A couple united in a shared passion to build communities through art and farming … and to make people cry for the right reasons. This episode features Amanda & Brad Kik, Co-Founders of Crosshatch Center for Art & Ecology.
A couple united in a shared passion to build communities through art and farming … and to make people cry for the right reasons. This episode features Amanda & Brad Kik, Co-Founders of Crosshatch Center for Art & Ecology.
(START THEME MUSIC)
When you’re an entrepreneur… You have to develop what’s called an elevator pitch.
That is, a description of what your business does and why... that can be shared in the length of an elevator ride.
But what if there isn’t an elevator in your entire town?
And what if your business is all about being grounded?
“We have never had anything that works in that one minute or two minutes. And the joke used to be, here, go read these books and then lets go grab a beer later.
Today… Brad and Amanda Kik…
Founders of the incomparable… nearly inconceivable… and certainly indescribable non-profit Crosshatch.
I’m Tommy Andres and this is Creative Coast.
(THEME MUSIC POST/FADE)
There’s an old colloquial expression made famous by Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart back in 1964.
He was ruling on a case about indecency…
And he said, basically, that while it can be a challenge to define pornography….
I quote - “know it when I see it.”
That’s sort of the deal with “Crosshatch.”
“We explain what we do by pointing at it. // Sometimes people come to events and they leave in tears because they’ve been so thirsty for this kind of community, and they just see it happening in front of them. // It’s the best… it’s the best when they cry.”
The reason Crosshatch is so hard to explain is because it’s a cosmic collision of two people with two visions that seem…
on the surface at least...
To be completely disparate.
Bringing together art…
And farming.
(START MUSIC)
Amanda Kik…
Then Amanda Jones…
grew up in suburban Detroit…
And left… Or should I say fled to Los Angeles for college.
“When I left Michigan I was never coming back. Like, that was never my intention to return.”
She majored in fine arts…
Then got a graduate degree in writing.
“Altogether I was out there for about 8 years.”
She made friends in the art world… Built a community…
And figured LA would be her forever home.
I loved the culture in Los Angeles, I loved the museums and the art scene and I had made a lot of good friends there.
Meanwhile, Brad studied communications in East Lansing…
just a bike ride away from his hometown.
“By the time I left Michigan State I was chomping at the bit to get out of Michigan.”
Brad headed west to find his calling...
He moved to Austin… Then Denver…
And just kept going.
“I didn’t and don’t speak any other second languages so I went as far as I could to a place where people still spoke English and that was New Zealand. // and while I was there I got really interested in permaculture and living off-grid, alternative construction techniques, just a lot of this sort of back to the land stuff - really got in deep to that.”
After Amanda left for college, her parents bought a cottage up in Bellaire, Michigan…
A village of around a thousand residents 40 miles north of Traverse City.
When I was growing up all our vacations were to great national parks. We went to the Rockies and we went to Banff and we went to Yosemite, but Northern Michigan wasn’t in our travel regiment. //And so when they bought the cottage and I came to visit, I was like, “Oh, this is Michigan? Like, this is not the Michigan I understood. This is very different from suburban Detroit. So I fell in love with that peace and Northern Michigan’s obvious amazing beauty.
In the summer of 2001, Amanda was getting a little burned out on LA…
She wanted to take a break from the congestion and pollution.
And so I asked if I could hang out at the cottage for a little while until I got it figured out and then a year went by and they said ‘you need to leave our cottage.’ And by that time I was like, ‘no, I like it here, this is just my style.’
Meanwhile… Brad is still a world away when he gets a phone call.
And then my grandpa died. And I was in New Zealand and flew home for the funeral and on that flight home was thinking about what I was in love with and realized I could be doing this work in Michigan. So I came back to Michigan… had a friend living in Cedar up in Leelanau County, so he kind of helped me make that transition Up North.
Do you think there’s something about sort of being older and wiser or just coming to a realization in your life… like, what do you think it is that triggers a switch when suddenly you’re like, “oh, Michigan is actually this wonderful place?
We talk about that a lot because it seems like Michiganders do this. We know a lot of people that leave Michigan and then come back. And for me it was // I had to leave home before I knew what home was.
(MUSIC POST/FADE)
So how did these two come together?
(laughs) Yeah. Well, there’s some we can’t talk about. But we met online before it was apps and all that. // Anyway, so we met that way and I sent her a message and she just threw herself at me (laughs). Yeah, no.
They went to space and back to cross the county line.
We were both in kind of transitional moments of you know like late 20s early 30s trying to kind of figure out what we wanted to be when we grew up and so we did a lot of talking about ‘well, what do you want to do with your life? What do you want to do with your life?’ And I really wanted to start an artist residency program. There wasn’t any at that time in Northern Michigan and that seemed like a great way to bring all my artist friends from Los Angeles to Northern Michigan.
I had no idea what that was, but I had left New Zealand wanting to // be an educational center around farming, renewable energy, living off grid, alternative building styles. All of that. So we courted talking about 501 3Cs and non-profit structures and mission statements and business plans and all of that.
(START MUSIC)
The couple fell in love…
We actually filled out the paperwork for Crosshatch and were engaged right around the same time.
And got married in 2005
The first event we organized was our wedding, and we used the opportunity to purchase the things we needed to run events.
And that’s when they went about wedding their ideas too.
We bought 10 acres with this vision to build an artist residency program on a working farm.
They started raising money…
Our mailing list came from our wedding guest list. //Yeah, that was our first year-end campaign.
