 Okay great so again good morning everyone morning. I'm Maria Jackson. I'm a board member with MPN and I'm the moderator for this session. This session is community engagement inside and out. We have about 75 minutes together and four terrific women to hear from in conversation to be had this morning and the way we're going to use the time is that we're going to start hearing from each of our presenters. The presentations are going to be broken up with just a moment for any clarifying questions. It's not an opportunity to have a discussion but if something was said that you didn't quite understand or somebody used a term or an acronym that you're not familiar with that's the moment to say can you explain such and such. We're going to move through the presentations and then we're going to have a conversation up here in the living room with T for a little while after the presentations and then we're going to open it up to have a larger conversation with you and at that time Steve will have a mic so he'll be able to mic comments as they come in and just want to remind you that this is going to be streamed live so hello everybody out there. And we had a prep session this morning that we wish you could all have been there for because the conversation was reached this morning and I trust that you'll get a snippet of that. We know that you can't discuss all of the issues that are pertinent to this topic in the small amount of time we have together but hopefully this will bring up key issues that will launch other conversations in the time we have together during the conference. So I'm going to start with some introductions and you should know that in preparation for this session I ask people to think about who they are and how they want to be understood by you as they talk about themselves, what they do, why they do it, how they define community engagement in their own work and how it's part of their work. And I'm going to start with introducing Risa and there are a lot of titles. And there are a lot of titles that I'm going to share with you for good reasons so just as bearable because everybody here has a lot of titles. So Risa is a program director at Leveraging Investments and Creativity. She is the founder of the Laundromat Project. She is a fellow in public service with Coral currently. She's a past fellow with the Ford Foundation's Douglas Red Fellowship Program, focus on artists and community development. She's on the National Advisory Committee for the Social Practice Lab of the Asian Arts Initiative. She's a fellow of Artist Files which is a project of the Glative Grass Foundation and she's a past fellow of Echoing Green which is a seed funder for social change ventures. This is Risa. This is based in New York. Anula Shetty is based here in Philadelphia and she's a filmmaker. She's a teaching artist. She's an occasional performer. She's a board member of NAMAC which is the National Alliance of Media Arts and Culture and she's co-director of Termite TV Collective under La Shetty. She is based in New Orleans, Carol, and Carol is executive director and co-founder of Ache Cultural Arts Center. She's president of the Aretha Castle Haley Merchants and Business Association. She's a board member of the Central City Renaissance Alliance and she's a dean of the Ache College Unbound Collaboration which is a collaboration with Roger Williams University in Providence, Rhode Island. Welcome Carol. And last is Philadelphia's own Gail Issa. Gail is executive director and founder of the Asian Arts Initiative. She's a fellow who has been a past fellow with the Ford Foundation's Douglas Red Fellowship Program focused on arts and community development. She's a former board member of NPN and she is a council member of the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts and the first Asian American appointed to that body. So welcome Gail. And we're going to start with Risa. Each person has about 10 minutes to share some thoughts, images, whatever comes to mind that is going to help tell the story. And we're going to start with Risa. Can you hear me? No, I can hear you. So who am I is literally the existential question which I think a lot of folks in here, you know, as human beings wrestle with but also because as a match as it can be to list all these affiliations I struggle with how to articulate the role that I play in this field because there's so many slices of the work and so many different spaces I have to go to be able to work in those slices as opposed to having this very integrated nuanced way of working at the intersection of art and being a human being, right? And so, you know, there's an element of social enterprise, there's an element of community development, there's an element of just straight up arts and culture and what it is to make something or create something or a agenda or something. Then there's the hybrid, you know, technique of how you make something in public space, how you organize a body of people, how you direct ephemeral energy over time in an iterative process. So there's all of these nuances to this practice and again, there isn't this kind of singular space in our infrastructure to be able to work in that way. So for the purposes of this conversation I'm going to wear the Launch My Project hat because I think that that is the way that I organize my career. What I didn't say is that I'm actually from Philly born and raised. Love Philly! And Philly is what made me enter the art sector. My background is actually the corporate sector but growing up in a city that talks about a Philadelphia Museum of Art, a art museum and that space being made of marble and on the hill and downtown in a single location in a city of neighborhoods where that may not be your reality, you may not see yourself in that space. And so being really invested in making sure creativity, this thing that I believe is so essential to power and self-authorship and self-determination is broadly accessible. And that is really how the Launch My Project was born and my experience in trying to, again, assemble all of those different slices of experience to feed the Launch My Project is how my career came to be what it is and how I land at Wink and really kind of shaped the entire trajectory. So I'll share a little bit about what the Launch My Project is through a video instead of me chatting. So well, if you could... Through a sculpture being approved. A few artists that actually have formal training and actually apply all to a goal beyond a studio of a watch but at the same time still are moving in purpose and get someone talking about a framework which is bigger than any of the single affiliations and institutions is just being really invested in the idea of citizen artists and in creative citizens that at the end of the day what local leadership really looks like at the neighborhood level are a lot of creative problem solvers and imaginations to understand what's possible and not just what is actually happening and that means that all of us have to be tapped into our creativity not just those folks who are officially artists and that's how we make our profession, make our living but spreading that out and making that normal that that is part of all of our humanity and our capacity. There's one. So I had just a quick question. Is it just located in New York? And also does it... I originally thought that maybe it traveled around to different longer nights in different areas which I think would actually be kind of dope. So if you can tell me about ideas for expansion and tell me kind of what different other communities it might serve. Okay, good. So we have those two programs and our art education program has a long-term partnership with a particular laundromat that you saw in the video, the