#47: Sarah Calhoun - Work Pants, a Music Festival, and Small-Town Montana

Mm-hmm.

You told me about your day-to-day in year one.

What, what is day-to-day today?

Hmm.

So now it's a lot of, um, managing the, the Red Ants Pants Foundation, which is more, um, focused on-- My, my role is a lot of fundraising and board management and oversight of staff.

Um, so within the foundation, we have the festival is our biggest program, but we also teach women's work skills, so carpentry and chainsaw classes for women and trailer backing and dovetail joinery.

Um, [clears throat] we're gonna start a welding program next year, so, so some real kinda tangible skills there for women in the trades, which is, which is really fantastic.

Um, we also have a girls' leadership program that's a year-long in-depth leadership study for rural Montana girls.

It's free for them.

Um, we have women in agricultural community retreats, and we have a grant cycle also.

So we were able to gift, um, over 210,000 from proceeds from the festival over the years, which is pretty fantastic.

So kind of general oversight over all of that and all the staff that help us manage that and, of course, trying to, trying to ask for money along the way because nonprofits are, um, you know, it's a, it's a tough landscape out there raising money, but there's, there's, uh, folks and opportunities for, for people to step in and be able to kinda be part of this growing colony.

Yeah.

Yeah, it makes me, uh, [laughs] I will never complain again about my workload.

It sounds like [laughs] you got a lot going on still.

But it's all such, like, such cool stuff, and it sounds like you're doing what you love.

Um, and I-

Yes

...

I'm sensing that you're so passionate about-

Mm-hmm

... what you're building, and it's cool-

Absolutely

... uh, to meet, meet people like that.

Do you have, like, goals five to 10 years out from now? Or are you kinda just, um, at this point just doing what you love and happy with, uh, where you're at?