 a new national anthem. The truth is I never cared for the national anthem. If you think about it, it's not a good song. It's too high for most of us with the rockets' red glare, and then there are the bombs. Always, always, there is war and bombs. Once I sang it at homecoming and through even the Tenacious High School Band off-key, but the song didn't mean anything, just a call to the field, something to get through before the pummeling of youth. And what are the stanzas we never sing? The third that mentions no refuge could save the hireling and the slave. Perhaps the truth is every song of this country has an unsung third stanza, something brutal, snaking underneath as we absentmindedly sing the high notes with a beer, sloshing in the stands, hoping our team wins. Don't get me wrong, I do like the flag, how it undulates in the wind like water, elemental, and best when it's humbled, brought to its knees, clung to by someone who has lost everything, when it's not a weapon, when it flickers, when it folds up so perfectly, you can keep it until it's needed, until you can love it again, until the song in your mouth feels like sustenance, a song where the notes are sung by even the ageless woods, the short grass plains, the red river gorge, the fistful of land left unpoisoned, the song that's our birthright, that's sung in silence when it's too hard not to go on. That sounds like someone's rough fingers weaving into another's. That sounds like a match being lit in an endless cave, the song that says my bones are your bones and your bones are my bones, and is it that enough? Discovery, Night Foundation's weekly program on the arts. Thank you for joining us. I'm Priya Sarkar, Director of Arts at Night, and today I'll be discussing the social impacts of the arts with two guests who know a lot about that topic, albeit from quite different perspectives. Our first guest is poet, storyteller, and organizer, Aja Monay. Born and raised in Brooklyn, and now based in Miami, Aja has won numerous accolades for her poetry, including being named the youngest winner of the legendary Nea Rican Poets Cafe Grand Slam and a nominee for an NAACP literary award for poetry. She co-founded Smoke Signals Studio, a safe haven for artists and activists in Miami's Little Haiti, facilitates Voices Poetry for the People, a workshop in collaboration with Community Justice Project and Dream Defenders, and most recently has been hosting Homemade, Poetic Remedies for the Times, an online poetry reading she created with the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. And that clip at the top of the show was of acclaimed poet Ada Lumone reading during the May Day episode of Homemade. Aja, thank you for joining us. Hi, thank you for having me. Our other guest is Clay Lord, Vice President of Strategic Impact at Americans for the Arts, the nation's largest and leading arts advocacy organization. Clay leads the organization's research, communications, and program initiatives to drive systemic change, including the development of this social impact explorer tool, which we'll discuss a bit more in a moment. He joins us fresh off of the Americans for the Arts annual convention, which took place virtually this week and ended yesterday. Clay, thank you for joining us too. Happy to be here. Before we dive into the conversation, I just want to let viewers know that we will have a brief Q&A at the end and you can submit your questions anytime during this conversation in the Zoom Q&A or in the comments on Facebook Live. So Aja and Clay, as you both know, Knight Foundation's goal is to foster informed and engaged communities and we support the arts because we believe that they connect people to each other and to the places where they live. So as social investors, we seek to make social impact. But that phrase, as all three of us have discussed in the past, that phrase can be very ambiguous. It means a lot of different things and it can seem amorphous and vague at times. So I'd love to start by hearing from each of you how you think about it. So perhaps Aja, we could start with you as you think about the impact you seek to make, whether it's through your poetry or through the work that you do with organizations, how do you think about that impact? Well, thank you for the question and thank you for having me. I think social impact is, in my mind, it's almost like it doesn't even need to be said because in saying it, it's like you imply that being a human being is an island unto itself, but it's not. I mean, we live with people and we live in the world, in community with people. And so the biggest perspective or approach that I have to my work and to art is that it's about relationships and it's about organizing around those relationships and understanding the impact that we have in one another's lives as part of just being here in this existence. All of us were made up of the many stories that raised us. And when you start to learn of the impact of storytelling and the cultural resonance of that storytelling, you realize that culture shapes our societies and it shapes and shifts how we see and value life and value the ranges of life. And so art has always been a big part of how we animate the world around us and how we tell those stories that make up the breadth of who we are and examine that interior world that then illustrates the material conditions of our lives. Thank you. And I suspect that many of the folks watching will agree and feel that in some ways it's a shame and a challenge to have to try to put that into words as if it's something we don't all kind of experience. At the same time, Clay, you work with a lot of folks and organizations who are trying to figure out how to communicate that, especially as they might be advocating with folks who don't necessarily see it the same way or speak the same language. And I wonder if you could share a bit about how the development of the social impact explore tool and maybe what you've been learning as that works progressed. Sure, yeah. And thank you for having me. And I've just got to say I love Aja's sentiments there and I fully agree with them. And I think one of the things that is both interesting and frustrating about working at an organization like Americans for the Arts where our primary audience is actually the people who are policymakers who are not necessarily deeply invested in arts and culture or at least don't think they are, is that there's this uniquely or relatively uniquely American challenge that is a full disconnect between a culture or a people generally that consume a significant amount of arts and culture that center arts and culture in their lives in various ways that as you've seen through