 Ghosts, right? What happens when Pac-Man needs a power pill? Who said it? He gets what? Then what happens? He can even eat the ghost, right? So what we try to do is create media advocacy power pill of a film, right? A film that can increase your awareness and your education in a very short amount of time. Let's think about political civic engagement and why most of us don't engage. Why the ignorant to the processing? We don't have time, right? So I want to put you through a process where you don't have a lot of time looking at your watch. Seven minutes, seven minutes, not seven to one. Seven-minute power pill, right? And what happens is it increased their learning. And more times than not, when it's a very important issue, critical issue, they feel to fight, right? And you can see it in their eyes. You see that fire in their eyes? Get ready, because the next thing they're going to want to do is fight. You don't have the tools that they can use to fight that they can't advocate on their own behalf, right? So part of our mission is to do just that. Trust not going to go to the Capitol and represent you. You are going to be empowered by the media. You're going to be empowered by the training to draw the maps by hand, right? To draw your own districts and present those districts on record. Like we did, and we'll see the whole process that we went through to do that, right? And so what I want to begin with is to first slide and talk about why political civic engagement and why the folks that are moving forward, the crazy folks that are moving forward, we do this and we're trying to get you to do it as well. The number one way to put this democracy to the test is to make political civic engagement a part of your lifestyle. What's wrong with getting over where to go into a city council, right? Because it's where they're making decisions about you. If you learn those processes, you can fight to protect the right to run for office. All the right to elect, vote in, candidate of your choice to represent your what? To protect and advocate for your community interests. Now check out the question that the Bob asked yourself. Does the current pool of incumbents represent your community by laws on your behalf? Or do you actively engage in influencing the shaping of those powers, right? We're going to talk about how to engage, right? So the first thing I want to show you guys, of course, this is a film, right? A short seven-minute power pill that ties, go back to the first slide for a moment, that ties censors to redistricting the voting rights, right? Now what I'm leaving out of this whole piece is the historical backdrop of citizenship. I primarily focus my work on African American boys and men, right? And we talk about citizenship, not just about immigration, because we weren't brought here, we didn't migrate here or immigrate here. We brought here to chat, right? To talk to you, to talk, to speak to you. But once we acquire citizenship, we acquire the right to be counted in the census. When we acquire the right to be counted in the census, for the first time we had the opportunity to cultivate political power, right? And we had the opportunity to form the German money district, right? So censors and redistricting is a way to protect our voting rights or advance those rights, right? And so let's go to the first power pill now. Before you go to the third and first slide, I just want to tell you that there's some very, very cool people on this video, right? Some of you, if you really get down, you might recognize it. And if you don't get down and you've just been recognized, you'll be informed, you'll be empowered to know that. Hollis Watkins, Mississippi, Southern Echo. Derrick Johnson, president of Mississippi NAACP. Of course, Brother Jacques Morial. The director of our census that was resigned a few months back, director of the Rose and then Brenda Hyde, who's also demographer, organizing activists in Southern Echo, right? And so without further ado, let's check out the first power pill, so many video censors and redistricting voting rights. When we first came to this country, we were brought here as a chief source of public blame, or free of view that human child property that could be owned and we were not considered in any other constitution, other than being both accountants of these bills. And we're being for the purpose of the census, so that it would be to normal child slaves to benefit from the federal support that they can receive or haven't slaves in yet, not allowed to exercise any rights that normal citizens could exercise in this country. After the passage of the 19th century, about both rights that, we found that many individuals who were called to vote could not be cast in effective value. As a result of that, in 14 years, 9th century Supreme Court over-registered to draw on the political boundaries to determine whether or not individuals who cast a ballot were able to cast an effective ballot to benefit candidates of their choice. Fortunately, in Mississippi, that ballot continued and we were able to elect more African-Americans to run the office within the state of the country, take a set of all the other officials who are of African descent reside in the state of Mississippi. I think it's important to maintain districts where minority voters can elect a candidate of their choice because of the long and shameful history of Louisiana with respect to respecting the rights of ethnic minorities and other marginalized stakeholder groups. Under the Voting Rights Act, states that will part of the element that I've seen a few local jurisdictions around the country, those jurisdictions that have been long and well documented in history, violating the rights of voters of color are required to pre-clear a change in voting procedures, rules, or redistricting with the Justice Department. That's the primary protection of the Voting Rights Act. We have to determine the method and process as well that the districts by which people get elected from. And if you have not understood that if you don't know how that process worked, then you are totally dependent upon someone doing that for you. And if you don't know how it works, those that's doing it could not be doing it fair or beyond the Justice Department if you were never doing it. So it's important that you yourself get involved in the process, learn the process so that you can contribute to the actual drawback of the districts just like by your being counted, you participated in the determinant to one extent and the amount of resources that came into your state. The Census Bureau is a nonpartisan organization. Even though the census counts, determine the real portion and inform a redistricting. We have nothing to do with that. Our job is to count every one once and only once and in the right place. That's all we do. Then we get back the information to the people freely. That's our job. The states have to redistribute. We actually do calculate the reapportionment counts, but that's the end of it. We are a nonpartisan organization. Not drawing. If you say redrawing, you redoing something. The lines are already there now. So you're going to redraw them. And once you redraw them, that's when it determines. We run. We can vote for that person. That's right. If that's it. You go over here outside of the district for the day. You can't vote. You don't know the district. So put them all together. I believe if you say that to them, they won't like this. Organizing and having a post-cretinium, that's what we actually have to organize. This was the first opportunity we had at that particular training where we were trying to get ahead of the path. But then we were able to acknowledge that how important the census was to this recovery. Because those census dollars and infrastructure dollars could be used to help rebuild communities and all these. But that training happened in 2009, nearly a year before the census count began. So we had an opportunity to get ahead of the ball. This is a redistricting training. We're still a year out, a full year out, from the actual redistricting process. So they threw us a few curveballs at the legislature. But because we were prepared, we were able to take advantage of the opportunity. So this was one training, that was the hand-drawn training that we took community leaders through that went back to their communities and trained more folks. And that was Mississippi, where we had a ballot box coming together. The other piece is we're moving into losing such a large population of folks. Now here's the deal. Political power in America is the numbers game. It's the one reason why at one point during history, all of the white ethnic groups began to be counted as one group. At one point, you can be counted as Irish, you can be counted as Italian, etc. But to cultivate political power, all of those ethnic groups formed one group, a white group. Now that group is, no matter how many ethnic groups you group together, you will still not be half of that population. So it's a main way to also maintain political power. But for us, you're losing $150,000 people after the storm. $118,000 of those people were African-American. Some folks were being excluded from the recovery process. You get one-way tickets out of your community. When 100,000 people don't have transportation, they're trying to get rid of some folks, right? But when you lose population numbers, your political districts shrink. So you lose the opportunity, you lose political power and you lose the power to elect a candidate of your choice, right? Which is why these two mechanisms are so important. The next one. Now I wanted to bring this up for one reason. And especially when we're working with African-American men. We, we have no idea about our political history in terms of, you know, running for office and maintaining office. As soon as we got the right to vote, two years later we had the right to be counted. And it's like all of these folks just ran in every ways that they could get into, right? Is that there was a 400-year plan. When we had, we were able to be counted and the great political power, we were able to do that, right? And so I just wanted to raise up this guy, John and I, and this guy, Hero Revelle, because this is an ongoing fight with Louisiana and Mississippi folks, right? Now technically, the first black and hungry was John Willis-Benard, right? But John wasn't able to take his seat. Now he went on to be the first African-American to speak on the House floor, but he ran for a seat that was not occupied, but he was denied that seat by white Congress, right? And so Hero Revelle was going to be technically the first incumbent to actually hope to see for a number of years. He didn't complete his term, but the significance of his seat was that he was the old space-centered seat of the Confederate President Jefferson Davis, right? So there was some symbolism, right? We'll talk a little bit more about symbolism later. The young John Rainey who ran the North Carolina, the South Carolina, then you had Blackscape Groups who was technically the last African-American legislator in Congress before Jim Crow came down. And then it was a long period of time, 30, 40 years, where there were absolutely no African-American legislators in Congress, right? In the Civil Rights Act. Next slide. Oh, back. One, one time. The significance of Shirley Chisholm was that once we acquired the right to vote again, because we had a Civil Rights Act and a Voting Rights Act in 1800s that was repealed once Jim Crow folks took over the Supreme Court, et cetera, and they lined up in Bowie and excluded us from the Bowie, right? But once we were able to run again, the first person around this time was a woman, an African-American woman that now, when we had the right to vote in the 1800s, only African-American men had the right to vote. And for the first time, there was a full person in the census and not through folks, right? It was a child. And so, let's go on to the next slide. What year was that? Go back. She was like, oh, she didn't, she didn't. Oh, she was elected to a law office, but then she ran for president. She was the first African-American woman for president. For a year, Shirley Chisholm. Okay, and I basically talked to you last while I said we were into this. Once the 14th it gave the African-American men to right to become citizens in America, right? It also gave Native Americans and Chinese men as well for the first time they were countering the census. Now, this is, we acquired the right to vote for the citizenship in 1868. Two years later we were countering the census. Let's go to the next slide. It was as if, I mean, well first of all, you know, there were millions of slaves concentrated in the south, right? Once we had the opportunity to counter the census, it was instant political power, right? Because we were then able to form a majority of minority districts all over the south, right? And so, just having slaves so heavily concentrated in the south came back to Iowa for about 20 years, 20, 30 years. And so, you know, we sort of went through the history there, which sort of brings us to the now, right? We've talked about the count, talked about redistricting, talked about political power. Now, let's fast forward to New Orleans Postal Training. Now, again, you know, initially, what really teed everyone off is, this area of the law of life, or this area of New Orleans is these gentility, heavily concentrated African American homeowners. Now, the very first remilk proposed that we saw made nearly 50% of the lands aboard green space, big pockets of green space drawn on these big pockets of green space until, again, concentrated that green space in every place where African Americans work, right? And so, we lost 118,000 African Americans out of 150,000 or 180,000 people after the song. It was going to make for an interesting redistricting fight. Can I ask a question? We're on the map, are we now? We're in the map. Maybe about right here. You know? And the green, I can't correct the key, the green represents what number? Since 2000. Since 2000, right? And so, you just see, this is African storm, right? And so, you see less green in these areas. So, of course, from here to here to here. And so, this represents the actual population, right? And there's another power field I want to give you guys which is the documentary power field, right? Now, there's a difference between the media advocacy power field and the documentary power field, right? The media advocacy field is about seven minutes. Then that's the documentary piece across about 19, 