The Vera Project

Budget Size: Between 1MM and 5MM

Region: Northwest

County: King

Mission Statement: The Vera Project is an all-ages nonprofit space dedicated to fostering personal and community transformation through collaborative, youth-driven engagement in music and art. A music venue, screen print shop, recording studio, art gallery, and safe space for radical self-expression, Vera is a home to Seattle’s creative community.

Community Accelerator Grant Award: $23,800

Primary Impact Category: The Future

Website: https://theveraproject.org/

“Everything we do is a little bit subversive,” says The Vera Project’s Executive Director, Ricky Graboski. This unofficial mission statement will come as no surprise to those familiar with Vera, an all-ages, drug and alcohol-free music and arts space on the Seattle Center campus that offers over 250 concerts a year, classes in screen-printing, audio recording, sound mixing, concert lighting, and other artistic mediums, and frequent ad hoc workshops that serve as training opportunities for youth interested in entering creative industries. Where the Vera Project’s subversiveness really shines, however, is in its management structure: Seattleites aged 14-24 who put in at least twenty-four annual volunteer hours at Vera earn voting rights on everything that happens in the space and make all major administrative decisions, from voting in board members to allocating funding to new projects and initiatives. The level of agency afforded to youth members fosters a spirit of volunteerism and social responsibility that Ricky believes is what Vera is all about: “We want the young people who move through our space to take over this city.”

For many years, the same spirit of joyful anarchy that ruled Vera’s programmatic offerings also defined its organizational growth – the team moved in as many directions as possible at once, picking up new goals and objectives and putting established ones aside. Now, they’re working on an approach that balances its one-off programs with more consistent offerings that have specific academic benchmarks and post-engagement job placement opportunities. The Community Accelerator Grant has been instrumental to Vera in achieving their current level of stability, largely by supporting salary increases and allowing them to offer benefits to a larger percentage of staff, approximately 30% of whom were once youth members at Vera. “We’re getting to a place where people can stay here because they want to stay here,” Ricky says, “which gives us more consistency with our budget, our capacity-building, and, most importantly, our mentorship and youth development. Having familiar faces around to help bring youth through our programs is invaluable for us.”

Lately, Vera’s primary challenge has been a good one to have. “There are always new young people, and all of the young people have cool new ideas that they want to try out, and our programming strategy has always been, ‘Let’s throw everything at the wall and see what sticks,’” says Ricky. “And fortunately and unfortunately, almost everything in the last few years has stuck, so we’ve been running out of calendar space.” The Vera Project recently became a permanent steward of The Black Lodge, an underground DIY venue in the Eastlake neighborhood that, as a concert space with no barriers to entry, has historically been an invaluable resource to the community Vera serves.

While The Black Lodge will significantly expand Vera’s capacity, the team is also looking at the space as an opportunity to conduct a characteristically subversive case study of its own, asking what it takes to operate a community center where youth will actually want to spend their time – and suggesting that such spaces can be run on remarkably affordable budgets if they have real cultural relevance. Ricky hopes that if The Black Lodge experiment proves successful, it’ll pave the way for more underground spaces in the city to go overground, helping craft the Seattle that The Vera Project has always wanted to see: an artistically fulfilling and community-minded place to grow up.

Black Lodge by Sebastien Deramat with Ricky Graboski & Jason Johnson, featuring Kyle Maclachan