 Hi, I would like to introduce you to Gary Corbett, who's a good reviewer of our first artist, and he is also his first NPM conference. He is an NPM creation fund work playwright for Legend of Koalao, which just kicked on his tour online to an audience that was like two of all, so I'd like to introduce Gary, who's going to share a poem with you. What's called Pacific Orchids? A screaming song is blowing out of the Pacific Ocean. You can hear its reckoning call when the wind cracks the massive ships like breaking Eucharist coast. You can smell it when waved ease is dead, like foul communion wine rising from the bowels of the sea. A hurricane is coming! Run, run, run! Lash yourself in coconut trees, hide your babies, make love one last time. Pray to your Almighty, ruler over the natural elements. Your God, Allah, Christ, Buddha, Shiva, Mohammed, Mercedes, Rolls-Royce, Hummer. Make your peace. A hurricane is coming. Young music, young myths of invincibility, your collective fables of Buffalo Bill, Uber al-Supra-Man, Haruna Rashid, Mu-Wantaro Krishna, Rough Riders, General Custer, Pao Banyan, Johnny Appleseed, hide them in a cave vault, but not too deep to disturb the shameful dust of the charity trailing tears. Irish potato famine, holocaust, rape of Nan King, Philippine ballad giga massacre, Turkish Muslim killing of Armenians, Serbian atrocities against Muslims, the Milai massacre in Abu Ghraib. A hurricane is coming! Quick, stack your architectural digest, soldiers of fortune, GQ, Business Week, bodybuilder, Bible, Quran, Rig Veda, J, Jet, Vogue, Golf, clear the Amazon rainforest or paper. Build a better bomb. Build a pyramid-shaped bomb. We need more. We need more because the hurricane is coming. Don't think you can take a cafe and latte break or hit pause or the TV remote. This screaming wind won't wait for you. It's fake pounding at your door. It's nature's way of saying, you may do the eternal Pharaoh King, Pope-President, Prime Minister, Premier, Sultan Mullah, Brahmin, Judge Judy, Dr. Fell, lowing illusions of human boundaries, religions, laws, nations, race, sex, wealth, into humanity's foxhole, tossing out notions, superiority, when any helping hand is needed for survival, discarding hate and fear of someone different, replacing them with the humility that we all die. We all are mortal. And sometimes we need moments of kindness to overcome the terror we manifest against each other when a hurricane, hurricane, hurricane is coming. Artist, activist, radical and radical rouser, Nicole Garno. Speakers, panelists, up to the stage. Make your way out up here, my 11 siblings. Find yourselves a chair, settle in. Y'all looking good. Everyone's got their hair together. Yeah, kisses and hugs, okay. Yep, kisses and hugs, let's get this. That's important. We've got plenty of chairs. So, hey, National Performance Network, Visual Arts Network. Made it to 4.30 to the landing app session. Way to go, okay. I'd like to just take a second before we get into this, like, a lot of ideas. And just get, like, a little bit present, because I don't know, if you're like me, you're like, you've gotten a lot of stimulation this weekend, a lot of input. One of the ways that I like to do this is, if you can, slip your shoes off. I got these boots on. If you can, slip your shoes off, go ahead and do it. If you can, it's fine, because you can do it with your shoes on. And what, oh, now you're going to see my smart little socks, because it's been kind of chilly. So, what we're going to do with our feet is, shoes on or off. Just take, like, a second to, like, feel your feet. I would like to invite you to feel your feet. In fact, I dare you not to feel your feet, now that I've said it three times. And just, like, really feel your toes. Feel the surface, like, the bottom of your feet on whatever that surface is. And let's just remember that, like, 12 stories below us is the actual Earth. And, in fact, our feet are basically in the edge of the Mississippi River right now. Right now. So, that's just where we're located in our bodies. So, it's nice to remember that. So, here's what's going to happen today. I'm going to take my shoes off. I've been, like, kind of going back and forth. I've been coming to New Orleans a lot, like, back and forth between New Orleans and various other places for about eight years for a lot of different reasons. And one of the things that I noticed about coming and going from New Orleans is that, you know, New Orleans is really big in the imaginations of people everywhere in the world. Everywhere in the world, people have questions and want to know stories about New Orleans. And New Orleans is really big. It's big. And so, what we're going to hear, and a lot of us have heard a lot of those stories, and there's also a gazillion different stories about New Orleans. And so, I think that one of the purposes of this session today is just to start to deepen and complicate some of the stories that we have about New Orleans by hearing from people that are doing really interesting projects right now in New Orleans. We call these people leaders and innovators, and I think that we can agree that they are. But really what we want to hear is their stories of their work and their challenges. And I guess what I would like to say to the panelists, one thing that happened is Stephanie McKee and I had like a drive-by in the bathroom this afternoon, like a little weave past each other. And she said, I started to get excited about today's session, she said, well, I don't know how I'm going to say it all in seven minutes. So what I'd like to say to all of you is you don't have to say everything in seven minutes. You don't have to say everything. We're your colleagues. We're your friends. We're your comrades. Tell us the stories that you need to tell. And also, I'm going to invite you to understand that as colleagues and comrades and friends, you can put some questions out there too. You can put some challenging stuff out there. You don't have to have all the answers. You can also ask some questions and we will be there to witness you in that challenging place as well. So that's my invitation to you as panelists. With that said, it is my extreme pleasure to introduce our first speaker. Stephanie McKee is a performer, an educator and choreographer and a cultural organizer who's based here in New Orleans, Louisiana. She's a member of Ultimate Roots and she's the founder of Moving Stories Dance Project, which is an organization committed to dance education that provides opportunities for dancers and choreographers to showcase their talents. She is an artist and a cultural organizer who's deeply committed to creating work that is in concert with community concerns. Currently, Stephanie