COMMUNITY INVITED TO RECEPTION FOR ARTISTS ANNE EGAN, DEBORAH ROSENTHAL, & NANCY SARGENT

The community is invited to attend a reception on Friday, July 16^th from 4:30 p.m. to 6 p.m., at the Door County Community Foundation. The reception celebrates the Lobby Gallery Summer Exhibition featuring works by Anne Egan, Deborah Rosenthal, and Nancy Sargent. The Community Foundation is located at 222 N 3^rd Avenue in Downtown Sturgeon Bay. Refreshments will be served by Thyme Catering.

Anne Egan studied art at St. Norbert College but did not begin painting until moving to Door County in 1988 when she took many classes at the Peninsula School of Art. Her work was represented by Woodwalk Gallery for fifteen years and can be found in many private collections as well as several public venues. After a 5-year hiatus, Anne had returned to painting and hopes to never again stop. “My paintings can begin anywhere—from inspiration arising from natural world, manufactured forms, or the human form,” said Egan.

After retiring in 2018 from a three-decade career as a museum curator in several small museums, including 24 years as Curator of Exhibitions and Collections at the Miller Art Museum in Sturgeon Bay, Deborah Rosenthal has recently been focusing more on her studio training in painting, drawing and printmaking. “Drawing is my primary interest along with color experimentation influenced by Fauve artists’ exuberant color practice,” said Rosenthal.

Nancy Kinsey Sargent was born and raised in Fish Creek.  She graduated from Gibraltar High School at a time when there was no art program offered. Nancy attended Cardinal Stritch College in Milwaukee.  Graduating with a B.A. degree in education with a concentration in art, she returned to Fish Creek to teach elementary art in the Gibraltar School System. Marriage moved Nancy away from Door County, but in 1997, Nancy and her husband John retired to Fish Creek. Nancy exhibited her first collection of work as an emerging artist in 2001 at the Snow Star Gallery Ltd. in Fish Creek. “My love of color, pattern, rhythm, and symbols takes on a life of its own becoming more about the act of painting than the images themselves,” said Sargent.

Each season, different Door County artists will be invited to exhibit their work at the Door County Community Foundation’s Lobby Gallery. The Gallery is normally open to the public during the Community Foundation’s regular hours of 8:00 a.m. to 4:30 p.m., Monday through Friday.

The Door County Community Foundation, Inc. is a collection of separate charitable funds set up by individuals, families, non-profit organizations, private foundations and businesses that are managed, invested and disbursed for the current and future good of Door County. The Community Foundation was launched in 1999, currently administers more than $33 million in assets, and distributes more than $5 million to charities in Door County every year.

Winding Down the Emergency Response Fund

Now that the vaccinated among us have begun to remove our masks, it’s time to update the community as we enter the final phase of the Door County Emergency Response Fund.  As you may recall, The Board of Directors of the Door County Community Foundation activated the Emergency Response on March 19, 2020.  Working in partnership with United Way, this Fund was our community’s coordinated philanthropic response to COVID-19 and resulting economic crisis. 

The initial contributions to the Emergency Response Fund were entirely local.  It began with a gift from the Community Foundation itself along with local year ‘round residents whose jobs remained secure.  Then donations started to arrive from across the nation as seasonal residents sent gifts to help those who were unemployed in the place they love.  Nearly 70% of the $1.2 million donated to the Emergency Response Fund and other response efforts at the Community Foundation have come from people who live in Door County only part of the year.

While $1.2 million is a modest number in the grand scheme of philanthropy, on a per capita basis, it appears that the generosity of the people who love Door County has made ours the most generous response effort in Wisconsin. 

A joint Community Foundation-United Way Task Force established three priorities for the Emergency Response Fund.  First, our goal was to provide support for organizations offering immediate relief and assistance to people who were struggling during the stay-at-home order.  That work ended in June of 2020. 

The second priority was, and continues to be, to provide support for organizations helping people in who continue to struggle as the national recession threatens their family’s economic security.  Remember, during the summer of 2020, unemployment in Door County was double what it was during the summer of 2019. 

As challenging as it was for working families last summer, our single greatest concern was the looming 2020-2021 off-season.  For those at the bottom rung of the economic ladder, jobs become scarce during the cold months.  If a family doesn’t make their usual summer wages during the busy season, their ability to survive through the winter would be severely compromised.  Hence, the Community Foundation and the United Way placed great focus on creating initiatives to address two very basic needs:  food and shelter. 

For food, we brought the 8 food pantries together to form the Door County Food Pantry Coalition (www.FeedDoorCounty.org).  For shelter, we created a new Door County Rental Assistance Program (www.RentReliefDoorCounty.org) and internally prepared ourselves to make a significant investment in rent relief.  Thus we launched these new programs and waited for the substantial demand on our resources to begin. 

While the economic crisis continued during the off-season – people were struggling mightily –we didn’t anticipate the massive federal response.  Instead of Door County having to bear the burden alone, federal and state money became the primary sources of rental assistance.  As a result, instead of being the sole funding source, the Emergency Response Fund was primarily used to fill the gaps when a particular family didn’t meet the rigid federal and state criteria.  Functionally, this meant that the Emergency Response Fund never needed to invest more than $70,000 into rent relief when we anticipated spending several times more.

