About Lupinewood Institute
Lupinewood Institute’s mission is to build shared resources and understanding between people by supporting community arts projects and the workers who run them.
Lupinewood Institute supports the creation, growth, and long-term health of projects serving their communities by acting as an incubator. Our goals are to put resources, equipment, and know-how in the hands of people who need them, and to build relationships between people in our shared communities across differences. New projects join the Institute by completing the Start Something program: a six-month facilitated curriculum and stipend offered by the Institute that helps organizers to develop and launch a community project.
Once a member, the new project joins a collective of established ones who work together on their individual and group goals, and who collaborate on administration, fundraising, and promotion. The Institute is staffed by admins who provide a backbone for the collective of projects to operate, managing things like decision-making between projects, shared fundraising efforts, and the Institute’s own programming. Projects and admins come together at monthly meetings to report back to each other, make and discuss proposals, or otherwise support each other’s work, and once a year, annual plans and budgets are proposed, discussed, and decided on collectively.
Check out our current projects:
Because our projects are comprised of people with autonomous opinions, content produced by and within our projects does not necessarily reflect the views of the organization or its administration.
The Institute’s board members & staff
Hunter Swanson
Executive Director
My name is Hunter Swanson and I serve as the administrator of Lupinewood Institute. I was born and raised on a farm in Franklin County and have an abiding love for this area. I view art as the product of people’s efforts to make meaning out of their own internal experiences and their interactions with the broader world. The power of that act to combat alienation and deepen our understanding of what it means to be human is what drives me in my own art-making. I see Lupinewood Institute as an ever-evolving piece of art that grows through the collaboration of everyone involved in its projects, and I’m excited to be facilitating ways for people to come together and access the resources they need to do this work of meaning-making and community-building. Outside of my administrative role, I also make music with Harm, a band affiliated with EAM, and do illustrative work using gouache and lino printing. I also work as a therapist with a focus on supporting trans and queer clients, and manage the admin end of LWI, keeping budgets balanced and pursuing funding to keep these projects thriving through grantwriting and other fundraising efforts. I feel genuinely inspired by getting to see these projects take on a life of their own and become vehicles for people’s creative passions, and am excited to keep building together.
Makoto Chi
Board President
Hello, my name is Makoto Chi (he/him), and I am the board President of the Lupinewood Institute. Four years ago, I moved to occupied Pocumtuck and Nipmuc territories from the west coast of so-called canada to join Lupinewood Collective. I hold a BFA from Emily Carr University of Art and Design, and have supported myself as a working artist for over two decades. Inhabiting my position at the Lupinewood Institute dovetails into my deepest passions: working with artists and makers from divergent and often traditionally marginalized groups, event and program planning and development involving peers and to the benefit of our communities, and overall cultivating a culture of experimentation and queer joy. I myself am a practicing artist, and believe creativity is one of the wellsprings of human happiness and a necessary skill for survival, and I am excited to be a part of a group actively supporting each other and acknowledging the importance of art in our everyday lives. In my own background as a mixed race, queer and trans person, and as an artist myself, inhabiting multiplicity and dreaming into world building is endemic to my place in the world: it is an honor to be a part of this project.
Terran Rainer
Board Secretary
I’m Terran Rainer and I’m secretary for the Lupinewood Institute. For the last 17 years I’ve been working with immigrants and refugees, teaching English and the skills needed to navigate systems in this country. Helping folks access what they need to not just sustain their lives, but to also live their dreams, is why I love what I do. Lupinewood Institute feels like a natural extension of this work: it’s about people accessing what they need to live their dreams, and then to turn those dreams into something that helps sustain their lives. I love that each project has a community-focused component, and I love the buzz from being around so many people driving at things that fire up and feed them.
Jayne Ethereal
Board Treasurer
My name is Jayne Ethereal, and I’m the treasurer of the Lupinewood Institute. I’m one of those people who’s always taking a deep dive into something new: I’ve been a practicing magician, a skateboarder, a drummer in a marching band, a rapper, a mixed martial artist. Following my passions has been a challenge my whole life because of growing up in foster care in Franklin County, and I benefited a lot from organizations and programs designed to help people without resources gain access to them. I’m excited to be a part of Lupinewood Institute because it expands the ability for regular people in this community to chase what’s fascinating them and overcome the obstacles in the way.
Lupinewood Institute’s Board of Directors