is the Artistic Director of Junebug Productions and Junebug Creates produces tours and presents performing arts which support and encourage African-Americans in the Black South and beyond. Junebug Productions is the organizational successor of the Free Southern Theater which was co-founded by John O'Neill in 1963 to be the cultural arm of the Civil Rights Movement. He called it a theater for those who have no theater. The Free Southern Theater was a major influence in the Black Theater Movement and recently celebrated its 50th anniversary. Stephanie is one of my teachers, so I'm really pleased to introduce her. Please welcome Stephanie McKee. The 60s is inevitable. That movement will need its own expressions of art and culture. Those who've set out to do work in that movement will need to know what we try to do and how we fare. They will need to know about our failures as well as our successes. That knowledge will help them to be more effective in the work they set for themselves is our job to make sure that the information is there for them to find and that enough people know how to tell them where to look in order to find it. It's like my mother used to tell me the cook isn't finished until the dishes are cleaned. This says the tone. That is a quote from the invitation to the Free Southern Theater funeral. And that was written by John O'Neill. And that vision says the tone for where we're going right now What you're looking at right now are images from the 50 year anniversary of Free Southern Theater. What was important for that convening is that the very thing that we talk about here the importance of gathering and of learning creating the container for learning to happen that both is multi-generational and diverse. The founders of Free Southern Theater were there and they kind of left us a little bit of a framework for the direction we're going in. And so one of the things that I like to think about is my dear friend and colleague, Rhea Baumann talks about the three piece of performance. Preparation, practice, and patience. So preparation is actually these convenings like the National Performance Network convenings. It's also convenings like the 50 year anniversary of Free Southern Theater. A container that is stable enough for us to be able to learn from each other. But also recognizes that it's not about top down learning but that we're all both teachers and learners, life long learners. The practice is that we actually set forth to do convenings like this and to create our work and to think of newer innovative ways to get our work and our message out there. The patience is sometimes messing up and being patient enough to step away from that work and giving the seeds that you plan enough time to grow. And maybe that means growing without you but giving it the room to grow. So when we talk about the direction that you focus is moving in there are a couple of areas that we're talking about. Story telling, which is always the basis for the work that we do. But we're now looking at what does a digital extension of storytelling look like for us and can it keep the same values and integrity of our story circle process. Also who's telling our story? Are we telling our story? Is somebody else telling our story? We want to be the ones to tell our story much in the same way as the work Free Southern Theater by Free Southern Theater. And I talked about that creating a stable container for learning to happen with the recognition that we're all learners and teachers. And whenever we deliberately set that kind of container together we are setting the tone for new discoveries for innovative ways to move forward with our work and also creating and building community along the way. Art making, producing and presenting art and thinking about that in different ways in a hierarchy kind of way, not in that way. But looking at all the art that's around us we're here in New Orleans, Louisiana. Art surrounds us all the time. Theater surrounds us all the time. So recognizing that that work is happening every year. Art is supported. It is because of Junebug Productions taking a chance on me as a really young, naive dancer saying that, you know, I'll just write a brand and do my work. It's because of them taking a chance on me that I'm standing here before you right now. I'm very clear about where my feet are planted and the shoulders on which I stand. And so as we're sort of looking into the future of this we have to build our capacity as an organization. It's a two woman organization right now and that's kind of a hard thing to do. We're hoping to expand that but with that expansion we know comes a lot of challenges in expanding especially in kind of quick growth, right? And so the stable container that I spoke of in terms of learning it's also creating the stable container within the organization so that we're ready and our feet are planted and we're grounded so that that growth can happen. I reminded that as a dancer one of the things that we say is moving slow to go fast. Such a beautiful way. Our next speaker is Julia Stewart. And Julia is working on the front lines of social innovation helping New Orleans entrepreneurs to transform their great ideas into reality. She also serves as a trustee for the New Orleans chapter of the Awesome Foundation which is a worldwide network distributing a series of monthly $1,000 grants to projects and their creators. She has been fortunate to travel to 28 different countries and she spent the last two years living abroad in Hong Kong and Switzerland. Her current role is that she is the program director for Propeller a source for social innovation and Propeller is a New Orleans based non-profit organization that incubates ventures with innovative solutions to our city's most pressing social and environmental challenges. Propeller connects change makers with the resources that they need to make change happen faster. Please welcome Julia Stewart. You all are into Peter so I was trying to think about how I could connect with you but all you think about was my eighth grade year when I forgot my lines and 10 little Indians and then you really closed the curtain so I thought that maybe I would just give you a go it up. Taddle up, huh? Taddle up, huh? Yeah! So we're almost eight and a half years out from Hurricane Katrina and there are still major challenges that our city still faces. There are over 35,000 lighted or vacant properties in New Orleans. We also, as Louisiana has been called the world prison capital, we incarcerate more people per capita than anywhere in the world. Also, we are tied with Mississippi for the most unhealthy state. So those statistics seem grim, right? But there are creative, smart people out there with solutions. Social