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Please describe your social prescribing program and the communities it serves.

Who we are, who we serve: 

SAGE is an acronym for “Share, Accept, Grow, Encourage”, a grassroots artist advocacy non-profit founded in 2019 in Green Bay, WI. Last year, we grew to serve all of Brown County in hopes of bringing arts programming to some of our rural communities. SAGE focuses on the adult population and works to address accessibility, equity, and inclusion by removing the barrier of cost from all of our programming and the right to artistic expression.

In January of 2025, SAGE hosted an information session around the development of our “Social Prescription Calendar.” In short, we chose to utilize our existing website calendar to showcase free arts and culture events, emphasizing that the events we chose could directly impact social connection, mental health, and overall individual and collective well-being. Following that information session with our partner organizations, SAGE officially launched our Social Prescription Calendar on International Social Prescribing Day.

Social Prescribing Program

How it works:

Through the Social Prescription Calendar, individuals are able to access a collective location for a list of free arts and culture events throughout Brown County. This way, folks are able to “self-prescribe” activities to address their own well-being. We also work with partner organizations such as our local Aging and Disabilities Resource Center, our domestic abuse shelter, and tribal entities from the Oneida Nation to function as link workers, encouraging their client base to attend arts and culture activities listed on our calendar to connect with their community. Our engagements are intentional with the calendar, and we utilize a business card to give individuals the opportunity to browse a variety of engagement opportunities in their own time as well as work with partner organizations to determine what events might work best for them. 

In our first six months, much of our effort has centered around educating our community and leadership on simply what social prescribing is. We began with 20 area organizations across the county but have grown in the last few months to include government leadership like the mayor of the City of Green Bay, our Wisconsin State

Representative for the 90th District, and a Business Committee Councilman for the Oneida Nation. We believe that having a strong support system of advocates and diverse voices greatly contributes to the validity and integrity of the program, particularly in regard to a volunteer-based non-profit introducing a new concept and collective infrastructure as we work to address well-being.

What types of social prescriptions (e.g., arts, nature, volunteering) are referred, and who serves as the connector? 

SAGE focuses on arts and culture activities throughout Brown County, WI. Our connectors are our partner organizations, who encourage their own client or participant base to utilize the calendar on our website to find more activities that lead to greater connection and well-being. We give each organization business cards with a QR code that links back to the calendar, and the back of the card can be used to list specific recommendations.

How is your program funded?

The Social Prescription Calendar began as a volunteer effort, utilizing our existing website calendar to highlight free arts and culture events hosted by our partner organizations. The calendar itself continues to be a volunteer-based effort, but as we began to consider how artists could be activated to host additional classes and gatherings, we developed a donor-funded model in which as little as $100 adds an opportunity for engagement to the calendar. SAGE has always believed in engaging our donors to actively see their contributions at work, and by creating a low investment/high impact opportunity, more individuals are able to participate in addressing community well-being.

How has social prescribing impacted the health and well-being of the people you serve and which outcome measures do you use to measure that impact? 

From our inception, SAGE has functioned as a platform for artists to engage as peers in their community. This is how we continue to address well-being and qualitative engagement with our Social Prescription Calendar. As we are in our first 6 months since the Calendar’s launch, we are still in the planning stages of how we will address the capacity to collect data. Right now, we utilize one-on-one conversation with individuals attending programs, observations of website visits to the calendar, and community interest in partnership to best understand where this program is going. We anticipate having a solid model for data collection within the next year.

What advice would you give to others looking to start a social prescribing program?

Be inspired by those already doing the work.

Our program began with research and collecting online articles that shared data, but more importantly, was storytelling of real experiences. In our own way, SAGE was founded on the principle that social connection is vital for well-being, we just didn’t pinpoint it as such. We already knew that coming together and sharing a space to make our art, sharing best business practices, or taking our talents to serve the community made us feel like we belonged to something; having felt that for years made a lot of research equal parts relatable and energizing. Doing a lot of reading before taking the concept of social prescribing out into the community also made us more informed advocates, enabling us to speak concisely and effectively. And, of course, we cannot speak of reading and better informing ourselves without mentioning Julia Hotz’s “The Connection Cure.” Reading completely through her book was like supercharging our determination.

Social prescription has a basic infrastructure. Use that infrastructure to create something your own community needs.

One of the aspects that was so serendipitous about social prescribing was how closely it already fit into our mission statement- to connect artists to their community and to provide access to the right of artistic expression. We took the structure of social prescribing, the health care providers, link workers, and community organizations, and began a list of individuals and organizations we’d already worked with that could fit into these categories. We then accessed our strongest relationships (those who we felt knew our organization best)  and came to them to get their thoughts on social prescribing. Once we had their support, we felt more confident in pursuing more. For SAGE, we have two pillars that are particularly important to us- serving our artists and making sure access to the arts through our programming comes at no cost to the participant. We took our own personal experiences and our observations in the community and focused on the following:

• More than 1 in 3 households in Brown County, WI are “ALICE households” (Asset Limited, Income Constrained, Employed). In short we recognize this means they have just enough to cover essentials but a social outing might be out of the question because of the various costs associated (entry fee, transportation, time).

• Our communities have limited access to mental health resources, particularly in rural areas. An individual may have to wait months to receive care from a counselor or be limited through a transportation barrier. 

• Wisconsin is 49th in the nation when it comes to state funding for arts and culture, but it doesn’t mean we don’t have incredibly talented individuals waiting to share their abilities. As an artist advocacy organization, how could we increase engagement in the arts to demonstrate its impact and provide more work for our artists?

• Our partner organizations already had free programming on their own schedules, but as a community we did not have a collective space where those events could be shared side by side. This is what brought the “Social Prescription Calendar” to life. Taking the infrastructure that is social prescribing and molding it to best fit the area we serve. When starting a social prescribing initiative, if individuals can relate on some level to what it is you’re working with and working for, to us, it just makes the initiative undeniable.

There is no such thing as an organization that is “too small” to take on social prescribing.

SAGE is a volunteer-based non-profit organization with an artist-led board and a shoestring budget. To be frank, we also aren’t big fans of fundraising or asking for donations, but we pride ourselves in making sure those who do contribute towards our work understand us as an organization and what we stand for. We are able to push for big things because people know who we are. Don’t be intimidated by asking to speak with municipal governance or people in high positions at companies, but again, create relatable conversation that helps them see a bigger picture. SAGE can place the impacts of social prescribing in conversation around community development, economic development, tourism, and other perhaps unconventional spaces. It all comes down to quality of life. As stated earlier, do the research, observe your community, ask questions, and prepare yourself to speak confidently. The great news is, once you do meet with folks about your proposed initiative, word-of-mouth only helps you along that much more. People are great resources, utilize them to connect you to more organizations they believe would be a great fit for your program. That piece of the puzzle helps everyone feel seen and builds community across organizations that might not have considered working together before. You’re building an ecosystem; it has to start somewhere.