the protests of the last few weeks and as you've seen in a lot of other ways in the COVID crisis have gone to arts and culture as a way to express themselves, celebrate things, mourn things and also sort of stay sane in the midst of a quarantine. And at the same time don't actually value culture in a way that translates into public funding and public support. And so what we have done, what Priya's mentioning is something called the Arts and Social Impact Explorer and I think we're gonna share the link. It's a free tool online and what it basically is sort of the exact opposite of the natural innate belief in the power of arts and culture that Aja's talking about it. It's sort of taking all that subtext and making it text. And it's making it text in like rainbows and making it spin and making it tiny blurbs that people can capture and take home that try and explain all of the different ways that arts and culture are inextricably connected with every aspect of your life. And so there are 26 different aspects, community aspects that are listed here ranging from environment and sustainability to workforce, to economy, to diversity, equity, inclusion, community cohesion, aging, health and wellness. And in all of these cases, what we've done is we've pulled together a variety of disparate research and example projects as well as organizations that are working at these intersections and we've made them all easily accessible. We've designed this really deliberately as sort of like the surface of a lake so that people who want to can come and they can look at three different sentences and get a sense of the intersection between the arts and community cohesion. They can understand that the arts participants, nine out of 10 of them report meeting someone new and making new friends or that 80% of people explore new places using arts and culture as the mechanism for exploring them and that that allows them to have a broader and more expansive point of view about the world. Things like that, they can keep that surface and if they want to, they can dive really deeply. We've got fact sheets that people can download. We've got links that people can follow to the original research. And by integrating those two things together, we're able to allow people who are at different places on their journey to understanding the universal and profound impacts of arts and culture to both understand them for themselves and then also to share because one of the things we also know is that it's not enough to talk to the people who are already on our boat. We need to get more people onto our boat in order to kind of get where we need to go and that includes folks who might not think of themselves as arts advocates, might even not think of themselves as arts consumers or art makers even though we know that everyone in the United States is consuming or making art in some way, basically every day. Thanks, Clay. So we can see from that tool that there are many different dimensions that are articulated there. And from Knight's perspective, based on the philosophy that I shared a few moments ago, the sweet spot that we tend to aim for is that part of the wedge where we paused that's community cohesion. But I think that that's something we, many of us perhaps would agree that seems to be harder and harder to come by in recent years. There have been studies including some commission by Knight Foundation that are looking at the increased polarization that has been taking place. And so I'm wondering how can art achieve community cohesion? Meaning what does that specifically look like? How do we get to where my bones are your bones and your bones are my bones, as Ada Lamont says in her piece that we opened with. Aja, would you mind starting off? Well, I don't know the answers. Working to figure that out, but I think a big part of the difference between the institutional intellectual framework of what Clay is doing and versus the work that people are doing on the ground, grassroots organizing, is to understand that people, a lot of the folks that we're trying to reach who aren't on our bandwagon actually, but who have many times been the victim of cultural appropriation or exploitation of cultural power and impact because the powers that be are very aware of the impact of culture. The government understands how culture and art works even though we claim to say that we don't. It's not measured just by what we fund publicly but it's also measured by the stories we tell, the media we put up, the ideology that we support, the consumer products that we put out in the world, like all those things are used art to animate them and to create the world that we exist in that is so consumer focused and capitalist driven that we have to talk about it in the sense that these things have also, art has been weaponized against our communities and therefore as grassroots organizers, our job is to get people to understand that they are being used as well, that their skill sets and the things that come natural to them, the things that they don't spend forever going to schools to learn all the fancy words about, but that is literally instinctual and almost like a genetic memory, ancestral in some ways without that sounding too kooky, but that it's second nature, the gift of gab that our folks have, the love for beautifying neighborhoods or homes or communities. Then the narrative that we tell in the world that like black and poor people don't love themselves or don't care about their communities or our savages or all this stuff is told through storytelling and it's told through ways that are purposely and intentionally strategically created so that we're more disconnected from one another and that more barriers and more stereotypes are created to vilify and to create this narrative in people's imaginations of one another and so then we live in a society of fear and when you live out of fear, you're more likely to make irrational illogical decisions not just in terms of the ideas and images that are playing in your head, but also in terms of the way that you move in the world and how you love one another and how you show up for your neighbor or how you don't show up for your neighbor. I mean, look at COVID, this COVID reality we're being told all these narratives of fear that are making us more distant from one another and you're seeing that we have a president in office who's propagating that fear so that others feel validated in their fear and their insecurity and affirmed and it allows them to make these really horrific terrorizing decisions about harming one another. So art in my mind, the way that we try to use or talk about art and culture is that they go hand in hand and there