art is a non-profit that is committed to supporting social entrepreneurship in New Orleans. We work with entrepreneurs that have creative and viable solutions to our city's biggest environmental and social challenges. So what's an example of a social entrepreneur? Let's take Tiffy Tiffins, founder of Matter Inc. She was in our program two years ago and her company's tagline is we work to make the world a better place by creating products and collaborations that matter. Tiffy designed these bird soaps and it's a black glycerin bird soap and as you use the soap, the soap washes away and inside is a white ceramic bird keepsake. And 50% of sales from these birds goes towards BT oil spill cleanup. And the idea is that the black represents the oil and so you're washing off the oil to reveal a clean white bird. She's given 18,000 donations so far. Another related problem to the BT oil spill is our vastly disappearing wetlands. Every 38 minutes, you can say goodbye to one football field worth of wetlands. And at this rate, Louisiana will be Atlantis in two centuries. It's really easy to ignore a problem that you don't see every day. So that's where Lost Lands Environmental Kayak Tours comes in. They were in our program last year and they are committed to taking people on educational kayak tours to show them firsthand what's happening to the wetlands. In addition to locals and tourists and student groups, they also focus on people with wider influence so they take out policymakers and academics and reporters. Propeller believes that to make real change happen and to happen quickly, people need to work together. So the way that we do this is we facilitate dialogue between high level policymakers and grassroots innovators. We also create mutually valuable relationships across sectors. Taking a step back, this is really why I love working with Propeller. I graduated from Louis St. Clarke College and knew that I wanted to be on the solution side of a lot of the institutional challenges that we're facing but which issue to choose. They're also important. Environment, human rights, criminal justice. And I found also that I was wary of putting blinders on to the other issues if I were to just choose one. So at Propeller, we're able to maintain this bird's eye perspective of the challenges so that we can get multiple sectors working together to build stronger solutions. And problems are never isolated in a city, right? So you need land to grow food when kids are eating healthy food they're going to do better in school. When they do better in school they're going to commit less crimes. And when they graduate, they need jobs. So Propeller works with entrepreneurs at all lengths of this chain. In the end, we're left with a more robust network of change makers attacking problems from multiple angles and contributing to a healthy, more vibrant New Orleans. Take for example, our biggest success story from last year the Healthy School Food Collaborative. So you all remember High School Lunch, right? What did you eat? You had some nachos, some hot dogs, maybe some chicken fingers. What were you doing right after lunch? Maybe falling asleep in a Singleton's class, right? I don't remember Charlotte's web. Was the spider or the pig the bad guy? I don't know. Why unhealthy school lunch? So that's why Propeller has facilitated a healthy school lunch to over 38% of public schools in New Orleans. This means no more fried food, no high fruit juice corn syrup, but fresh food that Scratch prepared daily. To make this happen, we needed a lot of people working together including landowners, growers, distributors, educators, and policymakers. Similarly, our theory applies to the day-to-day working environment. In January, Propeller will celebrate our one-year anniversary of our shared workspace called the Propeller Incubator. So the image on the right is what the building looked like when we bought it. It was a rim city world. It sold car rims, vacant fawn parts, and on your left is what the building looks like now. It's located in the Broadmore neighborhood and on the corner of Washington Abroad we have some rain gardens in the front. This is our studio. It's 10,000 square feet and filled with collaborators from a lot of different areas, from arts, education, humanities, science, technology. It's like the most compact college you can imagine. On day one, we had 24 members and now we've grown to over 80 businesses that rent office space from us. And the result is an office that doesn't feel like an office at all. It's vibrant and energetic and people are exchanging business cards all the time. People get things done faster than if they were to work isolated alone in a coffee shop. So I know that many of you have creative ideas and you use tools to take those ideas and make them concrete, whether it be a sculpture or a painting or a dance piece. We do the same. We take the community's ideas and we apply the tools of propeller. So our policy and business support and we help to transform those ideas into reality. Art is social change. So I encourage you all to visit us. Our website is gopropeller.org You can follow us on Twitter and Facebook at Go Propeller and you can email us. Your speaker is really modeling and keeping within the time frame. Really doing excellent on that. Our next speaker is an artist. Her name is Dawn Ditto. She's a New Orleans based artist and she throughout her career has merged art and new technologies to broaden our audiences and dialogues. So some of her early works such as CV radio booths aimed to break socio-economic racial barriers and later works address pressing issues. She's exhibited throughout the country including at the Whitney Museum of American Art and recent installations include Steps Home for Ballroom Marfa and The Goddess Fortuna for Prospect to International Biennial. In 1997 she received the Rome Prize as a Knight Foundation Visiting Artist. Her current project is that she's developing part two for an ongoing touring exhibition aboard the mothership postulations of myth and math. While on location she's on location in Cactiva, Florida as the artist in residence at the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation and she's making this work because she and all of us have been impacted by an onslaught of ecological disasters. So in this current work she's considering the blocking's prediction that we have no more than 100 years to either save the earth or leave it. I'd also like to mention that in 1976 she won the demolition derby in the Louisiana Dome as the only female contestant of 35. She would end the end on several of my projects and it was June Bob Productions back in the late 80s who I worked with on a major project. The