We were lucky to catch up with Tobi Santagado recently and have shared our conversation below.

Tobi, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. One of the things we most admire about small businesses is their ability to diverge from the corporate/industry standard. Is there something that you or your brand do that differs from the industry standard? We’d love to hear about it as well as any stories you might have that illustrate how or why this difference matters.

Having the ability to think out of the box to help artists of all mediums in various ways is why we love what we do.

Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.

My daughters are professional dancers and own mignolo dance contemporary dance company which is an umbrella of mignolo a 501C3 non profit NJ organization. We decided to become a non-profit after the co-owner and parent of our daughters Charly and Eriel’s uncle suddenly passes away. He is why we are called mignolo and the longer story can be found on our website.

We’d love to hear a story of resilience from your journey.

When we built the art center we had planned to spend around 50k and it ballooned into 125k. We build it primarily to give a rehearsal space to mignolo dance. At the time I was on Metuchen arts council and a council member was talking about how she works in Princeton and they have build a community and have a humble place that artists can connect and call their own. At that same time we realized that the art center would not be used every hour by mignolo dance and that our community would benefit for a place for artists to call their own. Problem solved. We were building a place and could make this happen. What we didn’t know is zoning was not interested in this becoming a reality. I had to hire a lawyer and it took nearly two years in front of zoning required meetings and a lot of time and money before we got to our meeting in front of the zoning board where we would learn our fate. As the public meeting went on it appeared they were going to reject our request. Being on the arts council I asked them to come to the hearing. Well at the end of the meeting they are required to here the residents opinions and over 15 people went up and spoke on our behalf and even reprimanded them for lack of support in a town that says they support the arts. Well, we got approved with a ton of things we had to do if we were to get approvals costing us another 15k plus. We had to add a 2nd bathroom. We had to add special ada appellant gravel and we had to add a lot of bushes even though our art center is next to a train station and the bushes didn’t mean anything to residents as we are commercial space and that side is only transformer station. We never gave up, spent the money and have just celebrated our 5th year.

What’s a lesson you had to unlearn and what’s the backstory?

For many years we tried to create programs to help children impacted by opioids, that are being bullied. Every time we try to do this we get no one interested. The hard lesson is while you may want to offer the world something if the universe isn’t responding you don’t give up being of service, but you do give up on the specifics and look for other ways that the universe may need more.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://mignolo.art
• Instagram: mignolo dance – mignolo arts – pinky thinker press
• Facebook: mignolo dance – tobi santagado – mignolo arts center
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tobi-santagado-96502544/
• Youtube: @mignolodance
• Other: I own a company https://www.santagadoservices.com

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