 grant to be part of the microfacile cycle of work. And so for each of the four communities that we're in, Detroit, Appalachia, New Orleans, Hawaii, we invited people, artists, people working across sector in those communities to apply to these fellowships. And we have eight amazing fellows that have been to all of these events and they've been tasked over the course of the microfest is to look at how, just kind of look equitably, look, take close examinations at how art and how communities in distress and economic, environmental, other forms of stress and distress are using art as a way of addressing these challenges, these needs. That's been kind of a guiding question for the cohort. And at each of these meetings, we meet before the microfest and we talk about what we're seeing, thinking, and we observe what's happening in their own communities. And then afterwards, we can pull together and we can do a little debrief, look ahead a little bit. And so now as we're more than halfway through the microfest cycle, we thought this would be a really good opportunity to just invite them to make some space in the schedule to hear their thoughts. As your peers, our peers, people who are asking similar questions doing similar work, petitioners that come from different backgrounds. So this is an opportunity to just check in with some of the learning that's been happening overall and part of this is also we're now kind of more than halfway through this event. And as we move forward, we're gonna start to zoom out a little bit more. So yesterday, earlier this morning, we're looking closely at what's happening here on the ground. There's been some national voices. But now as we reach the end of this event, we're gonna start to pull out a little bit. And as we think about what's gonna happen in Honolulu in June, this becomes a nice little segue also just to give a little check in with the cycle so far and also with starting to plant some ideas and connect some thoughts as we move forward. So at this point, I'm gonna hand it over to our cohorts. They will introduce themselves, introduce the session. And here you go, welcome. We are two of the cohorts here and we just wanted to set up a little bit of a context for this session. To me it feels like it's more of a taking a breath and so much is coming at you. And I think like a little pause. If this is a roller coaster ride, this is where we're stopping before we go up the next big thing, you can adjust your seat belt and talk to your neighbor and talk to them. I feel like it's a time to reflect a little bit in the process, but we're not gonna, we're gonna, we don't wanna pile more stuff on you. We wanna make it easier, we wanna make it easier. So we got together as a cohort and just thought what would work for us in terms of trying to, as Ricardo Levins Morales put forth in a cultural organizing workshop, prepare the landscape, prepare the ground, appropriate fertilization so that when the fruit comes to bear, it's what we want and sustainable. And knowing that we're all, well, speaking from my standpoint, I'm here in the middle of an incredible amount of stimulation that's happening all the time. And so I'm having these connections in the moment. And in order to be present in the moment, I don't wanna think about what I'm gonna do next or what I'm gonna do beyond here, but I think that's what we're going to start to try to prepare in the soil is, in making these connections here, how do we start turning our attention forward so that we don't just get on whatever transportation back to our homes tomorrow and say, okay, now I'm exhausted, but we start filtering that into the space. We start broadening out our capacity. And so we wanna offer a way to introduce ourselves that will translate into everyone being able to introduce themselves in smaller groups that hopefully will start to seed that conversation, fertilize that conversation towards not just these connections here, but so we can easily transition into how it affects our work moving forward. So we're gonna model that here. Example and present a question and I'm gonna open it up and break it down to groups. So we'll go ahead with it. Good afternoon. What's up, Moose? Bringing it up Moose Juicy? Inside, I'm going to do it. It's not that easy. It's not that easy. It's not that easy. Okay, my name is Trapani Trapani. I'm a native of Central City, New Orleans. Some people call it the mouth, some say the third one, but it's called Central City. I'm a filmmaker, and how this micro-fest has impacted my work is immediately because yesterday, I was about to share some of my work with members of the NET Fest, which I thought was really grand, a PTSD point of fact. Some other folks got to feel a little bit of that and understand how this city's been reshaped by the unnatural disaster of Katrina. And so my question is, how will this experience enhance and add to my work? That's my question. Hi, everybody. This is Moose. I am a native of Detroit, Michigan. Third generation Mexican-American. My great-grandparents came to Detroit to work for Ford Motor Company. And when they came to Ford Motor Company, they had very good jobs. When I, after I went to art school, I ended up being a corporate photographer at Ford Motor Company