images behind you is just a medley of work from early work to latter work so I'm just going to let it roll and I've got a time to end when I'm supposed to end and we'll see how good I do. Just a little background of my practice I studied art of course but I was also very influenced by mass communications and kind of a child of the global village somewhat conceptually based I choose a wide sweeping array of media to best serve the idea of the project and there's no consistent style to my work but I do often turn to working in human scale that is somewhat of a constant. I do like to use new technologies because I find it's a way to broaden a new audience build a larger audience and be more a part of my time and particularly with younger audiences hold it I'm going to scroll down I'm kind of athletic but I do want to follow my notes here so I'll use new technologies but I also like to draw and incorporate pop culture and heroes of the underground I like to mix all of that in as well I think of myself as an engineer of experiential spaces or environments and somewhat of a trickster of a common monkey girl Community engagement is very important to me it's a go-to tool I think that to create intimacy is to enlarge empathy and understanding so it's very important for me to find venues of community engagement I don't like to dump things down for the community I like to up the ante of what's transcendental and experiential I think that's the best way to convey the power of art I want the audience in the piece part of the piece and that experience I think serves art and the public well Katrina, Hurricane Katrina comes along and I think that is something that every New Orleansian will share with you it's a line of demarcation there is a pre-K dawn and a post-K dawn and I think what I learned from that is just kind of a greater physicality of my work is I think I was aiming to reconstruct what had been deconstructed and also embrace a larger embrace of the lessons of paradox how there is actually silver linings there is beauty and destruction if we look hard enough and there is great empowerment to be found in change what happened though there's another ship the Ant Hill as an example I think pre Katrina I was focused inside the Ant Hill looking at the tunnels the systems by which people work equitably, hopefully moving equitably to work together and post Katrina I'm looking at the Ant Hill from the outside and very concerned about the external aspects of life that can impact us and lead to full destruction of course it turned to a growing interest kind of was a singular interest in the environment I've worked in the past in socioeconomic race issues as some people would point out maybe it wasn't my place to do so all the time but I feel very confident it is my place to work on the ecology so I have an exhibition a few years back called on the scene dealing with what was invisible in the threat I have projects placing a family inside test tubes of water what's in the water what's in the ground that we walk on also a project Mutants which is a floating illuminated sculpture for reading water content it's not fully developed yet I'm trying to work with the scientific arm in a collaborative way thinking about the big picture again it's kind of like I got thrown from the street into space with Katrina let's use that metaphor and while in space had the luxury of time travel and visited the goddess Fortuna who was self-introduced to me prior by John Kennedy too Boethius and others so a few years back did a big project for prospect two called the goddess Fortuna and her dunces in an effort to make sense of it all and of course it's dealing with the arbitrary haphazardness of fate and disasters so there I turn to casting as goddess Fortuna Katie Redd and Big Freedia two of our great bounce dancers here two years prior to the debacle with twerking and what's her name Cyrus then anyway used our local heroes to play the goddess and then now I'm working on a project called aboard the mothership part of it is up right now in Mobile Alabama at the Center for Living Arts the other part too I'm working on just finished the work at the Rothschildberg Foundation residency where I worked with first responders who posed for me in their hazmat suits kind of nostalgic for maybe a nature lost and also with some of the scientists there and with the sculptures that are falling from the sky and it could be the smallest thing that is most threatening to us what's inside a small bottle what's inside a briefcase so taking on that but lastly when that comes out I want to have community engagement component hopefully focusing on utopians utopia quest and we'd love to honor some raw spaces the place and to work with I hope to have some kind of collaborative context with George Clinton and the original mothership thank you and I'll talk more about all of this later if you're interested bye so our next speaker is friend of mine Trapania Bonobotter Trapania is a filmmaker he's worked for the past 10 years at the intersection of film civic engagement and social change throughout the south from 2008-2012 he served as executive director of Moving Forward Gulf Coast Bonobotter has diffused several documentaries social justice films and PSAs dealing with the recovery of New Orleans and fair redistricting in communities protected by the 1965 Voting Rights Act he's the founder of the Oscar Michaud Media Institute and he trains the next generation of filmmakers his current role is that he is the founder of the Black Men and Boys Initiative the Black Men and Boys Initiative grew out of Moving Forward Gulf Coast which was a community-based initiative committed to restorative justice to bring information, strategy solutions and new media to blatant attacks on humanity the Black Men and Boys Initiative seeks to shape a new future for Black Men and Boys beginning in the great city of New Orleans this multi-year initiative is composed of strategic community and national campaigns focused on issues of critical impact on the lives of Black Men and Boys please welcome Trapani Abana Good evening everyone It's early evening right? Trap, would you rather have a thought on this one? It's up to you One, two Well, again Trapani Abana Most folks call me Trap Native of New Orleans Central City and I'd like to thank Mark Valdas for this again I could actually call myself an artist now I thank Mark for that fellowship He utilized film quite a bit as an organizer too and as an artist I believe that 2014 for me may be a year to let it all right? In terms of whatever art may be in my hand as an intersex with movement work on the ground this idea of the Black Men and Boys Initiative grew out of my work over the past four years working