You Can Count on Us

A Letter to Our Community

One of the things I've always admired about Ely is the way people show up for one another.

Maybe that's because I grew up on the 400 block of Harvey Street. If we ran out of a cup of sugar, we knew whose door to knock on. Looking back, I couldn't tell you whether we always remembered to return it. What I remember is that asking never felt uncomfortable because that's simply what neighbors did. You trusted that someone would answer the door, and someday you'd probably answer theirs.

Those moments don't usually become stories people tell. They're too ordinary for that. Someone stays after an event to stack chairs. A business quietly sponsors a youth production because they think children deserve that opportunity. A neighbor shovels a driveway before work. None of those moments seems especially significant on its own, but together they're the small stitches that keep a community from coming apart. Most of us don't notice them until something reminds us they're there.

I've been thinking about that a lot lately.

Not only because this summer was difficult. Every community eventually has a season that asks more of it than anyone expected. What stayed with me wasn't simply the uncertainty. It was how quickly people began finding ways to care for one another. The smoke made so much of daily life harder, but in a strange way it also made certain things easier to see. It became much clearer who was carrying different parts of this community every day. The work wasn't new. It had been happening all along. I was simply paying closer attention.

That realization has lingered with me because it changed the way I've been thinking about Northern Lakes Arts Association.

This year we celebrated forty years as an organization. Anniversaries naturally invite you to look backward, and we've spent plenty of time remembering productions, artists, volunteers, and the thousands of people who have helped shape this organization. Somewhere over the past few weeks, though, I found myself thinking much less about our history than about what forty years asks of us now.

An organization that's been part of a community for four decades carries a different kind of responsibility than one that's just beginning. People begin assuming you'll still be there next year, and the year after that. That's an extraordinary vote of confidence, but it also changes the question. Instead of asking what we want to become, I've found myself asking what our community should be able to expect from us.

We're an arts organization, so our tools look different than those of many of our neighbors. We don't fight wildfires or coordinate emergency response. We don't operate shelters or write public policy. What we have are rehearsal rooms, classrooms, galleries, performances, artists, volunteers, and spaces where people can be together. Most days those things feel ordinary. This summer reminded me that they aren't.

During Jesus Christ Superstar, I caught myself watching the audience as often as I watched the stage. Outside, there was so much uncertainty that many people were deciding each day whether it even made sense to leave home. Inside, something else was happening. For ninety minutes people laughed, listened, cried, and sat together. When the performance ended, many didn't rush out the door. They stayed in the lobby talking with friends or simply lingering for a while before heading back outside.

I've thought about those evenings more than I expected to because I don't think what people needed that week was simply a musical. They needed somewhere to gather. They needed a place where the air was clean, where the conversation wasn't about the next news update, and where, for a little while, they could set down some of what they had been carrying. Art didn't solve the uncertainty outside the theatre, but it offered something different. It offered a place to be together.

Behind the scenes, I was trying to do what I imagine a lot of leaders across Ely were trying to do. I wanted our cast and volunteers to feel steady even when I wasn't entirely sure what the next day would bring. We made decisions one at a time, adjusting as circumstances changed, asking the same question over and over again.

What does our community need from us right now?

Sometimes the answer was obvious. Opening the performances through Pay What You Can felt right. Encouraging audiences to support local restaurants before coming to the theatre felt right. Offering our building as a place where people could gather felt right. None of those decisions felt particularly innovative at the time. They simply felt consistent with the organization we were trying to be.

A few days later, someone thanked me for making those performances Pay What You Can. Before they left, they paused and asked, "If organizations like yours couldn't make that decision, who could?" I didn't answer immediately because I wasn't sure the question was really about Northern Lakes Arts Association. The more I've sat with it, the more I think it was a question about responsibility.

Healthy communities don't ask every institution to do the same work. They ask each institution to understand its own work well enough to contribute it generously. Schools teach. Libraries preserve knowledge. Churches care for people's spiritual lives.

Businesses create opportunity. Nonprofits meet needs in different ways. None of us carries the whole community, but together we carry more than any one of us could alone.

I've come to believe that's the work of leadership too. It isn't about trying to become everything. It's about understanding what you've been entrusted with and offering it as faithfully as you can.

For Northern Lakes Arts Association, that means continuing to gather people, creating access to the arts, investing in local artists and partnerships, adapting when our community changes, and showing up year after year. Over the next several weeks we'll be sharing those commitments as five public promises. I hope people will read them, challenge us to live up to them, and hold us accountable long after this campaign is over.

Those promises also explain why we're inviting people to invest in this work through a matching gift campaign. A philanthropic partner has generously offered to match every gift, dollar for dollar, up to $15,000. More than helping us meet a goal, those gifts help build the kind of organization that can keep asking, "What does our community need from us?" no matter what tomorrow looks like.

I don't know what the next few years will bring for Ely. None of us does. What I do know is that communities are shaped by ordinary decisions made over and over again. A neighbor answers the door. Someone stays to stack chairs. A business sponsors a youth production. An audience gathers on a smoky July evening because being together matters.

Those moments rarely make the news.

Over time, they become the story of a place.

I hope Northern Lakes Arts Association continues to be one small part of that story, and if you believe every community deserves organizations people can count on, I'd be honored to have you help us continue writing it.

Much gratitude to you and to all of our community,

Ian Francis Lah

Executive Artistic Director

NLAA