It would be romantic to begin this profile of MaryAnn Toboz with the story of her youth, that she was the second oldest of ten and that at 19 she moved with her infant son to a cottage in Nags Head where she tended bar, packed fish, took up boogie boarding and played in a rock band.

As Toboz says, that was a long time ago. Today the sheer number of people touched by her talent of weaving the healing arts with her organizational and networking skills puts that nascent romanticism into perspective, dwarfs it even, with the largeness of her task.

In 2004, Toboz, inspired by her experiences with a non-profit in Utah, founded Tidewater Arts Outreach (TAO). Four years later, the organization can boast presenting a phenomenal 600 free arts programs for people in need.

With her performer roots, Toboz initially drew artists from her own musical circle.

“I started out with 50-minute music programs. I just grabbed my friends,” says Toboz. Now TAO supports 179 artists and serves a swelling number of nursing homes, shelters, crisis centers, hospitals and more.

“There just ain’t enough visits,” says Toboz, referring to the loneliness of nursing home residents. “And I love how we can transform a room for them.”

Toboz’ interest in bringing arts to the underserved began here and there. Her first experience was performing for a children’s hospital in D.C. and then for groups in Virginia Beach. All the while her career, after working as a public relations manager for Alltel, leaned into non-profits such as United Way and Volunteer Hampton Roads. In Salt Lake City, while working as a development manager for United Way, she connected with the non-profit Heart and Soul that brings artistic presentations to isolated people. On her return to the east coast, she brought their by-laws with her (with their permission) and TAO was born.

“We can all use more music and arts in our lives,” touts the TAO website “and particularly those who with special needs and who are restricted in some way in taking part of the rich cultural community so many of us takes for granted.”

TAO is working to empower artists with ways to aid in healing. To help its audience get the most out of the experience, musical programs are 70 percent performance and 30 percent engaging. Since its inception TAO expanded its programs to include visual and other creative arts workshops. A poet may teach journaling and poetic expression in a workshop for women in shelters for domestic abuse.

“They have got big troubles,” says Toboz, referring to women in the shelters they serve, “and seem to be open to learning new ways of dealing with their stress.”

While the TAO mission is about connecting the arts with the underserved and isolated, Toboz seems to operate through growth. The place she finds herself now is a natural evolution from her early musical years and her openness to opportunity. She checks TAO’s growth with practical words such as “smart” and “purposeful,” but the nature of her management lies in three other words “helping, healing and allowing.”

What is natural to TAO’s task now, she believes, is creating a bridge between artists, the medical community, and the populations and institutions TAO serves. In the future, in addition to increasing the number of grants, there are plans for the publication of a book on ways to connect special needs groups to the world through art. Also, in the works is a conference to help build the bridge between the medical community and the providers of artistic workshops and presentations.

As the TAO website (www.twartsoutreach.org) stresses, special needs populations are not going away. Just within the demographics of the elderly in Virginia, the 85 and older population is predicted to grow five times faster than the overall population until 2025.

In that climate, what Toboz wants most is for TAO to become a reliable source of organized programs for people with special needs. The opening of its new permanent headquarters in Ghent in July of this year is a milestone toward building that reliability. The comprehensive resource of local artistic and musical talent that TAO supports is another.