Vsa Minnesota

Educational programs and artist residencies: the school residency program brings visiting artists into classrooms around the state to provide participatory arts experiences to students with disabilities. Students in 7 schools participated in residencies this year. In addition, the artist ambassador program pairs the organization's arts in education coordinator with a Minnesota artist with a disability to make classroom presentations focusing on building student awareness of the capabilities of people with disabilities in the arts. Students with and without disabilities in two locations served as audience members for these presentations.

Cultural access and inclusive arts services Vsa Minnesota serves as a resource to state arts organizations on disability awareness, the americans with disability act, and physical and programmatic access to arts venues and services, using on-site materials and community resources. The program again this year included the ada improvement grant program for metro arts organizations made possible by a grant from the metropolitan regional arts council (st. paul). This program allowed Vsa Minnesota to make grants to 16 organizations seeking to improve access to their programs by people with disabilities through physical or program improvements. The maximum grant amount was 15,000 and 199,600 was awarded in total. This program/service area also continues to include access to performing arts which is a long-standing program that provides technical assistance to arts organizations in the areas of american sign language interpretation, audio description and captioning for individuals who are deaf or blind who attend arts performances offering these accommodations. Technical assistance includes marketing to deaf/hard of hearing and blind/low vision communities and building performance organizations capabilities to meet the needs of audience members from these communities. Vsa Minnesota has a captioning display unit that it offers out to organizations wishing to provide open captioning for their live arts performances. The organizations accessible arts calendar promotes all performances in the state featuring asl interpretation, audio description and captioning. This calendar is found on the organizations website at www.vsamn.org/calendar.

Professional development: the professional development includes facilitation and promotion of networking and technical assistance to artists with disabilities. This occurs through artist gatherings in twin cities locations and through an email posting service that lists current information pertinent to Minnesota artists with disabilities, including employment opportunities, calls for art, accessible performance listings, and announcements of happenings by and for artists with disabilities. Finally, this program also includes the emerging artists grant program which supports Minnesota artists with disabilities in creating new work. Six 2,000 grants were awarded this year to writers, performing and visual artists.

Public awareness and outreach other awareness work includes ongoing visual art exhibits showing work by Minnesota artists with disabilities. Work was shown during the year at vision loss resources. Vsa minnesotas web site (www.vsamn.org) is accessible to people with a range of abilities (including people who are blind or have low vision) and includes current and pertinent information about the organization and its programs. Additional information about the organization can be found on the Vsa Minnesota facebook page. Organizational affiliation relationships Vsa Minnesota has a formal licensing agreement with the john f. kennedy center in Washington, d.c. Specifically, Vsa Minnesota is allowed to use the trademarked name "Vsa" as its organizational name from january 1, 2017 through december 31, 2019 for no fee. Should Vsa Minnesota choose to use the name beyond december 31, 2019, an annual licensing fee of at least 3,000 will be due to the john f. kennedy center for the performing arts.