20 minutes, right? And so, I want you guys to sit through this film for one reason and one reason. We get to see how the four steam population happened in three ways. One, they're eliminating public housing when people came back to the city after the storm and public housing was boiled up and fenced. People were not allowed to get their belongings out of their homes and the homes were set to be bulldozed. Activists, advocates, lawyers stood in the way of making that happen, right? And so, you'll see that fight for public housing. They didn't remember about the fight for public housing. People were fighting for one-for-one replacement. It was never about moving back into those, just the floor floor initiatives, right? But importantly, they remember about those housing developments. They were those most sturdy buildings in the city, right? And so, most of them were not even damaged again. There was a concentrated attack. So, I want you guys to check out Preston City Exit. It's an excerpt from a larger film that will not release in its entirety until the 10th year anniversary of the training, right? And we can clearly see then how much the city has changed. And we'll give a show of folks how the city changed, right? So, please check out ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... and who would need it, but the stone has helped to create kind of a new, new, new world of complete walls for the housing assistance, people who lost their jobs, people who lost everything, people who didn't have that, people who had insurance coverage, and all these kind of issues and they do have a whole house in this world, and so when HUD regates the number of housing units that they run out of, they really provide such a significant power. Now they say that they got a right about building in these kind of places, and that eventually they will be additional housing providers that the plans that we develop will take five and sometimes ten years. We've seen through some other public housing developments that it took seven and eight years before there was any housing open that some of those public housing sites. So they will not, they're saying that they're going to build a new housing system. It doesn't mean that I just want to say that the bizarre and cynical policy of him in talking about tearing down perfectly viable buildings that look just like the buildings nationally, you are saying you people out of their houses for five years makes no sense, therefore you have to conclude that the reason you are doing this is to keep people from coming home. It makes no sense at all and so fine. You're talking with those big old things in Chicago, New York, and other cities, that's not what we have here. We have this with porches, with balconies, as our poor plans around this city, around the country, around the city, and I've shown them safe and orderly, they're just rough. When I say that you're planning to tear them down, it makes no sense, therefore it must be that you just don't want your residents back. At least my possessions were inside and told me I need a lot more than has been done. I realize ten years so far to get my property. These two different populations, there is a level of overlap, but if you look at African American survivors, post-period Katrina, they were essentially locked out of the reconstruction effort. No housing, no access to jobs, no transportation, the infrastructure of the city was basically left in disarray and in some cases the disarray was created by the government agencies, such as Hannah and Hud, locking down public housing. I mean that's a very simple way to make sure that you have certain workforce that isn't able to return home, despite the fact that their homes were not damaged. Katrina, a robbery, her other father died, died in the lake. He was very young, they were both honest and hardworking men. I'm a third week of September. I think LSU and the state realize that if they did so much as put a bandaid on a patient-generated hospital that they couldn't later claim to FEMA that the hospital was substantially destroyed and it would not have been able to claim a replacement value and place FEMA to those taxpayers of nearly half a billion dollars. It could have been real, it was fixed up by doctors, by military and the state assembly had no interest in involving that hospital because apparently they had other agendas, which was let's use this as a pretext to build a new hospital. I'm concerned that the most vulnerable population that which is medically uninsured are going to be left out again and not be of adequate services. Charity Council, like I said, I stayed during the storm with army special forces and I said absolutely because I'd seen set up some tents at the conventions and I know that we're still trying to do some work and so the military, nurses, our other states, we all were able to use their large Navy comms as well as the large comms that came from the U.S. Chairman, the Board of Outside Chair, is all these men certainly aware of space students and air filters and they put the centers of accomplishment in that, which is pure propaganda. Right first sentry, we should see whether LSU is overexciting its authority in closing chair. Out here. What was it like? Really happy that's where I'm going on PTS, but the point of that piece was really to highlight three things about political civic engagement. That was three, actually three vignettes from a from a larger series that we did called Recover and Restore, is where we produced a series of videos of eight people in their recovery of their return home. It was an alternative to dealing with the government, right? So when you received a copy of the DDV in the extras, it would have a pathway home. You know, if you're from the Lord 9th Ward and we gave you a list of organizations that are in the Lord 9th Ward working to get people back to connect with people in your community, right? And so we basically took all of those, those recover and restore episodes and created a composite of that and that's the Cretaceous piece, right? But those three vignettes were basically used for one, the housing video used in the policy fight that Maxine Waters, you know, fought to have. It was a bill for, it was a affordable housing bill, but it wasn't the best bill, but we're back, right? The second piece was an excerpt from the low wage worker rights video that we use as a tool to bring black and brown folks together to talk about what's really going on with employment and labor in the city and why we have to work together and not allow employees to pit us against one another, right? So it was a great organizing tool. The third piece was a piece that was near and dear to my heart as well as shock because it was actual footage of the clean hospital that LSU said was so damaged, right? And so this is actually the doctor, one of the resident doctors, Serge is that, that worked at Sherry. He recorded that video, but then he later had to sign a gang order that he couldn't use the video nor could they talk about what they did inside the hospital, right? And so he gave the footage to me. But that video said that part of it and some of the other interviews that came out of that piece used in the lawsuit against LSU fight for charity hospital, right? So they can be used in various ways, but just sort of talk about this political paradigm shift that happened as a result of the extreme loss of population. We have to talk about the fact that for 30 years, really, we had a majority African American led municipality, right? And over a very, very short period, it seemed like it changed overnight from a majority black municipality to a majority white municipality. One from having an African American mayor, sheriff, national attorney, city council to having a complete majority white city council, white mayor, white sheriff on and on, right? It's not completely bad. It's not completely good. But when you have a large population of African Americans and all of the people that work within the municipality of white, what's that called? Be afraid to say, hey, hey, not exactly the same conditions, but let's be mindful, okay? So with that political paradigm shift, we saw, we just realized that redistricting was going to be a mud, right? For one, we don't have our population numbers back from far long and hard to get people back in town and to be counted in their bed, in their house on the day of the census, right? And this is, you saw Dr. Groves on the video, we were trying to get them to have field hearing and reading about census to get folks who actually still had residency in Orleans, counting in Orleans. Now, again, he wanted to politicize the census, so he agreed to meet with community leaders privately about some of the census forms that were not going out into rural areas, right? People in rural areas generally use PO box, but they don't send census forms to PO box, right? And so he came out and met with us and he put 100 workers back on the streets that went back out into those communities and got those forms in people's hands, right? And so sometimes the direct actions bring those leaders down that can actually make something happen, right? And then in that instance, for Southern Echo and some other folks who were able to have made that happen in the right to Groves. But again, with the extreme population loss, we resolved to start with the District Encyclopedia in Louisiana. Go to the next slide, please. Now, here we go. This map, actually this map is a coin of Brother Warrior. He was the first one to say, it looks like an octopus. We don't have the image of what gerrymandering is, but you could replace it with this. You could look at this map, how a gerrymandering is down in the river. It's a stove pipe here. I don't know if you guys know all the principles in all the Echo stuff, but I'll just shut them out. Stove pipes, you can't have this little precinct sticking out here, right? All of this happening over here, right? So what you did was you cracked a continuous district like this one. This is the district that they destroyed. This is the one we were fighting for. It encompasses the Lord Life Board and all of New Orleans. Some of us took a ride back there last night. They cracked that district down in the middle here, and they spread it over three parish or county areas, right? Which is amazing. It takes nearly an hour and a half to drive the district, and you would need at least a quarter million to run. This map retrogressed from five majority minority districts in the metro area to three, which never happens in the northern district, right? Well, the map that we produced retrogressed from five majority residents to four. We're going to keep four because instead of jumping the river here or jumping the river here or going off into an entirely different parish, we dropped the lake in the slider, right? You know we kiss a lot of people all the time, but you can't complain about jumping in the slider out of one parish when you just jumped into three, right? And so this map actually graded out better than that. You'll actually see part of the testimony with myself, Brother John Muriel, and Senator, State Senator Willa Lewis, who had to represent our community trying to get their maps on record, right? And so with that, I want to bring in Brother John so we can sort of talk you guys through sort of what happened at the Capitol. I'm going to get John to reflect and force in the memory that I sort of reflected on this a little bit because of one important thing happened that blew our minds. But again, because we were prepared and the trainings and all of that, we were able to make something happen, right? And so I'll just go into the story a little bit and John and I are going to tell the story, right? And so after the hand drawing training, we attended another training in North Carolina with a group called Southern Coalition on Social Justice. And at that meeting, we met a gentleman by the name of Tony Fairfax. Now, Tony is a serious democrat, right? The first one I ever met. Well, I know enough technically with Hollis, but when Hollis trained us, I don't know if Hollis said. Hollis didn't train us on an attitude for redistricting software and the actual software the legislature used that we actually purchased, right? And so after the training with Fairfax, we felt a little bit more empowered because we now are working with the same software that the legislature used, right? We're in the game now, right? So let's see. When can community folks turn in maps during the session? We don't know. Guess what? They don't know. No freaking body knows. They drew this map with not one single input or suggestion from anyone in their districts. It's called a public protection. So when the legislature goes behind, there was an every district amongst themselves. And you guys took each other out, and you throw her out through the bus, and how many can happen? Let's see what happened. Maybe we'll do it some other time, but we're not going to get into the trouble. But so I want to fast forward to 2011, extraordinary session, extraordinary session. First of its kind in Louisiana history at the State Capitol, right? They're going in to redistrict the entire state without you, right? So I've been in California at an Amnesty International meeting, and I'm at the airport, and I get a call from Brother Shot, and he says, we're trapped. The maps will do tomorrow. I'm like, they don't have any maps. We're just the North Shore Alliance and the South Shore Alliance, and the Slaughterhouse folks and the New Orleans East folks are coming together. Why? Because they can't choose my break to the North Shore. They still have their businesses and their church in the East, but they live on North Shore. But they also live in a super majority white district. $14,000 to $15,000 in African-American people, native American folks, and never have representation. So we're saying that we've done something amazing. We've given them an opportunity to be a part of their community again and have some popular power, right? Get this call from Shot. It's like you got to be here in the morning, and we're like, good thing the flight's coming in tonight, right? Fast forward, get home, drive to the airport. When he drives to the capital the very next morning, me, Shot, get to the capital. We're in a hallway talking, right? Live-action things are going on, right? I had never met Senator Willa Lewis, right? I'm in her community. Her residents are organized. Over $3,000 signed on to the petition. But I never met her. So she comes out, Shot introduced me to Senator