McKenzie Wren, MPH,  Wren Consulting

The link to the recording of the webinar "Engaging with The Tiny Survival Guide" can be found under Webinar Recordings.

"Adult providers need healing too! Healing centered engagement requires that we consider how to support adult providers in sustaining their own healing and well-being. We cannot presume that adulthood is a final, trauma-free destination. Healing is an ongoing process that we all need, not just young people who experience trauma.” - Shawn Ginwright, The Future of Healing: Shifting from Trauma-Informed Care to Healing-Centered Engagement

According to recent statistics from the US Census, there are currently over 20 million veterans and active duty service members in the United States. Although arts play an important role in healing, the veteran community is often overlooked in programming. New Mexico Arts (NMA), a state arts agency, and Art Spark Texas, a nonprofit focused on inclusive arts, are two organizations emphasizing and creating programming for veterans and military families. 

Discovering the Gap

“In 2009, we realized there were a lot of veterans in our community and people who we were going to war and coming back, but not identifying as people with disabilities, which is the population we work with,” says Art Spark’s ArtWorks Director, April Sullivan. “The terminology didn’t relate to them.” 

At Leadership Exchange in Arts and Disability (LEAD®) we are able to share resources and knowledge, develop best practices and foster collaborative relationships to create communal success for cultural organizations. Often when we return to our hometowns, it can feel like the successes of fellow organizations are in direct conflict with our own. In the case of accessibility, knowledge networks around the country are proving this wrong. 

If you were in attendance at LEAD, you might have seen the session “Partners and Rivals: Championing Access Across a Community.” At first look, the panelists didn’t come across as rivals or even colleagues, but friends. All five panelists hailed from Pittsburgh and have been working together for inclusion and accessibility in the arts community. Organizations in Pittsburgh have banded together, becoming a national model for how different kinds of organizations can foster a community-wide collaboration that effectively bridges knowledge and experience gaps around accessibility, aiming to fully connect people with disabilities to the arts community.

Meet Me at the MoMA, a program developed for patrons with dementia by the Museum of Modern Art in New York, New York, has influenced museums both nationally and internationally. None have had such expansive and wide-ranging success, both in terms of geographic area and diversity of organizations, as SPARK!

SPARK! Ignites

With the mission of making Wisconsin a leader in addressing challenges posed by Alzheimer’s, the Helen Bader Foundation (now Bader Philanthropies Inc.) sent out a request for proposals to every museum in Wisconsin. Taking cues from Meet Me at the MoMA, the Foundation aimed to bring similar opportunities to their home state.