are many examples and studies and books that you can look up where we know that this society, American society understands the impact on the role of art and culture. We just aren't, it's intentional that our school systems and our education systems are so bad, they're horrible. Our school systems are so bad that then we need private institutions and foundations to come and fund us for arts programming that should be embedded in our education and our humanities program should be embedded in our education system, but we're still fighting and it becomes a private sector issue. It becomes a, let's bring somebody else in to bring arts into the community that then keeps the community more separate from itself. And so I think like a big part of us is just getting, the work that we do is getting people to understand that art is an organizing tool and that it's always been a part, it's a black radical tradition, it's always been a part of our lives and how we animate our lives and how we tell our stories. Thanks, Aja. And Clay, I do want you to be able to respond as well, but I wonder if I could just pose a question that might also be a framing for that. So Aja, you talked about how we move in the world and I think so much of what's been going on both in the pandemic as well as more recently where the killings of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery and the protests that have taken place have been kind of a clarion call to individuals of all many different backgrounds and beliefs to organizations, to different sectors to kind of reevaluate and rethink how we move through this world and what the role is of arts and culture and what our particular roles are. And in fact, of course, we say social impact. I think we're all seeking to have positive social impact. There could be negative social impacts as well as we've seen, we have even recent examples, unfortunately of even arts and cultural institutions either having negative impacts whether through just not being mindful of what they're doing or and how that could impact people. So I'm wondering, Clay, in that context, after con just ended and you, in fact, just in the weeks leading up had completely revamped the program to respond to what's happening right now, what are organizations thinking about right now? And I wonder if you could share a bit about the themes that really, that you saw that came out of that. And of course, please respond to Aja's comments too, if you like. Yeah, no, and I will touch on that, but first I just wanna really lift up what Aja was talking about and note that one of the things that is hard in developing something like the Arts and Social Impact Explorer and in developing it specifically to try and work to incrementally shift the existing system of power instead of we have a lot of other work that we are doing is about sort of trying to dismantle those systems and to create a kind of broader cultural equity in the US but one of the things that we have found in the work around social impact is that this framework that the Explorer shows where it really is about drawing the lines from arts and culture to something pragmatic or something that people say is the top thing that they care about is a pretty white point of view. And I wanna acknowledge that and say that we've had a lot of focus groups and work that we have been doing as we continue to try and overhaul the Explorer to make it more localized and make it more customizable for folks. And particularly when we dialogue with Native American participants or African American or Hispanic participants they sometimes don't have much to do with the Explorer because they think the Explorer is sort of a dumbing down of something that is innate and natural that culture is everywhere and culture is part of every aspect and every decision that is made in their communities. And so they think it's sort of fine that we have to have this sort of tool to talk about things with decision makers but they also, and I agree, feel it's really important to recognize that that's not everyone's point of view on culture that not everyone is starting from that deeply pragmatic utilitarian place and that there is a whole aspect of arts and culture that doesn't have anything to do with that that simply is there and that is making all of these things possible in communities whether it gets the credit for it or not. To pivot to the conference, so the annual convention we do it every year we were supposed to do it in DC. We ended up putting it on virtually and as Priya you were mentioning we had about six weeks to reprogram the whole thing during which everything changed week to week, right? So we ended up developing about 50 new sessions from scratch over the course of that month and a half and they were all designed to respond to what we were hearing from our constituents for the kind of most important needs. And that included a sort of major component about cultural and racial equity and the understanding of a need to move towards anti-racist points of view to, particularly we serve a lot of public and private local arts agencies which collectively distribute $2.8 billion in funds every year either as grants or as contracts and so how they could rethink their grant making strategy rethink their hiring strategy which of course is work that they have been doing for a long period of time but has taken on a sort of specific urgency and an understanding that some of that work has been performative when it needs to be actual and so they were looking for sort of information on that and the other big sort of area which we had talked about before Priya is around making the case right now. So I just wanna give two quick examples. Philadelphia, the city of Philadelphia one of the larger cities in the country is in the process of trying to cut 100% of the funding for their city agency for arts and culture and that is really frustrating because that agency in the form that it's had has only existed for about 10 years which means that they were late to the game and now they're leaving early and it's gonna have significant impacts on the cultural community in Philadelphia because they distribute money but they also directly advocate for the role of arts and culture in city government and then on the other side of that you've got LA County which two days ago released and adopted the first ever county-wide cultural equity statement where what they did in the midst of this crisis in the midst of having to cut significant funding from everyone is they reaffirmed a belief that arts and culture needs to be integrated into every single city department that it needs to be used to address as many of the different challenges and