We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Kathleen Crocetti. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Kathleen below.
Hi Kathleen, thanks for joining us today. Let’s kick things off with talking about how you serve the underserved, because in our view this is one of the most important things the small business community does for society – by serving those who the giant corporations ignore, small business helps create a more inclusive and just world for all of us.
Community Arts & Empowerment is a non-profit organization, our mission is to make art for, by, and with the public, to build community identity, pride, and connections through public art projects, and to foster creativity and empower communities through the arts.
Watsonville is a low-income agricultural town. Eighty-five percent of our residents are either new immigrants or first generation from Mexico and Central America. Our mission to elevate through the arts starts with our arts center.
We operate a free afterschool arts center where teens come make public art with us. The environment is super chill, kids arrive and leave when it is convenient for them. We have a stocked kitchen where they help themselves to snacks and a quiet reading area where they can hang out or do their homework. The youth choose the kind of music played in the studio, and we have free wifi for those who would prefer to listen to different music on their own devices.
Our participating teens are introduced to a myriad of opportunities for growth. Community Arts Empowerment is focused on creating public art for our community, but we also offer homework assistance, college and career counseling, and letters of recommendation. While creating public art with us, students are learning job skills. We have all kinds of students joining us. For those not interested in higher education, we have industry partners who offer students job shadowing experiences at a tile manufacturing company and a tile installation company. Both of these businesses are union shops and offer competitive wages and benefits to their employees.
At any point in time, we have up to five youth employees. Any of our youth employees who sign up for a 529 savings program can participate in our matching savings program. We will match up to $400 a month for any youth who wants to save for future higher education.
These are the tangible ways we empower our community, however, the art we make is our most impactful gift.
We usually have at least two projects and up to five in process. Our largest one is a five-year project called “Watsonville Brillante”. When finished, “Watsonville Brillante” will be a 12,500 square-foot mosaic that covers the 6-story downtown parking garage in Watsonville. Through a community engagement process, we invited the community to choose the images we would create for these mosaics and it is those images that empower the entire community. To date we have given stipends to 120 individuals for the use of their artwork, 105 of those contributing artists were high school students. But it is the images of artis Juan Fuentes that take your breath away and provide an overwhelming sense of love, pride, and acknowledgment within our farmworking community.
Public art that has permanence usually depicts people with power. We are changing the archetype of public art in our town by honoring the people who are at the bottom of the economic pyramid, those who create wealth for others through physical labor.
The four vertical panels of “Watsonville Brillante” are each 60′ tall and depict a Mexican strawberry picker, an apple picker, an indigenous woman in a field, and an Asian flower grower. They are massive and striking.
One of our youth said to me, “To me, these murals represent my family, that could be my dad and my uncles.”
Our executive assistant pointed out that we literally have to look up to them.
Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.
Before deciding to start a non-profit organization I had a 30-year career as a middle school art teacher. One of the recurring projects I did with my students was to create mosaics for the City of Santa Cruz every spring. In 2016 I traveled to Barcelona and spent 10 days immersed in everything Gaudi. I came away with the desire to create a monumental mosaic installation. I considered that if all the mosaics I had done over the past 14 years were in one location I would have assembled a monumental work.
The qualities that make me a good teacher are the same ones that make me a really good Community Artist—the ability to envision the big picture, break down large tasks into manageable parts, create situations where each individual contribution has meaning and is valued, employ strong communication skills, and display the patience for dealing with bureaucracy.
I began by writing a white paper, and after consulting some really smart people and then I began to assemble a Board of Directors. One by one, I found the right board members, who, each in turn, have made valuable contributions. With the white paper in hand and more than half of the funding secured, we got the approval of the City of Watsonville and signed a five-year lease on the previously unused Muzzio Mosaic Arts Center (renamed after we got it) for $1.00 a year, in exchange for providing free arts programming and covering the downtown civic parking garage in mosaics.
There are several ways big public art projects come to life. There is no playbook for a well-documented example of one inspired person with the support of a community creating a visual arts center based on social justice resulting in a monumental facelift for an entire town.
We’d love to hear about how you met your business partner.
I created public art for at least 6 years before I ever made any money. In the beginning, I was always in the red which would have been hard on a teacher’s salary, but my husband’s engineer job enabled him to fund my passion projects. More than a decade ago, a wonderful woman-now my best friend, Susanne B., changed all of that. She helped me turn my passion projects into a business, and we now stay firmly in the black.