Willa Lewis, and Shot's a very cool, strategic guy. Here's what he said to her. This is Brother Trap, and I work for him. This reminds me of my cousin, you know, he's 10 years old. We're trying to get him to pass us 13 and get him to move us. He gets to the box office and we say, he's 13. And he's like, no, I'm not. I'm 10. So I shot him. I remembered that last time I took on my shot. I used the great shot. I refused. I didn't say anything. He passed Buster with Senator. He's one little problem. I was not a part of the Legislative Black Conference. Now there was shot. How are we going to get in, right? Outwalks Tony Fairfax, who's from North Carolina. Why is he in Louisiana? He's just out of contract for the Legislative Black Conference to do all of their maps. My don't. So, when he walks out, Shot said, I was doing this. Okay. Then I call the Legislative Black Conference. Can I get in with Tony Fairfax and draw a map for Senator Lewis? They're like, you're not a member of the Legislative. The Legislative tells Shot. Shot calls the Senator Honest. He says, he got to get trapped in to get him to map for Senator Lewis. He just ran it right away, right? She says, okay. Outwalks Katrina Jackson. Who she, she's the Executive Director of the Conference. She walks down the hall. She says, I want to reserve time to get in there with Tony Fairfax and I want Trap to get in there with him. Matter of 15 minutes, all of this is blazing and happy, right? We're sitting in the session. In walks Katrina, taps me on the shoulder. Walk back. Shot can hide the Senator and Tony. We'll get a map together in a matter of 10 minutes. I may be exaggerating. It was pretty effective. But I want to, I want Shot to talk a little bit more about the details if you can remember how exactly did he get Senator Murray to get us tied on the floor to at least get our maps on record. If our maps are not on record, they can do whatever they want with the obstacles. They don't have an opposing map. They don't have anything on record that they can say, outfit is, what do you have? You have anything better? Oh, you do? Let's take this, right? Remember, we knew that we had to get an alternative plan on the record in order to have any sanding for going to challenging court day. And they were playing faster to lose with the deadlines for submission of maps. There was a lot of funny stuff going on. You know, I've been around with legislature really since I was a kid. My dad started doing legislature in the late 60s. And I really, you know, is storied and fabled and notorious as the Louisiana legislature is. I have never really seen anything like this. I mean, it was the quintessential smoke-filled room where really, I think it was about four older white guys got together and drew a map and gave today the model for its attorneys and drew a plan. And that's where this, what we began calling the Octopus District came from. And it was intended to protect incumbents. It wasn't intended to protect a fairly represented body to meet the law, to be a compact and contiguous district as the law requires. It was solely intended to protect incumbents. And because we had this big loss of population, we had people who were displaced and dispersed across the state, they wanted to take greatest advantage of all of those conditions. So in this environment, we began organizing. We knew we were in for a fight, but we had no idea that it was going to be anything like this. We thought we were made to go into a boxing match, not an ultimate fighting mix, or to pull out the nice stab in the head kind of fight. And so they notified us of the deadline after they had had a late night meeting of the Senate Rules Committee. And a meeting, I think it was like 9.45 on Friday night. That's when I called you. It was a Friday night. Now we met that following Saturday morning. And we had generally the outlines, and they had hand drawn on that. And conceptually, we had gone around and vetted it with the stakeholder constituents to make sure that they supported it, that they had confidence that this plan, conceptually, would represent their interest and protect their rights. One thing that Traff did mention is that a lot of people who had been displaced from Eastern New Orleans in Canada here, who did not believe that, were staying in a slide gap, just across the St. Anthony average. They were coming to work in New Orleans every day, coming in on the weekends, working on their analysis. So we kept that, we tried to keep that community of interest to the end. And then there's a long history of people who lived in New Orleans East for the last 20 years moving to slide gap because housing costs were cheaper, the school system was a little bit more stable. So with all of this backdrop, we find out that we have to get a plan together and get it submitted. And we were able to make it that way. And boy, when this map was submitted, all hell broke. Really. Because not only the incumbents affected who benefited from this map were upset, but they were upset that stakeholders had intruded in the process. We encourage you to go over on the spoke to your role. Did Cynthia participate in making the map, or did y'all just make it? So what's her, she said, go over. Well, we had been working on this map, on the conception of this map for a while. And we were really trying to, it was really difficult because we also wanted to protect the gain of two African American students in the Northern part of the state. And we needed to keep those legislators at bay. So, you know, technically statistically, demographic is very, very difficult. We couldn't have done it on the airpads in short. And I mean, he is a brilliant demographer and he applied, you know, incredibly. We came up, we turned this map into a plan in a matter of an hour and a half. And so that's something that you can take days or weeks. But Cindy will have noticed, actually, when we conceptually got this map together, we had this idea, instead of this thing snaking all around and going to represent three different parishes, that we would keep this community of interest together, she was, she could actually support it. And, you know, the, also an outcome was they passed one of the substantially this map in some much very minor changes that really did not affect anything. I think they kind of off this finish. No, they cut this. They cut this point. Yeah, they cut that one off. But what he ended up doing, what he ended up doing is leaving a majority after the American district on the West Bank that was representing an American majority in the White District, was representing after his majority by the White Senate, who was one of General's lawyers and the chair of the Health and Welfare. And in Louisiana, the Louisiana legislature is really, it's a separate branch of government that doesn't operate in. The presiding officers of the House and the Senate are not the left-wing governments. They're chosen by governments. So ultimately, the governor decides who's going to chair the legislature. As an aside, what's happened over the last year and a half, there are two cases where legislative chairman disagreed with the government on a single piece of legislation. And he summarily removed it. He summarily removed it. And then they issued this issue. But back to this soul, we had an opportunity, we wanted to get this map in the record. So we had to get a hearing before they sent in government affairs. And they did not go out of their area. They knew that gymnastic map on the record was the first step to a possible legal challenge. And Senator Ed Murray, who represents New Orleans, he was a must, they said. He's an old man. We grew up together, played football in the street and lived four or five years old. He was a former Army officer, brilliant attorney, and a great, behind-the-scenes legislative tactician and consensus builder. And we didn't make a move every year to get in a punk alive. And he, I think, may have issued some private threats. He suggested that if we were not able to get a hearing on this map, one, that his opinion as a lawyer was going to give us great grounds for a legal challenge. Two, I think most convincingly, that he believed some of these people in New Orleans who had suffered all of these injustices leave us with nothing to do. And the reason with them that the worst adversary you could have is somebody who's not a lawyer. So we finally able to get a hearing. And the incredible thing about the hearing is that we had the stakeholders, the people most affected, to come and testify. I think we had 16 neighborhood associations and home-owned associations represented at that year. They even had to say that we've never seen this many people living in a community advocating on their own land. And these are folks who were, we did not teach them much about the district process. They knew what was up, but they never had the tools to engage, right? And so for the first time, they're coming forward with waves over the course of the extraordinary session to testify on behalf of the community. And the thing, what happens in this case is New Orleans needs to build to be low-level is a majority half American neighborhood. It was mostly middle-working class. And a lot of the community leadership that there were, a lot of school teachers and jobs were protected by community contract. A lot of professionals and entrepreneurs, people who were independent and who were really kind of functioning as leaders in their congregations. These were people who, in the barbershop or beauty shop, when people had a dispute about a issue of public interest, they'd say, track which it doesn't mean. So they were sophisticated enough to gain very quickly, to advocate on their own behalf. And they had the resources and flexibility to actually try to account for it, not once or twice, but it was something that we had every day for two weeks, every day, every day. At the end, you know, I'm sad to say that we did not win this battle. But I think to amplify, we were able to protect the two issues we have in our districts in the normal part of the state because when we introduced that, some of the legislative leadership said, oh, yeah, what? You gonna put that in record? We're gonna take these two away from you and treat for it. So at the end of the day, they passed something to look like this. We explored a legal challenge based on this, and after a great deal of research and discussion that without a substantial amount, probably something important to know about us, that we had no chance on a mounting legal challenge that we probably would only have less than 20% chance of winning. Not because of the barriers to this, but primarily because of the general repellent court that entered into the year. And those of you who might live in Texas, you know about the gift of a second court repeal. It's the most conservative federal court repeal. It's packed with courtes of George Bush's father, George Stone and Bush, and it is the absolute worst. But just to say, why, if you do live in Louisiana, Texas, Arkansas, Mississippi, there are five main reasons coming up on that court. That President Obama's going to, if you do live in any place that has a gift of second George, you know, but you keep an eye on that, that you work with your local communities to try to encourage people to be considered, who are going to be aggressive, who are going to respect the rights of stakeholders, especially at the grassroots level, who share your values, and also people who are young enough to serve a long time. What the Bushes did is they appointed people to the federal bench very, especially where she fought. Even at these points, some of the Pellow court judges would be very, maybe they served very years or more, you know, and they had a great lasting effect. But, you know, what this fight over redistricting did for a lot of people, both stakeholders, observers, and allies, is it really amplified all of your struggles in the cynical schemes that it validated when we believed that in wanting to close down public housing, not be open to public hospitals, and the intent was to discourage working people from returning down. Public housing, our public hospital, these subsidize not the people who live there. They really subsidize the business community because they're able to pay a section of slave wage to people who are concerned with the business industry because there is public housing available because there wasn't public hospital and when we didn't have access to primary and preventative care until Katrina, but we did have charity hospitals was one of the two or three best public hospitals in the country. It's always really one of the top few trauma centers in the entire country. And, you know, we had a great mental and behavioral health program and we lost all of that. So the effect of that was that families and children older people who are worried about their access to healthcare, families and children who are worried about access to public education near their homes, public education, schools that they're familiar with to do the practical effect was to discourage those people who return. Keep them out of this as long as possible. Hope that they can support these houses so they can remain connected with the whole social and economic environment you see. And they actually revealed this if you recall or something. And so they can do all of their call as well. Just two weeks ahead of Katrina, on September 8th, 2005, there's an article that they made of the Wall Street Journal written by the court at a expensive time working as a reporter in the Wall Street. Well, one of the self-disciplined citizens and socialists in the elite group admitted that they, their intent was to remake the Wall Street into a wider richer city. And, you know, we find that, I think, we have had some measures of success but we still struggle with public housing and public education. All the public services but public housing and public housing and public health. We struggle with that. Still. In New Orleans, we don't have any schools anymore. We have what's called an open role. So the role that public school might play in finding a community given an identity place where parents discuss common problems in the community not just with respect to their children. We've lost all of that. On public health, you saw in the film that charity hospital was ready to open at the end of the system. And General Otteray, you remember, was the hero of the trip. Let all the military forces actually will tell you that. And he actually called Governor Blanco at the end of September and