opportunities in LA County as possible. And so we're at this moment where there's sort of two paths that people can go down and we ideally want more to if they can't go all the way towards the version of what LA County has they can at least not kill public funding for arts and culture which is at significant risk. We're seeing the same thing with arts education where in almost every state they are looking at significant education shortfalls in terms of funding and arts education as well as physical education and things like that are on that cutting block. The state of Massachusetts just entertained an idea of furloughing all of their arts education and music teachers for the coming school year. And so we're trying to deal with all of that. And a lot of that is dealt with through the lens of social impact and through the sort of more immediate conversations of what do you care about? Okay, the arts are part of that too. So that it's not the end solution where people are naturally understanding that arts and culture are part of everything but it is the shorter term solution of working with mayors, working with elected officials working with people in Congress to help them understand that arts and culture for example has 5.1 million cultural workers inside it many of whom are independent contractors who have benefited from the CARES Act and its integration of unemployment benefits for gig workers for the first time. That is a direct result of many years of advocacy to help people understand that those gig workers are doing real work. They're doing work that should be valued and that they're doing work that manifests an economic impact, manifests in social impact and so therefore they need to be covered in the same way as everyone else. Thanks Clay. You know your example of Philly which I'll just mention Philadelphia is one of the eight cities in which Knight funds the arts and it reminds me of something that last week's guest Michael O'Brien of the village who is from Philadelphia and who was speaking with Victoria Rogers our VP of arts. He said it's easy to reason away people who are distant when doing line items in budgets, closing those distances matters. And it strikes me that you and Americans for the arts and the works that you all are doing with the social and as part of which is the social impact explorer tool and Aja the work that you are doing with the various organizations that you're involved with are in a grassroots way are coming at that challenge of closing those distances in different ways and that one of the themes that kind of comes up in conversations that we have at night and others have is about that unique ability that the arts have to potentially close distances on both an intellectual level but on a deeper emotional level. And I'm curious, Aja how do you think about the work of closing those distances? I'm thinking about both organizing work that you do as well as your artistic process and kind of one thing you and I spoke about is how long does that take? What's the quote unquote result and when should we expect to see a result and is it even realistic to be expecting kind of results when it might be a long process? And I'd love to hear that before we take a few questions from the viewers. Well, there's two things I wanna say. First is that it's not the job of the oppressed or oppressed or those who are underprivileged to bridge that gap. It's the job of the people who get paid to do that one and two, who are in positions where they have resources not just fiscal resources, but relationships and understandings of how systems work, et cetera. Those are, it's their job, especially public servants to make sure that they are reaching out and bridging the gap. And I think every foundation should have a grassroots organizer, at least one organizers that they are in conversation with and working with to understand what is the pulse of the community? How do we better fund the community? But also how do we shift policy so that we don't need foundations eventually? Like I know that's a weird thing to say but we wanna stop philanthropy. We want people to actually, we should get to the place where we're creating positions where people are self-sufficient, where we have created a society that actually values people's lives and we don't need foundations to put band-aids on a suffering sick society that's not actually solving the core issues and intimate realities and lives of people. So that's the first thing. The second thing is I wanna bring up someone like Sister Angela Davis who talks a lot and has been working a lot around abolition and talking about the ideas of abolition at least 20, 30 years ago, where now that was such, then it was such a foreign concept for mainstream conversation. No one, saying the word abolition got you written up in right wing magazines and articles and television networks as a crazy radical socialist who had, how dare you, you're crazy, you don't know what you're talking about. And now it's normalized. And one of the things that Angela Davis talks to us about is how these moments were organizers where the world is not paying attention and we feel like we're alone and we're not getting the funding and we're hungry and we're frustrated and we're angry and we're burned out that those moments when we feel like we wanna give up and that things are not worth continuing to do that those are very deceitful moments because actually what we learn through these uprisings and what we learn in these pivotal moments is that movements are not about just one moment. Movements is all that work that's happening day to day interdependent on one another in the in between time and that it's actually feminist. It's a radical feminist approach to thinking about time and thinking about our relationship to our communities and our societies that we have to have a long-term strategy, a long-haul strategy and know that change does not happen overnight. It's the incremental day to day struggle that then these epiphanies that seem like they came out of nowhere, you know, the white mainstream consciousness waking up and saying, oh, whoa, there's been an undercurrent happening. There's always been other Americas in reality of the narrative, the great America that we quote unquote talk about. There's always been an undercurrent of that. Juneteenth as an example, something that everybody now is talking about but in black communities, we've been celebrating Juneteenth since Juneteenth and I remember going to book festivals in Harlem and experiencing black authors coming together and black, you know, not just art craftsmen and people like putting up their little stands and everybody supporting the community and getting