directly with Black Men and Boys as a way to begin to make significant part of my lifestyle right? Me myself I can acknowledge that I'm a citizen of slaves so I feel that there's an obligation, a personal obligation to make this work a part of my lifestyle to never forget where we've come from so we never go back to that So using art, film, music and print as an innocent specifically gave the work as relates to activism but sort of using the force plowing squares on the slide of how we move towards making civic engagement part of our lifestyle right? So looking at citizenship, voting rights census and redistricting as a way to cultivate political power right? Now in these conversations with my agribusiness buddies and advocates and communists and everyone all of the isms I think we all agree that we can't continue to run in this government at some point we're going to have to engage so after 7 years of organizing under that banner come to the conclusion that we need to do a little bit more than participate we actually have to engage I think through that sort of organizing perspective we get to where we need to go and you know this is I like what Nicole said earlier about sort of making this thing what we wanted to be because I'm so tired of reflecting on this redistricting process right? and telling that story over and over again just feel like it's time to do something else right? And so I'll touch on this you know just briefly in my short time because it was important post Katrina that we get involved in the political process right? so that we can be counted in our communities so that the funds to rebuild our community is to fall within the bounds of our districts right? That didn't happen because you know you had over 180,000 people that were kicked out of the war and 150,000 of those folks were African-American right? and so being counted and then being able to elect a candidate of our choice post Katrina was very important this is a film of the first film I produced documentary I produced on the recovery it's called Press and City Access and you can see this on the real site you need contact information at the end of this session we'll sort of use this to sort of make folks aware of what was happening on the ground although this was not our first attempt at using film as an organising tool this was this was a piece we produced on the redistricting process to help bring folks up to speed on where we were as activists sometimes we have to realize that we're very privileged with information and knowledge and access and the people that we serve don't have the information and terminology that we use so we have to come up with innovative ways through media do art to sort of short man learning period so I'll tell that story about Pac-Man does everyone heard of Pac-Man? what happened to Pac-Man? I mean you know what happens to Pac-Man? Pac-Man eats pellets and goes chasing him over the board, right? but what happens when Pac-Man eats a power pill? what's the first thing that happens when he eats a power pill? he can eat the ghost and everything else and so what we experimented was sort of these six to seven minutes short video advocacy films, right? we said that beyond six minutes of content about political process people lose interest kind of like some of you may be losing interest now but this film was a way to bring folks up to speed yes, census and redistricting is connected to your voting rights it's what you have the voting rights act for so you can participate in these processes and so this is Dr. Grove from U.S. Census and he did a great job trying to get folks in the museum to count it, let me speed up to the good stuff here's a question are GIS matters visual artists? I think they are there's some beautiful and bad art to the left good art to the right compact, contiguous redistricting ones the one to the left is the bad one the one to the right is the good one we came up with the good one but here's why the word continues because before 1910 we had a voting rights act well, in 1910 we lost it and what happened from 1910 to 1960 was the fact that no African American African Americans are people of color working in Congress throughout this time because in 1910 Jim Crow came up and so the voting rights act is under attack again and so there's more work to do and so doing not part as a dissent in the slave I want to share something with you real quick this is a project we're working on and we're moving from conversation to action we have a lot of meetings but we've got to get busy and here's our first effort at getting busy this this is a project that came out of the hospital from the Institute which is a multi-media anti-violence project so using music and film as a way to go in and work with young folks who are dealing with these issues we can't continue to tell young folks how we want to help them and they're not educated so this is a process of a multi-media training and what came out of it was this particular song and these are the participants in this last institute these are the ceasefire brothers from the Noble Life ceasefire program this is concentrated in Central City and so these guys went through the process and now we're working on this piece we have five artists on this song this is a throwback to the self-destruction song from the late nineties a bunch of new york rounds can we get it away well this is some new artist guys but we're working on this process together and of course this next piece this is the Noble Life pilot program of this reentry program and we're producing a film called bounce back and this is an audio visual walk of this reentry process so you'll have formerly incarcerated persons interviewed for this piece but also having someone as they transition out to prison going through this process and then getting access to some liberties and this is the final piece the bridge project which is a coffee table book used to fundraise for the initiative right trying to send a photographer good job so far and we'll be selling this as a way to sort of raise money for the work they're doing that's my time if you have any questions about any of the projects and programs that are happening with the initiative please contact Travis speaker today is Kyler Hughes and Kyler is a member of Kids Rethink New Orleans schools so Kyler has been a member of Kids Rethink New Orleans schools for three years she's an outspoken advocate for restorative justice and she's spoken in numerous conferences with Rethink sometimes the organization Kids Rethink New Orleans schools gets shortened to Rethink so that's what you're going to hear a YouTube video with her thoughts about education was featured on MSNBC's Education Nation hosted by Melissa Harris