A little over two weeks ago, the Great Falls Symphony Association made news by announcing that they were sunsetting the Chinook Winds quintet indefinitely due to lack of funding to keep them operational.
The reactions around the community were that of shock, anger, disappointment and disbelief. Understandably. I wrote a column myself asking why there wasn’t more communication about what the Symphony Association needed before making this drastic decision to let these primary players go, although they did say that they were going to offer them the chance to stay on with the symphony. An offer that, unsurprisingly, hasn’t been seen with much gusto by any of the Chinook Winds members: Dorian Antipa, Norman Menzales, Evan Tegley, Madeleine Folkerts and Julia Klein.
Emily Wolfram, the former GFSA Manager of the Core from 2016 to 2019 and current wife to Dorian Antipa, wrote a solid piece for WTF406 in which she said that “The most worrisome administrative failure is leadership knowing that the Core residency program was a financial problem for eight years and, in all that time, not finding solutions or even communicating about it,” and “Administrative problems aside, the sudden ending of a beloved ensemble has caused a loss of trust on multiple levels—the ramifications of which will be felt now and well into the future.”
I encourage you to check out her piece, but I’m not talking about the GFSA or even the Chinook Winds in my piece today.
I’m writing about what we can do, as a community, to try and ensure that this does not happen again. That we don’t lose another of our amazing organizations, musical or otherwise, that we’ve been fortunate to have in our fine community since even before I moved here my first time back in 2008.
This should come to no shock to anyone, but, the most direct way to support non-profit organizations is to contribute to them. They all need funding to survive and they sometimes live or die by the grants that they’re able to secure. Donations make up a huge part of their existence, as well, and it doesn’t take someone with an internet blog to tell you that donating to a non-profit is a no-brainer if you wish to show you value them.
But, what if you can’t donate? Or you can’t continuously give? What can you do to ensure that the same fate of the Chinook Winds doesn’t happen to say the Cascade Quartet or any of the other cherished non-profits here?
The very first step is to reach out to them.
Think of a place or group you have either paid admission to, or bought a ticket to go see, or visited recently even if you didn’t have to pay to get in and find someone to ask what you, a passionate patron, can do to help out.
Maybe they need volunteers. I know the Great Falls Public Library is ALWAYS looking for good volunteers to help out. Or maybe they need someone to help spread the word about what they’ve got going on on social media. Whatever they need, it’s more than likely that we have community members here who can help fill that need in ways that aren’t strictly financial.
An even easier way to start is to find their social media pages and click like, follow, love, or whatever the platform of choice calls it these days.
Sign up for their newsletters. Nonprofits LOVE sharing stuff in newsletters. As someone who works for two, I can tell you from first-hand experience that it’s a tried-and-tested method for sharing what’s actually happening at a given organization.
OR, you could even show up and offer to buy the people who work for your favorite non-profit, museum, organization or charity a cup of coffee. Write them a letter telling them you support them. That you appreciate them and want them to know that you value their presence in our town.
Those things might seem trivial, but trust me when I say it’s HUGE. When you get even a small nod from someone out in the community who shows you that you’re appreciated, it can do wonders to people’s morale. It’s simple, it hardly costs anything and yet the benefits far outweigh the costs.
We are blessed to have a deluge of non-profit organizations in Great Falls who each provide unique and subsantial contributions to our area. We’re a much better place with the all of the museums in the Museums Consortium, United Way, Big Brothers and Big Sisters of Cascade County, the library, the Great Falls Symphony, Easter Seals, the Red Cross, Special Olympics of Montana, and the many more I’m likely forgetting to mention here, but you get the idea.
One thing I’ve learned since I’ve moved here in the early 2000s and returned last year is that we have passionate people who care about the welfare of our arts, our musicians, our theater troupes, our military members, our children, our sick, our poor, and our unhoused. We may not be able to give as much as we would like at all times, but, I know Great Falls has the DNA to show that we care and that we’re not going to let another one of our institutions go down without a fight.
Losing the Chinook Winds hurts. I’m still sick about it, and I find myself going through the stages of grief about it because I remember how they made me feel when I would attend their shows and get to know the members of their highly talented cabal.
Don’t let that hurt drag you down and make you feel like Great Falls isn’t a place that can support groups like them, however. We can before, and we will again. I know it for a fact.
So in closing, I urge you to take a minute and think about an organization that has made an impact in your life now or at some time in the near past. Ask yourself if you can do something, ANYTHING, to help them. And then, this is the big part, go out and do it. Even if it’s something small, it’ll get the ball rolling, and that can be half the battle sometimes.
Thank you, Jake. This is a great article. It should be an opinion piece in the newspaper Great Falls no longer has.