your fresh juice. And I mean, we have always, regardless of whether or not we've been spoken to or looked after or funded or supported, we've always tried to be innovative and creative about how we show up for our communities. And I think that that's the time that doesn't seem effective in the moment. Sometimes we feel really like it's not, maybe it's not gonna make a larger structural difference but I go back to my practice, which is as a poet understanding that the interior world and the personal relationships are political. And so those day to day things that you do with your team, your staff, the people around you, your neighborhood, your grocery, you know, the grocery worker, that all these interactions, which I think poets force us to pay attention to with these small intimate moments that shape our stories and shape our ideas about the world and what we imagine as possible is how we get the change in the end social impact we wanna see and investing in those intimate interpersonal relationship moments, which is what organizing is about, then we start to see a cultural shift on the undercurrent. I mean, Obama, quote unquote, couldn't exist, you know, the presidency, even though we have the issues we still have without that every day, day to day organizing, knocking on doors and phone calls and sitting in the churches and listening to people's stories. And I mean, we see that that is the most effective and in this era of social media and stay at home orders. It's important that we realize that internet, even us on Zoom, is a tool to try to mimic the collective consciousness that we all have, the need to connect. We're seeking still, in spite of not being geographically around each other, we're still seeking connection. So that's a big part of what I see as the beauty of this moment too, is how we continue to be innovative and create and inspire and reach out to one another even when we're not physically around each other. Thank you. You know, I would like to take a question that's been submitted that I think relates to what you were just sharing, Aja. Usha asks, at a time when we need more healing through art, how can we get people to see artists as essential workers who can make an impact? This could be for either or both of you, Aja and Clay. Well, I'll answer it first because that's what I'm doing. Do it. So we started this webinar with a clip from Homemade and Homemade was created in response to the fact that we were being, and it was right in the beginning, at the very beginning, before there was a lot of virtual events happening that I knew Poetry Month was coming up and I knew that we were in this moment where we're gonna have to be home, people are dealing with this illness, how do we get folks to one, understand the importance of home and how home is always, rather than it being like this prison sentence, which it isn't, but those of us who have the ability even shelter in place, right? In a midst of a country that has an incredible houseless population, what are the things that we take for granted in our homes that are there all the time, that we have been disconnected from their ability to heal us and how we show up for ourselves because we're always working, we're always moving, and we're always trying to make ends meet or do whatever it is to survive? How do we practice? What does COVID teach us about practicing love and care and how we use the same approach of artists who have the passion and the focus and the fortitude to commit to an act of creativity and that the way that you cook and the way that you prepare yourself tea and the way that you make your bed and the way that you shower, that all these things are arts, are artistic practices, and so how do we animate our lives in the ways that we start to really deal with those little things as if they are valuable, which teaches us those are labors, that the home has always been seen as the place, oh, that's what women do, that ain't a job, that's what domestic workers do, it's not worth a decent wage, it's not worth attention or even a story or a movie made about it or a book, but that these are actually the real essential workers of our lives are the people who make our homes and the people who teach us how to heal and teach us how to make homemade remedies. Your grandma who has that folk tradition she's been using forever, the auntie that tells you to put the onions on your chest or under your feet or the vicks that your grandma always tries to put on you every time for everything that anything happens, right? There's all these little traditions we have that have been a part of our lives, so we wanted to offer literal homemade remedies as well as things that you could get in your kitchen and you're cupboard and figure out how to make to better your immune system, but as well as medicinal poems, poems that can take care of your interior world while we were dealing inundated with so much news of death and fear and frustration that poetry allows us to deal with the stillness of our voices and to really hear what's there, what's truth and what's not. And so that's one of the ways that we respond to seeing healing as a part of the artistic practice that it's therapy, but it's also deeper than that because it's also, it's political too that it has the ability to do that. I think that's, I love everything about that and I think it illustrates something that's really important, which is the sort of innate, that innate creativity has a, in our, in the work that Americans for the Arts does with this sort of like the broadest constituency, this concept of essential has become an interesting thing for us to think about. In part because we're at a moment and our research shows this where something like 50 to 60% of all of the creative workers in the United States are currently unemployed because of COVID-19 and that's awful. It's like three times what you're seeing in most other things. We are the first or second, depending on which research you're looking at, most impacted sector in the country right now, we're gonna have the longest trajectory for recovery and the people in our field who are gonna recover the slowest are independent creative workers, the artists themselves because of how our structure is set up. That's really awful, but in the midst of all that and this is not meant as a balm necessarily, 75% of the folks who responded to our survey and that's something like 19,000 survey responses so far have reported that they have been using their artistic practice to raise morale, create community cohesion or lighten the experience of COVID-19 on their communities through arts and culture and the bulk of them are not getting paid to do that. And so the