The shifting of the cost of rental assistance to government funding has left us the resources to attend to the third priority of the Emergency Response Fund: providing support for the non-profit organizations themselves, whose long-term viability is threatened by the economic crisis in Door County.

“Our first two priorities were focused on helping people who are struggling during this health and economic crisis,” says my colleague, Amy Kohnle, Executive Director of the United Way.  “While that work will continue, our third priority is to look at the health of the non-profit organizations themselves.”

Arts organizations and environmental groups are major economic engines for Door County, bringing tourists here and creating jobs for our residents.  Historical societies and other kinds of charities are important to our quality of life.  While the primary focus of the Emergency Response Fund remains helping those families who are facing tough times, we also want to ensure that Door County’s most important charitable organizations survive this crisis as well.

If you’re an arts organization, environmental group, historical society, or other kind of non-profit that incurred significant expenses related to COVID-19, you are invited to join human service charities in seeking assistance from the Emergency Response Fund.  To apply, or for a complete listing of grants awarded, visit www.RespondDoorCounty.org.

For Many Charities, the Economic Crisis Continues

The Door is open! From the cars lined up on the highway to the people lined up at Al Johnson’s, it’s clear that Door County has reopened after more than a year of this horrible pandemic. The advance-reservation rates reported by our lodging establishments indicate that this may be the busiest season in Door County ever.

Yet as we look around at all the people who are enjoying their stay in this wonderful place, it’s easy to forget that some of our greatest community treasures were hit hard by this global health and economic crisis and are still struggling, even now.

“COVID nearly destroyed our organization,” said Amy Frank, managing director of Third Avenue Playhouse (TAP). “We haven’t sold a ticket in over 15 months. In March of 2020, TAP was in the final week of rehearsals for the first show of the season. The majority of our production expenses – construction of the set and costumes, salaries for the rehearsal period, promotional and advertising costs, and royalty fees – are all incurred prior to the first performance. Closing the theater right before opening night immediately put TAP in the red, and we’ve been playing catch-up ever since.”

TAP’s story is far too common on our peninsula. So many arts and cultural organizations that are both essential to our quality of life and critical to our tourist economy faced similar stories of financial carnage last season.

“COVID devastated our budget last year,” said Mona Christensen, executive director of the Birch Creek Music Performance Center. “We not only lost all of our tuition revenue from our academy, but ticket sales from our concerts, advertising and sponsorships as well.”

“In 2020, our major conferences were canceled,” said Lauren Ward, managing director of Write On, Door County, “leaving us, like many artistic nonprofits, searching for ways to stay afloat and continue furthering our mission.”

These cultural treasures aren’t merely nonprofit organizations. They also employ real people who bore the brunt of this economic devastation.

“We had to cancel contracts for 63 company members,” said Dave Maier, managing director of Northern Sky Theater. “That’s more than $500,000 in lost wages to our performers and production staff.”

And this revenue loss wasn’t limited just to arts and cultural charities.

“We closed the Nature Center and canceled programs and events, including the Festival of Nature for the first time in 18 years,” said Andy Gill, executive director of The Ridges Sanctuary. “We count on those visitors to pay trail fees, make donations, shop in our Nature Store, sign up for memberships and take advantage of our programs. They are critical to our earned-income model.”

Environmental charities faced a significant added challenge during the pandemic because unlike arts groups whose stages went dark and buildings were closed, environmental organizations experienced a surge in the use of their facilities as the desire to be outdoors created unprecedented demand. Unfortunately, the increased use of trails and outdoor spaces translated into significantly higher maintenance costs without a commensurate increase in revenue.

“Demand for our programs is at an all-time high, but the decline in income has made it uniquely challenging to meet those demands,” Gill said.

It’s easy to look around at the incredible number of tourists we’re seeing this season and conclude that the economic crisis for these community treasures must be over. Unfortunately, that just isn’t the reality. Whether the source is guidance from public-health officials, restrictions from governing associations or labor contracts, or simply following best practices in a given field, ongoing COVID-19 restrictions are continuing to limit the ability of our charitable organizations to take advantage of these massive visitor numbers.

“This year, because of COVID protocols for music schools, summer camps and vaccinated/unvaccinated youth, we are operating at half capacity for our academy,” Christensen said. 

Similarly, Maier noted, “We already know that 2021 will also be a compromised season due to reduced audience capacity.”

That’s where you can help. The next time you walk the trails at Crossroads at Big Creek, be sure to leave an extra charitable gift behind. If you enjoyed a Midsummer’s Music concert, put something in a donation envelope before you leave for the evening. Charitable organizations such as these are essential to our quality of life and a major economic engine for our visitor industry.

“The ongoing donations from our friends and supporters are not only paying our bills, they are feeding our spirits,” Frank said. 

This season, make an extra gift to the charities you love the most.

This article, written by Door County Community Foundation President and CEO Bret Bicoy, originally appeared in the Peninsula Pulse.