laundromat but when we are working to commission artists to do projects in their neighborhood laundromats we go wherever that laundromat... wherever that artist lives so at any given season we might be in Jackson Heights and Bed-Stuy and St. George with Staten Island and the Bronx and the next season we might be in a particular neighborhood within Harlem and then in Fort Greene. So we really are kind of going wherever the artist is which also means that in terms of our own training and professional development we're really trying to create foundational practices around community organizing, period. Or what it means to talk to a multiple audience is period so that we can be nimble in that way but I also want to give a shout out to the fact that we were in Philly last year. So in the video we talked about three artists every year we've actually grown so we now had six artists in residence last year one of which was in Philadelphia and then we've also created a fellows program so there's a body of artists who are just getting a professional development training that's unique to this kind of practice as well as then that commissioned group who are actually mounting projects so you have this large network of artists who are working in this way and that's a cohort instead of peers well after the residency. And we'll have a chance to revisit some of the structures that we will describe here in discussion so just know that. And we're going to move on to a new level. Okay. So like Risa, I too have well I too wear many hats and today I'm going to talk about my experiences as a teaching artist and working with communities in that capacity and two of the organizations that have been really influential in my community work one is the Asian Arts Initiative who I've done a lot of work with and Scribe Video Center which is a media arts center in Philadelphia. So I'm a co-director of Termite TV Collective we're a group of video artists we make experimental and activist media and in 1999 it was the end of the millennium and every thought the world was coming to an end so we thought you know it would be a really great idea to go on a trip across the United States and create video while we were traveling and work with different communities. So we got an old school bus and we packed in all our editing equipment into that bus and we took off. So one of the things we realized while we were traveling was that because we were at cities only for a week there wasn't enough time to really establish a long relationship with communities so we came up with this idea of a five minute life story so we would just set up you know stop somewhere, set up a tent and put up a sign that said tell us your life story in five minutes and it was just amazing we didn't really know whether it would work it was just an experiment and it just blew our minds and things people came and shared with us so I'm going to share one story with you and have the first link please What's the little one thing? Catch us to age, you'll cut the wasa Geikh na ayakhat Deshi taan anakhat You know basic reading and you can get my native language My second name is Catch us to age and if you can't pronounce that David's okay too Dahi taan which means village at the end of the trail there's a long legend behind it but it goes back to time when a group of Shanket were looking for a place to call home and they followed this beaver down this trail and they came to a spot and that's where they became known as Deshi taan or the village at the end of the trail because they followed this beaver and the beaver became a clan emblem for the Deshi taan it's a lot longer than the actual telling it would take hours to tell it and probably there's songs that grow with it but I'd have to have permission from our clan elders to actually recap verbatim and the songs but I'd like to bring a little bit of attention to the Shanket culture here in Alaska we call ourselves Shanket and we consider ourselves to be Native Americans not Eskimos sometimes we get quite perturbed when somebody asks us if we're an Eskimo and we're not we're still very probably Alaskans and we're probably we're not all ice and snow here but it does get quite cold at times but it's like I really love sharing with people culture and language one of the words we hear quite often in Shanket society is which means thank you which we pronounce it correctly you have to learn a new sound which doesn't exist in English for example say well notice where your tongue is on the L position and keep your tongue there and breathe out kind of hissing like a sound which is one of the easier sounds to learn in Shanket it's part of goo, not chase thank you now if you agree there was a certain quality of them editing their stories themselves and then presenting it to us and it was really interesting what people chose to leave out what people chose to tell and also this is my first experience with this kind of community work what it made me realize too especially with David we were in the Sitka public library and we set up a sign we would just put the camera and he was sitting right next to us and observing us and we kept asking him do you want to tell us your story and he wouldn't then finally he wanted to know everything about us so after we told him our life stories then he said okay I'll tell you my life story what I realized was that you have to have a relationship it just doesn't just come out like that to get a really good story there has to be trust built you really have to build that relationship and also the 5 minute life stories they had this element of talks what they call in Hawaii talk story where you're just sitting and listening to someone tell a story and also a piece that was very different that you were used to editing where everything was about fast cuts and soundbites so if you can show the next link well so over the course of the trip we collected about 400 life stories from and they're all available on our website so if you're interested and it's all people just talking about their lives I'm sorry you can't see this so what's the website it's termite.org and we have all these we have over 400 life stories we kept the project going and one thing I realized later in my teaching practice this was a really good model to use in workshops that are taught to youth and community groups so with the Asian Arts initiative in the youth media programs we used this model and had youth media makers go and ask people to tell their life story so it was a really easy way of getting the youth to interact with other people in the neighborhood and it's also just in terms of there's all these people just walking around and everyone has a life struggle and you just don't know their stories so what we found when we screened it in communities there was so much impact because people didn't know things about their neighbors and their neighbors would not talk to them and it was really intimate things but they would talk to us to tell a story so that was a really eye-opening project for us we'll put into 10 years later if we can go to the next link walk Philly so this is the project we are currently doing it's using mobile media and locative media which is media that's tied to a location so we were really interested just in exploring the app of watching media that is tied to a certain location at that location and what kind of depth is created at those moments and especially with this new smartphone technology we were excited that it was finally the technology to do that so we used this model so we created these video walks all around Philadelphia so there's a google map that has all these different points where there are these walks there's actually one that starts at the paint bride if any of you are interested in