The Friendly City Foundation is focused on building more than programs.

They're building community by supporting artists and creating opportunities for connection.

The nonprofit demonstrates how art can enrich the culture in the Bradenton area.

[music] We created Friendly City FLI at the time, which is our art and music market now.

Friendly City Art Festival.

We decided that was a great place to kind of begin.

And so here at Aspera, we got 22 artists together, did our first little art festival.

We were so surprised that there were that many artists who even showed up.

We planned it really last minute, but for Bradenton, we could see that there was a vacuum of art in the area, and it was really like the inspiration for a lot of what we were doing.

You know, we don't have an art alliance in Bradenton.

There's just not a lot going on.

So for us, it was a really important thing to be able to create that.

And me as someone who just loves to gather people.

The community I think is hungry for the arts, but it is very difficult for an artist to survive in this city.

What do we do to make a space for these artists to be able to sell their work that they were excited to present and was a part of who they were?

A great way that we have captured that mission is through art club.

That's a really exciting thing that we've been able to do is we found that there really was this wealth of community here.

They just didn't have a space.

I think one of the best examples of Friendly City Foundation capturing, like our mission and vision is through, um, Tori Silva.

And she's started as just a photographer coming in.

And throughout the past few years, she's now made photography and film her full career.

[music] Before connecting with Friendly City, I think some of the big challenges that I faced were just finding a community of artists.

Um, it was really, really difficult for me to meet people that were into the same thing that I was.

I think a community like Friendly City is just really, really important, um, in any area.

But for Bradenton specifically, it's amazing.

Um, it's just really it's really helped out a lot of creative people.

[music] Uh, Bradenton's a really interesting place that, um, it is like a small town.

I mean, there's like hundreds of thousands of people here.

And I think a lot of times people think of Bradenton and they think it's like a drive through city.

People don't realize maybe how, again, it's large, but it's small.

And so we sit on a lot of committees, whether it's, you know, redevelopment committees or stuff with the chamber or other city organizations, we meet with all of the other creative partners in the city quarterly and just talk through what everyone's doing, what are ways that we can benefit the city.

One of the things that I admire about the organization is the skill that they have at bringing out Gen Z for all sorts of issues, not just the arts, but to really get involved in the community.

So I see them as a connector, but also as an organization that really has the ability to just bring this generation into the conversation when it comes to community issues.

So we collaborated with them.

Last year was our first major collaboration, where we had a Christmas get together from the families in our programs.

The impact for that specific one was really our families being able to get together in person and to build on the community and the strengths in the community by getting together.

I think it would be a shame for us, local, state, federal government to think about defunding a lot of organizations who are providing essential services to the community.

Um, success for the Friendly City Foundation in Bradenton, I think really centers on our mission and our in our projects.

Are we really helping people make careers out of their work, and as a foundation that we're giving as much inclusion to the different types of art, that no one's excluded from that.

And so whatever people are doing, again, whether it's fine art, digital art, music, poetry, dancing, all of the different things that fall into that is that people are connecting around it.

They're able to collaborate and they're able to actually create and share.

And so I think that's a huge win.

And I think the best thing is when people think about Friendly City Foundation and again, Oscar or Friendly City Art Festival and Art club is that they feel like they have place in community, that the community is really the driver for it because we need people, we need to be in community with other people, and artists need that just as much as anyone else.

[music] To learn more, visit friendlycity.foundation.