Lucy Freeman, 2020-2021 Co-President
My name is Lucy Freeman and I’m the co-president of MUSIC Matters for the 2020-2021 year. Over the past four-and-a-half months I’ve had the pleasure of interning at the Ann Arbor Summer Festival, an event with a 36-year history of uniting the community around the arts. As the Operations Intern, my job description included organizing contracts and W-9s, creating and maintaining production schedules, communicating with festival vendors, and preparing plans to have a smooth running 21-day festival. That all changed, though, as the COVID-19 pandemic surged and A2SF pivoted their entire season.
The day I was interviewed for my position, the University of Michigan cancelled classes for the rest of the semester. A week later, I was hired with the idea that we would be remote for at least the first 2-3 weeks as things shut down around the state, so I went home to west Michigan and began to build my schedule of Zoom calls and google docs. Of course, we had no idea how long these measures would be in place at the time, and soon we were redesigning our entire programming, cancelling the traditional in-person activities, and adding virtual versions or entirely new programs to the calendar.
Though the challenges the pandemic brought to the festival’s programming were definitely not ideal, the interns were given amazing opportunities to pitch their ideas and work with more autonomy. My projects shifted into researching pandemic responses by organizations across the country, creating production needs lists and calendars for each of our 6+ programming initiatives, and creating geo-tagged audio-based experiences, one being a series showcasing artists that would have performed at the festival, and another a story that unfolds across locations in Ann Arbor.
Despite my internship experience being slightly different than what I originally anticipated, I was able to see firsthand how arts organizations can navigate change while staying true to their mission. I think my experience in MUSIC Matters helped me to learn flexibility and collaboration, which were invaluable during my internship, and I’m excited to bring what I learned at A2SF back to our organization.