The Yes House, Granite Falls, Minnesota

<p>In early 2018, a local family in Granite Falls, Minnesota — a small town on the prairie — donated a vacant commercial building to the Department of Public Transformation, an artist-led nonprofit focused on rural revitalization through the arts. The family had been trying to sell the property on the private market without success. DoPT had been running a traveling nomadic theater company celebrating small-town life and was looking for a permanent home. A Granite Falls community member connected the two, and the building at 726 Prentice Street began its transformation into The Yes House.</p><p>What followed wasn't a conventional renovation. DoPT led Discovery Tours — walkthroughs of the empty space where community members were invited to dream about what it could become. Over four hundred people participated in these exercises, imagining the building as a theater venue, a youth recreation zone, an artist hub, a community gathering space. The programming and design emerged through a year-long community engagement process in which local residents collaborated with local and national artists and architects. The construction has been long and honest about its challenges. They've averaged about $130 per square foot — modest for the Upper Midwest — but COVID-era inflation pushed costs to nearly $200 per square foot. They launched a creative capital campaign in 2022, eventually raising the goal to over a million dollars. Along the way, they discovered that the space's versatility opened doors to unexpected funding — private health insurance companies funded the rock-climbing wall because of its ties to health and exercise.</p><p>In the fall of 2022, DoPT launched The Yes House Futures Committee to guide the building's operations through a community-led process, with local residents alongside staff and board members making decisions about stewardship. The Yes House is becoming what Granite Falls asked for — a place for theater, fitness, art, conversation, and gathering in a town where such spaces are rare. The project is also a case study in the messiness and beauty of community-led building: the slow timelines, the creative funding, the mistakes made and addressed, the ongoing negotiation between vision and reality. For rural communities, the Yes House suggests that the arts and community design aren't luxuries — they're infrastructure.</p>