Perry Hughes is also a talented vocalist and spoken word artist she's a ninth grader at Benjamin Franklin High School a little bit about Kids Rethink New Orleans schools Rethink embodies an idea that is as dynamic as it is simple give young people a voice in the reform of public education through Rethink citywide and school based programs use identified areas for improvement within individual schools as well as within the school system as a whole they develop innovative solutions and they act to make their solutions a reality please welcome Kyler Hughes you mentioned I'm a freshman at Benjamin Franklin High School and I've been a Rethinker since seventh grade sure as you ever know Rethink is a non-profit organization that believes students are the experts in what they want in schools and Rethink gives basically the leeway for students to let their voice be heard Rethink has really opened many doors and opportunities for me it has allowed a voice to be heard that originally and I love how first Rethink is I don't have to worry about being judged really friendly, loving and accepting and being a young teenage girl in high school and starting off middle school you know will it even give you a problem and we have an organization that accepts you so much it really makes you feel comfortable enough to kind of speak your mind and I really developed a voice by me in Rethink I have a little poem that I wrote this year at Rethink's 2013 summer program that I performed at the press conference that they had each year to close the summer program out and to make their recommendations to the school board and the title of the poem is Justice for the Target a little bit about where the poem came from when I wrote the poem I didn't really think about what I was writing until I had finished and the poem was kind of inspired by the situation that I was going to portray wrongly and I was really inspired by the idea of how as a young person by just being young I'm jellied by just being young I'm already on this radar and so that's where the poem comes from we live in a day and time where it's not safe to be young in America where being youthfully profiled is the new trend but what about my future or does that even matter or is it smart that I want to go up in a society that condemns people for who they are that kept people out of what they believe that target people simply because of their skin it's a man-eat-man world when everyone is a target of institutions that criminalize young people with suspensions called school that is synthesized as a community so much children probably say they come from the streets where guns and violence are everyday sites it's a plea for justice a call to rise up for the target I am the target you are the target and we all are the target if you see my brother in a hoodie please don't shoot him give him a book and tell him to stay in school if you see my sister about to strike another girl for something said on Instagram don't videotape it grab her hand and say fight for education your future, not for a boy if you see me proving a stereotype to be true by arriving in person because of the financial buying my family is in take the weapon of mental and physical destruction and tell them education is free and the key to success and success is a drug to love this goal is squatting down my future but what about the kids of this future would they need justice for the target or would they be a target for justice moment of silence for the target you people are in luck because we have time for dialogue that means questions or panelists while you're getting your questions and comments together I'm going to pose a question of my own to the panelists so here's my question when you think as you're thinking forward to the next two or three years what's the biggest challenge that lies ahead just talk a little bit about that and what kind of support or what kind of solutions you're looking for you want to start? well the big effort funding so I feel lots of I feel committed to what I hope to accomplish I have to pull it off somehow I don't want to figure out how to do that I am personally of course dealing with larger environmental issues very cognizant of the fact that we are not yet post race post gender and so how do we simultaneously move that forward kind of with a focus on environmental justice so that we can prevent collectively becoming post human you know the big FBA is an issue in terms of funding also with there are a lot of innovative ideas that are being proposed that I would think traditional funders can connect to so I think there may be some some innovations that need to happen on the funder side I think folks are working on that but you know in terms of this work we have a lot of folks who are not aware of what's training in America in terms of this great new role in this which is that window to actually access the mic so I think the challenge is to work to make more folks aware of what's happening and hope that they'll be moved to action so yeah I am going to say capacity we're a small organization and we're a black organization and I think everybody in this room knows that organizations like ours are disappearing every day we said it last year I'm going to say it again this year we are literally shutting our doors every year and so an organization like Juma hangs on by thread we've had many near death experiences but the information and how we were started and this type of work is so important why is it important it's important because we get this work to an audience of people who don't typically go to theater they don't typically go out and that's what we're trying to do in the last few years we've really been looking at how to deepen that relationship to our constituency base going back to sort of a value of a 3-7 theater what does that look like so one of the things that it may look like is having come to a late night filled with extreme like extraordinary spoken word audience for those who are not on a spoken word network they typically don't get to this particular audience they have this they have these places that they go to and it's important for the aesthetic of the work we're talking about an African aesthetic we're talking about a call and a response which means that inside of the civic theater that is not conducive for that type of work this work has to happen in other places it has to happen on the streets people will come to the thing that they value the most if they value it more than second line then they will come no matter what that second line and how it looks they will turn around they will come to that if they feel it is for them and if they feel that the content is what they need so I speak to the disparity inside the