doing that so basically you download that onto your smartphone and then just walk along the video and this is just an artist so we had different artists create different walks some were experimental some were more documentary style following an artist or a historian talking about the neighborhood then again with the Asian Arts Initiative we created a workshop out of it Gail was really excited about this project and she said why don't we have a workshop so I'm going to show you a little excerpt of the workshop we did today we are trying to we're trying to try and build a a practical workshop but we couldn't we were working with a company that worked on this we were working on it and we went for it we tried to build the something we didn't know things were difficult by some youth in the program and that was more experimental so just to give an example of different ways to document a place. They created a whole mystery in Chinatown so you know you are following these signs they meant to put these little icons all over the place and created a whole mystery out of it. So the idea with this project and community engagement was you know often people who are residents of a neighborhood really have this connection they really have a sense of its history and its triumphs its problems that are outside the story and may not even think about so how do you capture those invisible markers and that's what what Philly was about you know how do you capture them how do you get people to experience it on location so I think I'll wrap up now okay Thanks. Thank you. I'm going to be doing a hodgepodge between some additional themes that are in as well as the PowerPoint which is really about being able to give you the power point. So Maria talked about how we got together early this morning and I think we all prepared and then we had our other preparation without director here and now you're seeing what the performance that kind of generated out of it. So I'm going to be doing a hodgepodge between some additional themes that are in as well as the PowerPoint which is really about being able to give you the power point. It's really about being able to give you some images of what we do looks like okay. So the big question you know who am I right. So I started out as a child I like to you know Cosby's line we're in his city so I'll do that. And my grandfather was a Baptist minister and so the whole notion of inspirational word music and people working together for good was something that was infused in me from the beginning people being with us in our home and being able to take care of more than just ourselves. And so that was that was part of what I grew up on. And then I kind of moved on and became the first graduate in my family on either side and that brought along with some responsibilities as well. And along with that came the fact that I studied sociology and political science. And so that was the beginning of my learning things that I didn't even know I didn't know. And so and I say college and bound to talk about that there's three sets of knowledge what you know you know what you know you don't know. And then what you don't even know that you don't know. And so we operate all of us do inside of that paradigm. Okay. And so I completed that and was I came of age at the time that the civil rights movement happened. And then I learned about what people could do if they just aspire to higher purpose. And and that became a part of who it was that became. And in that moment I came to know people culture nationalists who were doing work that was culture based. And that's when I got fit. And I didn't I didn't like get the distinction of the culture and the art and all of that then. But as time went on I got a bigger consciousness and a better sense of knowing what that meant that art was really a subset of culture and culture was a bigger thing. And it's there with us like oxygen all the time. And that is the thing that really needs the most attention because we take it for granted like we do the next breath. And we don't understand that there are some folks who become masters at being able to manipulate culture. And that we have focused on a small part of it and not attended well to the bigger. And I was in the struggle of trying to figure out how I could manage to make that manifest that generate that as something that could be done. When I met Douglas Redd who understood this to the core of his being he came here understanding it I think. And as we began working together we began dreaming together about the place that we could do it in because we understood that we needed a place. And we understood that it needed to be our place. Doug's thing was he was trying to ask the white folks for keys to be able to do our stuff. And so everywhere I go I have a key to our shape because there's a tribute to him that I can go in the door at four in the morning and go one, two, two, one. And I have to ask nobody who doesn't look like me. And so having a place became very important in that conversation. Between that and now I became a human service planner and that's where I learned about the whole notion of how you capture need, desire. And that you don't always get the need and desire at the time that you get the opportunity to do something about it. And we spent a lot more time asking people what they need and want than we do giving them what they say they need and want. And I decided that what I wanted to do was to be about generating possibility. And it's part of why we're named what we're named. Our shape comes from the language of the people. What's Africa the human means, the ability to make things happen. And for us that's the matter of bringing culture to bear with life and living and generating creatively what comes out of that. And that both supports human development and it also supports community development. And in our instance, and I think we can start. They haven't been money. In our instance, we are working with communities and just keep on running. I'm going to try to talk this through. I'm looking at it here. The whole issue of community, people say the community like as if there is only one community that we're part of. So I sit here before you and I am both a woman, steeped in woman culture and I'm also African-American and I'm also Southern. You know what I'm saying? So I've got three cultures operating here and maybe a few others. You know what I'm saying? And so community is not a collective now that captures. And often we say it and not even let people know what community we're talking about. We just say community and it's like it's a euphemism for being black. It's a euphemism for being Latin American Asian depending on who it is that the person is speaking. And so the whole notion of recognizing that there are lots of community. And everything that you send is not sent to the same community. For artists, community is audience. And often we do our work and we don't know what we want. We just want people, fantasy to see. And so sometimes we have to think for a moment about this concept. So I say like theory of change is that things are happening and altering so often that we have to update that unknown unknown thing. We have to update our knowledge basis, which updates our value system, which updates our behavior. And so we're constantly trying to figure out how do we manage to manipulate the world. We accept it, manipulate to manipulate the world so that people get an opportunity to update and upgrade. Their knowledge basis. And what I'm thinking is that I'm not talking about the ones that are stuck over here, you know, not able to move. I'm talking about the general Jane and Jill who wants to be a good person. Given new information, what they do is the information then helps you shift