Mimi Fariña

Mimi Fariña founded Bread & Roses in 1974 to bring free live performance to people isolated in institutional settings. The organization’s mission and history page identifies youth, adults and seniors whose circumstances limited access to ordinary concert venues. Her historical role concerns the creation of that performance institution; the organization’s present programming is not counted as her personal output.

The operating distinction is access rather than ticket yield. Bread & Roses describes Fariña bringing musician friends into nearby institutions, creating direct encounters between performers and audiences. Its mission encompasses free live music and performing arts for isolated, institutionalized or marginalized people. These performances belong in live-music infrastructure even when no conventional box office exists. An admission-price dataset would miss them, while a performance record can describe the presenting organization, setting and source without inventing ticket revenue.

Marian Hubler’s April 29, 2020 institutional photo tribute, updated May 15, records Fariña’s death in July 2001 and places her alongside performers in settings including San Quentin. The tribute and mission page are both Bread & Roses sources, not two independent assessments. They substantiate the founding history and the organization’s intended audience but do not establish medical outcomes, changes in recidivism or a causal health benefit. The licensed portrait here shows Fariña at a September 6, 1975 Bread & Roses benefit at Berkeley Community Theater, photographed by David Gans; it is not a photograph of an institutional visit. A benefit concert and a free institutional performance can support the same organization while having different audience and financing arrangements. Live Index links her work to live-music undercount as related methodological reading: a commercial ticketing series cannot stand in for the full set of live-performance institutions.