for 22 years until the market went down in 2008 and closed my department. So since then, I've been doing freelance work, and I've been doing a lot of community projects with youth. I've done the diversity photography program. I created some public art. I did some beautiful mural in Southwest Detroit and such, I'll let us... So that's why I'm really excited to look around these other communities and see what's going on here and see what I can take back to my community. Southwest Detroit has the largest population of Latinos in the city, and it's also the most diverse section of Detroit. So I'm excited to look at what everybody else has and also get feedback from other people on how things work in their cities. What I'm also interested in finding out for me personally is how do I measure the value of the work that I do? What is the value of having a mural of Chavez in my neighborhood? I'm hoping that I'll figure that out. Gafferville, everyone, how are you? Good. My name is Jessica Brooke Williams. I am born and raised in Detroit, Michigan. And I'm one of the fellows for this fellowship. I wanted to basically give you guys an idea of who I am and just for the record, I'm not ID at all as a theater maker or an artist. But I do identify as one historian of the Afro-Diaspora and of my American art. I ID as a campaign fundraiser where I have had the job of raising over a million dollars within one year with our corporate partners for our initiatives at United Way. I identify as a foundation representative. I actually have worked in a foundation for the last two years of my life on the investment side, where I'm looking at money, making money to then give to arts organizations and grantees who do what it is they need to do in the community. And then I moved into a role on the programmatic side of the foundation to see how the foundation create initiatives to use its money the best way, how do they engage more residents, how do you do it in the proper way? And that's been to me for the last week of my life. And then I also identified as an evaluator. I have worked the last six months. He has three jobs almost in common. I work as an evaluator for a research department that looks at non-profit organizations and their programs and tries to analyze the data on them and give them better ways to operate their organization, how they can roll out their programs. And then I lastly identify as a cultivator of the arts. The last five years I've worked with young adults who have ideas about what they want to do with their art but they don't know how to connect. They don't know how to connect with the United Way or the foundation or an evaluation firm to help them understand how to collect the data of their program and make it measurable. So in all of those very ideas that I have about myself, I sort of have a ensemble in my mind but all these different ideas I have to speak when I'm in one place or in another or in the foundation world or in the campaign fundraising world is very ensemble-ish. So I basically, through these microphones, have had this leverage my curiosity to look more at the legislative standpoint of engaging arts and developing communities and all that. So maybe that'll be the sixth sense that I'm in. And my question was how can philanthropic efforts leverage language development to better communicate the impact of the arts in sustaining thriving communities? So that's my question. So I'm from Knoxville, Tennessee when I'm living in Knoxville, Tennessee, from Chicago. And so I guess, I think that's the first thing I want to talk about is how can philanthropic efforts leverage language development to better communicate the impact of the arts in sustaining thriving communities? That's my question. So I'm from Knoxville, Tennessee when I'm living in Knoxville, Tennessee, from Chicago. And so I guess when you interact with me, knowing this kind of struggle of place where I'm at and where I'm from and the values of what I've brought with me and the values of where I'm at now. My identifier to the first is a social worker, macro-level social worker that works with communities and organizations and systems. Next, it would be community organizer. So I have academic foundations from the University of Tennessee, Go Balls. No. No. But the other part of my education, which is very significant to me, is through Highland Research and Education Center. And that's where I learned, okay, so Highland, not the ball. But that brings my grounding of the use of popular education for participatory research and including everybody and recognizing everyone as experts in their own environment and their own experience. So very much taking away that hierarchy and that power that's so present and how many of them do you like. The impact that micro-fests or the micro-fests have had on me is really, I'm still struggling with it as far as how to really make it a tangible thing. But the main thing is seeing the potential for really making some powerful work happen and to see the power of collaboration. So this whole issue of prospector collaboration is like, I'm sorry, I'm beginning to look at y'all. I don't know, but it's more powerful than I think we realize just yet. And I'm really interested in energizing by moving that