challenge around essential is that there is, there is essential work and then there is essential to the point that it deserves to be recognized financially. And right now the arts have this problem where because they will be there, they are taken advantage of in the United States and it's a really challenging issue because of course the answer isn't to stop creating. The answer is to get to that recognition that Ajah is talking about and make sure that it's a universal recognition that we don't actually have to have the social impact explorer anymore. We don't have to draw all of the lines and connect all the dots because everyone understands it and that's where we ultimately wanna go. But we are in a moment right now where artists as essential workers, artists as first responders, the reaction that we get from people is that artists are not the same thing as healthcare workers. Artists aren't the ones who are right there on the front lines and that is disrespectful for you to say that. And then on the other side I was in a conversation yesterday with Dina Haggag from United States Artists and she was saying that they've just launched Artists Relief which I think Knight is part of and they had an article in the New York Times where they called artists, they put artists together in the broader category of working class labor sectors. And within a half hour of posting that article online they had to take the article down because editors had received so many comments from people lambasting the idea that artists were working class, lambasting the idea that art was labor. And so we've got a lot of work to do in terms of that public value. And that's part of why we think that the first step is to make all of those connections for people so that they can learn it. And then the idea is that eventually it becomes as innate for as many people as possible as Aja is talking about which is exactly where we need to get as a country in order for arts and culture to be valued as the incredible essential thing that it is. Thanks, Clay. I think what you're talking about and I just wanna confirm for folks, yes, my foundation is part of the joint effort that is the Artist Relief Fund. And I think what you were talking about just leads well actually into a question that we've received from Arnold which I'm gonna ask as Arnold asked it and then just perhaps reframe also just looking at the time reframe a little bit as closing question to both of you before we end with art. So Arnold asks, I work with college age arts advocates who are just now discovering their political voice. They're expecting immediate action and are frustrated. How would you advise them to work for the long haul? So I kind of would ask each of you to kind of answer that question from your own perspective. I think Clay, I was wondering from your perspective because you're working with organizations because so much of us are so many of us meaning organizations of different types and that's philanthropic entities, that's public entities, that's the arts and cultural non-profits, are really very acutely focused even more so now than perhaps a few weeks ago or a few months ago on what is the role we can play especially at this moment and how might we communicate that? Curious what your advice would be to folks who are figuring that out. And then Aja, for you, for artists or organizations who are trying to find the way that they can authentically play a role that is appropriate and effective but might be a long range commitment as you've noticed, what advice might you have for them? So from Americans for the Arts perspective and I should also just say from my perspective, I think so I was part of Americans for the Arts, I was the representative of a coalition called Create Justice that was a coalition that spanned from artists and folks who were actually incarcerated who were working to integrate arts and culture into rehabilitation and incarceration practices in the United States, all the way up to national advocacy organizations like Americans for the Arts funders, things like that. And I was in a sort of big coalition meeting that we were having that was that whole span of people and the dialogue about duration came up, the dialogue about persistence, the dialogue about sort of the different roles of different people in any movement and the frustrations that come with that. It is deeply unfair to ask people who have been working their whole lives to be patient. That is a terrible reality of for example, movements towards racial justice. That the people who have been laser focused on this for longest are the ones who are most oppressed by the current situation and who most deserve to have the current situation changed. And so the idea of saying to them, it's gonna take a long time, you gotta be in it for a long haul is deeply unfair. And I think the thing that has happened in this moment, which we will either capture and it'll make movement happen or it will pass us by with the next crisis, is that there are a bunch of privileged people who have suddenly become aware of something we should have been aware of a long time ago. And we can either embrace that and embrace the exhaustion that comes with that because honestly, it's been three whole weeks how many people are tired at this point, right? And that's a real thing and you've gotta pick that up. So what does that mean in arts and culture and with organizations? I think it means individual champions inside organizations raising the questions about the state of philanthropy, raising the questions about national nonprofits, national service organizations, local and regional agencies and arts organizations and the structures that they have put in place that have perpetuated systems of injustice even as we have been ostensibly working towards a system that is more racially just, more socially just and bringing those things up in this moment when it is so hyper sensitive so that we can begin making those movements happen. And then yes, it is gonna take a long time and I think the secret is that take a long time can sometimes end up being code for wait until people aren't paying attention anymore. And it needs to not turn into that, it needs to instead be something where we are incrementally setting ourselves up with tasks inside Americans for the Arts right now. We are building, we've had a statement on cultural equity and a cultural equity plan for about five years now. We are building a new one that is very specific incremental movement that we will be making. We are starting with education, we are working on finding funding for distributing ability for people to take anti-racist trainings, et cetera. And we're gonna hold