One year two sisters were enrolled in my art class, and one of them was a little bit of a challenge. This is how I met Susanne, she is their mother. Susanne wasn’t at all concerned about her daughter’s behavior, but she was excited to meet me. Susanne is a whirlwind of energy, with a million creative ideas and a passion for reuse. Susanne is the lead pre-construction engineer at Rinaldi Tile and Marble, a tile installation company. She would periodically show up and dump tiles in my classroom because she could not bear to see leftover materials go into the landfill. I used her donations to start the public art mosaics my students installed all over town.
A few years after her girls graduated, I was doing a project and paying an exorbitant price for materials when I decided to look up that crazy mom, Susanne, and see if she could use her influence at Rinaldi to negotiate with my supplier. Luckily for me, she not only helped me get the materials at a reasonable price, but she was now at a place in her life where she had spare time to give and wanted to give that time to me. Susanne became my most ardent volunteer for my community mosaic-making projects. I swear that from across town, she can hear me sketching new ideas in the middle of the night and shows up early the next morning with sticky buns in hand, asking about square feet, tesserae, budgets, and timelines. I would never have gotten this far without her experience, advice, and considerable mosaicking talents—but most especially her friendship.
Can you open up about how you funded your business?
In the spring of 2019, I started a non-profit to fund “Watsonville Brillante” my big project idea. When finished “Watsonville Brillante” will cover 12,500 square feet of a parking garage with mosaics. We correctly predicted that we could create 1200 square feet every six months and that over five years the project would cost 1.5 million dollars. By the summer of 2020, we were fully funded for the first five years.
$1.5 million is an unheard-of amount of money to raise in both the non-profit and the arts sectors in our community. It’s all about a compelling story backed up by a good reputation and strong relationships.
Santa Cruz and Watsonville are two cities in the same county and though only 14 miles separate us, we are worlds apart. Santa Cruz is 80% white, Watonsivlle is 85% Latino, and by all economic measures Santa Cruz is near the top of all State rankings and Watsonville is near the bottom. The same disparity exists in access to the arts, arts education, and after-school opportunities.
These indisputable facts were the tenets that supported our assertion that the youth of Watsonville deserved a free afterschool arts center and that the City needed an economic boost that we could provide with a striking monumental artwork. Backed up by beautiful visual documentation our story was an easy sell.
I don’t like asking for money, but a friend of mine reminded me that I had been asking parents for money every year to help fund the art program at the public school. She was able to help me see that what I am offering is an opportunity for people to be part of something transformational for both the City and individuals.
Susanne and I had been creating public art mosaics for 10 years, and every one of them has tiles we had scrounged from the Rinaldi Tile bone yard. Our first ask was to Rick Rinaldi, the CEO of Rinaldi Tile and Marble. We asked him if he would commit to the installation of 12,500 square feet of tile in 10 phases over 5 years. Rick said yes! and there we had our first $250,000 donation. Rick pointed out that we would not be able to scrounge 12,500 square feet of tile from his boneyard. He then introduced us to Paul Burns and Eric Edelson the former and current CEO’s of Fireclay. After meeting with them, sharing our white paper, and taking a tour of the Frieclay factory it was time for me to make the ask, and so I asked them for 6,000 square feet of tile. Paul looked at me quizzically, and said “You are going to need at least 14,000 square feet, why are you asking us for just 6,000? This project is going to be so amazing, we want to be your sole providers!”
Paul’s excitement was the confidence boost I needed, and the asking got a lot easier especially since we could tell future donors that we had already secured $500,000 of in-kind donations. Our in-kind budget was rounded out with donations from Laricrete for installation materials donations and the City of Watsonville for a 5-year lease on the Community Center. With $900,000 of in-kind donations secured it was time to go after the cash we would need for operations.
My parents had just reached the age where they needed to take the Required Minimum Distribution from their retirement savings. They were happy to send the RMD to my non-profit rather than pay almost 1/2 of it in taxes. They became my first Angel donors, people who promised to give us $20,000 a year every year for 5 years.
Greg Pepping, the Executive Director of the Coastal Watershed Council, a local non-profit invested in protecting our waterways knew of my project and introduced me to George Ow, a local philanthropist.
George had wanted to meet me because he walked the waterways every day and had been enjoying the mosaics my students and I had been installing along the bridges and levees for years. George knew of my work, he knew people who believed in my ability to complete projects on time and within budget, he was impressed that my parents who are not well off agreed to be my first Angle donors. George not only came on as my second Angel donor, he agreed to be president of my Board.
Within a year we had our 4 other angel donors! My Board told me that raising funds for this project was so much fun they wanted me to expand and give them a new project to fund.
A compelling story, a good reputation, and strong relationships.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://communityartsempowerment.org/
- Instagram: WatsonvilleBrillante
- Facebook: Watsonville Brillante
Image Credits
Image Credits: Tarmo Hannula, Crystal Birns, Shmuel Thaler, [email protected]