Meet Joe Burgum and Simone Wai, co-founders of Folkways, a community-oriented nonprofit. Joe, from Fargo, serves as the executive director, bringing 15 years of experience in experience design, human-centered design, and placemaking. Simone, originally from Moorhead and the creative director, specializes in marketing and collaborating with artists. Together, they leverage their expertise to enhance community engagement and cultural initiatives through Folkways—but what does that mean exactly? Let’s find out.

Q: What is Folkways’ mission?

J: We create experiences to connect community and enhance quality of life. And really, for us, it’s through shared experience, that community is formed. I think that’s true of how we live our lives, how we make friends, how we go to school, how we work, all those are shared experiences. Some shared experiences leave us tired and not wanting to do them again, and others energize us and make us feel seen in who we are, and the world that we’re a part of. We really believe that it’s through those shared experiences that a community is formed. So, at Folkways, it’s community building and placemaking. We see events as our medium for change. It’s not explicitly that we only do events, but for us, those are great shared experiences.

Also, a big part of our work is transforming the world around us. So we’re sitting here in Broadway Square today, which is a space that we’ve dreamed about for about a decade and are super excited to have been a key player in the last three years. But prior to that, we were making our own little plazas and squares around Fargo in order to create the type of spaces we want a community to form in. With placemaking in our community, it’s really about third spaces. What Folkways does is, we create those events that can become a third space. We’re not running a coffee shop or library or the place you’re going to go with your friends on a weekly basis, as a business, what we are creating are femoral experiences that are in the public realm. Public space, placemaking, and community are really a trio for us in our work.

Q: You talk a lot about placemaking— what does that mean for Folkways?

J: Professionally speaking, we really see placemaking as sort of a spawn of landscape architecture and urban design. Placemaking is public plazas, concert venues, or Broadway Square—the types of places where you can go for free in the public realm and connect in a community. We think about ourselves as designers… it’s like, we’re architects, we’re landscape architects or urban planners, but we also have a really strong emphasis on programming people. It’s not just physical, or hardware, it’s also software. You might have hardware and software in the space; the software is those grassroots community events. So as a placemaker, it’s fundamental that we’re doing public engagement from a human-centered design standpoint, where it’s rarely top-down. It’s always what the community is interested in. We ask ourselves, ‘How do we test, how do we experiment?’ or ‘What’s growing in the community garden and how do we cultivate that?’ How do we celebrate things that might be perceived as weeds, when really they can be beautiful flowers if we look at them differently? For the public when we think about placemaking, there are a number of groups in Fargo that do this work, and I think we’re the ones that really put it to the forefront in a way that’s different than producing events. It’s different than putting on shows because we’re really thinking about a lot of different aspects within an experience.

S: It’s creating a space in which people can interact. We’re laying out the little garden, and then all the people come in and put in their own creativity, or their own conversation, or their own culture of the space.

J: Placemaking for us is vibrant public space. That’s really what it is.

Q: How often do you think about itinerary for placemaking events, or is it more organic?

J: We aren’t necessarily thinking about 15-minute increments of what you’re going to do when you get to the farmers market; we definitely run a show, we’re thinking about the production before the event from a mainstage standpoint of a load in logistics, but we like this idea of personas and guests. You might be someone who comes to the farmers market to buy groceries. and then you’re going to head to the lake, versus someone that’s coming because they love hot food and they’re going to spend all day to smorgasbord through six vendors and sit in the square. We like to think about those different character arcs for people in the community in order to really ensure that we’re creating an experience that touches on a lot of different people’s lives.

Q: Talking about what you just said, how have you been able to research that & how do you know that you’re doing it effectively to represent the community?

S: We’ve looked towards a lot of different groups and a lot have gone to a lot of different events around the country and around the world to decide or try things to see what’s a good fit in our community. We look for what people respond really well to. There’s a group called Project for Public Spaces that we’ve taken a lot of inspiration from. There’s a group called Better Block, whom we’ve taken a lot of inspiration from. This stuff isn’t rocket science, but it is anthropology.

J: It’s a lot of it’s our own internal process that’s led us to research outcomes, maybe not in an academic sense, but in informing of our work manner. Which is, you know, test and iterate, listen and look for pain points that people have, and then test and iterate and evolve around that. The farmers market hasn’t always been what it is today. We didn’t start 10 years ago saying we’re going to have 80 vendors, we have had incremental success. Similar to the Night Bazaar—we had a hunch, we had asked, ‘What would it look like to do a unique creative event for families and kids after the work day?’ We really wanted to have this intergenerational experience, it could be an anchor for people working and living downtown, that they feel like they can come to straight from work with their family and meet up. So, that really informed the kid’s activities and that it’s family-friendly. Then also this whimsy that evolved out of it from our own curiosity when we asked, ‘What if it literally was like a circus on the street, or a Renaissance Faire on the street, or like a magic meetup?’ We really believe that through Night Bazaar, there’s such power and self-expression, and that’s where we get really excited about creating those spaces.

Q: How have you built the right team to execute both the hard & software sides of placemaking?

