-: I'm Natalie Gray and I'm the Youth Services Coordinator
at the Arts Commission.
The Arts Commission of Greater Toledo is a non-profit
that handles all the art in Toledo,
that's not a school or a museum.
So, we maintain all the public art.
We have the Young Artist at Work Program,
where we employ teens to make public art in the summer.
We have the Art Loop every third Thursday of the month.
We have a free arts, glass
and music festival called Momentum.
We give away grants to artists,
and we have a creative place making program.
As the Young Artist at Work Coordinator,
I hire about 45 teens every summer.
They work full time and make minimum wage,
30 hours a week for about six weeks.
They learn professionalism, financial literacy,
and they make murals usually.
So, they'll make murals and learn entrepreneurial
skills and learn that art is a career, art is a job.
And, the creative industry has really changed
the landscape of our cities.
My busiest time is in the summertime,
when we have, I have a seasonal team,
so when I have 45 teenagers and six instructors,
the days are busy running around,
delivering paints, signing time sheets,
and just making sure that everyone's
physically and emotionally safe,
is a lot in the six weeks.
So, that's my busiest time, is when I'm trying
to hire people and get these projects.
They usually do three major projects each year in six weeks.
So, that's the busiest time for me.
But, the rest of the year we plan, we hire,
we do a lot of interviewing and grant reporting.
Typically yeah, I work full time in an office,
and I do a lot of the hiring coordination,
posting online, connecting with partners.
Everything I do is outside of our organization.
It's all outreach to schools.
It's outreach to partners.
Partnering with libraries and different venues
to do art shows.
Figuring out whose building we wanna paint on next year.
So, everything I do is with somebody else.
But, I typically work in an office full time,
and sometimes that's going out and painting,
patching up a mural that's been tagged unfortunately.
And, sometimes it's you never know,
you have to be versatile.