Every other week on NHPR, we like to highlight a local nonprofit that’s providing a great service for the Granite State. On this week’s Give Back New Hampshire, our focus is on Creative Guts.
Originally started as a podcast just about five years ago, Creative Guts has expanded into a nonprofit with the mission of awakening the creativity in all of us.
This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.
Sarah Wrightsman: Our signature program is still very much the podcast and what most people know from us. We do roughly hour long interview based interviews with creative folks, largely in New Hampshire, but elsewhere too, about whatever their creative thing is. We dive into their passion. We dive into their hearts. We talk about the challenges. We talk about things like imposter syndrome. And there's all really fun conversations we get to have with creative people who are doing all kinds of different creative things.
Laura Harper Lake: And it's all disciplines. So a lot of folks think, oh, visual artists. But we will interview dancers and writers and musicians and chefs, wood makers, jewelers, the whole gamut.
Creativity is a muscle that everybody has, and it's a muscle that we believe needs to be exercised. So we like to celebrate the folks who are doing that, whether it's their full time gig or if they have a day job and they're doing it as a hobby or on the side, or they're trying to make it their full time gig, it's really inspiring to see the perseverance of creatives, and New Hampshire has such a vibrant tapestry of creative people.
Sarah Wrightsman: One of the things that we do every year, and this is one of our favorite programs, is our tiny art exchange. People sign up, we collect names and addresses, and then we assign you a person and you send them a tiny piece of art.
And so you might be sending, you know, your art to someone who's down the street from you or elsewhere in New Hampshire, or you might be sending your art, you know, across the ocean to a different country. And this is an opportunity for two people who are creative and producing some sort of visual art to just be able to connect with one another, to share their art with one another and to kind of “meet.” And I put that in quotes, “meet” another creative person.
Laura Harper Lake: And through the work that we do, like with the tiny art exchange, you know, a lot of it is balancing providing opportunities for practicing creatives to share their work and tell their stories, which is if we curate it, it might be through exhibits, through the podcast, through the zines that we publish.
But then we want to make sure that art is open for all. Creativity is open for all. So we have the tiny art exchange. We have open mics, figure drawing, meet and makes. These types of events, we really encourage and hope to empower folks who are practicing their creative passion, or maybe want to dive into it.
Sarah Wrightsman: Yeah, that's so true. And something that we really value is this sort of idea of connections and being able to foster connections between people.
So whether that is, you know, two artists who are meeting each other and connecting and collaborating or, you know, someone who's not an artist, who's meeting an artist that they really like, or even for us, getting to meet the people that we interview on the podcast is always really exciting because we like them too, and we like their art.
Laura Harper Lake: One thing that shocked us last year was being the recipient of the 2023 Governor's Arts Award for Creative Communities. As a younger nonprofit that is an all volunteer working board, it was really amazing to get that recognition and receive the honor of being recognized as a vibrant, creative community.
Sarah Wrightsman: Truly it was. And I can't stress enough how little Creative Guts is. We are completely volunteer. We don't have any staff. You can go look at our annual report for 2023. We have a budget of about $12,000, which means donations to Creative Guts really make a big difference.
Laura Harper Lake: Folks can donate through our website, and you can make a one time donation or a recurring donation and any amount that you're able to do. We really appreciate it.
Sarah Wrightsman & Laura Harper Lake: Thanks so much for listening. And with that, show us your creative guts.
