Nonprofits Create Community is NIA’s theme for 2026, as we celebrate the ways that nonprofits come through for their communities in spite of all the challenges facing them. In this series, meet some NIA-insured nonprofits who share their stories of creating community in their own words.
Meet Murphys Creek Theatre of Murphys, CA
Jodi Vaccaro, Executive Director of Murphys Creek Theatre, explains:
“Murphys Creek Theatre provides professional theatre for everyone — breaking barriers with transformative stories, bold new voices, and pay-what-you-can access.”
How does your nonprofit and your mission create community for the people and places you serve?
Making theatre feel like something that belongs to everyone.
“Murphys Creek Theatre creates community by giving people in a small rural town in Northern California a place to gather around live, human stories.
Our mission is professional theatre for everyone — breaking barriers with transformative stories, bold new voices, and “pay-what-you-can” access. In Calaveras County, access to the arts can be limited by geography, income, age, transportation, or simply the feeling that “theatre isn’t for me.”
Through “pay-what-you-can” tickets available at every performance, free access for veterans and first responders, and partnerships with local artists, businesses, schools, and volunteers, we work to make the theatre feel like it belongs to the whole community.
We bring together longtime locals, weekend visitors, students, retirees, artists, business owners, veterans, first responders, families, and people who are simply looking for connection. They sit together, react together, and often keep the conversation going afterward. That kind of shared experience matters.
We also create community by making our theatre a place where new work can begin. Through our Quill to Act New Play Festival, we bring audiences a world premiere each year. There is something powerful about being able to say that this brand-new play started here, in our community with these people, and we were part of it.
Our youth education programs create another kind of community. Through programs like Summer on Stage, young people work alongside professional theatre artists, build confidence, and become part of an intergenerational creative home.
In a time when many people are isolated or divided, live theatre offers something simple and rare: A room full of people feeling and thinking together.”
What are your nonprofit’s biggest challenges or obstacles to creating community?
Limited resources and geographical barriers to participation.
“One of our biggest challenges is serving a rural region with limited resources. Calaveras County is spread out, and people face real barriers to participation, including cost, transportation, limited access to the arts, and competing work or family demands.
As a small nonprofit theatre, we are constantly balancing ambition with capacity. We want to keep tickets accessible, pay artists and staff fairly, offer youth theatre education, maintain an aging facility, support new work, and produce theatre that is meaningful to our community. Those goals are all connected, but they require funding, time, labor, and trust.
Another challenge is that “community” is not one single audience. Our patrons are a diverse mix, from longtime theatre supporters to people walking through our doors for the first time. We want everyone to feel welcome, while still protecting the artistic depth and professional standards that make the work meaningful.
The encouraging part is that these challenges also clarify our purpose. Because resources are limited, every partnership matters. Because people are spread out, every gathering matters. Because access is not automatic, we keep asking how to remove barriers and invite more people in.”
A broker’s take on community in action.
Before a nonprofit can help build community, they need insurance — and brokers are their guide to helping them find coverage, maintain it, and, if needed, make a claim on it.
Murphys Creek Theatre partners with Egan Gost, a broker with Kerber Gost Insurance Agency, who helps them get the most value from their NIA coverage.
As their broker, Gost shared his insight into the benefit Murphys Creek Theatre brings to the community:
“Murphys Creek Theatre is a truly special organization that brings people together through the power of live theatre.
Their dedication to creating engaging, high-quality productions while making the arts accessible and welcoming to the entire community is inspiring.
MCT not only entertains audiences, but also enriches the cultural life of the region, supports artists, and provides meaningful opportunities for people of all ages to experience and participate in the performing arts.
It is a wonderful community treasure and an organization well deserving of continued support.”
