Cultural Outreach Project
With support from the Oregon Cultural Trust and the Collins Foundation, Rogue World Music is excited to launch a strategic cultural outreach project to increase our organization’s cultural competence and relevance to local cultural artists and communities.
Focused on building relationships of mutual understanding, trust, and benefit, this project has two main goals:
Learning if, how, and which local cultural artists and communities would like to connect with others through sharing cultural arts.
Supporting the priorities and needs of cultural artists and communities in an authentic process that fosters genuine connection rather than appropriation.
With proven ability in cross-cultural relationship building, Ana Byers has been promoted to Program Director to lead RWM’s cultural outreach team. The team will cultivate a group of Cultural Arts Advisors to add layers of perspective to our work. We also expect to discover new local cultural artists and tradition-bearers who could be included in the statewide Oregon Folklife Network.
Photo courtesy of Bob Palermini
Longer term, we aim to:
Ground our programs more authentically in the cultural traditions of the Rogue Valley region and beyond.
Act as a resource for local cultural artists and communities who want to share and connect with others through cultural arts.
Present the Ashland World Music Festival as a vibrant, free, multicultural community festival reflecting and honoring the lived experience of the region’s diverse communities in both leadership and programming.
Engage culture-bearing artists as teachers in our world music education program.
This is our focus for the coming year, and we feel it’s vital to strengthening our mission of building community and cultural connection through world music experiences. If you are, or you know of, a local tradition-bearing artist we should connect with, please get in touch with Ana at anabyers@rogueworldmusic.org