Year 14: There is Always Room for More

Being a creative college program, Visible has always focused on the small and precise programming and recruitment and job placement and musical product release. Doing more, but more small things - not giant undertakings. We’ve existed as a small college, even petite. Yet in 2013-2014, we welcomed many more students from all 50 states and impressed the Briggs Foundation enough to have them support our new classrooms at 200 Madison (see photo). We had many new rooms for classes, offices, studios, performances, and even grilling out on the 5th floor relooking baseball games at AutoZone Park.

There was room for more but also room to add more small spaces “out there” in other cities, countries, and partners.

We were overfilling our first housing option and the rooms were being stretched beyond capacity. We had taken over apartments by now and had some fun times moving more people into Fielder’s Square. Students loved being in Downtown Memphis and we invited more people to our more space. We did partnerships with band directors and choir directors from all kinds of schools, we developed an idea for a Chicago campus in Lansing, IL, and we worked on partnerships with the MidSouth Fair and Delta Fair and worked on projects with Johnny Cash statue and Calvary Rescue Mission. Service and entertainment.

It did feel like a time of expansion or, as we said, in-spansion because we were going deeper inside our network to create space for more opportunity for students to lead by opening up more small spaces in Chicago and then looking at Texas and California. It appeared as if Godwa opening doors to invite more people into the Visible circle and leave room for people to record, tour, write, travel, get better jobs than ever, and open the door behind them for more Visible grads.

At least in our hearts and within God’s vision, we do know there is always room for more. It is just not as fun to administrate all that. Things were setting the stage for the culmination of 15 years hard work in getting the school to a solid place and a lot of great worship songs were written and recorded during this year.