What's Up - Your guide to what's happening in Fayetteville, AR this week!
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Mulhollan doesn't know how much money she raised because she simply asked her buyers to send their donations to 7Hills. Then, her Sami roots — her heritage comes from Lapland — started to push their way into her art, and she sent donations from those creations to the Marshallese as another indigenous community. And finally, she returned to birds to raise money for the Arkansas Audubon Society's Halberg Ecology Camp, where she and Kelly have taught ornithology for two weeks every summer for the past 18 years. By this time, of course, Kelly had found a way to help and created 26 "Ozark picking bows" — a musical instrument kind of like a "jaw harp" that is sometimes called an "Appalachian mouth bow" — which raised $4,600 in donations for the MayDay Community Kitchen. "We were very fortunate going in to this pandemic," Kelly says. "Donna gets Social Security, our house is paid off, and as folk musicians, we know one of the key tactics of survival is low overhead. We do have a Patreon page and do two videos a month for our patrons, and believe it or not, that adds up to a pretty substantial paycheck. And it's very humbling, but we've also been getting little checks from some of our fans, people who assume we could use it, and it's true. We're living simply, and everything is fine." The couple plan to continue to help out wherever they can until they can play music again — or introduce their new Ozark Flea Circus. But that's another story. — BECCA MARTIN-BROWN Kyle Kellams KUAF When the covid-19 virus rolled in to Northwest Arkansas, Kyle Kellams, news director for KUAF, the Northwest Arkansas NPR affiliate, and producer of "Ozarks at Large," called his team of reporters together. They expected that with all the shutdowns that would come from the pandemic, it might be harder to fill the hours of local news programming. And with many staff members working from home, it might make reporting more difficult. They even considered reducing the number of hours devoted to the news. Kellams says what happened couldn't have been further from that expectation. Instead, he says, he'd walk into his office on any given day thinking he knew the content of that day's shows and find emails and texts from Antoinette Grajeda, Daniel Caruth, Jacqueline Froelich, Timothy Dennis and Zuzanna Sitek pitching another half a dozen stories that needed to run. Of course, they weren't just stories about the coronavirus — although Grajeda updated the audience every morning on the numbers, which Kellams says he hopes made it real for listeners. There were also major ongoing stories like the Black Lives Matter/social justice movement and presidential elections, for example. Ask Kellams which stories he thinks mattered most locally, and he'll tell you "stories about how education was dealing with the virus, the reporting that everyone did about underrepresented populations during all of it and stories about people helping each other." But coverage of the arts continued, too, "just not in a traditional way," as KUAF reported on how nonprofit organizations were pivoting to serve the community and stay in business themselves. 4 WHAT'S UP! JANUARY 3-9, 2021 People Continued From Page 3 Kyle Kellams wasn't sure how KUAF, the local National Public Radio affiliate, would continue to deliver local news to its listeners — and discovered even greater demand. (File Photo) Musician Donna Mulhollan started needle felting pieces of art in exchange for donations to 7Hills Homeless Center. Then her project expanded and her husband, Kelly Mulhollan, got involved to help even more people. (Courtesy Photo) 2020 IN REVIEW