J: It’s unique being a boutique, I don’t think many people think of nonprofits in that way, but in our case, we definitely are, we’re like a social venture. In some ways, people who are familiar might say we seem more like an architecture firm, or a small interior design group, or, that we just do special events for clients—and those are kind of who we are, but we’re really this new social venture. I mean, we’re a nonprofit with a mission, but we’re operating like a design studio.

S: I think we have the most talented people in the community. And I think that they want to be a part of our team because they get to do their work, what they’re good at, and what they’re passionate about; but they also love the mission of the organization and they love that they get to invite their friends to things that they create. It’s like, I’m not making this for someone else, I’m making it for all of us, and that’s really special. That’s not something that most people get to share with their their own personal community or their own personal family.

It is really unique that we get to be a nonprofit that’s for the general public. And there are a handful in our community, from theatre groups to the Plains Art Museum to the zoo, but to really be center stage where our audience and the people we’re serving are the public is just really special. You get to come and volunteer and then you get to come back and enjoy the volunteer work you got to do with your friends and family I think we’re very business savvy.

We thought about what the divisions are of any good business and you have marketing, sales, or, in our case, development, fundraising, then you have core operations, whether you’re making something, delivering a service, or offering a program in our case. So, we’ve built out a team around people who get experience—it’s not just about producing an event, it’s really about creating an experience. Because we serve the general public, we get to interface with people every day, that could be our future teammates. People start to surface when we notice who has been volunteering is back, or a vendor has started a business at the market, and then they ask us questions that are a little bit deeper, and we can see that this person would be a good teammate.

Q: How do you see folkways evolving over the next five years?

J: One thing, per our engagement, is we’re really excited to continue to invite the community into what placemaking means and examples of what it means across the country. We’re a unique strategic group that has the potential to do a lot of different things. Whether that’s a Januarylong sauna festival, or a projection art festival, where we’re projecting the buildings with light art. There are a lot of fun ideas, and for us, it’s finding the right partners and the right patrons who are passionate and excited about different forms of art. Different groups or different audiences that are underrepresented, different areas around isolation, loneliness, food access, and intergenerational experiences, for us to grow into. We’re primed for the right partners to take on new things.

One thing that we’re in the process of piloting right now is a new operational plan for Broadway Square with the Downtown Community Partnership and the Park District. We’re in the first couple of weeks of that. But for us, that’s really exciting to have been such a key partner in the space last three years, and now be a key manager of the space. Five years from now, I’m just really excited to see the progress. Tenure is something we’re really excited about, and having good conversations with the city governments as the cities are thinking about what placemaking is, and neighborhood placemaking. We’re excited to think about what the civic center could look like with more activation. We’re really excited to reach a really important milestone for us, and for any small nonprofit, which is $1 million in gross receipts, which is super phenomenal. So our hope is in five years, we’re at $2 million, which is another big leap.

Q: How would you say that Folkways influenced the development in downtown West Fargo & Moorhead?

S: We’ve actually been involved in a few [conversations], especially in Moorhead, with the master planning processes. The Downtown Master Plan and Moorhead Comprehensive Plan

J: We’ve [worked] specifically with Roers Development and under JLG Architects, helping them think about placemaking for the new development in Moorhead.

S: There is such an opportunity when you’re starting, basically fresh, to think about the human-centered design portion of it, how things will look from a bicycle or on foot or seated from a bench in a plaza. It’s been really cool to be a part of those processes and chime in on those things as well.

Q: Was there a moment when you realized the impact of Folkways’ placemaking—or, the ‘we’ve made it’ moment?

S: Every time someone tells me that they moved to Fargo because they came to the farmers market—oh my god, that makes me cry

J: Those have been the moments over the years, the more small-scale recognition. Someone told us that they got a job in Fargo but didn’t think their wife would move here. She wasn’t sure before they came to the farmers market, but by the end of the day, they went shopping for houses. Those moments, I think, really speak for themselves. And in our mission of creating a sense of belonging for people that they feel connected, is really cool as well, we’ve gotten a lot of praise and credit, as a whole as a part of the Renaissance downtown.

We’re not putting up 80 tents on a Saturday, we have 80 vendors who are showing up, and they’re being a part of it. It’s a hive, it’s not one single entity or organism that’s making it happen. It really is that collective approach to allow for the vibrancy to come to be, so we really feel like we’re community gardeners. We’re not every plant—we’re not every aspect of placemaking, every part of vibrancy, but, we do take the stewardship of arts and culture and vibrancy and nurturing that, very seriously. People look to us because they see us out there with the hoe tending to the plant, but this is someone else’s event. We’re just super excited to be able to get behind them, support them, and let them do their own thing.

Q: How else do you measure the success of your impact, or maybe where you need to put more focus on?

S: We measure a lot of things from how many people come to [events] to how much is spent at our vendor booths; but also from how many people were wearing costumes at the event to how many people got a s’more to roast with their kids? Measuring success for us is how many people came but, also how many things did they participate in? We don’t want people to just come, we want them to be engaged, for them to feel like they are actually a part of it. So that’s what our success measurement has transitioned to, from a breadth of participation, now to a depth of participation.

