Building & Practicing Mattering and Belonging
Dear friends,
Thank you for showing up for Maine Inside Out in so many ways in 2020. With the support of our community, MIO has evolved in leaps and bounds during this challenging year, and is heading into 2021 more committed than ever to building a world where everyone matters and belongs. This is urgent work. Our collective future depends on it. MIO will continue to invest in the leadership of young people and the creation of art as ways to envision and materialize this future. MIOs has big plans for the year ahead, an incredible and expanded staff team, and exciting news and updates to share about how we can ALL do this critical work together.
Building something new requires commitment and effort, but it can also be joyful. Maine Inside Out invites you to come PLAY with us in 2021. Let’s stay connected!
- All of us at MIO
Community Artists
Tyler Jackson, MIO Project Facilitator and Open Mic Co-Host
Staff Team
From left to right: Darryl Shepherd Jr., Chiara Liberatore, Joseph Jackson, Noah Bragg, Tyler Jackson, Stacy Perez.
From left to right: Joseph Jackson, Tessy Seward, Stacy Perez, Chiara Liberatore, Margot Fine, Bobby Bennett (2019-2020 intern), Noah Bragg.
Board of Directors
Welcome Anna Diaz, MIO’s new board chair! and Thank You Anna Melbin, MIO’s Outgoing Board Chair for your dedication!
In the News:
MIO's new Co-Executive Director Bruce King featured in the Forcaster and Portland Press Herald
A little more about MIO’s internal culture - building and practicing mattering
and belonging internally.
Maine Inside Out believes that change begins at home. We need to build and practice the same ways of being within the organization that we ultimately want to see in the world. In 2020, the entire MIO team and membership did some deep exploratory work together to collectively define Maine Inside Out’s purpose and core values, and to redesign our organizational structure and people practices to better reflect those commitments. MIO youth artists participated in 82 individual interviews and focus groups. As a result, MIO moved from a somewhat traditional organizational structure to a holacratic model, in which decision-making is broadly distributed and roles and accountabilities are transparent across the organization. This new structure is relational, iterative, experimental, liberatory, and resilient. It supports innovation and autonomy, and challenges each of us to practice accountability to the whole. We are happy to share more about how we landed here and what it looks like on the ground to operate in this new way. Please reach out if you’d like to learn more.
Maine Inside Out is a 501(c)3 non-profit organization. Your tax-deductible support goes directly to support art-making, collaborative advocacy and transformative justice work in our communities, to help build a world where everyone matters and belongs.