said, Governor, I just expected the hospital with the U.S. Public Health Service is ready to send your people down here. And Governor Blanco says, Well, thank you, gentlemen. We're not going to be here. And he was defunct for really years after that. The gentleman was revealed that this wasn't the simple scheme that we thought. If they reopened that hospital, they would not have later been able to claim to FEMA that it was at least 50 percent destroyed. And a public facility, in order to get replacement value of the has to be 50 percent of more destroyed. So if it had ever been real, they could not have claimed that it was 50 percent destroyed. And from that claim, they got $297 million from the federal government that they didn't deserve. That's $490 million of your money and money. And they're using it to build a mega money, a mega money, a new public hospital. They destroyed an entire neighborhood, displaced more than a thousand families in a heartless city to build what we call the Taj Mahal. And the hospital is, you know, a monument, perhaps, to Governor Baku Jinbo, but it's not financially a disability system. Even if Governor Jinbo were to take Medicaid expansion, that hospital would still require a public facility that would be $120 million. And so that's 100 something million that you're talking about, which has all gone into the construction of this new hospital. The state had appropriated $300 million to renovate Sherry Hospital before the trip. Had not spent any of it, they were going to renovate this band. It was a fair limited program. The hospital was never going to close. They used that $497 plus the $300 million, plus some focused focus on the books to come up with $980 million to build this new Taj Mahal Hospital. It's not going to open for at least two years that the suit was pinned. Ten years later? Ten years later. And you know, even when it does open, unless there's some financial magic that they can do and that it works on financial magic that is sustainable, it's going to go bankrupt and grow. Real challenging one. How far are we going on time? We have about five minutes. We're about five minutes. Yes, we're about five minutes over right now, so we could probably go another five-ish at most, but well, after this, we have another presentation and then a break. We're going to have a break before the next piece, but yeah, and then we have we have some work in this room for that facility. I think we're here. Okay, so I feel like we're all very it's very it's full, right? It's a lot. And the thing I wanted to say is as we were driving here on the bus, if you saw the large construction cranes on the left side of the freeway, I meant to actually say it as we drove by, but that's a hospital that they're talking about. Potageal hospital. And hopefully on our way to our next spot or at some point, you'll see it. It's it's that big construction on the other side of the freeway from the dump. Right? And it's really lit up at night. Yeah, there's like a wasteland around it and you can see. Yeah. And in Emerson's Promise, Emerson, we're driving to work in class neighborhood. You know, regular folks who work every day very hard their homes, most of them are severely damaged by Katrina's. The mayor said, come on home. A lot of these people got money through a road road program to fix up their houses, brought them into their savings and whatever insurance they could get. They fixed up their houses. They came back in two years later until it gets to get to step and expropriate their homes and get lost. Let's take the next four minutes to just fill the questions and then we'll bring my kids for my stuff. I'm sorry, Miki? Yeah, well, I'm wondering. So, I'm wondering. They built that Cleyborn bridge and now it's an hotel where it's down. Oh. And bronze right in the room is historical for me. Yeah. And that's what you do. Close to my heart because I live a block from you. Right now they're in, the update is right now they're in a midst of a fairly extensive study. We, you know, my neighbors and I, we're disappointed so far because we've outreached the stakeholder here. We're pleased. They had, I think, eight outreach sessions in late November and December. And I think they had an outreach budget above $100,000. And they got only three. What's the issue? They built an elevated freeway through the heart of a historically African-American neighborhood. It was a beautiful boulevard with four rows of huge live-on trees and it was, that public space was essential to the cultural development and identity of the city. And it was also a black business district. So they built this elevated highway in between 63 and 66. It destroyed that neighborhood. Right now, since the elevated highway was reaching what is the end of its useful life, meaning that they're going to have to spend a substantial amount of money to refurbish and rebuild to get about 30 to 40 years out of it. And we really kind of forced its stakeholders to demand that there be an examination of taking and restoring the boulevard. One of the big problems we have with that is it's a practical problem. It's a transportation planage problem because they built a Taj Mahal in the hospital and the city surrendered the street for it. Taking it down and returning the trash to the surface arteries is more difficult because you reach a bottle. When you turn on the street green. The terrible thing about this Taj Mahal is that it's a suburban campus in the middle of the city with asphalt parking lots and fences around it. It's not a walkable, urban, natural campus. But do you have a question? Yeah, I'm sorry. Any questions? Do you have a good question? I was wondering if you could just talk a little more about the connection that you talked a little bit about public education and I understand there was like thousands of teachers that were fired after portrayed it. When it seems like it ties in with all the different ways in which working class before a middle class teacher were attacked. And my understanding is that was the largest group of black homeowners in the city. So a very significant voting population involved. Well, what was the significant voting population? Because these were these were, you know, these were community leaders. And at the end of September, the 1st of September, they decided that they were not going to reopen public schools in the organs for the 2005-2006. And then a few months later, they severely fired all the voting employees of the public school district. Even though it was 97% of them. These were people who then thought they had union protection. People who were hurting their pensions. People who were leaders in their communities. And that was part of the strategy to discourage them from returning. They knew that these, most of these people had families and had financial obligations, not only for the children, but perhaps for the parents that once they were fired, then they had to seek other work. And many of them, many of them found other work outside of it. So the whole idea was to push people out by any means possible. So you saw all the city work risk for fire, for meeting them in school, all school teachers. And when you close public houses, you're talking about the service and tourism industry for the mostly black women, the more income black women. They're all black women. Right. And so you saw some transplanting happen as well. You saw a push to spending the day and spending that, which allowed for contractors to not pay a fair wage or check the documentation and they bust in the entire labor force and repair the handbox and just get closed. So when I snuck into the city with my camera, as far as I can see, all Latino workers are rolled up to a foreman and I say, where are the jobs? I say, we got everybody. I said, yeah, everybody. The city's closed. Right. And so when the transplanting happened, they replaced the low income black women who worked in the tourism service industry with HB2 visa workers from South America and Central America. Right. And so the transplanting process that happened to create a new labor force that would be that you'd have to be paying less wages to them. Right. And put them in conflict with returning residents. So there was that friction that happened in that second that yet that we didn't show that the full piece on it but there was much more there. Right. With the suspension of the visa. That was two months with no act. Two months with no the work while the labor force when the hospital was happening and then everything sort of stopped. And the other practical effect of that was they wanted to swap out the labor force they wanted laborers who wouldn't be the service of their rights. That's it. They wanted people who were on a special visa so that they spoke up about working conditions. They did. Howdy. They wanted people who faced language barriers and faced you know really a city sort of racism from the affluent class here. And that was that was really part of the the master. Okay. Hi. See where we are. At the absolute start. And the thing about this process is always that there is never enough time. But I do wonder are you gonna stay with us for a little bit or do you have anything to talk about? Um I thought you were going to take off. Okay. We're going to be eating lunch then go to the feather um at one. One o'clock right? It's two o'clock. Around one o'clock. One o'clock. Two o'clock. Two o'clock. Two o'clock. One o'clock. Two o'clock. Okay. So we'll be on a right now. I'll take it off. Yeah. So before you know someone said thank you so much. Thank you. So that's this morning. And the next phase of work for us is to go again to what Bobby General again this Medicaid expansion. Right. So we're we're in are still in our planning phases and um it's a really good plan that's coming together and focus on really being engaged in the capital is put in here in the legislative session. Yeah. And just real quick at lunch we'll tell you about something that Bobby General is doing that. If you had a Republican governor is coming to your state zooms and it is part of Bobby General's GI on working poor people. Yes. Yes. So without further ado Oh wait. No, I don't know. Oh no. Oh, not yet. Okay. Oh, sorry. Um, I just want to I just want to I feel like something has happened that's right with us is um we yeah we're in process and we have to move to the next thing but I feel like we need a collective breath like make that link what I hear about what's happening with Latino workers being brought in pitted against African-American workers it reminds me of history I know about what happened in Hawaii with different API populations being pitted against each other in Portuguese so again like all these in terms of like connecting these social justice moments I think that we're seeing a lot of overlap and um so what I want to do is just kind of have us take a collective breath I'm going to give you a five and that's not a lot of time but I want to at least have a minute there are you can actually write it yes okay so let's do a 10 you know where your backwards are what time who has the time 11 36 it is 11 36 I'll give you a three minute and then we'll start again at 11 46 okay great go these are machines that have sticky oh this one thank you so much thank you we can treat us at a web we need how to calculate just was it so blah blah every little thing is right so pro p- so what the world hope you have you can just just have a little step because I like don't feel the cum closer to the phone and what do we have got the last last a little bit you know you can just write it this this like sometimes So, I'm wondering if we could just get out and see what's going on. We're going to be discussing about, uh, white announcing that. It's probably going to be a lot of fun. We're going to see pictures, we've got, we're going to see pictures, we're going to see what's going on. I'll see you in a minute. That's awesome. That's awesome. That's awesome. That's awesome. That's awesome. That's awesome. That's awesome. That's awesome. It's been a lot of transition. Yeah. I played the entire Wednesday. 11. 11. 11. 11. 11. 11. 11. 11. 11. 11. 11. 11. 11. 11. 11. 11. 11. 11. 11. 11. 11. 11. 11. 11. 11, I have broadband and We're at five minutes away. I'm going to give you a brief, like, a brief update. Now we're going to talk about the Permanent Fire Enforces, which there are some other social disorganizations that we have in the that have been really, really, really worked out, and we've been able to focus on like that, to carry out this, like, remote work, or doing all the ground organizing, and really, if I could trade that, I'm going to be able to make that happen. So there's a way to actually take this connection in this conference and try to kind of build that bridge a little bit I've met, like, I've met the other person. They're the first people to listen. She's also one of the most proficient in that group of people that I've met. She's made a little bit of a part of our course. Yeah, possibilities. Yeah. Because the bodies that are going to be organized, the organizers that are going to be turned into, we've all been mixed up and confused for the first three years. So, I'm going to go and make a foundation for the guys, a lot of them, and a lot of them, and a lot of them. It's the same thing, or I have to, I'm sorry. It's the same thing that's going to happen in Redwood. You know, they want to wake people up and we only talk about what we only talk about. So, are you going to do it? I'm going to do it. I'm going to do it. I'm going to do it. I'm going to do it. I'm going to do it. Here we go. Oh, that's for that one. No, it's fine. I don't want you to have to turn on the production. Um, maybe. I got a little stuff to start with. I think we need to ask her a follow-up question. I should have known. I know that. Yeah, you do. You have to be known. I'm sorry, I'm actually... I love food. I love food. I love all the food Katie eats in the city. I'll help you. This is the kind of presentation I like to give out when I'm done. That's what we're doing, but hold on. Do you mind? Yeah. Yeah. Oh, here's mine. I'm gonna put this here. It's... It is darker. We lost some of the production lights. I have the most light, and I'm gonna just say that we have to leave open for your stupid Katie's. Yeah, I'm just gonna play with nature. For the love. Yeah, I think it's our help. So... High tech. The camera. Towards the front section of the room. Yeah. Yeah. It's a fantastic book. Can we get you guys... There's also chairs here. There's another chair there. Alright folks, are we back