 at the Carver Museum for hosting us here today. Grab a bite to read something to you from the New York Times. Oh. So you may have been following this, and I just had that exact language. Anyway, in spending so much time together, talking about some things that are really troubling in negative in the world, there's just some positive news happening in the world. There's always something to share together, and basically deciding the Army Corps of Engineers is not going to issue permits on the pipeline. Whoa! The tribes say it sits near sacred burial sites. In a statement, they said, although they're going to explore alternate routes. So they could engineer some, although we've had continuing discussion and exchanges of new information standing around soon in Dakota Access, it's clear that there's more work to do. The best way to complete this work responsibly next to the vicious week is to explore alternate routes with the pipeline across the back of the river. They're not under the river, and that's what we're after now, so small victories, small wins for organizing and coming together, right? We're going to do this then, and you're so much together. But if you could be, we're going to work individually and in small groups and large groups today. So if you could be in groups of four to five folks, that would be great. So people in the back can come join a group, and you'd be like, um, here's a photo. So just a little circle of your awake controls. Something else to keep in mind as we're working in small groups is that they're tightly echoing space, is that it will have a tendency to get really loud really fast. So by acknowledging and sort of pointing that out right now for you to be aware when you are talking with folks in your small group, if we all decide together to talk quietly and talk at a tone that's appropriate for the folks around you, we can prevent this sort of rapid exhalation of everybody yelling over each other, right? So just keep that in mind. You're all smart folks in this group. The way the conversations have been focused on process and focusing on taking, like, what are the next actions we're going to take forward? And it came to us in conversation when we kind of make these facilitations oftentimes as a group of us talking first about sort of what's going on with the people we're working with or the conference. But it came to us when we were sort of discussing things that oftentimes the hardest part about taking an action is first to, like, sit and think through where you are and what you're doing in the moment. If you're going to think through ideas, like, what does it mean to live in this formal phrase of Trump's America? What does it mean to look at ideas like displacement and gentrification and looking at the ways that equity, diversity, and inclusion intersect with those ideas? But sometimes the first thing you have to do that is really hard is to sit and think about what are your own day-to-day operational practices? So what we're going to do today is do it. And we've selected that because we don't want this to become self-ladulation, oh, I hate myself, I can never achieve anything, I am in a rub, I have bad habits, I just need to leave this and go drink a whiskey neat. I just want to drink a whiskey neat anyway. So it's like, OK, let's not reinforce that wish. But how do we do this in a kind of playful way? In a kind of way that allows us to see our own thinking in a broader sense. So what we're going to do today, first, is an activity that we call Making Space for Innovation. And for Making Space for Innovation, if you have a writing utensil with you, go ahead and hit that out. If you don't, Brad has one. And he also has little note cards in case you need paper. You could use your phones to give a note app or something that's not necessarily important that you you could use your digital devices if that's planned and if that's not handy. You just need one note card, cover up your clusters. I can tell you that. You'd rather type something in a note or an email to yourself. That's OK. Do you have devices you have writing utensils? I'm under specific instructions. Here are the names of the rounds. The magic rule works. Then, in ecology, you counterproductive behaviors. And then, facing down, undesirable results. Now, each round will get 10 minutes. In the 10 minutes work like this, they follow a pattern called one, two, four, all. So the first minute, you will be working on your own. So this is for the introverts and the people who need a little time. The next two minutes, you will be speaking in a pair. Then we'll move to small group and then a whole group discussion. But we are going to go through that one, two, four, all having in 10 minutes. As we work, I just want to bring back up the agreements that we've been working under. Number one, speak from your living exterior. Use your own knowledge. Speak from that space. Number two, respect that the language and ideas we share are formed from really different experiences and cultures and privileges. And this is the third thing, because this can get tricky, and I'm really terrible at this. Be aware of the air time in your use. So this is not a space when we're moving this quickly. We don't want to monologue. I always want to monologue. So it's harder for me to just be aware of how much space you're taking out. So I'm going to back this back up to the very first part of this activity, and it's called Imagining Who Worse. So on our kind of slanted screen, you can see a kind of progression. And I'll read it for you as well. Make a list of all you can do to make sure that you achieve the worst result imaginable with respect to challenging discriminatory practices associated with displacement or gentrification, or preparing to meet the challenges of Donald Trump's America. Choose one or the other. You can come back and do this with the part you didn't choose another time. But the worst possible results. When you do this, keep in mind your own context, in your work, in your artistic practice, when you're thinking through one of these ideas in the space in which you work, how could you achieve the worst possible results? Let me give you an example for my own. So I'm in the process of forming a community advisory board. What I can do is put Steve Binn on that community advisory board. So really, when you go for worse, go for real worst. Don't be like, well, I cannot