J: That’s been an emphasis the last two years. As with growing a team, it allows you to go deeper to codify things in a stronger way. As the team grew, instead of the goal of just getting the Farmers Market done, we’re able to ask, ‘how do we deepen participation?’ Thinking about how do we really create magic through art? I think it’s interesting, as an organization that is so much about the human experience and human existence, we’re really trying to quantify things like joy, wonder, and excitement, and being seen and feeling belonging— rather nebulous-type feelings. So, we often take allegories of those things to like, people roasting s’mores. That’s not just buying a candy bar, that’s an experience that you’re having in this environment. That’s a way to ask ourselves how we have more of those moments.

Q: Are there any personal experiences that represented your work with Folkways?

S: We hit $1 million in revenue for our Red River Market vendors in one season. That was a really big deal because it went from being something good for the community to something that’s impacting people’s livelihoods. People are actually able to have that be what they do for work. I think that was a really big deal for me. Local dollars help local people.

J: I think it’s been cool… We have taken a lot of creative risk in some of our events in trying to create environments where a counterculture can be present in a way that is more accessible for people. I think about some of the performers we’ve worked with that we now have had relationships with for half a decade. Individuals like Katie Rose, who I genuinely don’t even know how she ended up at our first Night Bazaar, but she showed up and she can juggle and hula hoop. It was great, like this is what we’re trying to do with in the circus theme. And over the years of creating opportunities for her, she is now a stilter and she does fire spinning. She now spends her winters in Florida working at Renaissance fairs.

S: She’s actually auditioning for a professional circus artist right now

J: When we think about arts and culture, circus arts is void in our community, we’re a small community and it’s not something at the forefront. But I think about all the theater, gymnastics, and dance programs we have, and, to me, circus arts is only one notch removed from some of these. So to create a space for someone like Katie to have that platform or another gentleman, Evan, is an unbelievably talented fire spinner, which is a very counterculture kind of art form—flow arts is not in the mainstream—having a stage for him to perform is great.

S: Another good one is FM Aerial—one of the first times we had them at one of our bigger events, they got up on the tables and did their silk performance, and it was incredible. At first, I was looking at the audience and I was unsure how it was going to go, wondering if people were going to respond well to this. After they were done performing, the first people to jump up there and say congratulations and that they loved the performance was a group of elderly ladies, probably 80 years old. That’s when I think we saw this as more of an opportunity to bring in eyeopening experiences for people, whether they’re kids or grandkids… We really believe that we’re a platform, a lot of our work has scaled and has an impact.

J: Part of our placemaking work is being a platform for others and really being a nurturer of creative cultures and a spirit of servant leadership. We’re at the back of the room, it’s not necessarily about us, or the credit is due for what we’re doing.

Q: What is something about Folkways that you wish more people knew about?

J: I wish more people succinctly understood our work. A lot of people know the market and the Christmas market, but we’re really excited to take the next year to really articulate what does placemaking and community building look like. With that, we are a community cause. We’re here because of community and business support and individual donations. As people are excited about the community, it’s through that passion, that desire to give and to volunteer, that we’re able to continue to grow into more things. It can be challenging to do something that no one’s ever done. When we gave our first talk at Startup Brew a decade ago about Folkways, we talked about how culture is the magnet that brings people in and that a sense of belonging is the glue that keeps them here. And that’s been our thesis for a decade. At the time, there was a little bit of [hestitancy], like that we were these early 20-somethings, and that it’s an interesting idea and that we gave a philosophical TED Talk and didn’t necessarily have projects to show. And now, people are like, I get it. I come to the farmers market, and there is a vibrant culture, and I feel like I belong here. I want to be a part of it.

We’re a 21st-century cause, 25 years ago, placemaking wasn’t a thing. We had some arts and cultural organizations, we were talking about public space, but we weren’t talking about belonging.

There’s a lot of potential and new ideas when we think about things, it’s not more of the Red River Market. We have a whole binder of ideas, we have all sorts of inspiration. When we think bout our community at large and our small metro area, it’s really cool to see new neighborhoods emerge. To have downtown West Fargo, North Cheyenne, be a node, to have a door, a neighborhood stretch is super rad. As a community, it’s important for us to celebrate that there are multitudes within the community, and also acknowledge that downtown Fargo specifically has been the heart of the city since its inception, so it’ll always have a different kind of precedent. But that doesn’t make other neighborhoods less than because of that.

Q: If somebody has an idea or has a desire for something, and they want Folkways in on it, what’s the best way for them to get their voice heard?

J: We love drinking coffee. Hit us up for 30 minutes, an hour, or two hours, we’ll figure out how to make time.

S: We made a really cool event organizing basic worksheet that people can go through and fill out to think about their idea in the way that we think about our ideas. On the back, there’s a checklist of prompts for people to think about how to make their event more welcoming and inclusive. We would love to make that available for anyone who wants it as well.

folkways.org
FB /wearefolkways
IG @wearefolkways
Linkedin | /company/folkwaysco
Linkedin | /simonewai
Linkedin | /joeburgum