your stuff. And you don't do it in the moment that you hear it, but over time we adapt. And in adapting, that's how we learn how to become different. Now we've got a problem right now in our country because the world has moved. And a lot of folks are still stuck, you know, in the time that was. And we're moving to the time that's going to be. And we're caught in the shift and it's chaotic. Like, is that a sign? He's just moving like that. I didn't know. You know, we need help in the day-to-day curriculum of the trans, you know, kind of moving from this one place to the other. And so our strategy is to use culture, the whole notion of bringing the creative sense of art as well as just the other devices of culture together so that people get an opportunity to learn more, consider more, aspire for more. We often talk about asking people for what they want, but that's not fair. If you don't get people opportunity to know what the options are. And often we ask people where they are, what it is that you like. Well, it's a baby step here. If you don't have your rent and you want your rent so that you don't have to worry about it, or maybe you want a house, so you don't have to worry about that. But what if you can have more than that? And so how do we manage to be constantly having people understand better what they can have and what they can't? Keep moving the slides, I'm seeing two fingers over here. So how this shows up is that in the planning world, they're constantly doing plan. And so I'm constantly looking at them. And so sometimes I don't need to ask somebody again whether they need a place to live, or they don't like the fact that when an area gets done that they get kicked out after it gets better. That's what's happening in our community. And you just can keep the slides running so people can see. We know that there are people who are brilliant, who don't have degrees. So we created our Chicago-Jung Valley so that they can get the degree. And that we can honor the work that they have done and the trainings that they've gotten inside of it. Black men, the whole issue of status of black men is an issue. We're working on that in a specific kind of way to be able to deal with that. Disaster and resiliency. We're working with a group now to bring some of the knowledge that we have in New Orleans to bear in New York. We've gone to Japan at the tsunami and be able to work with people there. It doesn't make sense to know how to be able to deal with this stuff without being able to be in a position to share it. And living, we now own the apartments above us and we are able now to... We have a population that's probably 75% are artists, culture bearers, or social activists. And so they don't have to worry because we're buying a building. They won't get kicked out. And the community is getting better. And we're now having to navigate the issue of blending the family. Everybody didn't come there to make a cultural district that's focused on African and African American and Korean stuff. So we've got to manage to be able to work. And that's toward the whole notion of us being on the boards for the various organizations in the community. You can't just do your art and have the world provide a naked man when it doesn't go the way you want it. So you've got to put the time at the tables. If you're not at the table, you have to be worried. Lucas Diaz said that. If you're not at the table, you've got to be worried about whether you're on the menu. The technology world has given us an opportunity to do things bigger and all. And so we're trying to do a little bit more with that. A big thing we're really excited about is the opportunity to work with Bob and Chuck Davis along with Freddie Evans, who just wrote the definitive book on Congo Square. And Bama Luthe Gray, to be able to essentially put together using Ford's digital, the video conferencing equipment, an opportunity for people to be able to hear from him and to hear about African dance and how it kind of evolved in America. And we're looking at that as a model and something where we can be in touch with each other more than all of us having to sit here in the room together and how we can learn in a different kind of way. Again, culture meeting, the reality of life. The final piece is, I'm a founding director and I know Linda's here and I know that Tracy Task is one and I know Quayer Archer is one and all of us have to think about what happens next. And so we are really trying to get a legacy group together where we're thinking about what it is that, and then Gail has said, you know, she's not immediately as looking at the possibility of transition as some of us are. But, you know, what is that about and how do we manage to do it easier so that institutions, it's hard to build an institution. The institution shouldn't go because of the life or the time that a person has in that institution is gone. And so we are really trying to look at how we can manage to get that conversation going. But all of it is about community engagement. It's about hearing and knowing what the community says, talking to them individually sometimes, not always in groups. And using these damn needs assessments and reports and stuff that people use, it doesn't make sense for them to tell us and then to go back and ask them yet again. You know, and did you really mean this? And sometimes the answer doesn't change because for decades, it's the same answer. We don't have enough response to what it is that people need and want. And that's what we need to be working on as well. And so I am at the Aster and the effort that he's putting forward because a lot of this is, you know, floated by economy. And you have to have more ways. There's more than one way of skinning a cat and we've got to learn some of the other ones. Stop it. So I have also a set of PowerPoint presentation slides that will just run so that you have something to look at in case you're tired of our living room seen up here. But in terms of who I am, I won't start as far back as Carol did, but I told Maria also that I'll only just mention that I did accidentally get sent to a socialist summer camp. My parents have been regretting it ever since. I had a chance to be exposed to meeting I grew up in Southern California, a middle-class fourth-generation Japanese-American with family roots from Hawaii. And had a chance to meet Puerto Ricans from the Bronx and natives from different reservations around the country. And just really see, you know, again, people from really different, like racial, ethnic, and socioeconomic backgrounds. And to spend six weeks sort of building community and also building consensus. So that's also where I learned to sit through long meetings. And then I actually came from California to the East Coast in order to go to college at a small liberal arts school outside of Philadelphia. And for me, growing up Asian-American in Southern California and then coming to the East Coast about 23 years ago, it was actually a huge, huge culture shock to not be able to take for granted anymore that I was Asian-American and that I would be surrounded by people who looked like me or who were familiar with people who looked like me who were able to speak English fluently. You know, and, yeah, and I found myself, you know, feeling very isolated and feeling a need to always explain. And so I guess two things happened for me in terms of why I do this work. You know, one, I said I began to volunteer work, you know, in Philadelphia with a lot of the immigrant Asian communities here. And I think that in my heart, I'm really a community organizer. But one who at a certain point realized that I couldn't be effective because of my limited language skills. I'm really only fluent in one language. And, you