Carson City – If you live in Carson City, chances are you’ve attended one or more of the Levitt Amp concert series concerts held on the Brewery Arts Center campus in Carson City over the past 3 summers. Gina Lopez-Hill is the Executive Director of the Brewery Arts Center and oversees the seed grant from the Levitt-Amp Foundation and organizes the now annual series of free, outdoor musical events, no small feat. Gina stopped by the KNVC studios earlier this week to reflect on the impact of the concerts and to explain why citizen voting is important for winning seed money for 2019 …
A key to the Brewery Arts Center winning funding for concerts in 2019 is contingent on votes cast by residents. You can cast a vote for another summer of funding for Carson City here.
We asked Temple-Hill about the Levitt-Amp grant and why community voting is important.
“In order to have the concert series, it is a grant we receive is the main seed funding for it. It’s $25,000,” Temple-Hill said. “Obviously the concert series costs a lot more than that, around $100,000, but it’s a good start. It’s good seed money for it.
“The grant is a 3 part grant. The first part is your initial submission, which happened back in September, and from there the pick the top 40 applicants.”
Carson City competes with cities across the nation under 400,000 in population. Of the 40 finalists, citizens must vote to advance their city to the next round.
“There is an online voting process,” said Lopez-Hill. “They give us 20 days to rally the community to vote for our town to receive the grant again, and the top 25 from those vote-getters go down to the next level, and they choose 15 out of the 25, and we’ve been fortunate enough to be in that top 15 the last 3 years.”
For more from Gina Lopez-Hill, listen to the audio interview embedded above …