be very well organized. No, just go big time. Yeah, I would also say this is a rapid list-making. This is not picking one. This is think of as many and as quickly as you can, actions, things you can do to make sure the worst, and just rapid fire, generate a list as fast as you can. Don't overanalyze, don't overthink. As Tara said, go big, go obvious, go super obvious, and come up with as many of these actions as possible. And it will help frame your thinking if you just kind of choose to focus on one of these two topics. All right, you have a minute for list-making and silence. Go. It requires a lot of time. Yeah, it needs to get timed out. The worst possible results. But we're focusing on what you would do to achieve the worst possible results. What you, the worst things you could do to achieve the worst results is for two minutes, you're going to share your list with somebody close beside you. And as you're sharing that list, if you hear something that's truly terrible, and you're like, wow, you're sick, that is a really big thing, add it to your list. I know it's hard to think this way. It's opposite of how we're taught to think. So if you hear something truly terrible, just add it to your own list. Feel the worst, all right? You have two minutes to share with a partner each other's list. Go ahead and share. From each group, to stand up and just tell me one or two things that rose to the surface in your conversation. So one person for each group, stand up, please. You're like, oh, my God. Good point. We have a phrase Donald Trump and a minus one place. A what? A minus phrase Donald Trump. That's disastrous. Um, I do believe that we should bomb the story of the neighborhoods to make room for condoms. We also had accepting Donald Trump's policies or not actively fighting against them. Supporting outright campaigns and not allowing ourselves to be silenced and wasting people's time. We're going to ask for citizenship papers for entrance to arts events. We're going to resurrect the old, demeaning discriminatory language of arts critique, including comments about how one looks. Um, who has it on? Who here do you find has even a little investment? Um, donate money to the KKK. And take a lot of drugs. That. Listen to people who share our perspectives. For gentrification, turn all rental properties into Airbnb's. And for Trump, do nothing quit or change programming to reflect the values of a repressive agreement. Here. Um, we actually share with Susan Kew, not the drug group, um, give excuses and donate to the KKK and let people know that I did it proudly. Um, and, um, excuse, break this ideals and actions. Yeah, we just basically said nothing, don't engage, but we're at, we're not, we're not even. Here. Yeah, we just don't care. We don't challenge a normal life. We're going to make pinatas, thank you, that look like stereotypical images of immigrants and sell them and, um, but we can't call it pinata because that's not an American word. Good word. Good word. We're going to use Trump rhetoric. We're going to program only things that appeal to the very wealthy and particularly Caucasians. We're going to do away with all youth programming and we are going to sell the dance place and the two houses we own, uh, to greedy developers and we will, uh, support all of the greedy developers in changing our neighborhood into being extremely gentle. Awesome. Thanks. Awesome. And, um, here. Um, we're just, we're just going to leave for the show right now. These are terrible. You're very successful in being terrible. Um, what I want you to do now is just read over your list again. Go back to your card and just look at that list again. And if there were ideas, sorry, Karen, if there were ideas that you heard from other groups that resonated with you as well, you may add them to your list. So you can add terrible things to your terrible list. One, two, four, I'm going to say three. One, two, four, all. I'm going to change the impetus a little bit. This is kind of the harder thing to do what I'm about to propose. I want you to go down that list, either by either, and ask yourself, is there anything that we are currently doing in any way, shape, or form that resembles this item? And you have to be kind of brutally honest to do this. Now, I, some things there won't. But for example, when I say, look at Steve Bannon on my community advisory board. Well, that's about policing bodies of color, Muslim people. I can look at that and think, well, that's about policing. Well, I know that the security in my building is not particularly friendly to non-white and non-wealthy folks. So that's the analogy I can make from the very worst possible things may be a practice that's actually happening a little bit in my environment. Bright enough one, for example? Sure. I'd like, so for example, in a gentrification project or a neighborhood, in a redevelopment project, you, while you want to engage a lot of folks, you may realize that you have no one on your board that looks or resembles that particular neighborhood or has, in the long, it has a history or a connection to that neighborhood and you may realize you haven't done anything to actually change that, which brings someone onto your board as a reflection of what you're really trying to do in a particular neighborhood. So you may realize, even if we're not further in gentrification, we're saying there was a, maybe you didn't think that yet. Right? So you just take that list for one minute. For one minute you're going to take that list and just look at each item and see if it echoes with any practice that's alive in your building. And some of them won't. But I would imagine there are some items on that list in which there is an echo. So again, we're going to do one, two, four, all, skipping the three. So you're going to have a minute to just study that list on your own and create a new list of kind of analogous similarities. Okay? So one minute. Go ahead and restart. Brutally honest. And in silence, you're working in silence. In your practice, your organization's practice, it may not be you necessarily, but if you see things in your organization that are happening, that resemble this behavior, that can count too. If you see collaborators or folks in your community among your supporters, if you see that behavior, that can count too. So in brain, if we don't start with something that's really out of the box and kind