know, in organizing after one of our earlier mayors who are also former Governor Randall had closed a series, closed, was making a number of city budget cuts and cutting back on the hours of libraries but actually chose only one library to actually shut down completely. And that was in predominantly Asian-American and African-American neighborhood in South Philadelphia. And their suggestion was that, you know, the youth in that library could instead walk several blocks to another neighborhood and use a library called White Man Library. So we organized, you know, a lot of my sort of experience with grassroots organizing was rooted in that particular experience. Kind of an inaccessible campaign to reclaim and to reopen that particular library. And then simultaneously I also found myself on campus organizing for more Asian-American studies and also for there to be greater admissions for Asian-American students in addition to international students and in addition to students who were able to afford the really expensive tuition at Swarthmore College. And it was during those aspects of organizing both in a broader community context and on campus that somehow I had an amazing opportunity to see a performance by a solo or at that time a solo performance artist named Lady Shikawa. And I felt that when I watched his one man show that what he was performing and what he was doing could sort of speak to people or spoke to me in a way that was different than all of the rallies and protests and petitions that we were circulating at the time. And so for me that was, that actually became, you know, part of my entree into an important aspect of what it is that I continue to do now. And most of my work now, as I think most of you hopefully are aware and had a chance to visit us last night is through an organization called Asian Arts Initiative which is a community-based non-profit that believes in the power of the arts as a way to tell the stories of Asian-Americans and also the diverse communities that we are a part of. And I think throughout our history we as an organization have been very committed to sort of the idea of community engagement. And really though in the past five years that sense of defining community has in addition to sort of, you know, kind of a broader sense of Asian-American community has really also begun to focus deeply on our immediate neighborhood with the opening of our new building and the purchasing actually of that building thanks in large part to the advice from Carol's partner Douglas Redd who had given the advice about the importance of especially communities of color owning our own property and being able to control the resources in our communities and hold on to that. And so, you know, in addition, so I guess now in our neighborhood one specific sort of program that I wanted to kind of highlight sort of before we go into open discussion is a project that Asian Arts Initiative has been fortunate to launch this year called our Social Practice Lab. And in our Social Practice Lab we actually have seven artists or teams of artists who are in residence with us for a full year. And for me and for us it's actually about like time I think to be able to understand the place and to be able to build relationships is both a luxury but also such an imperative need in order to do the community-engaged work I think that we're talking about. And so, some of the artists actually who are in residence with us include Anula here as well as Colette and Ben and Volta who some of you have attempted to see their work in the Van exhibition and then Catherine Sklavi who's the local NPN site coordinator is also one of the artists in the Asian Arts Initiative Social Practice Lab. And each of them over the course of this fall has had to, as sort of contractually require folks to spend at least 20 hours which is not that many but yet at the same time it's more than we usually have to actually either do community service or observations in different aspects of the neighborhood organizations or other aspects of spending time literally on the streets. And so in addition to that we've also of course had the fortune of convening a national advisory committee of practitioners including Risa including some other folks who have been involved with NPN and Van and Transforma like Rick Lowe from Project Row Houses and Amy Chang who had written I think one of the essays for the Transforma publication. And Edgar was involved in the Transforma? No. Oh, sorry. I was doing comments. Sorry. Sorry. So yes, so anyway some great folks and Impo and Osorio is a local artist based in Philadelphia and Edgar Arsino based out in Los Angeles are just some of the advisors and then we've also convened what we call the local resource team of representatives from the neighborhood and one of the things I've been particularly proud of is the fact that in addition to offering a modest honorarium to our national advisors we're honoring a comparable or offering a comparable honorarium to the local community members who are also dedicating their time and their expertise to help us in three different ways around three different levels. One is to help inform the artists and their projects that they'll be developing over the course of the next year. As a community based organization as a community based arts organization how is it that we can really shape and design artistic programming that responds to and contributes to a neighborhood vision? And then third through some of that sharing one of my hopes is that we will also then be able to contribute to and shape a larger policy discussion about decision making and development of our neighborhood as a whole. Some of you had a chance last night I know I'm going to try to wrap up but some of you had a chance last night to see a little part of the neighborhood that I call Chinatown North which is just north of the commercial core of Chinatown. It's a neighborhood that was divided from that commercial core by the construction of the Bine Street Expressway which you probably saw in the late 60s. And it's a neighborhood that has had to struggle really for its own existence over time and continues to be a very contested territory. So one of the dynamics that a number of the artists are exploring in this social practice lab is the fact that in a single geography there are at least four different names for our neighborhood. I choose an Asian artist who has chosen to call the neighborhood Chinatown North in order to really help state claim to the Chinatown community's expansion and right to occupy that area. It is also known by some people as promoted by some developers as the Cowell Hill and Lough District. And I'm sure, I know it was dark but still you may have seen some of the sort of luxury condos and apartments that are being built really within one block of Asian art station space and within one block of the homeless community shelter sort of on the other side of us. And then it's also been known as Trusseltown because of the viaduct or abandoned railway that some people in our neighborhood are interested in turning into a park similar to the High Line in New York. And then a number of people also call it the eraser hood after David Lynch answered the gritty aesthetic that he made popular in his film Eraser Head which was inspired by his experience of living in our neighborhood when he was an art student at Pala, the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts. And so I think just summing up by piece, I am hopeful even though I have a lot of questions about how we can go forward and I'm glad that it is a lab that we have launched but really experimenting with ways that again as a community arts organization how can we truly sort of impact and facilitate engagement of