field I think another very obvious thing is that Juma now encourages and supports leadership of women of color that is something else inside the field it is not lost on me as a woman with this short haircut and walking into a room that I have not treated the same and I'm not giving the same respect so that is another real real issue that I'm finding more and more now that I've moved into a leadership position now I see it a lot more I guess I would echo sort of the theme of my presentation which was collaboration and alignment and I think in this room there are people who are tackling issues in their own way with their own ideas coming out of the artistic out of the box mentality and then the practitioners and the academics we have kids who are working on things and high level policy makers and in between there is that great area of funding I think to go back to that beautiful poem that was that started off our presentation tonight a hurricane is coming in many ways and you can take a look at that directly and understand the environmental apocalypse that is very much a reality you can take a look at it from the political standpoint of really what what direction are we going and and so I feel like I like to take these big questions and go back to the self and think about what I'm doing and how I need to expand my consciousness out from my own thoughts and think about I am this one person in this room, in this state in this country, in this world and think about really others and how we can all you have needs and I have needs and how can we come together to find a collaborative link that will progress us all forward in a much more unified way in the next two, three years I'll be graduating high school so I'll go on and get ready to go to college but I'm pretty sure in the next two, three years I'll do a long school and I'll have just brightening the knowledge of everything that I already have and I want to take the type of issues that we think is focusing on now and I'd like to see them both pass through all of these paths and then which leads us to enhancing so so now is the time when we invite you, beautiful beloved said lengths in the room to speak things that you're curious about or you want to comment on and the one thing we've got Will who has a microphone Stanlin has a microphone and Will has a microphone though so the microphone mirrors will run over to you swiftly and the other thing that I would ask for the benefit of all of us in the room and also our panelists is before you ask a question or speak just say like hey I'm Nicole and I'm from Chicago so that we just have who in the room is speaking in from what position and all that kind of stuff so who has a burning comment or question for any of our panelists or all of them okay great right up here and I'll say your name and where you're from my name is DeGonag and I'm an artist in Miami I work with incarcerated teen girls and the question is what kind of um I my girls are 17 to 17 years old they're in detention centers um one thing you think kind of and I can bring to these girls to get their minds to be open to these issues because sometimes very hard to penetrate them because their pain is so deep um what do you as they're here believe that we as artists could break into these spaces to um give more reaction and engagement from all of us right next I don't know that it's hard to talk to teenage girls in general because it's a scientific thing that happens like I know for me I don't know like talking like how people speak really shy most of the time so I know for girls in that age right getting especially when they have those types of circumstances they all like when it comes down to issues that we're talking about today they all know about the issues and they're probably all very effective about the issues it's just getting them comfortable to talk about it and I know a lot of teenagers like spoken word a lot of teenagers use music and art as a means of escape so you have things where they can paint pictures you know to express their feelings or you know you have a theme one day where you write about um write it more and more you can have like a seminar type thing about building your things like them that are kind of getting them comfortable and then eventually they'll come around and they'll start to say well if one thing they like to see when people are open other people are open a lot of teenagers feel adults kind of just write them off as being they just don't want to talk but if an adult is accepting tourism and opening to do the things they like to do and they'll open back up towards that thank you thank you comments from people have said things in your room from around the country okay Suzanne hi I'm Suzanne in California I'm from Washington DC and I'm sorry this isn't an exact question to you the group but it was an issue that's troubling to me that I kept thinking of throughout all the talks um when I was on my way here and going through national airport um I went to get in a security line and the attendant looked at my ticket and said oh you're a TS something something go stand in that line and so I went through another line and there actually was no line and I didn't have to take off my shoes and I didn't have to pull my laptop out and I didn't have to do anything and I walked through and um I got to the other side and I asked three of the TSA people why I was in that line rather than the other line which had a long line and nobody seemed to know one of them asked me if I had applied for it and I said no and it was just something I brought with me into New Orleans about this um type of segregation and why that this maybe happening I wondered if it's happening at other airports did anybody else experience it's it's random as an Arab-American who's been screened way too many times last um many years I was shocked when this happened to me and it was right when we were coming from the Junebug residency to speak to my cousin and I asked Stevie and she was like I wish Junebug had that kind of pull but actually no so I did investigating and and then this is what a security person actually shared with me this is called being pre-screened and this is what's happening folks you get a freebie at random your name might you might get a freebie to experience the loveliness of being pre-screened so that you can then be inspired to go buy it online yes yes you can get one to buy pre-screened status for something like 100 bucks for a certain period of time and then you won't actually get checked and people who can for the buy it will this service is already available for international travel you can purchase pre-screening for your passport for your US passport which allows you to when you're entering