in? Yes. Alright, we're going to introduce a brother from... who's now in Shy Town. And you know what? I'm going to Google him online, and try to look up some of the plays he's been involved in. Sounds good when he really gets down, right? But I like to introduce him as the guy who doesn't make those type of films anymore. Brother Mike Rob. Wow. When I said he doesn't make those type of films anymore, would they get the connection to Mike Rob, the name that looks like that sounds like the award? I think that's a particular film genre. But no, Mike is awesome man, and Mike is going to continue this conversation about art and activism, and art and legislative engagement, right? And so Mike can give a little bit deeper detail about himself with the life, but without further ado, I've never been introduced in reference to pornography. That was awesome. Awesome man. We didn't have a lot of time to acknowledge but that was a super deep and intense presentation. So I'm just going to say thank you, Trevor, that was so beautiful. And on the one hand, I feel like I'm really feeling the way this morning could have been just about that work, and we could continue that conversation, so I feel slightly like I'm going to make a sort of turn into a kind of different way of thinking about arts in relation to legislative activity, but I'm going to just trust that I feel really moved by what you shared, so I think that's probably in the room, so whatever I share is going to find some connections hopefully. But I do want to say something that, but it's short, we just have a little bit of time now, so I'm going to be super happy and just talk about a couple things and then go on. But I do want to know in the room because it has to do with what I'm going to talk about. I just want to ask if you would help me get a sense of how you self-define for a moment in a couple ways. So I'm not going to ask you to limit, but I just want to get a sense of the various aspects of you that you bring to this conversation. So for example, if you self-define, you put your hands up as many times as you want, but if you self-define as an artist, in any way, whatever that means to me, just put your hand up for a moment, please. If you self-define, in any way, as an activist, put your hand up. If you self-define as an organizer. As a community worker. Okay, and whatever these things mean to you, I'm just making stuff up. As a cultural worker, okay, as a community-based artist, as someone involved in the political process in a way that you would say is a significant part of the work that you do in your life. Okay, just totally curious. All right, so here's the deal. My name is Michael Rood, and I run two sort of different bodies around the Sojourn Theater, which is a 13-year-old ensemble-based company. It started in Virginia, spent nine of its years in Portland, Oregon, and for the past four or five years, has been working around the country. I mean, we actually, different than what Mark said this morning, we are not a place-based company now. We live in eight cities that are 13 of us, and we regularly work in projects all over. So teams of us are together, sometimes for a couple years on projects, and sometimes for five-day projects that we spend a year preparing for. So I'm going to describe one or two of those projects a little bit. I also lead the recently formed Center for Performance and Civic Practice, and that's a two-year-old entity, and I'm going to talk about that to start with. And the thing that connects both of these things is this idea of civic practice, which is my connection to the work that Trapp was talking about today, and the way that I think about the legacy of community-based art and community-based performance-making, existing now in a sort of cross-sector, multi-disciplinary way that so many people are working in community settings. So I'm going to start by saying that here's what civic practice has come to mean for me. I'm going to have to hear. I've been coming, like, a lot of people to conferences for a really, for a while, you know? TCG conferences, alternate routes conferences, net conferences, arts and culture, so many conferences and convenies, and I feel like I've been, really now I can say it's been over 20 years of sort of being in these conversations where community-based and ensemble and activism, all these terms are so jumbling and have meant different things at different times that I've needed to start to put together a vocabulary for myself. Less to demand that other people take on that vocabulary, but more for me to understand how to talk to people outside my field, which is theater, about the work I do. So I have begun to use the term civic practice and to write about it and to teach about it and to work in it, because I have found it very helpful in the last several years. And to me, civic practice isn't just theater. It's cross different disciplines, but I'm a theater practitioner, so that's how I frame it for me. It's work, isn't it, that artists do in collaboration with non-arts partners, and I sort of generally say non-arts sector partners, because there's of course a complicated conversation that many of us believe everyone is an artist. So it's not saying you're not an artist and I'm working with you, but it's saying the arts are, in addition to being many other things, they are a field, right? They are disciplines, they are a field, they are a sector, but they're also connected to so many other areas and sectors. There are people, many who define their fields and sectors as not being primarily arts focused. Legislative sector, advocacy sectors, business sector, health sector, education sector, and yet, we all know examples of artists working in collaboration in those sectors. Most frequently, although not entirely, but most frequently, my experience of artists working in those other sectors is artists coming up with project ideas and then finding partners in those other sectors and bringing those projects to fruition. And many of those projects have social justice impulses, but many don't. Some are projects that somebody realizes, this would be really exciting to what I'm about as an artist to partner in this particular setting. I think there will be some positive social impact, but my goal is this is how I'm going to make my art, right? So there's lots of partnerships that we all know have happened for many, many years. I feel like what's starting to be identified more and more in the last couple of decades, and it's not new, but it's sort of, there's a bit of a light on it in different ways, are when artists work with non-arts sector partners and the lead impulse is actually the need of the non-arts sector partner as opposed to the vision of the artist. So I define that as civic practice when an artist and a non-arts sector partner are collaborating and the artist is bringing their expertise and they're bringing their vision and they're bringing their skills, but they are consciously serving the need or desired outcome of a non-arts sector partner. And there's people in this room, I know and many I don't, but I know people in this room who've been modeling this work for decades. So it's out there, but I find in a lot of settings, I do a lot of capacity building work with artists and non-arts sector community members. There is confusion very often because non-arts sector partners are used to, most frequently being approached by artists about partnerships and collaborations that will help realize the vision of the artist. There's nothing wrong with that, that's awesome. Many of us do work, it's not on either or, it's a continuum, it's a spectrum. But I know for me, it's starting to name the impulse and the context of a project. It becomes easier to communicate about it across partnerships and relationships with funders in educational institutions. So the Center for Performance and Civic Practice, something that I've started and been working on with different people, is specifically about trying to highlight projects around the country going on that are civic practice projects. Trying to see and fund projects that can be documented in catalog so that projects can exist as models of civic practice. Some of Sojourn's work falls under civic practice, but not all of it. Some of it doesn't at all. Some of it does. This one I'll mention this briefly. What I'm really going to talk about is Catherine Charer's project just for a couple of minutes and then I actually want to share with you that it's a Chicago Parks project that's going through the Center. Am I making sense so far? I apologize for my rash. I'm telling you the cold is in the last minute, but it's coming back. I'm okay for now. Thank you. So I think the way that I would start is I would say a project that really got me thinking about civic practice in a way that's helped me move to this entity and be clear about this, because we did a show five years ago in Portland where we were basically built. Built was about demographic change in urban areas and how resources get allotted and where we're going to live. It's so related to what Travis was sharing on. We literally spent a year working in Connecticut, Chicago, and Portland to develop a participatory performance where audience members planned a city together. And the goal of the project was to get people in the room who would not normally be in planning conversations. And they were with political leaders. They were with planners. They were audience members. And they were diverse in many different ways that diversity can relate to an audience. They were diverse geographically. They were diverse socioeconomically. They were diverse culturally. They were also, very importantly, diverse ideologically, which for us is a big, primary concern for a lot of projects. Anyway, we did the project and part of the project was we invented a participatory civic planning board game. So as a part of the show, we created a presentation at the Appalachian School. So I won't do a lot of this, but basically there was a board game we created and it was a part of the performance event and audience members played it at different moments amidst the performance. I should say, Alicia, who for years was Sojourn's managing director, produced the unit that I'm talking about and he's intimately acquainted with it. Because the show had this game, planners would come and say, this would be really cool and a planning set. And we'd start talking a little bit. It wasn't clear to them how to pull it out of the show, because it was a part of the larger performance event. But we found ourselves intrigued enough that we spent a few years in kind of quiet conversation with different folks. And then about a year and a half ago, Rockleland and the NEA did all this cross-agency funding opportunities. And the EPA and the NEA Sustainable Communities grant. And most of us artists, we didn't know about it. People didn't know about it. The word didn't get out. But it was like $100 million that went out around the country to regions to apply for to do creative planning around sustainable communities. And so in Virginia in the New River Valley, which is at the intersection of five counties, which contained a lot of five counties, their planning commission heard about our projects. And they contacted us through Bob Liner, who many of you know. And we went down and met with them. And they felt that they were having an incredible amount of trouble getting people on ideologically different sides of planning issues into rooms, having meaningful dialogue that could lead to resource allotment proposals for local government. We went down, we demonstrated the game. We talked to them. They got super excited. They used some of the NEA HUD money and they commissioned us to adapt the game for their regional planning commission. We did it. We spent a few months in planning stuff. And I want to note that if I was working on civic practice ideas, this was coalescing for me. But I started to realize that, okay, so the assets that we as artists are bringing to this conversation we're having with these planners, the assets are clearly things like we have invented an activity that brings imaginative acts and expressive actions into a space that is normally people sitting around a table or watching a presentation and then sort of voting things. So there's this element of imagination and expression. Those are assets we have as artists. We bring the ability to facilitate the dynamic dialogue between people who may have different perspectives. We're bringing the ability or the attempt to build coalitions out of a variety of stakeholders with different self-interests. Yes. So these are assets we felt like we brought and their needs were clear. They needed dialogue and they needed actually data on Resource Allowance but they were very open to how the data would be gathered. We modified the game and the short of it is it went really well and it's now for six, eight months. Been the primary public engagement tool in these five counties for their planning. They went presented at a national conference a couple months ago that HUD hosted and as a result of that we've now been engaged out in Oregon, in Kansas, in Maryland. Different regional planning commissions are connecting with us to modify this project to be a local arts-based tactic for their planning. And it's super exciting because I feel like we understand what the asset is. The game changes each time but it sort of has a the elements of it that are consistent are clear enough that we can modify in location-specific ways. So that example of civic practice has been really helpful as we've begun to sort of have these conversations about when we develop relationships that are not begun because we want to make a shovel but are begun because we want to develop this partnership. We feel like we might have some assets that could be useful here but we're not going to presume to come into the proposal. What we're going to do is attempt to build a relationship and listen and learn and over an extended period of time as we start to learn the needs as articulated by the non-arts partner, we're going to see if we feel like we have assets that we can bring to match those needs. And then we're going to see what kind of proposal we can bring to the table. And the thing that feels important to me in addition to the legislative aspect of this and this is something I was talking about somewhere last week. And under the radar last week there was a panel the other day on social practice and the arts and how it's connecting to community. And on that panel I was saying that the thing that's often