogs do you own?"
Laura Zabel:
So many. An embarrassing amount, is that an answer? One of my biggest professional goals is to somehow acquire a shoe sponsorship from Sven Clogs in Chisago City, Minnesota, it's a great handmade clog business. Some athletes want to have Nike. I would really like Sven Clogs to be my sponsor.
Tim Cynova:
And with that, Laura, we are out of time. I want to thank you so much for being on the show today.
Laura Zabel:
Thank you so much for having me. It's been great to be here.
Tim Cynova:
Lauren and I started this live stream in part as a way to socially connect with our friends and colleagues, even as we physically distance ourselves right now. To share some laughter and news with each other as we're spread around the world. Before we sign off, we wanted to take a moment to thank the healthcare professionals, the first responders, the scientists, the amazing humans who society depends on who can't simply work from home, and who put their lives at risk in service of others. They're our family members, our friends, our neighbors, and people we'll never meet. Thanks to each of them, and thanks to you. Stay safe, stay healthy, and for those of us who are able, please stay home. Continue the Work. Shouldn't. Suck. LIVE adventure with us on our next episode, when we're joined by Nina Simon, Spacemaker and CEO of OF/BY/FOR ALL.
Tim Cynova:
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