Ever since local non-profit SpokesBUZZ opened its doors in 2010, it has strengthened the music community in northern Colorado by incubating local artist and promoting talent development. But after six years of operation and successfully creating a music hot spot in northern Colorado, SpokesBUZZ it is be ending their operations at the end of August.
SpokesBUZZ Executive Director Dani Grant said the organization is ending due to lack of funding.
“We had a good run of six years, but when we attempted to make SpokesBUZZ more of a Colorado-based educational organization, rather doing a lot of national programming, we had to re-design our funding model, and we weren’t able to successfully garner enough to pull it off,” Grant said.
Although the board of directors only recently announced the closure, Grant said the end of SpokesBUZZ has been in their sights for almost a year.
“Every non-profit lives from month to month,” Grant said. “To change the structure of the organization dramatically like that, we knew that we were probably rolling some dice in order to pull it off. We were adding an awful lot of expenses. We were changing our fundraising model. And we knew that those things were risky. We’ve known for the past probably year that we were in an uphill battle to try and keep her afloat.”
Grant said that the current chapter of SpokesBUZZ has ended, but that she is optimistic about the future.
“I think right now we are focused on closure to make sure that we’ve got all of our business stuff wrapped up and all of our staff gainfully employed elsewhere,” Grant said.” “But who knows what grassroots efforts might become needed? And who knows how SpokesBUZZ will evolve? We will begin looking at things from a volunteer standpoint.”
Grant said she is hopeful that the Bohemian Foundation’s Music District, which will launch in September, will fulfill some of the roles that SpokesBUZZ was responsible for in the northern Colorado music industry.
“We will share all of our intellectual property with them to make sure that they have everything they could possibly need to be successful,” Grant said. “We hope that some of the vacuum left by the closure of SpokesBUZZ will be sucked up by the Music District for some of the new things that are happening in the community.”
While the end of SpokesBUZZ brings great sadness, Grant said she is focused on acknowledging the impact that the organization made in the northern Colorado music community.
“We will miss waking up every morning and getting to work with the artists, but we are super proud of what we’ve accomplished, and we feel pretty responsible for a lot of the music activity in northern Colorado over the past five years,” Grant said. “We are all pretty satisfied with what we did on our mission in terms of creating a lot of trailblazing for music in northern Colorado and really putting northern Colorado on the map nationally and even internationally as a relevant music city.”
Collegian Arts and Culture Editor Randi Mattox can be reached at entertainment@collegian.com or on Twitter @randimattox.