the diverse constituencies that live in our neighborhood and how can we shape the direction and hope you know to retain some of the diversity and representation and equity that we want to see in our community. A thread in all of your stories it made me think of some of the best advice I ever got and it was a career advice and someone told me get clear about what you want to do and don't worry about positions and I think the takeaway was you're there to do a job not have a job and the notion of whether a title matters or not was really based on whether it enabled you to do what you think you're supposed to be doing. And it sounds from all your stories that there's a vision that drives whatever titles you do take on whatever tables you do sit at and it trumps anything else and how do you do that how do you want to get clear about what it is that trumps what you take on and how do you decide what you need to take on. Two things I'll say one is I was not ready to do anything but continue to learn until I was in my 40s. I had worked several places and all of them had been learning grounds that's the first thing and I used to be scared about anything that I didn't think I could take on and I think I have learned that I say yes to everything until I have to say no and having to say no is when you discover you just know it because you have to drop things that you know you can't drop and that's the thing it's not something that is a system or whatever that's got their own way of being able to figure that out but I've discovered because we are digging you know we're trying to get somewhere we're aspiring for ourselves in the various communities that in a certain way I often don't know enough to say no when some an opportunity presents so I owe it the attention of determining whether or not it is something that you know that could help a shea or could help somebody that I know is trying to do something you know because we're not acting we're acting from so many tables that we really are a courier and a message giver often for folks who don't manage to sit there and so that's that whole notion of being folks sitting with the businesses in Central City and also sitting with the folks that are doing the people work so in a certain way you know I'm hearing everything that's going on I'm saying well that's something that so and so could do yes you know she could do a great film here but you have to you have to figure out for yourself sometimes we don't ask ourselves that question we were saying that earlier I know I sometimes don't know I'm thinking something until I speak it to somebody and you know I don't know that I think it until somebody calls the question and I realize that the things I know that updating information things have come together in a way that I have an answer do you know what I'm saying so it's different for I think it's different for everyone but for me because we are in a generating mode not just for our shade but for the several of the communities that we represent that we really have to say yeah we're interested we're curious about that before we kind of say oh no I'm not interested in that you know we're doing this you know we often don't know enough to say that when we first hear about something that's clear as caramel right I'm not in my forties yet so maybe I'm out of my boat but it's too struggle with it not just on a personal level but thinking about the fact that I think the reality of the way that so many individual artists work is not different from the way that I'm working even though I would be more often categorized as an arts professional which is that there are always different concerns and they don't always match up nicely you know and so how do you move in and out of these various projects and these various questions literally the structure of our field isn't designed to support that so if I'm interested in human rights right this second but I'm also part of this geographic community and I want to talk about our zoning issues and then I'm also you know as you were saying these kind of multiple communities are also part of you know this cultural community and I want to advocate for wealth building I mean how do you how do you occupy all of those spaces effortlessly maybe that's too great of a ambition but um right you know where it isn't a warring internally nor are you having to rationalize why you are concerned in those multiple spaces and how your skill sets are relevant to all of those spaces and I feel like you know that is what's in my belly all the time in terms of trying to figure out where am I most useful in this field that is so still very boxed and conventional and it's thinking about what it means to be a creative person and the professional spaces that are available for people. So it's kind of like how do you engage strategically and not be all over the place it's a key question but yeah and at the same time I think that there's some folks who are just that's the way their brain works so they aren't all over the place because they are completely present in that particular conversation in that particular moment but when you have to go back into the rest of the world and apply for resources or ask for time off or whatever and organize your time because you belong to this larger economy that doesn't wrap its brain around the idea that you would be in these multiple conversations and multiple topics that's when it becomes messy, right? I guess one thing that I would add from this morning's conversation too is like that need to or that desire I think that many of us have to kind of sort of work with a larger group to build a common vision that can help sort of guide the strategy and the priorities but then simultaneously I think one of the things Carol had raised in that I think is important is also for us to always be ready to take advantage or to respond when there are sort of unforeseen opportunities that open up and to not wait to have a plan in order to be able to leverage those opportunities so that's not a direct response but I think something else that's important to us. And where do you learn that skill set for each of you for many years when there is the work and the kind of training that you may have gotten whether it's as an artist or as an administrator or as some from some other codified field how do you learn to do that and if there's a next generation that's going to do this kind of work how do you deal with that? I have always had around me people who do more than I did and I talk to them all the time and one of the things that people are proud of and proud of stuff that I share and want is that we have the permits upstairs I gotta tell you I thought that I thought that like I don't do and finally one of my mentors essentially pushed me off the fence I left a room and when I came back people would congratulate me because we would get the bill he just announced that he wanted to work with me Rory Priest was a New Orleans and I tell this story all the time I went to the bathroom when I came out everybody was congratulating me and I said not since I was a kid did I get applause and he just simply had made me say yes to the opportunity of getting and then he said at the table with me when it was time to negotiate the price and he got half million dollars knocked off the piece and so it's having people in your life who know more than you your capacities and your absolute capacities because you don't always have the ability to be able to do that but if you don't cultivate this and bring these people with you then in the moment you need them they're not helpful because they don't understand you well enough to be able to understand whether it's something that they could talk you into considering when you're saying no not there I