ourselves to that and we are trying to build that accountability in because we don't want this to be temporary thing that then subsides, we need this to be the impetus for change so that that long haul can maybe become slightly shorter. Thanks, Clay. I wanna, people thought ending slavery was impossible. People still think ending sex trafficking which is essentially slavery is impossible. None of these things are impossible so long as we are breathing and we can all do something to change it immediately. Immediately, it can happen literally right now, it can happen tomorrow. If all of us truly decided to care and to put ourselves in uncomfortable, stretched out situations where we grew, we have that capacity. The human spirit is insurmountable in terms of its ability to evolve and transform and inspire and do good in the world. Evil cannot last for forever. So with that being said, we can do anything we want. We can, we could really do it. If you decided tomorrow, if everybody at Knight Foundation decided tomorrow, they were gonna throw some money out of the window and say let's all go down to the house of the shelter right around the corner and we're gonna go feed everybody and we're gonna all paint the houses and we can decide whatever we wanna do, we can do it. You can do it, it's possible. Everything is possible. I think the difference is that we are walking on eggshells with people who are afraid to face themselves and face the harm that has been done in the society. We are trying to make sure everybody gets things the right way, they get the words the right way, they learn the books the right way, they find the right talking points, that we have the right graphics, that we make the best painting, we find the next great novel that's gonna change the conditions of our people but in actuality, we decide what changes. Each one of us decides that we can change something, that we're going to do something about it, that we're gonna sit and talk to our business partners and our team and our friends and our families and we're gonna challenge them, we're gonna push them to no end and we're gonna make things happen. We decide that, we decide to be uncomfortable. We decide to think that people's lives matter more than our comfort, that people's everyday lived experiences are more important than whether or not we like the way somebody talked to us or the way somebody looked at us in an office meeting one day. That in actuality, what are people really caring about? What is this frustration, this aggression really coming from? Where is that deeply rooted? And we are animals in the sense, mammals in the sense that most of us are trying to protect ourselves. We're moving from a place genuinely of just wanting to, of defense and trying to make sure that we're okay in the world. But when we actually sit down and make agreements with one another, we don't need to fight. We don't need to have to sit around and make illustrious words and do illustrious web panels to talk about what we already know to be true is that every person deserves to live, every person deserves decency, every person deserves a roof over their head, every person deserves access to equitable education and healthcare. These are things that I don't understand why we're still even arguing it. So I get it, I get the frustration of wanting the urgency of things happening. Poof, it's done. But that means that all of us have to be invested just like we're seeing in this uprising moment, all that energy that we're seeing that's awakening, it's showing us what's possible. Look at what's possible when all of us wake up and say, yes, I wanna change, I wanna do something different, I'm going to do it. I'm not even just I want, I'm going to the difference in language there. I will, these are important things. How we frame our words, shows how we actually see our world, right? So our language, how we talk about ourselves has to change. How we talk about our capacity to do something has to change. Courage, having the courage, that's the greatest human virtue. Having courage, find the courage to do the most difficult thing that is necessary for equity in this world. That's one thing. Digital organizing is a tool. It is not the end, it's a tool. It's one way of helping to amplify the stories we wanna tell, the things we wanna see in the world, the ways we wanna be and how we wanna love, but digital organizing in and of itself is not enough, right? Creating, and I know that it's a great skill set, but this is why we talk about relationships. So I would say to Arnold, is it Arnold, that finding ways to build relationships with others who are doing similar work that might not be doing digital work, but are organizing around the same issues you love and care about, the same things that you wanna see, that you're urgent to see change for. Find other people who are trying to do that work and offer your skill sets as a service, right? Cause we all have something to contribute. Some of us are architects, some of us are chefs, some of us are dancers, some of us are, you know, I don't know, good at budgets. We all have different skill sets, but if we all bring those skill sets and say, look, this is what I can do, this is how I can help, put me in coach, let's make it happen, it's that, but also not putting the labor on other people to tell you how to do it. You seeing and studying and listening and learning and saying, ah, I see that this team or this group or this organization, they don't necessarily have the support with the artwork in the way that they need. So I'm gonna come in and I'm gonna use my digital skills and I'm gonna help amplify that message because more I do that, the more the change happens. So there's that. The other thing I'll say is, some things don't need to take so long and some things do, right? You can't change people's minds overnight. That's not something that you just gotta be aware is, you know, everybody in every generation tried doing that. There's some things you just can't do so overnight. And there are things you can do, like voting. You can vote, you can register to vote. You can vote these people out, like Breonna Taylor's killers would be convicted if we had different people in office who took urgent action when something like this happened. So we have to see what are things that we can do and what are things that take a little bit more strategy and work and effort to make happen. And then we plug in with our skill sets and we say, okay, I know I can get up and register to vote. I know I can go online and do that very easily. That's very quick. Okay, I know I can go to my, find my local place to go vote and make that happen. That's one thing I know I can