of wacky, and then look for connections, we're just going to spin. So this is to get us out of great habits of thought. So again, one person from each group, if you'd like to stand up and share with us a thought and idea that came up in your conversation. Be it a fact. Remain to be quiet on the areas for the editorial team. Not adequately challenging the privileged discourse fundamental to Western contemporary dance, but there's no inherent or necessary risks. Oh. Don't drop it. Not adequately challenging the privileged discourse fundamental to Western contemporary dance which there's no inherent or necessary risks. Right. You pass it. Bringing people from our community together or getting information from them, forgetting that they may or may not ignore this and chronology that they own that information. I know. Where we put our money, and who were paying for it, who were investing in one, what that means for our practice or the digital world. We talked about economic support or patronizing or partnering with judge-of-time businesses that services are out of the reach of original thinkers. I don't need that. We talked about basically doing nothing. I think that's the worst thing just doing nothing when it comes to racial injustice and feminine injustice. We talked about practice of not presenting local artists bringing in artists from around the city and so that creates a situation where you're not presenting artists of color who are present locally and also just be a set of some kind of traditional aesthetics and kind of some of the traditional aesthetics around what I call an art and how that art is like potentially larger than what people love. We echo the partnership with businesses in the role of gentrification, art, watch, the mechanisms of gentrification, the artist's perspective, humorizing the people's difference. There's one that's also not putting art bodies forward in action to be physically present or physically writing those letters making them a physical action part of art. What do you mean people's differences? Humorizing. Humor and commitment. Yeah, like making friends. Long-term complacency leading to long-term complicity. Hopefully you should hear what you're resonating with us. Did you realize that we're doing that too? Yeah, it's happening around me. I've seen that, there's an action to that that I can identify with. Alright, we were talking about treating this like this is normal. This is really supposed to be normal. And then also you know, allowing our lawmakers and watchers to give this new regime more respect in the past. Because what we've seen over the past eight years has been disgusting. And we've improved this image. We talked about checking out and disengaging. We talked about a lot of echoes from what's been said. Sort of acknowledging our privileged bubbles that we live in that we live in, in our intersection with other types of representation and communication happening in that echo chamber that's sort of speaking to yeah, close to us. These are going to be repeated but it's important for our language and our money to keep arising about money familiarity be allowed for disrespectful language. And we also talked about the taking of money when the source of the money is not aligned with your values. We talked about taking action to work outside of our bubble even when it's we're all fighting to survive but to make the effort to advocate and organize with other local and to be public even in our own materials about ways in which we may be contributing to gentrification or practices that we may find ourselves in that we can't necessarily get out of but to be public about that in our programming and materials. We also spoke about acknowledging who might be funding our work and who our partners might be and that's what we do. Okay, is that everybody? Okay, great. Things that resonated that you found there were behaviors and actions that you may be a part of or see or be familiar with that's contributing to some of those undesirable results, yes? Okay. And it's good to be in a room where you hear a lot of honest talk and it kind of resituates you within your own struggle. So this next step the third step is the hardest and I want to point that I'm going to ask you to, of course, do the thing you've been doing. What is the first step that you might take when addressing this problem? But I want you, I mean we can write dissertations about this but I want you to just think of the tiniest step the first tiniest step possible. So I talked to you about the ways in which I know that the security folks in the building that I work in follow non-white folks, people who look less wealthy they follow them around the building. So the first, and I made that here today, there's so many difficult things I can say about where I work but the first thing that I'm going to do when I go back this week is we have to have a meeting with the artistic director and we have to begin to talk through how that behavior directly nullifies his vision and vision for the organization. So that's just a meeting. That's the first step I'm going to take. I can't change it all by myself but I can make that meeting happen. So don't be overwhelmed just think of the first step something that you could maybe initiate in the next one to two weeks. And two and even more specifically to stop the unproductive behaviors that you just identified, right? You're not going to solve gentrification you're not going to solve the challenges in Trump's America. What is the thing that you need to stop the behaviors? So in my example, it might be I can have a meeting with my government committee at my board to address term limits to make it easier to facilitate more rapid change within the board, right? To change the makeup on one little thing you can have a conversation about term limits. Doesn't mean I've got to fire the whole board and start from scratch. One little action to take to try to address the behavior that you identified. And we're going to repeat the one, two, four all patterns. So you have a minute to think on your own. Go ahead, thanks. And then you can share with your partner and as you hear amazing things write those good ideas down. You have a couple of minutes to share with your partner. This is my favorite part of the whole thing is getting to do this. As it came up in our group was the aspect of the boards and the nature of the programs