But Brad and Amanda say they had a lot to learn.
We both had non-profit experience, but we were also like gloriously naive. So like our original budget I was like ‘In year one we’ll start with $10,000 and then in year two and three, then we’ll move up into like the million dollar budget. // basic non-profit growth rate.
(MUSIC SWITCH - SHIFT TONE OR TEMPO - SOME SORT OF TRANSITION)
While they were developing their own land…
They started an artist residency at a cabin in the woods not too far from their home that they ran for seven years.
And that was really great.
They also started organizing meet-ups at farms around the area…
We had a couple of events...
Bringing in experts to lead workshops on things like edible forest gardening...
beekeeping…
And mushroom cultivation.
Our budget was really tiny. Our capacity was just the two of us.
Brad and Amanda noticed that folks would take some of their workshops over and over…
And they realized people didn’t just want to learn how to do things…
They wanted to talk about those things…
Become hobbyists around those things...
Form communities around those things.
Just like dork out over.
So they launched guilds.
They eventually bought more land…
And moved the artist residency to their own backyard.
Artists stay there…
Learn to farm and live off the land while they create.
And folks from the community come to Crosshatch to swap skills…
Attend workshops…
Or meet with guilds.
(MUSIC POST/FADE)
Over the years it got easier to raise money for Crosshatch…
And at some point we got introduced to federal dollars and we got good at writing grants.
And easier to organize events for Crosshatch.
But it hasn’t really gotten any easier to talk about Crosshatch.
Amanda brought this art piece and I brought this ecological piece and we brought them together and it was chocolate and peanut butter and it ended up being this beautiful thing, but we’ve spent the last 15 years learning how to talk about it. We called it the eye roll factor. We would talk about this work we were doing and people would just like look for someone else at the party to talk to. They were afraid they were stuck in the corner with someone who was not quite there.
It does sort of feel like being talked to about religion at a party I would think, right? It’s like a similar sort of thing where it feels like you’re prothletising to people I would think. When you were talking I was thinking about Alcoholics Anonymous and how Alcoholics Anonymous is like a group of people who wouldn’t necessarily be drawn to faith, but they find faith to be a useful tool to combat addiction, so it becomes this very sort of utilitarian thing in their life - not just spiritual, but they’re using it as a guidepost for how to get better. And I wonder if that sort of thought process clicked in your head where you’re like I don’t just need to be telling people about the problem, but I need to be finding these sort of small scale things that can impact one person at a time which will then hopefully domino into these big cultural shifts. Is that sort of what you guys were figuring out along the way?
Yeah, I think that’s spot on, especially the reference to faith. It’s actually led me to think a lot about the church I was raised in and the different ways people use religion and the different offerings in our lives. That idea is really apt for the kind of work that we do too. There’s also this kind of feeling that people have left the church in droves, but Crosshatch has offered people some of what they used to get from church, right? Which is this sense of community, this sense of shared purpose, a sense of just being together and in support of each other, and also maybe a sense of a higher calling. And one of the things we realized pretty early on is that we could point to it. That it was talking about specific people. We say we support the people who didn’t listen to their guidance counselors, and we’re really lucky that they didn’t because they’re some of the smartest, most passionate most interesting people who are really shaping the culture of the community. And then to realize that this whole broad community vision, this culture change vision, wasn’t us telling people what this culture should be and then hoping they would learn how to do it. It was us going out and seeing all these little pieces of it already out and around in the community and saying how can we grow this a little bit? How can we connect you with this other person over here who you haven’t met yet and what’s going to happen in that conversation?
(MUSIC START)
Speaking of conversations…
I went into this one not quite knowing what Crosshatch does…
But here’s what I’ve come to understand.
It’s about appreciating what we have today…
And preserving it for the future.
It’s about looking to the past and learning from it…
But not trying to return to it.
It’s about combating climate change by changing the mentality of society one beekeeper at a time…
And most importantly it’s about a couple trying to share the love they have with each other and for the world…
Through the work they do every day.
It’s about making people cry…
For good reasons.
I’m not trying to make people cry, but when they do we know we’ve pushed the right button. That we’re doing the right thing. They’ve learned about something they’ve wanted to do for a really long time, they’ve been dreaming about this and now they feel like they have the tools that they can do it. And they know these other people with this information too, so they’ve just built this little community that like, they are their people. And it can be like a really grounding experience for people and it becomes really emotional.
Yeah, I think that initial moment of deep emotional response to what they’re seeing and experiencing is really a big win, and then when people take something they’ve learned and make a life from it and you realize it’s become really integral to who they are and how they make their money and how they live Up North. There’s just a feeling like you’re giving people tools to live with and that feels like a huge win.
But explaining that in an elevator pitch is like, ‘we make people cry by having them take mushroom production workshops. That doesn’t fly.
Yeah, it’s hard to explain that in an elevator.
(MUSIC POST/DIP UNDER CREDITS)
If you would like to learn more about Crosshatch, visit crosshatch.org.
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Creative Coast is a podcast series brought to you by Traverse Connect…
the Grand Traverse Region’s Economic Development Organization…
and is produced by Maria Byrne and myself through our own little start-up podcast company Airloom Media.
Our composer is the incredibly talented Josh Hoisington…
A Traverse City local, by the way.
This podcast series is made possible thanks to generous support and funding from the Michigan Film and Digital Media Office at Michigan’s Economic Development Corporation.
You can visit Traverse Connect’s website at traverseconnect.com.