do. And I know I can look up organizations around me that are working on these issues on the ground and I can see, well, let me see. What does their Instagram look like? What does their Twitter look like? What are their thing? Oh, they might need help here. They really don't know what they're doing here. Let me call them, let me email them, let me see how I can support the work that they're doing so that my skill sets can be of service. And I think that's one way that we all can plug in and be effective with one another. But just learning what's urgent, what's necessary, you know, like stopping people from getting killed and murdered, that's an urgent thing, right? But changing people's minds overnight, that's something that we have to work on in relationship and partnership with each other. Thank you, Aja, for that advice. Thank you, Clay. Thank you, Aja, for that call to action as well. I'm reminded, you'll have to forgive me because I'm about to quote you from your Mayday episode actually when you shared Tony Cade Bambara's quote that the role of the writer is to make the revolution irresistible and that really stuck with me and came up for me again as you were speaking just now. I wanna thank everyone for sticking with us over time for this great conversation. You know, as I said at the beginning, this is a show about art. We started with art and we're gonna end with art. And Aja, thank you for graciously agreeing to share some of your work with us. And I'll say some final things afterward, but Aja, please take it away. Thank you, thank you for listening. This poem, I was commissioned to write this for a piece about, there was a medium was doing a special about power and they asked me to do something in response to Audre Lorde's poem, Power. So if you get a chance to look up that poem by Audre Lorde, please do. This is called Injustice. And there were several things that were happening during the time I wrote this poem. The Brett Kavanaugh interviews for him to become Supreme Court was happening. And there was also a poet who a little earlier before that from Palestine who was dealing with being arrested for writing a poem on her Facebook page saying, resist my people resist. And she was arrested by the Israeli government. So this was all happening. And I wrote this poem in response to Audre Lorde. Injustice, howling in the wound of words, a tongue trembles with the tension of true, the difference between poetry and rhetoric is there's a world outside your door knocking inward. A voice hungers fearless, wooed by courage, a deliberate impulse, the ability to turn a knob, alter or shift action. A window is a mirror of risk. A poet writes to balance the scales of power yet feels the absence of power. Perhaps instead of rape, I ought to say he forced a sweating throb, liquored moans mangled mourning, a roofy stone turned me inside out studded wet worn, too tight busted bruise came and went I was a ghost, a rage no one can see. I killed myself a little to enter the memory so close I choose not to resurrect the devil in details and the country, still a culture of take or be taken violently. The United States is a forced entry on stolen land. The Supreme Court weaponizes words against flesh law is made still a poem is not a knife or gun or food unless the knife or gun is a pen or clothes. A pen is only a sword of feelings not a home, not louder than a bomb is not flesh or blood, not a condom or pill cannot unrape you nor undo your doing yet. A poem is a doing still, warbling within an ear, eye, mouth or touch a living beneath words. How we respond to power reveals our power more or less a flex relinquished tug, push, pull, demand or plead a wrist dancing between fists and open palm to kill or be sacrificed murder is murder. I aborted the child, it did not leave me like a dove or bittersweet farewell. I suck the life I did not want away. The proof is in the pudding I cannot swallow a poet writes to balance the scales. Any child that dies cannot undie in a poem nor can a jury undie our children. There are no words to heal or bring back the dead. Remember you cannot unkill a part of yourself with dreams or kisses poetry or rhetoric, awards, accolades, pensions, money, comfort, marches or protests, judges or prisons. Losing a child is a suicide. The whole world silent, a voice lost in the difference between killing yourself and killing yourself, love and death. What we resist will amend or slaughter us. There will be others and there were others. What say Audre Lorde to Margaret Garner of power? The difference between poetry or rhetoric is a choice between lesser evils. Whether killing your children is killing yourself whether you kill yourself or your children. A final word singing from a grave shifted by the missing maddened by the whole power. Power is in the wave that moves. The way change is God. So is spirit or soul sees through or like love. The more you control the more it controls you. The difference, the difference between poetry and rhetoric is Dardin Tator. Because a poem is not a knife or gun or bomb yet. A poem can so enrage a nation to imprison a poet who attempts to balance the scales to agitate a people power to do to change when a foot is on your neck. It does not matter how you get it off. What words you say, what weapons you use, knife or pen so long as you do is survival and it becomes less and less important what someone thinks about how you resist. Unless of course they are willing to take the foot off your neck too. Thank you. I wanna thank both of you so much for taking this time and sharing your insights. Aja, thank you for sharing your poetry with us. I wanna let people know, Aja's book, my mother was a freedom fighter. Her collection of poetry is available on Haymarket Books. You can also check out past episodes of Homemade on Aja's website, ajamone.com and you can find out about upcoming episodes which are viewable on Facebook Live and on which you can also donate to the poets who are sharing their work. And I believe we have a link to Aja's to the book in the chat and Clay. Thank you so much as well. We're putting the link to Clay's article, The Golden Opportunity of Social Impact in the Arts in from the GIA reader into the chat. So please do check that out as well. Next week we'll be off for the fourth of July holiday on July 3rd, but please join us again on Friday, July 10th when my colleague Chris Barr will be joined by Ari Milenciano and Dorothy Santos to discuss organizing creative communities online. The very same Chris Barr composed our intro music and our exit music is by Akron Jazz artist Theron Brown. Until next time, we wish you good health, safety, and joy in art. Thank you and take care.