that make money and establishments with only very blue chair organizations like blue chair museums or performing arts centers that are really established. And one of the first things that I would do is address this problem or this situation with my board and have an open discussion about what this admission is on the regards. I personally think that researching our first making almost a priority and how the problem would be better to use our boards would enhance the negative response to the people. Basically being instead of just initiating self-doubt for your community experiences so that they understand those people well. Speak up even in the face of one's own fear. Join others who are organizing. Keep resisting and sharing information and communicating with our constituents. Our volunteers join the movement made physically present. We have conservative family members and have conversations to read articles and have nice perspectives show them different human experiences than they're seeing. And finally show above in 2020. Thank you for your diverse programming after the first five years of partly organizing. Don't wait for the audience to come to us who want to diversify our audience go to them partner with other communities and ask what they want. My task is that our board is not diverse enough so I am looking at my task now personally to seek out diversity for our board members. We want to mobilize ourselves not having meetings like this in our homes examining our back banking practices identifying social justice activist organizations to donate in a monthly sustaining basis and we have a couple of recommendations for you. Formulate a short statement against the practice of oppression that we add to our introductions particularly whenever we educate or where I work on the situation have our friends call us out anytime we say anything or have a practice that we should be not doing. Downtown project for elders and then this place we talk about elders and three of our new neighbors who have been to our gentrified neighborhoods and our to and ask the people that we're partnering with what their experience is. So make it a practice to research funding courses and not allow monetary needs to be used. We're going to have a meeting at school, local public school and to find out how we can help dozens of children that have been displaced from their homes in our community in the past year. We want to commit to sitting down and having a conversation with somebody that has a vastly different worldview than ourselves and perhaps prepare for that by committing to read at least one long form of journalism article a week and for me personally next week I'm about to spend a week writing on this piece that I did my art first on which is looking at my own biography through the history of Oklahoma but I'm going to switch that from looking really into the history of Oklahoma using my own biography just as a big door. We talked about speaking up and getting into ourselves in the past when we see something or say something and organizing the trainings in our offices in smaller places. Thank you. We want to acknowledge that this kind of process of color destructivity in some ways is really difficult when you have a group of folks from a lot of different backgrounds and it's our experience you'll sit within your own organizations of people who have similar context it begins to really surface some interesting conversations one of the things that we also wanted to model for this group is not only here's our thinking together and here's where you're going to hear echoes across multiple organizations but also that this is a technique that you can take back and pretty quickly do it with your own colleagues. If you have questions about any of the facilitations that you've seen this week Ron and Brad their contact information is pretty available on the Fuse Box website my contact information is pretty easy as well it's simply Martina's Martina's which is my last name at Guthrie's theater on theater.org Thank you for being so game for having these conversations for putting up with being time for exchanging cards for being really honest and in kinds of difficult ways I'm going to rush out of here right now because I need to get on the plane in a little less than an hour welcome welcome so we're going to head out again thank you so much I'd like to say something Hi, so remember when we started on Thursday morning it was a really messy difficult conversation and it felt totally unwieldy and it was kind of dissatisfying yeah remember that so where we got you today and what I was hoping was going to unfold over a few days so I think some of that is just due to your generosity and openness to continue having these conversations over a few days obviously also Kara's really incredible facilitation for having us here and again I want to just reiterate this is the beginning of our conversation and we're on a journey together and I can't think of a better group of people to be on this journey with so thank you for your openness despite the sort of messy sloppy ways that we're all sort of figuring out how to engage with each other around these topics as we have in the last few days I want to just give a huge thank you to all the folks here locally UT Austin a few stocks of women in their work in particular and all of the local artists and volunteers who gave so much of their time both this week and the months in the year in preparation for this so local Austin folks congratulations to our partners I am so grateful for both your critique and your faith in this organization I hope that we can continue to go hand in hand together with both of those things in good measure and for the new partners for joining us it's really just a tremendous honor to have all of you here the board of MPM Band really stepped up this week in particular to support me and the staff in this transition time for us and they made sure that every single board member had jobs and roles throughout this week that they were dispersed throughout idea forums and facilitation and all kinds of other things so thank you all board members for being such incredible partners with us this week to look at our amazing MPM Band staff you guys first annual meeting and we're going to have a great party tonight we're going to have a dance concert and maybe he's got a couple of final announcements for us take it away