work forward. And so my question is simple. It's how do we make art more accessible or relevant for common folk? I'm a homemaker, I hope. I didn't expect that to spot. Wonderful, so you know, respond a lot to and a lot. My most is obviously from Hawaii. What I am, what I identify with is I am an actor. I've been an actor, I've been a working actor for about a decade or two now. I've been, yeah, for quite a decade. That's no easy thing in Hawaii. However, a couple of years ago, I made the decision to leave my job at the theater company that I was with for about a few years to work at the Bishop Museum, because if you don't know, it's kind of the museum of the Pacific in terms of culture, not just Hawaiian culture, the culture of all throughout, different cultures of the Pacific. So I made that decision to switch from being an actor there, an actor working at the museum, for personal reasons, also for financial reasons as well, because being working actors and all the bills, but also for Kulia, for those of you who remember from Apalachio, Kuliana, is that responsibility, likes responsibility in a nutshell. So I made that decision and I get it. However, I then became a cultural educator. But most of you, the people that have talked to me ask me what I do and I say I'm a storyteller. I say storyteller because it is part of what I do as a cultural educator, but at the same time, well, it's not all of what I do, but I say storyteller because it's my way of still identifying being an actor of some sort, or being an artist of some sort, because I wasn't ready to embrace my identity as an educator. So that's something that I started to kind of, I guess struggle with about a year ago. And then a few months ago, half a year ago, someone gave me this application, they said that my work, the microvets, I had nobody had no idea what it was. I went on a trip to the Salomonas where a few weeks ago I came back and the application was due that night. So I'm like, I'm not gonna do it. And then it's 12 o'clock and I'll do it. And so I started typing and typing and typing. I finished it around 2.30 and I sent it in and I said, okay, whatever happens, happens. And then I got a few weeks later, I got it. And then a few weeks after that, I'm in Detroit and I'm like, what are you now doing? I'm like, I really don't know what I'm doing here, and I'm along the ride. So I get here, I'll get to Detroit. And I'm surrounded immediately by amazing people, people that know exactly who they are, where they are and all of that. And I was at a point where I didn't quite know where I was, what I fully identified with. And on top of me finding these new things that I am, I'm an elementary educator. I also find out I'm like, Chris, that I'm an advocate. And that I'm an activist. And all of these different things, which is super exciting and amazing that I can explore these new worlds, but also very daunting because now I'm an activist. That's all I need, that's all I ever wanted to be. And I was that, and now I have to wear all these different hats, which are amazing. And I can affect a lot of people in a lot of lives this way, but how would I do that? Okay, I'm almost done. And then right before this trip, right by the day I got on the plane to come here to New Orleans. Someone came back from another conference in my office, in my cultural education office, saying how that conference is a writer conference you went to. They were like, you know what? You are either an educator or you're an artist, big one, or the other. And so that, and I know we don't all agree with that, but that's when she came back with it. But that said to me, hold on, hold on, I'm not going to do that anymore. But that said to me, I do, I can't forget what I am at the core, the core of everything I am an actor. However, I do embrace that out and these other games. So what my profession, what my profession means to me is it's trying to find a way to embrace these new hats that I'm wearing, but still stay true to who I am. And I guess that's a question as well, as I try to wrap it up really quickly. But that's my two cents for this. Good afternoon. Official morning. Sorry. I only anodized as a post-K, white, middle, mid-western, middle-class artist transport, which comes with this sort of own baggage. I'm also an ensemble theater artist, an arts educator, and an arts administrator, not necessarily in that order. But I run the New Orleans Base Goat Ensemble as the co-artistic director. I teach for them and I also work for the National Performance Network, which is also based in New Orleans. This has been a really amazing experience and I'm really honored that Nancy and me this opportunity to thank you Mark and all of them for that. Some of the things that these last conferences have gotten me thinking about, when we went to Detroit, my immediate correlations are two New Orleans. I'm looking at a place that has suffered a displacement of people, diaspora of some sort, whether that's in the wake of economic devastation or environmental devastation, infrastructural, et cetera. And how in the wake of that, you see these influxes of artists outside of art, artists outside of art as a transplant, creative class to sort of bring the Richard Florida into it. And then you