The Culture Ambassadors Collaborative is a cohort of Twin Cities based artists and culture bearers working to build vitality and health in their respective cultural communities through folk and tradition based art forms. Through the support of a peer network and Folk Will Save Us' institutional resources, we seek to enable collaborative members to deepen their impact in Minnesota. Thank you to the Minnesota Humanities Center and the voters of Minnesota for their support of this project. Public announcement of 2024's Cohort members and projects coming soon.

The Folk Will Save Us podcast highlights the stories and work of standout artists using cultural traditions to innovate and inform a healthier, more integrated society. Interviews include: Rebekah Crisanta de Ybarra (Lady Xøk) & Xilam Balam (Los Nativos), Ahmed Ismail Yusuf (author, The Lion’s Binding Oath), Kari Tauring (heritage Nordic staff-carrying woman), Slavka Slavtcheva (dancer and cultural organizer, Minnesota’s Bulgarian community), Daniel Kahn (award-winning Yiddish singer-songwriter). New episodes coming soon.

The Longfellow Village Band is a community music and dance workshop celebrating the expressive heritage of Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe. Founded in 2020 to offer a secular, inclusive space to learn Klezmer music in Minnesota, workshops offer a space to embrace, learn, and preserve Yiddish culture and build solidarity across historically marginalized cultures. Led by a cohort of teaching artists, the name "Village Band" harkens to old times in Eastern Europe in which working musicians provided a soundtrack and grounding for a community's yearlong cycle of life and public ritual.

Folk Will Save Us provides grant writing support, strategic consulting, and training opportunities so that culturally rooted artists can thrive. These artists and culture bearers play a critical role in creating spaces where communities make sense of the world on their own terms and address issues at the core of individual and community health, and Folk Will Save Us works to amplify and support these artists in their work within their own cultural communities.

Launching in 2025, the Culture Incubator Fellowship will provide a yearlong community of practice for culture bearers and artists around the state of Minnesota. Fellows will be selected through a public RFP and reviewed by a panel of Minnesota cultural leaders. Stay tuned for more information, and sign up for Folk Will Save Us' mailing list to get real-time updates.

Di Bayke Klezmer Band is the performance arm of the Longfellow Village Band.  Its purpose is to offer community-based performance opportunities to the participants of the Longfellow Village band klezmer workshops. Di Bayke (meaning "Tall tale" in Yiddish) plays the dance music of Yiddish and Eastern European music traditions, and is made up of artists who have trained through the Longfellow Village Band workshops. Di Bayke brings experiences in Yiddish and Klezmer music to new audiences around the Twin Cities and Greater Minnesota. Contact us regarding booking a live performance or a workshop!