Creative Community: Creative Midwest Media Cohort Elevates Creative Storytelling in the Midwest
Arts Midwest's newest initiative provides support to organizations sharing the vibrant, brilliant artistic community in the Midwest
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The first thing Angela Zonunpari noticed when she moved to Sioux Falls, South Dakota with her husband was the warmth.
Not in the air, of course. But the warmth between the community of artists that welcomed her with open arms.
“When I moved here, I inherited a lot of my husband’s friends who are these amazing artists and musicians. They were immediately just like, ‘come here, you are an artist, you are a journalist. We know people here. We will send an email and help you out,’” Angela said. “I’ve never had that warmth. What I’ve noticed here is that relationships matter a lot.”
Angela grew up in New Delhi and attended grad school in New York City. She was already familiar with the stereotypes of the Midwest when she moved to her husband’s hometown, the narratives of boredom and uninspired living. Narratives that were quickly disrupted by the complex and brilliant artistic community she found.
Angela now works for Arts Midwest, a nonprofit organization dedicated to supporting and celebrating those same artistic communities that welcomed her home to South Dakota. She oversees the Creativity News Desk storytelling initiative as the Managing Editor. This program “commissions stories and gives grants for projects that amplify the power of arts and creativity in the Midwest.”
With their newest initiative, The Creative Midwest Media Cohort, the News Desk is providing even more support to ten media organizations across the region rewriting the narratives about the brilliant, innovative, inspired artistic communities that call the Midwest home.
Storytelling to Build Creative Community
For 35 years, Arts Midwest had provided grants for arts and culture community programming in Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Michigan, Minnesota, North Dakota, Ohio, South Dakota, Wisconsin, and the Native American nations to whom the land belonged first.
President Torrie Allen joined Arts Midwest in 2019 and saw an opportunity expand how the organization built community across the Midwest.
“Torrie was really interested in storytelling as a medium to build community and relationships, and to highlight the thriving and welcoming power of arts and culture. He knows the power it holds when we exchange stories,” said Angela. The organization began commissioning writers and photographers to explore the arts and culture environment in the region.
The Creative Midwest Media Cohort was borne from that desire to elevate the work artists create in these “flyover states,” a stereotype Angela says Arts Midwest’s style guide works against perpetuating. She and her colleagues instead focus on a similar mission to The Midwest Creative: showing the world how the Midwest has built a thriving, vibrant creative community. What that creative community is and what it could be.
The next step was to support other media organizations doing the work, too.
“We wanted the News Desk to be collaborative and honor the people who are working on the ground,” said Angela. “We thought about partnerships as support and met with journalists, freelance writers, and people operating smaller newsrooms. We learned they needed support with capacity building and financial operations. That’s now the idea of the cohort came about. How do we support and lift up the work of people who are already covering stories of creativity?”
Be In Awe of Everything that Exists in the Midwest
Arts Midwest looked to its robust network to pick organizations for the invite-only program. They looked for individuals and organizations doing distinct work and lifting up the voices of rural communities, communities of color, and Native voices in the Midwest.
They awarded ten organizations $15,000 grants with 50% supporting a project they pitched in their application.
“A few pitched us projects used platforms they hadn’t used before, and others pitched an existing project that they wanted to expand,” Angela said.
It’s impossible to give each project the space it deserves in a single newsletter when each is approaching storytelling in such unique and important ways. The Buckeye Flame, the only LGBTQ+ newsroom in Ohio, will cover the LGBTQ+ community in counties they haven’t been able to cover yet. Buffalo’s Fire out of North Dakota will document Native American dentalium artists and their work throughout history.
Our own Hola Iowa, founded by Iowa Writers Collaborative Tar Macias, will produce a multimedia series highlighting the contributions of the Latino community to the arts and culture landscape in Iowa and the Midwest.
Read more about the work that these ten amazing cohort members will produce.
Each project reflects arts and culture ecosystem that has long thrived in our region, building upon the work Arts Midwest to dispel the myths about what it look and feels like to be a creative here.
“We want to be in awe of everything that exists in the Midwest. Storytelling holds that power, to represent voices, to represent different people and cultures and show the diversity and how much arts and culture and creativity exists in the region,” Angela said. “We want to do away with a lot of coastal thinking of what the Midwest is.”
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