happening between artists who are engaging in this work and artists who are not a part of this work is there's this sense that when you know the real innovation happens in art studios and it happens away from community and then we open the doors to community and actually the truth is I believe the truth is something I would is that something I think is the case is that when we open ourselves process-wise to being in conversation with folks outside our sector and outside our sphere and outside our daily experience we are actually led to innovate formally practice-wise much more striking than when we work alone in our studios. Also amazing innovation happens in our studios. But there is something that happens when we are engaging in relationship to needs and in relationship that demands we explore things in different ways and so this takes me to what's become clear to me about this and that is for me and my company and the Center for Performance and Civic Practice we are having to recognize that when you talk for instance as a theater person about bringing your practice into other sectors people immediately assume you are talking about plays. Because it is the product in our field that is the most recognizable and makes the most sense to someone who perhaps is not in our field. So part of the capacity building and advocacy that we are at the center and that Sojourn does project by project is actually constantly articulating that theater does not necessarily equal play. Theater equals a broad spectrum of performance and process practice and tactics and strategies and for me for me if it is a time based event that includes intentional imaginative acts and expressive actions then I am calling it theater everybody can have their own definition but for me that's where it's at and I think about how to build a forest you know Katie Elyse's project has one of many examples as a project where like there is a lot of people who would say how is that theater I don't even know if you guys call theater for me it's theater and it's exciting theater because whatever you've been exploring in that inquiry as I've read about it that's a form you came up with in a relation to so many questions you were asking so for us we are trying to move that conversation with partners outside the arts towards the notion that you are perhaps in our case working with theater practitioner you might work with a photographer you might work with a dance artist, a visual artist collaboratively what we come up with is not limited by what you already know about the form that you assume I come from do you know that to me feels crucial so for instance I'm leaving on time okay because I have I actually have one of the sort of subtitle of this brief session is translations as being I think the key tool for so many of us in the work we're doing today so I brought for you a brief proposal that has moved through Chicago's legislative world and is up at the mayor's office with a superintendent and I want to show you the translation work we've done around that so I first want to mention this we got kind I wrote something about this on HowlRamps some of you might have read this lately but there's an essay from about a week ago about Catholic Charities and some work Sojourn has been doing this start is a Sojourn project and it's now a collaboration between Sojourn and the center and basically Catholic Charities USA which is the largest entity in the United States serving those living in poverty or around poverty which I didn't know they approached us about a year and a half ago because they've seen us in another conference and they said hey we're really interested in partnering with you on a conference in 2012 we don't know what that means but we'd love to talk to you and it began about nine months of conversation to determine what is this organization what do they do what do they need and what do we have that could serve them we ended up at their national conference in St. Louis in this past October I'd never been to St. Louis it was really interesting and it was almost a thousand people from all over the U.S who work for to see supported by the Catholic Charities USA network so they don't work for Catholic Charities but they all worked in poverty-serving organizations that had some portion of their funding and they come together for a five-day gathering to work on poverty amazing people many of you are partnered with people who work around that issue but these are folks doing all kinds of work all over the country and beyond all Catholic it's not a proselytizing set of agencies and Catholic Charities is a is a dialogical entity with an an analogical hierarchy they're in the church Father Larry Snyder is a papal appointee but Catholic Charities USA does not work following papal edicts except when papal edicts directly contradict their policy and one of the things they wanted us to do was open that up to the community to start a conversation about those tensions so the shortest version I can tell of this is that we went to their conference and over the course of the five days we interviewed 100 people 100 people to gather material but also to ask questions that would ripple into their convening so I want to point out that our goal was to come up with performative strategies that were not limited to the performance that we would share at the end of the conference which we did so our one-on-one interviews literally worked how do we see the conversations that are hardest for this organization to have in one-on-one encounters and then hope they ripple out we gave a workshop on policy we are not experts on poverty policy so we came up with a two hour session where we took we see people through I feel like I should give you a moment if it's dangerous we came up with a workshop oh it's totally different now we came up with a workshop where we basically broke the room into groups and a sojourn artist was at every table and a sojourn artist became a candidate for congressional office and this table had to come up with a platform for poverty reduction that they thought A would be effective and B would actually be electable in a region that they chose so they coached this person to become a candidate and then we pulled people from the room including two DC policy lawyers on poverty to be a press corps and every sojourn performer came up front and they improvised from an informed place because they had been coached a stump speech for two minutes and then they were questioned by the press corps and they had someone from their group coaching them like consulting and then at the end there was a debrief and we talked about what policies were really standing out what were the large part it was very exciting for them for us we learned a ton but what actually happened was that they didn't have it going in and then the two lawyers were charged with spending the hour after our two hours in helping these folks move that into actual advocacy work that they could take home in their districts so it was super fun and exciting another thing we did was I did a half day workshop with executive directors from around the country on just how many people in here ever spend time in rehearsal rooms rehearsal rooms rehearsal rooms so a lot of people rooms where work happens collaborate with them let's say that so these are folks who are living and working in ideologically polarized times we all know that everybody knows that but if you're somebody who's trying to move an anti-poverty agenda forward in a for instance predominantly conservative area and you are attempting to find ways that policy that might seem progressive can gather stakeholders from across the ideological spectrum you probably could use some time spent on how collaboration works you know how collaboration works if you're that person but you also don't actually have a lot of intentional tools necessarily so we did a half day on collaboration on narrative, on framing using sort of performance process as a way to think about that super exciting so many people here could leave a session like that part of the work of the Center for Performance and Civic Practice is to say legislative work and impactful work does not only look like advocacy as powerful and specific as what Trapp shared with us it also looks like sharing assets and skills we have in spaces where those assets and skills could be useful the rooms in this country where decisions are made and yet where there are there's so little knowledge on how to work together vision imaginatively and problem solve creatively is astonishing and as the mayor covers your face you know it's true it is so true at the local level, the state level and the national level how important would it have been when Biden had the task force the week before last to have an artist in that room not to be in charge but to help with the process of what happened in that room which was basically a series of monologues what could actually happen if you have the amazing people you've had gathered in there with Allison facilitating that meeting with some kind of creative practice in that session so that's what this is it's not doing plays it's not all we do that's not all we do so it's looking at those skills and assets so I think the last thing I would say about Catholic Charities is as a result of how well that event went which included a performance and some other stuff we're now the artists in residence for the next 18 months we're going to 14 sites around the country teams of social artists we're going to be in Iowa in two months a month later we're going to be in Maine one and a half after that and at each site for regional gatherings we're going to be giving workshops creating small performances going out doing interviews with clients and staff and then we're going to be at their national convenings for the next two years creating performance events based on all that local work we're also dramaturgically helping them structure their national convenings so that they are thinking more creatively about the way they make spaces for people to do skill work so that's come directly from thinking about what's the thing I want to do with Catholic Charities that satisfies me as an artist which I'm doing in other contexts I'm not doing the stuff I want to do as an artist but in these contexts I'm really learning and deeply, deeply satisfied by being in response to a need that I find of value in our communities so there's that and then the last one I want to share about is Chicago Parks I didn't know this Chicago Parks and Natural Resources is the largest parks district in the United States there are 550 parks in Chicago I didn't know many of them exist in neighborhoods in Chicago that the city calls underserved and all that goes with the terminology underserved so apparently just before Mayor Rahm came in there was a lot of planning a new summer program this was for last summer we got there so they do all this programming last summer in underserved communities and very few people go so Rahm comes in and he says to his superintendent Parks and Natural Resources well let's make sure that doesn't happen next summer in the summer after let's make sure people participate in our parks and people say that sounds great how should we do that and the Mayor says deputy there's a new deputy chair of the department of cultural arts in Chicago named Anhal Aguirre who's on TCG's board and used to be at Boeing and I've known him for a while he's this great smart guy and he told the deputy superintendent of Parks and Natural Resources to talk to me about civic practice and the guy I think felt like Anhal he called me and we had this great talk and this guy is a floral like he's a nature guy with a bit of experience but he's got a lot of over said over arts and culture stuff and he doesn't completely know what he's doing and he was upfront about that and he said well we have to do something what should we do and I said well certainly you guys have done participatory planning to develop programs in neighborhoods certainly you've done that before but no, no we've never done that and I said are you telling me that you have never worked with the people in the neighborhoods to talk about what the assets are and what the needs are as you had planned programming for 550 parks he said that is not how we develop program and I said would you like some ideas and he said yes so I met with him I listened a lot and I wrote this and then wrote what you're reading now and I actually called him yesterday wait I don't want to give it out to him because I know what I would do if I would read it I called him yesterday and I said I'm going into this meeting tomorrow I just want to know where it's at and he said well funny you called today because he presented it to the superintendent who's all in and it's now that superintendent is presenting it to the mayor's staff next week and the possibility that this will actually be a planning process that the city goes in partnership with the center but the reason I want you to read it is this is very specifically a translation this is actually is this live streaming right now so live streaming that last part should be a little keep it in your house live streaming I'm sharing something that isn't necessarily for the world it's just for you at home right now not to necessarily tweet or put it on Facebook but just to sort of have with you until it's actually a little more public thank you live streaming appreciate it thank you anyway let's pass this around and this is sort of involved in the act of translation and I just want to share a few and if I could can this call a session? yes yeah yeah read it take a moment to read it just because I just feel like it's I don't know I want to talk about the translation what's going on live streaming is personal you can see who's looking at it Jamie and I are talking about it is this a useful thing? I'm going to say this because this type of translation tool that we had this around two years ago was actually going this would have been an excellent way to jump in on the process of playing with the master plan that planned it out this is a document that the master plan folks would be beautiful a lot of times they don't get what we want we don't know what we want yeah we could present it I feel like one of the tools I want to get on the centers sort of library is different versions different templates of language that people can just use to riff on around access because it really is a matter of people speak different languages and different fields but how do you also speak about the value of artistic practice in different