see this creative place-making happening and how, while there's a sort of adaptability to that, there's also a huge problem around into it. And there's ups and there's downs, there's goods, there's bads. And trying to sort of unpack that all in relation to my own identifier as an artist living and working here, who's not from here. And I see some of that happening in Detroit too. And so that opportunity immediately brought those questions into play for me. Then I moved to Appalachia and I'm struck with this idea of some of the practice and comments working in an activist mentality to help support environmental justice, concerning coal lighting, mountaintop removal, et cetera. And how some of the tenets of ensemble practices we identified collaboration and transparency, flux lateral organizational movement, a decentralization of authorship or curatorial authority. And how some of those come into play in activist practice and whether or not we can consider on some practices as inherently activist or, and I know that's a broad brush up, the opposite of that being is activist practice and inherently unsung. Just got me thinking about that. I think the question that I want to ask though is as an artist, I spent a lot of time thinking about ensemble practice and those values that we correlate with them and collaboration, transparency, flux, lateral organizational structure, that sort of decentralization of authorship and how we use those cross-sector and how we can apply those cross-sector to the work that everyone in this room is doing. And we spent a lot of time talking about that. We don't, I feel spent a lot of time talking about some of the ways that ensemble practices don't work or that they not fail, but they are difficult. We all know that ensemble creative process is incredibly difficult and sometimes it works beautifully and sometimes it doesn't. And a recognition of when it doesn't and why it doesn't and how we can take those conversations into the cross-sector work. Hey y'all, I'm Bob Martin. I'm from Kentucky. I live in a place called Clear Creek. I'm honored to be here with some of my Kentucky family. I identify as a teaching artist, as a theater maker, as a storyteller, as a cultural organizer, and as someone who is on some sort of path of healing through this work with myself and with community. Amazing opportunity for connectivity because you all are a fantastic dynamic group of folks. So, as I was talking with Jerry Scott a year earlier, I don't feel as isolated as I sometimes feel in trying to pull together a lot of different strengths and strengths of work to make a living and to make a change and to heal myself in my community. So that connectivity, I think, is worth it just alone. But then I think beyond that, being able to look at some of these important things that are growing out in terms of how do we work together in these cross-sector places? So we're not just in a theater or in a school or in a legislative position, but we're filtering through all of those places through our civic participation with grace and with awareness of where we come from and with the ability to creatively vision where we would like to go next in creating healthy communities for ourselves and for our families. So we are asking questions. One question is someone who doesn't have a lot of experience working in ensemble, but who deeply believes in collaborations. How can I, with my community of storytellers of all different stripes, use ensemble as a unified force in bringing all of our stories together and make positive change in our community and out into the world? I'm looking forward to go before we break up. My name is Lisa Scheidt. I'm from here, born in Mercy Hospital. Theater maker and educator, a mother of art spot productions. I'm also a proud co-board. And one of the things we get to do as a co-board is we write reflections after each microfest. So I have 30 seconds excerpts from two of my reflections, one from the Kentucky Tennessee microcos and one from the Detroit. I'm very sure that I got to read because I think it will answer the questions. Okay, this one's from the Kentucky Tennessee microfest. I couldn't see the mountain because it had been removed. Even if it would have been the clear sky sunshine day and I looked as far as I could see from the top of Black Mountain, the tallest in Kentucky. I couldn't have seen it. The mountain had been removed by surface coal mine in a process in which coal companies defarce the peak and extract the coal with explosives to leave a flattened version of the landscape. When I stood on this unsettled ground of sharp gray rocks in Harley County, Kentucky, it felt similar to standing on a slab of my childhood home near New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. I felt powerless. I've never seen this mountain, nor the culture that I nurture, but my heart mourned instinctively. I tried to see the mountain with my ears so I stood still to listen. And from the Detroit microfest, 30 seconds of my reflection. Although I'm proud to be a net microfest fellow, I felt my privilege and responsibility smothering during the Detroit microfest in August. I felt discomfort in behaving like an art scientist, observing the art and cultural expressions of a city