US airports go through the express line but of course that means that you've registered all your data with this magic government database and then you know consider the possible implications of that any panelists have anything to say about screening yeah I experienced this you know a few weeks ago and I didn't mention this the netfellows went to Hawaii Junebug and I had a chance to go back to connect with some folks out there and when I was leaving I was randomly selected for this one if not take your shoes off if not take your laptop out of the bag and I thought it's a new day I had no idea this was some sort of testing scheme right again to get folks to re-register for this is there not so much concern to be investigated or whether you appreciate me or not you can still do whatever what concerns me is the idea that some people will be able to pay for this and others won't be able to afford it and we're dealing with public transportation so that's the issue that down the road concerns me other questions or comments for the panelists panelists yes, Samuel, hold on Will is coming with Mike actually I live at the border Mexico USA and you can buy so you can pass the window line but with their pass they put you under the computer and then once you pass to the US they follow you wherever you go by computer so they are looking at you why you are in the US which I think and they tell you oh why do you get a pass I say fuck that this is still scratching your heads Julia I have a question for you about propeller I was wondering if you can talk about some of maybe there's a couple of examples of specific projects in which our theater culture are involved in this sort of like innovations or community development projects you may have shown pictures of them but I think that it was hard it was hard for me to decipher but maybe you can just talk about some of those you are based on the work that we are working with this year one of them is Pelican Bomb NPN is actually a physical sponsor of the Pelican Bomb sort of a news blog and they also have something called the drop where they make local art affordable to people so you can purchase one piece of art for $8 two pieces for $150 and three pieces for $200 and it sort of came out of this model that they tried in New York and worked there but not quite sure New Orleans is the same type of has the same relationship to art here but see the same meaning you pay a certain amount over the year and then you're just given art throughout the year for different artists so that's one we also have a venture called the where you are and they are an online marketplace for art specifically local art so the local Etsy they've noticed that with Etsy you have people who are saying that they're locally made but they're really not and so it's sort of gotten too big for its original intention so they are showcasing local art on their website rr.com and they also they also provide like business support to artists to help them you know get the photographs that they need or understanding trademarks and copyright and all that I talked about Tiffy Tiffin so she's actually one of the few entrepreneurs that we have that had an active product a lot of the people that we support a service that they're offering or Katrina Breeze she's working on trying to degree Mardi Gras so she's getting local artists to actually make local pros that will support the local economy and also eliminate the waste that comes from Chinese imported beads and she's done some scientific testing on the beads and they actually are very toxic they have lead in them and say waste and all these things and the reason why they're allowed to be imported is because they are classified as jewelry instead of toys and so they are toys basically and kids interact with them like they were toys and so California has banned Chinese imported beads to give you an example of the severity of the issue so tons and tons of trash comes out of Mardi Gras so she's trying to tackle that issue from a bunch of angles that's good, thank you nice work we have time for one more question, go ahead Jose so you're saying your name and where are you from Jose Torres Tomas also dearly why can't we do something to help Junva as honest here Junva was miscalculated for my early projects and recently we talked to Jamal Neal when he was over at the college university teaching up north so what can we do is the artistic community to support Junva to make sure that it continues the sharing of information is really helpful at the end of the day part of the work there is a lot of heavy lifting that Junva internally has to do I think the sharing of information and opportunities small things this past year that I looked at things like the website macabre all trades for slightly used mac products in terms of increasing our technology that we have that kind of thing also databases we have to back into a database now there is no database it's a constant contact which does not a database maybe and so we're having to back all of that information so we're looking at sales force I did the research for that how do we manage our social media do you think that make our life easier the other side looking at that and how to track I think that's the big thing is learning how to track that so we can talk about our work more and I think we always need cheerleaders for our work just with this group of people that are right here that we are all in various conversations and rubbing elbows with various people and sometimes it's helpful for you to talk about the organization a piece of work so on and so forth so I asked a question about how a relationship may have been reciprocal at an earlier session today and I said it wasn't directly beneficial to Junebug it's indirectly beneficial to Junebug in that it was through the circle food store work that we did that we met the Tulane University city center and now we are able to do work with them and that is our earned income because now we do work with Tulane University city center the school of architecture so we do a lot of training for them things like that are being connected to those sort of things or what's helpful also writing about the work donating to the work coming to the performances and I think that also with the people that are local being able to connect and be more strategic about some of the work that we do and how we do it the sharing of resources on a local level will help a lot Kyle, Julia, Stephanie, Trab, Dawn thank you so much for sharing your stories today please well that person alright so first please let's give them a round of applause I'm sure that if you have other questions or comments you could grab one of the panelists on their way out Stan, what happens next?