The COVID 19 Crisis has forced us at the Museum of Friends (MoF) to reexamine how we deliver programs to our community. The shut down last spring helped us to pivot towards more on-line programming. We had to embrace the mindset of our current show title, COVID-19 Crisis or Opportunity? 
 
We are asking for funds to help with continued paid technical support to create more on-line and virtual tours and educational programs that address the current needs of our local students. Art will be used as the vehicle to get our youth to open up about the trauma of these times and communicate what they are going through in narrative content, color and form – these are our children of the quarantine. We need to set up a virtual studio where the lessons can be delivered effectively. We are asking for funds to purchase equipment; pay technical support staff; publicize and promote the new programs making them available for our local schools.
 
A total of $3,750.00 is needed to complete this project. We are asking for $3,000.00 for 3 months to pay the Fox Theatre Technical Crew for three months of filming and editing the new Art Educational Series for Youth Children Coping with the COVID Quarantine. We are asking for $750.00 for equipment to make this possible.
 
Learn more by watching the videos above! Please visit the newly designed website: www.museumoffriends.org to view and hear audio tours of over 100 works from the permanent collection.
 
Volunteer request, 
We would welcome any film makers or teaching artists as in-kind teachers to offer video programming for our youth.  We would like to work on this in January, February and March, 2021 so that our local youth will have interesting and relevant art programs to occupy their time and minds.
 
A second project we are working on is reaching out and connecting to the continuum of arts for change in Walsenburg through a Veterans Work Project with 3-D printers.
 
During the process of working on the Colorado Department Public Health and Environment mural Public Health is a Puzzle at Miner's Plaza we worked with four Afghan war Veterans sent to MoF from the Probation Department.  Although not trained as artists they were instrumental to the completion of the mural adding their own art views while learning the practice of mural making thereby allowing the project to become transformational and authentic for our community.  They expressed being disenfranchised and feeling not appreciated being unemployed therefore we put the pieces together of how to put forward the project 3-D printing with CAD design to create jobs, civic change, and community development over the next two years with the first steps towards a “Makers’ Space” in Huerfano.  
 
The Veterans Work Project with 3-d printers will explore community Pride of SOCO Art History/Herstory created by The New Aesthetics of Southern Colorado with the multitude of artists who created community (communes) around the subject of art that redefines the common view of aesthetics emphasizing how its integral role plays out in civically, socially engaged art and change thereby instilling equity, inclusion and social justice.
 
Learn some background on the mural Public Health is a Puzzle here, https://www.facebook.com/322608615858/videos/1197784907280406 or visit the piece at Miner’s Plaza! 
 
Needs for this project:
 
We are asking for a matching grant of $25,000.00 for the RedLine Arts in Society Grant to create 4 part time jobs for unemployed Veterans.
 
We are asking for an in-kind donation of 3-d printers, filament . The purchase of 3-D printers (3) CAD programs, filament for making various sellable objects:
	
	
Art Planter Boxes; 
	
	
	
bird houses; 
	
	
	
bird feeders; 
	
	
	
fly squatters; and those imagined during the practice.  
	
 
Volunteer needs, 
A retired science, art, or engineering teacher or professional to work with this program. Workshops with the Veterans on the use of CAD 3-D programming and design and brainstorming sessions on what they see necessary thereby creating the first step of a maker's space at MoF with the intention to use our ingenuity, collaboration and inspire communal strength thereby changing the inequity of lack of jobs and resources to one replete with them.