under distress and responding with questions such as, what can we learn and how do we connect? From the first panel titled, Arts, the Alarm Guard, and the Realities of Resurrecting an American City, there was tension. I sensed the revolutionaries in the room. They asked important questions about racism and trying to fight those who do not understand their culture, Detroit property taxes, and if the murals on the vacant buildings aren't as beautiful for those who just need a place to live. This tension resurfaced in every event I attended, pushing me to think outside my own city and outside my art making skills. I was tasked to think about and talk about what art does instead of just making it. The microfest are an ambitious undertaking bringing together art makers and non-art sector leaders from all over the country, looking at how art make, how art making strengthens neighborhoods. I was honored to meet Detroiters working hard to develop their community. They reminded me of Warriors in the midst of a long battle inspired by an enormous fight. I left Detroit now calling with unanswered questions. So today, the question I have here in New Orleans is a personal one. How can I expand my relationship as an artist in my community? So you know what's group you're in? I'm gonna be one group A. Group A. Group A. Okay, you're rolling with track. Okay. All right, before we break off into circles, we just wanna go with a few community agreements. And I want you to remember two words. One word, respect. The other word, oppression. All right? We're gonna respect each other's opinions and we're gonna create an oppression-free zone. All right? Does anyone know what that means? You know? Oh, I guess I should tell you. Many of us are familiar with what oppression feels like when I always look familiar with what it looks like. Okay? And so when we break off into these circles, we're gonna be sharing a series of questions with one another. And everyone's question is their own unique perspective. Right? We're gonna choose one question and then we're gonna share a conversation with one another. Right? So as someone begins to share their opinion, other folks make every contrary to their opinion. And we're asking you to hold in, walk out of the space, and scream as loud as you can yell outside of the space. So we want you to deal with your personal feelings outside of the space so that we can get through this exercise. Right? We do not wanna create an oppression-oppressive zone when I think about it. Cool. But if you're gonna do that, we'll go into the description of the circles. Okay, so I'm one of those people who are always in the five and 10-second delay because my partner is like, let me make sure I get it. So I'm giving y'all instructions so that you get what we're doing. We, you guys have heard, you've had a chance to hear kind of our experiences and the questions that you've come up with in our own, our own mind. And, you know, I wouldn't expect a thing to just kind of bring to your forefront. It's like, what does this have to do with me and my work? Right? And so we wanna give all of you an opportunity to respond but although we can't do it in a big circle. So we are gonna break up into eight groups. Each of you have a note card with a number on it. It corresponds to the note card, that one of the cohort tab. When you break up into your groups, which you'll follow whoever has your number, every person in the circle is gonna go around and ask a question. Similar to the way we ask our question. And really we're trying to figure out even you opportunity, this is about you participants. So we want to give you time to ask questions. We'll go around and give everyone a chance to ask their question. And then after we do that, us as a smaller group will answer those questions most of the time. And then after we have some time to do that, we'll come back to a larger group and your report backs and what you and your group discussed. We are now having an official reporter. This is organic. And so when you do your report back, we want someone to report back from their personal experience, right? Not necessarily speaking from for the group or about the group, but bringing it back to you. Because this is really time that we wanted you guys to reflect and keep reflecting on what this means to you in your work, okay? So I guess all the ones, if you have a one on your note card, you know what will he be, all right? We're not going to move yet. We're just letting you know who your leader is. If you have a two on your note card, you're going to have Lisa. If you have a three, you're going to be Jessica Williams. Lisa, the other Lisa. Lisa L. Lisa L. If you have a five, you're with Moses Goods and he has some Goods. I know. I know. I know. If you have a six, you're with me. We have seven. You're with William and you have eight. You're with Pat. So what we're going to do is your leader, we're kind of position themselves in the corner of the room that you'll be in. And if you can kind of move your chairs into a sit of a smaller circle, we're respectful of the beautiful floor. So kind of pick up your chair instead of dragging it. Okay? So we'll take a minute, 60 seconds for you to find your leader and to get into smaller circles.