don't want to be a layer large you know that kind of thing so it's about being able to understand you're never by yourself that's a good way to get things but you can't get things that last long by yourself well I know that Rhys and I were fortunate to be part of the Douglas Red Fellowship Program and I think in general that was structured where there was a network of peers as well as more experienced mentors who were allowed to invite to work with us and overall I would say that for me and so much of I think a lot of it has actually been around peer mentorship from folks of different generations but really reaching out and providing support and ideas and the sharing of time which I think is important as well as experience you know I got my degree in filmmaking and there wasn't a training program to work in communities a lot of what I learned was just things that I started discovering while I was doing it and so I've been doing this work for the last 10 years and I've just started developing my own curriculum there wasn't anything there that you know or this is how you teach video to a community I had to just start figuring things out and one of the there was a program called Artist in Communities Training that the initiative did and I took that and that really helped in terms of how teaching at university is different community setting how you know you can't just be on a black board just drawing diagrams and lecturing it has to be participatory so then I started developing and also I had a little bit of experience in performance so I started incorporating a lot of theater exercises into my video classes and you know just so I just learned it while I was doing it the only thing that I find that is really frustrating is that there is this divide between you know the fine art world and the community art world and it's been so frustrating to sit on panels where the question always comes up oh is this art you know can be evaluated as art and so just in terms of myself being an artist and you know try to present some of the collaborative community work that I do I just don't know how to present it because there's it's always this prevailing culture of like the individual artist and so anything that is done in collaboration is not given that same level of esteem in the art world so that's one of the struggles a related idea I think that we talked about in breakfast was that when the work is about process primarily and maybe the end product is in some ways it's more an artifact of the process and the real work was in the process which is less tangible it doesn't fit neatly in a lot of validation systems both within the arts world and with the intercepting fields too right there isn't a thing at the end how do you deal with that how do you deal with the validation of this thing that doesn't quite fit it doesn't neatly fit in the catalog it doesn't need to fit on the stage how what else needs to happen in order for that kind of work to be understood more fully we have a project called the way we work with elders Michelle sitting in the audience down on her she wanted to talk to elders about movement in their life and so the result that has come out of that is this collaboration and we still haven't seen the center where we go and do movement things with them they create shows that went up on stage for an audience that loves it because it shows it shows elders being active dancing having fun which is something that we don't ordinarily get to see and so it's about understanding that the places that we have right now for things that are not the only ones sometimes you've got to create the space where what you've done is valuable and again it's about that audience again who do you want in your audience one of the big things we've discovered is elders Tammy's grandfather was 103 and he just transitioned and granddaddy was driving until he was 100 102 so we don't have a world that has people between 60 and 100 being active and so this is creativity too the vision is to see that the creativity is to do something about it and so that's just an example but sometimes it is not either or it's a matter of you don't fit that okay we're going to create a place for it and that was an impulse that Michelle had because her father was older and so she had a sensibilities for elders that was a little bit different that was about vitality and she's a dancer and wanted to learn about kind of that dictionary of understanding about elders and movement and what it might mean for work but here it's very useful for them because they come alive they come in on crutches and it's like you're going what are they going to do on stage how did they put them things on the side and they put them on you and swear that they're going to perform in school and they are up there and they are doing it to death when you hear yesterday for the keynote I think the asters were really embodies how do you, so to your point yes we need to create new systems and also how do you know the current system so if you were talking about if they leverage, you leverage harder so okay I have a very process based practice but I also make these objects and I use your money to fund this process over here okay let me figure that out so what I don't want to see is trying to figure out how to commodify community based art or process based art and there's some sponsor like the revolution literally will be televised and it will have a corporate sponsor like I don't want to see that but I do feel like there is a way to figure out how to milk the current economy to you know borrow from this over here and leverage that towards kind of corporate business so we're going to open it up now and invite comments and questions from all of us and Steve has a mic back there so if you're interested in participating just raise your hand look up y'all or if you want to respond to some of the questions that have been on the table we can participate in many ways Linda okay great I'd like to know if you would just comment how much how much advice how much help, how much support how much inspiration you got from outside your community as you were looking for models for what you were doing as you were looking for partners as you were looking for somebody to to really give you what you needed to go forward there's a lot of talk about working from within the community and I think that's wonderful and I strongly understood but how much help you had to reach outside of the community for this as well can I ask you maybe because I think some of the response to that question also has to do with Carol's question of how do you define community I think I'm thinking of geographic community specifically but thank you for the clarification I mean I think just an initial response I think and like I think many people in this room having the chance to connect with folks from different geographies is a really special opportunity and a gift to kind of be able to learn even though I know there was one community development program officer here in Philadelphia who told me all real estate development is local because it's so influenced by the politics and the particularities of your location I think there's still a lot of other inspiration and creative linking that I've had shared with me with other folks through MPN and also through NAN and other forums where I've been able to connect with peers inside and outside of my community I think the thing I would say is that a lot of what we were doing we were doing on a smaller scale up until 2005 and then 2005 the great federal flood and we were still standing and this is toward two things answering your question about how much help from outside and also talking about why you better be ready for opportunity and so we knew we had to help our people