The Remember Project
A nonprofit fundraiser supporting
TrellisThe Remember Project uses the Arts to raise awareness and reduce the fear and stigma of memory loss.
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$25,000 goal
Gratitude
Since 2015 The Remember Project has been building dementia friendly communities one event, one audience, and one conversation at a time. You are an indispensable part of that mission, and together we are changing perceptions about memory loss.
As a part of our community, we are grateful to you for your ongoing interest and support in using the arts to build community. You will continue to see more from us, thanks to that interest and support.
In this season of Thanksgiving, we want you to know that our gratitude for YOU only continues to grow. We count you among our many blessings.
To make a donation to The Remember Project via Trellis, click here
The Remember Project is a community of professional theatre artists that are working to build more dementia-friendly and dementia-aware communities through the use of the arts. We are a proud member of the family of programs and services of Trellis.
Help us reach new audiences and create our next theatrical video!
Our founder often says, “I can’t believe it took a pandemic to imagine reaching audiences in new ways with The Remember Project, yet now we can see a pathway for connecting with more people and much more quickly.”
Sometime in 2022, we hope to be touring with our live events again, however, the virtual format is here to stay and that’s good news for the dementia-friendly community movement in the upper Midwest.
Theatre is an especially potent method to help people move beyond the fear and stigma of memory loss. Once a conversation is opened about dementia, people realize the importance of being aware and prepared for the myriad ways memory loss might impact their families and friends.
Our Give to the Max Day fundraising effort will help us in two ways: 1) an outreach fund to help rural communities work together to bring The Remember Project to them either live or virtually in 2022, and 2) producing two new theatrical videos rising from our partnerships with Exposed Brick Theatre and the Granite Falls Living at Home Block Nurse Program.
Planning is key and far too many families are in crisis before they even begin to learn about the resources available to them. At the heart of The Remember Project is the commitment to use the arts to raise awareness, connecting people to resources. The need is urgent. Based on estimates from the Aging, Demographics, and Memory Study (a nationally representative sample of older adults), 11% of people age 65 and older in the United States are living with mild to severe dementia.
History of The Remember Project
The Remember Project was inspired by a one-act play festival at Festival Theatre in St. Croix Falls, WI in 2013. One of the plays submitted that year was Steering into the Skid by Deborah Ann Percy and Arnold Johnston. Executive Artistic Director, Danette Olsen McCarthy, was struck by the straight forward honesty of the material and the simplicity of the staging. In the audience that evening was Gary Kelsey, who had worked in the field of Aging most of his career and immediately shared his opinion that this play would be excellent for education and outreach to help communities better understand dementia.
Ultimately, Danette read the anthology The Memory Care Plays which included two additional plays: In the Garden by Matthew Widman and Riding the Waves by L.E. Grabowski-Cotton. She collaborated with the St. Croix Valley Foundation to design and produce a pilot project in 2015, which reached 15 communities with 30 performances in the lower St. Croix Valley over 10 short weeks.
The program format embraces a recognition that the deeper art is the rich combination of watching a play and then talking about it. A Remember Project event provides the time and space to guide communities through challenging conversations. It is through these conversations that connections are made, walls come down, and communities grow stronger, together.
After the pilot project came to an end in December 2015, requests for performance events continued throughout Wisconsin and parts of Minnesota for the next four years. It became evident that this model works, based on audience response, media interest, and community partner enthusiasm. Happily, the Remember Project is now a program of Trellis.
The Remember Project received grant funding from the Minnesota State Arts Board to support a 2020-2021 arts tour in Greater Minnesota. Five communities were selected to participate in what was planned to be a tour featuring live plays. A global pandemic created a unique opportunity for The Remember Project to think differently about presenting theatre. A talented and focused group of seasoned professionals came together to envision and act on the future of the The Remember Project. Our first theatrical video Steering into the Skid was produced, followed a few months later by In the Garden.
While we were touring In the Garden a Minneapolis playwright, Bonnie Dudovitz, submitted a play for consideration. The play, Fortune Cookies, was soon to become our third theatrical video. The yearlong Dementia Awareness Tour wrapped up in early July of this year - to rave reviews from those who participated.
We continue to partner with interested communities to help them in their journey toward becoming dementia friendly.