fields without it just being the arts are great the arts are positive and the arts are important and without evaluating data what's just the language of here's something I think we can bring into this conversation because we're on limited time can I suggest and I want to make it not just me sort of talking about you guys maybe I have about eight minutes left so maybe just turn to like a person or two next to you just for like three minutes or so I wonder what's on your mind at this moment as I've talked about a couple specific projects and then you have this sort of example of language and trying to framework how does this kind of connect with you in terms of your own work or what might it make you curious about or what does it make you want to interrogate and then we'll turn out and for the last couple minutes talk as a group is that okay so maybe turning to the person and I'm just going to walk around please meet a new friend I don't have a theater background you last few moments and then we'll come back hello as it's going on do you know how many people are watching how many people here do you know where they are there are seven of you watching right now and we are so thrilled that you are with us alright coming back coming back coming back coming back coming back and turning it to you thoughts what are you talking about what are your conversations about right now what's interesting cat ran how do you how do you convince well this is my cat where does the money come from for these projects yeah yeah well I can tell you for these different ones for instance this one came from the cross agency money the planning commission oh sorry built this is built actually many of the poorest regions in the United States got that HUD NEA money for sustainable communities and still have some that isn't spent that has to actually be spent soon so that money came out of that grand cycle here capital charities came from capital charities and they are actually locally doing a bit of fundraising in the local but the national office is taking on most of that and I imagine if the Chicago parks project happens that that money will be city money and that sorry just on that that came from trap's question about or indication that we needed that here close to treatment and who would have said yes to that or how like it gets back to you saying we have to we have to constantly talk about the value of what we do I'm referring to you and say trapping that you have to it's not okay to believe you because I think more of the things who have been invested in this sort of equitable process it's very interesting and so my challenge will be this is so exciting you know a huge man but I would have to suspend the judgment on this until five or ten years when I see what kind of resources the Chicago city is putting into its parks if we the people say we need more parks it's a big stage we need to add this it's going to cost $15 million over five years well it's too long about that so I mean that's the man behind the curtain that you just have to acknowledge that it's there I'm wondering if you had it I'm just thinking here's how long it goes back just a quick second the engagement around census allowed us to see how federal dollars our tax dollars really float down you know post census and redistricting so when you're counting the money close to the failure part which is close to around but then what we have to do as responsible citizens is find that money we've been trapped across issue where issue dollars are going we're calling issue dollars we're talking about health dollars DHA gets all of our money from the federal government and the non-profits have to line themselves up with the government name just so that we didn't need it we were using that money but we didn't learn about that stuff until 2009 so now we're looking at how do we build sustainable communities with the knowledge that we have and could I also say just Kathy thinking about what you asked and Kathy thinking about what you just said I want to make sure that I don't give the impression that I think this work is just about the large scale projects because actually what's really important to me is that and one of the first initiatives that the center is working on something called the catalyst initiative is that people are doing and can do projects that bring artists assets to bear on non-art sector needs in like 50 hours over two and a half months and I can be citing those kind of projects as well there's a project in Chicago right now called now is the time which is a response to youth gun violence in Chicago and it's all these team councils from around the city that have gotten together with arts organizations and one of their particular programs is they're going to make proposals to the mayor and the mayor's staff on how the city legislative can do better job of getting young people involved in stopping youth gun violence and I was asked to come and meet with and listen to this group and it's this amazing group of teenagers from all over the city having great conversations but you know what they didn't know how to get from A to B they had stories they had opinions, they had desires and they had a goal which is in mid-May they're going to do such and such as a civic practitioner volunteer I said no I'd like to work with this group some and we just sat down and said what do you need to know to be able to make proposals that will be smarter than the proposals you would make today in August what do you need to learn who do you need to learn from who do you need to connect with what rooms do you want to be in and we came up with an entire plan for these public forums and activists too and the superintendent of public safety and everybody said yes to everybody they can get anybody in Chicago to come in a room in a way that none of us can people will come in the room and be interviewed by them and then we do facilitation structure a little storytelling and stuff we all do but they needed the help of synthesizing their goals and of creatively imagining a plan to get to their proposals and I just felt like I know what my assets are in this room I know what you want to happen you don't need to make a play you don't need to perform those proposals in May but you do need creatively and effectively to get from here to there so how are we going to use some rehearsal tactics to figure out what you need and then make these events performative and dynamic but about knowledge gathering so there are so many scales that we can bring our assets to bear on I just wanted to note that I wanted to just tag on that in the periphery of it and close to a lot of people who are stuff that goes more right in design but I've had a lot in the past couple of years with the civic technology of a lot of people working on the civic technology projects and one of the biggest challenges in that whole community is that you've got the designers developers, data scientists who are coming into space they don't have they don't really know how to engage communities so they're building these like data visualizations these maps, these like mobile labs that don't actually serve the people you have and one of the things that Sheldon and I were talking about for a while, some of the people in that space was kind of straddling through the civic arts and civic tactics how could something like civic practice make possibly be a way to get these people who have arts assets, technology assets and people in different communities who have real needs to like all engage in a dialogue and create arts projects and technology projects that serve real needs and there's a lot of potential there so that's one of the things that's really exciting to me I don't know if I should turn you or see if there's other good transition because I really really appreciate Michael the way that you opened up for us to kind of start to think about how this connects to our own work and I appreciate that you offered us a tactile way to think about translation and I think that you offered us very clear ways to see how we are able to translate kind of move into Spain and ask other people to just think about your work how does translation work in your work is that part of your work translating between artistic practice or non-arts practice and translating with stakeholders or community seems to me like theater as a theater artist I'll say that theater artists are speaking multiple languages at the same time we have the language we think about we also have the language of gesture we have the language about the use of space we have the language of dance and choreography those are all intersecting in layered languages so it seems like that as theater practitioners anyway we dwell in a multilingual space I don't know where I was going but it seems like it's a real decision can you just share with me what's your name? Paul when you were talking to Paul what that made me think of is right and in theater we have people who are part of each of those genres I have a set designer I have people of different genres who all come together to have this conversation about how to make the work come together in a way that layers forgotten we as artists but our audiences other folks how's the transition? well one very short point now since we're in New Orleans we're talking about how theater looks differently and what that is not just always about a play I mean theater happens here all over the place in second line already there are Indians and parades so there's a rich culture of theatrical performative dialogue expression that really asserts the values of community and different communities and those could be different values so I just wanted to make that connection and point out that it might not be engaging in directly civic engagement in the ways that we've talked about but I think it's a really important element and you know at Juba Productions we try to value that and support that kind of work I'm Kiyoko McCrae one last thing I wanted to say seems like you're talking a lot about civic engagement for sure and working with social service organizations and I was wondering if you had experience working with people who do organizing work or who work for social justice which I think are social changes a little different than not to value one over the other but what are the different dynamics I think organizers sometimes understand that they work a little better for an imagination for looking at creative ways to whether it's to dialogue or I can say very quickly one big difference is I didn't talk about this but if you look at these projects they are actually not straight advocacy projects they are inquiry projects or gathering projects that might have advocacy consequences most frequently when we were working with social justice organizers and people who specifically are doing social change work they would often want us to be deliverers of the message and we actually don't do that so we only work with organizers or social justice organizers if they are interested in the inquiry and the gathering where they might their message and their agenda may be part of what they're bringing to the work but that our participation is not negating other voices but that is the sort of advocacy of individual community empowerment which is what I see this work you're doing with the young people as a reversal for democracy I mean that's it's it's possible to have an advocacy position about that because there are plenty of people that would really just as soon you didn't do that I agree on that so and so a couple of things I hear you're saying Kip on organizing because it's kind of like organizing the very practice that it is using those cultural tools if you look at the civil rights movement songs we shall overcome but it's still impacting and it's funding projects today all of that is right and so I hear what you're saying about organizing organizing themes and look at it a little bit differently if you guys recall the story of the tower of Babel and if you guys don't recall back in the five days people were all trying to build this tower to reach God and then God was like you got all different languages and it never got done and so when we're talking about translation I think that it's Babel when people are trying to learn or present new things or even if it's not new it's just someone's different take on it or different words they're using but because we're babbling we do not work together to get the work done and so what you've done is so essential or in your attempt or just with this specific piece but on a more macro level that needs to happen more and be able to get more people to work towards the same thing otherwise we're babbling and we won't build the tower and then the third thing I was thinking about is when Travis presenting people were talking about issues like from a psychological perspective and as this hierarchy of needs so for housing and your education and your food is not what it should be you don't realize self actualization which in my mind is people being able to think about or participate in plays or theater or art but I think people need to stop thinking of the arts or theater as self actualization because what it really is the very essence of what we are that contributes to our basic needs and so I guess I've been thinking about how how can we do better at helping this be more used as our basic needs arts, music, visual arts performance arts those needs to be, and it's not right now considered the basic needs but really like knowing who I am being connected to a culture, a community being able to see myself represented in a mural or books in a library and my state color that contributes to my quality of life and well-being and so it's just something kind of a problem for me and just something to think about Before I take Katie's turn I just want to ask you to think about what is the vocabulary that you use to talk about your work because one of the things I'm particularly fascinated by is the words we're learning in each of the regions like I learned Broom Corn Troy, I learned Appalachian and Appalachian Powerpill is the word I'm taking today so think about that because that's also really critical I think it was teaching I wanted to build on what Mickey was saying and take us back to the biggest perception for me about my Miss Todd was that being a theater artist doesn't necessarily be making plays like it needs a lot of process about pointing to you about understanding and I was at the gym and so I think a lot about why art is as integrated as our world as it could be and I was at the gym and I learned like