for sure and we couldn't do it with nothing and there were people who wanted to be helpful too and so we conjugated culture inside of that construct of Maslow belonging when you belong to somebody and they belong to you you got their backs so what we brought in we got out we brought in and we got it out we shared it with folks in the community and right now we currently have more funding that's coming from outside of our new audience than what's happening inside of New Orleans and that is it continues to be more but a more in a smaller amount as time goes on and so cultural and social enterprise are very big things right now that I'm studying and that we're working on in terms of improving our capacity to earn we always wanted to earn but now we need to earn more than we ever we ever did before but we really get I would say three quarters of our financing outside the friends I've made here I made in those circles and so it helped us to know we were not crazy there were other people who thought the same thing and it's so helpful to be a weed you know what I'm saying and so when you discover you're a weed it's like you get a whole another kind of feel about yourself you feel like weed can do it because you're a weed Linda I'm really interested in carrying this about those moments when opportunity is presented in front of you and you don't quite recognize it and you have people in your spirit that can help you with that but I'm interested in those moments from the panel what were those moments where you knew you were going to take another week and how did you identify yourself very personal level like really nice not even on an institutional level but on a personal level so I'm a program director between investments and creativity for anyone who's familiar that's a 10 year initiative and we're in year 10 so you know that's a like work that out and you know speaking to what Carol brought up in terms of legacy building and being founders and really intentionally creating that next generation of leadership I always wanted to work myself out of a job so thrilled to say that we have hired our first full-time paid executive director in September, Camille Wasami beautiful very excited about that so there are these very particular moments that have created a cliff even if the timing of those things just happened to coincide and so there's a real question of what's the next role um you know I think the when is personal right like the when is specific to the person but I think that response um it's just um these products are practice based for courage you know of just negotiating the discomfort I think to be in process and iterative based work is to occupy space of unknowing you know it's to get comfortable with that unknowing um or um familiar maybe not comfortable but familiar with that sensation of discomfort and being able to lean into it you know find your balance other thoughts other thoughts yeah hello hello hi I had said something about you can't really expect people to talk about their wants and needs if the world of possibility hasn't been open to them and I just wondered if anybody on the panel wanted to speak to moments of individual transformation that you've seen in people when that world of possibility was open yeah I think that the work that we're doing you know with um Arshay College Unbound we've got one of our students here I think it's one of those places you know we have a really a hodge podge of students who are all at one level another artist, culture bearers or activists for the most part and I think there's an appreciation that somebody thought about them and created something for them that honored and respected what they brought and it makes a huge a huge difference I liken it to what it was like when we were in that post disaster phase and people we didn't know showed up for us it does more than help you in that moment but it teaches you something bigger about the world and how it can work sometimes and it makes you more committed to wanting to make the world work that way more times so that more people can get part it's transformational it's transformational on both sides I think as an American people for sure we become a bit jaded and so we have these high ideals that are built on shaky ground and we keep talking about the ideals but we're not working on making the foundation stronger and so it is inside of these individuals things that are happening and we're in a time when lots of them are we get to kind of recommit to the idea that faith without works doesn't work it's fantasy you've got to do the work to make the ideal to make the ideal happen I think two quick examples maybe to share one is just from our youth programs one particular alum who has become you know a very good friend has talked about how when he came first to be trans-initiative he would have assumed that after high school that his only option would be to join the military to do military service but that because he was exposed to the arts and to his own sort of passionate talents he has sort of committed to becoming an artist and to be a teaching artist who has come back and actually led programs for a while it's not common enough because there are a number of other youth from our program who you know even if they felt like they maybe they had a choice didn't really feel like they had a choice and have had to go into service and have had to go into combat and see you know and do really horrible things but but yeah I try to hold on to sort of those positive moments and then also on another level related to our neighborhood there was a project that we did that Asian Arts Institute did as part of our Chinatown inflects series of specific installations in and around our neighborhood and an artist named Rebecca Hackerman did something she called her visionary binoculars where she installed binoculars overlooking the Byte Street Expressway and then doing workshops and almost like charrettes with community members to ask them you know sort of like what is it that they would like to see there if it wasn't the Byte Street Expressway and there was one particular workshop that she led with preschool aged kids who you know all are very familiar with this expressway as part of their daily lives and they were at first just like wow it would be so quiet if we didn't have that expressway in our neighborhood and then the majority of them asked for either a river to be put there or a park and something green and so I think I mean it was actually really beautiful because I've sat in many formal neighborhood planning processes and were sort of for those desires for adults and other people in the neighborhood but to hear it from again like preschool aged kids you know I'm talking about sort of what is it that they could envision for their neighborhood was very powerful. Yeah my transformational moment actually was during the trip to Alaska as part of the process we were teaching youth about you know how to tell their stories and there was a native Alaskan girl who refused, she was too shy she said I'm not telling my story so I told her okay why don't you just put headphones on and do the sound for this other person's story so the other the other girl who came up to tell her story she had just recently moved to Alaska and her whole story was I don't see why native Alaskans get all these handouts from the government you know I could see this girl holding the microphone and getting really angry and there was this really intense experience for her because she was wearing these headphones and she could hear this the sound and then she somehow just waited to the whole conversation was over but then she came up to me and she said I want to tell my story important. Please join me in thanking the panel for their time