Cross Trainer and on the little TV player there was a TV show that was funded in part by the NEA so there was the announcement at the end and it gave the tagline of NEA which said the National Endowment for the Arts because a great country deserves great art and I thought that is the problem right there because the NEA which is the federal organization responsible for the health of the artistic life of this country is positing art as like a treat you need a good country rather than positing it as something that's necessary for a country to be great or important if not necessary valuable and so that's been something I've really been shooting over that came up for me in this country. What was the show? What was the great artist? I don't even know. I'm saying one of the things I've been playing with during this conversation is some of the timeline is connected to what Kathy was saying around the length of time which from this kind of relationship building when you first meet the Mount Arts partner how that relationship builds to the point that you even come up with whatever it is that you might want to do together and then how long post that before you actually get a sense of that this has kind of been infused a lot. I was thinking in my mind well gee that's quite an extended relationship and then in my mind you said oh I happen to do both sometimes so if you can talk to the difference between what is the relationship and what is the kind of extended year to year long pieces and in the shorter kind of two months. You can give examples but I feel like um I don't know where time should I talk about the letters. Yeah I think you can connect to them. And I want to tell us that we didn't have the formal like and not Michael's done and now we're in the big thing but I think that it connects and I think there's examples in the room like you said of different people's projects. Yeah sure. Sure I'll give you one short example. I had a graduate student working with me on this idea of city practice. He's a director and he comes from New York City and he comes from New York City. Community based work but he was really interested in what would happen if he didn't come to somebody with a project. So we did a hand me exploration together and what he had to do was he had to find a partner organization either on campus or off campus that was completely unrelated to any life experience that he had and he had to find an organization that was willing and interested in having some conversations with him where he would just listen and learn about them. They weren't committing to taking on any kind of projects but that they were open to seeing what he might have to offer them. So he chose and began to work with the Muslim Student Faculty Association. He's a pretty straight up East Coast waspy guy who had no experience really outside of his own faith experience except for a few Jews like me that he encountered over these years. So he began to develop a relationship with this organization by going and setting up a meeting and then being invited to sit in on one of their meetings and he listened and after three weeks he had an idea for a project. He's going to go to them and say I think what they need is they need a show that really gives people on campus a sense that they are more than just their faith. They need an opportunity to tell those stories and he came to me right before he was going to be with them and I said okay three weeks you've been listening and I'm going to say to you that because we're in a sort of course situation right now I'm going to say you're not allowed to do anything like that for three more weeks you can't make a picture proposal. You just have to keep listening and I want you to keep listening to what you think they need and what you ask them. What they need and what their challenges are. So three weeks later he goes back to me and he says well I mentioned that idea to one of my partners. They said that wasn't at all something they were interested in. What they were actually interested was being seen as a site for cross cultural dialogues on campus. They didn't want to represent themselves as these are our stories that were exotic that were not exotic. They wanted to be a site for connectivity beyond their own community. So he took a couple more weeks and he came back to them with a different proposal and he basically met with them for a couple of hours each week and they loved the proposal which was he said I want us to work with a photographer and we're going to set up a fictional photography studio on campus where we are fictionally creating the brochure ad for next year's campus brochure and we're creating the front cover and we're going to have it open and students can stop by and whoever comes in in each group they're going to come in and we're going to facilitate performing with them and we're going to have to decide what faces and bodies need to be on the brochure cover to represent the diversity of this campus. What are the clothes that need to be there? Do you know what I mean? What needs to be covered? What are the genders? So he basically created this workshop which was open and which was sort of playfully mysterious but people would come in and they loved it and they did and it was fantastic and he now has an ongoing relationship with them so in my mind that's an example of short-term somebody saying I'm going to take the time to learn it's in a bubble environment of the university but I could give you know I could give other examples of outside a university but that comes to me as a quick one versus somebody working for a few years versus the work in state prison that Kathy's done here which is years and years and years of work and you know you could tell us the story of how long it took to build a trust to get to which steps of the programs that you've done here to actually have a graduate program, post school the different kind of relationships you built but I'm someone who kind of believes that we have to be so super intentional about ethics and responsibility and we also have to be supremely reckless. We have to have both those things going on. I'm personally not willing five to ten years to see how one project went to decide how I'm going to do the next three as long as I'm learning and continuing to work and trying to be as responsible as I can but I'm going to know more five to ten years later that's going to make all that practice better. Let me think about and I think we can in different ways. Some of these projects exist within a funding pool or a timeline and so to think about resources like how do we get resources to have conversations and the other thing I just want to jump back to Kyoko's question about participating with organizers and I think one of my challenges as an artist who does organizing is that early on in my experience with social justice non-artist organizers was the disvaluing of my work because it doesn't achieve their results and I think that in this conversation about translation thinking about how and I think Mike Lee provided us with some really great tools and Trapani I think too like you showing us ways but we're able to translate our assets in ways to help other agencies use their resources to get at their needs right and I think that the thing I appreciated about Powerville was it was a way to translate a cultural assets that people did not understand in terms of their very right and like you grounded it in such a clear historical context of citizenship that it couldn't help but to me like it didn't activate me as somebody who's like now I have this resource and now I want to get up and redistricting because I know that's an issue that's going on where I live and so I just wonder like there's any other thoughts for folks about how you're translating your work to non-artists or if you're not necessarily an artist identified how do you translate to artists either your needs or your assets so I'm wondering because a lot of this seems one way like how artists can help this either but are we considering the inverse I mean because a lot of it's a lot of like let us help you and impart our wisdom using the skills that we have and I'm just wondering I don't know does anybody have an example of an opportunity where a non-artist sector partner might have approached you as an artist or an arts organization or a company that you work for where a city planning PhD student approached me and she had heard about some theater work I had done and together we created a project where we used applied theater in site-specific performance workshops to bring people down to an urban creek area in Austin that's being redeveloped and I knew nothing about this before she brought me in and so we developed this together and the exchange part is that we spent a ton of time trying to figure out what is the value you know my master plan is that you know going back and forth and what's great is that she she was really excited to learn some tools from me and she actually uses them in her classroom now she talks about them with others as a planner so I think there's something that she took from that practice that came out of our work together that I wouldn't if she had just approached me and said teach me something I wouldn't have known what she needed but throughout that process I figured out where that intersection was and where she was saying there's this thing between this and this what can we do helping in that way but I also learned a ton myself about what I didn't know basically which I'm still wondering what I need to learn and I also want to just point out that around that I think Mickey that most often very often theater artists particularly in mainstream institutions reach out into their communities for the knowledge that they need or the resources they need to make projects happen so I feel like the sort of asset need thing often actually goes the other way and I feel like by sort of intentionally framing it as seeing it as viable and valuable to go the other way actually tilts more towards an exchange than it traditionally is and I would also say for instance in the Catholic Charities Project all of us working on that I mean I'm learning so much about organizing and about equity and it lends us to that that is affecting my life as well as my work and I would also say though I mean Michael I'm thinking about so many of those sojourn projects I think there is a real partners that you partner on in the way Michael has been talking about in this framework that is not about producing a play or whatever well part of what you're also doing as an artist and a company is also doing other work where you are producing plays and those long term relationships that you have built with those partners suddenly become the networks and their populations that now are either audience or research material or I'm thinking about like so many of the doors that open sort of exponentially along the way because the person in this sector who knew this person who knew this government who we would never have gotten to that ended up resulting in funding or audience or visibility for the company and the company's work and the plays that was part of that ongoing relationship I think that's part of how it comes to they had a human relations program I actually grew up in that facility you were in that program so I came out of a human relations program and then that human relations program one of the program officers in that program Danny Patel her partner husband is married to Ben Gomenberg at Shakespeare Center in Los Angeles and so in doing all these story teller projects with young people they're like what do you need they're like we need somewhere safe to go and we need a job so they created a cross partnership between the National Conference of Communities and Justice and the Shakespeare Center they're called Shakespeare Festival at the time so it's a little power to use program that pays young people to spend six weeks with professional artists creating a Shakespeare play adaptation and part of what they do in the play is they do an adaptation where they pull out the themes that resonate with them and they create original text around those themes and they integrate in the Shakespeare so years later they got coming up taller the Department of Justice and the Department of Labor was looking for a project to replicate in Richmond, Virginia and part of what happens is they're coming together and talking and so we were able to replicate that program in Richmond using Shakespeare as a work program to also help young people build communication and teamwork skills so we know that part of the benefit was not just that these young people come out and they can now they now have access to a Shakespeare play they now can it be able to break down and they understand all of that but they also had money that went directly to benefit their families and you know while they were in that program and for a lot of young people it was their very first job it was the very first time that they had you know there's all these other benefits so I do want us to kind of think broadly about them and I want the knowledge that we have to end but I wonder before we go because I'm a writer I wonder if you can think of one vocabulary word that you use to describe your work that you use in your in how you talk about what you do and all I want to do is just ask us to go around really quick and just say the little vocabulary word and I invite you I'll tell you what we'll do after that so first super quick yeah no paragraph one word so word I would use I have asked that question it's dialogue sustainability interdisciplinary healing multidisciplinary interaction surrender creativity listening inquiring so your tasks between now and lunch is to find someone and ask them what their word was and just to give a quick definition so we can start to build a mutual vocabulary because there was lots of people who had the same word but you may not have the same word alright so housekeeping things we want to help clean up this room we have other things to tell us yeah so it's 101 we need to pull out on the bus at 110 or very close to it before we leave the next thing we're going to be doing is going to Congo Square which is an outdoor space and then we're going to be going to lunch I'm supposed to encourage you to use the restroom here before you need if you need to do that Michael wants to collect these sheets so if you can pass them back to him but other things is if one or two folks might want to help carry the snack bag back down to the bus with Erin and I that would be super appreciated one back