 It's academic, and it's theater, and it's a place where they hook me. We have the audience, and the artists, and stories that work. We've mentioned practices, historical practices, cultural practices. Examples of women sharing what it is that you can share or how you can do that. There's no way you can ignore that kind of anymore. We're from all around the world. Do you think I can see you talking about it? What time is it now? Can you hear me out? It started out about different people, and about different things. Oh, see, how it went on. Theater for everybody, yes, everybody. That's it for today, then. And in due time, understanding of what relationships get, I'm already changed. So welcome, everybody, to the Martin E. Segal Theater Center here at the Graduate Center CUNY. My name is Frank Henschkorn. I'm the Executive Director and Director of Programs. Many of you, I know you've been here. Thank you, Julie, for coming here to the Graduate Center and taking time out of your so very busy life. I know how much you all do and work, but it is an important forum on cultural advocacy and policy in New York City. And we have a great program here. We will also honor the people who help us to make it happen, like Jimmy and Ed. So thank you for coming. If you have a cell phone, just take it out for this moment. I'll do the same. I just got the larger one to make sure it's all so that it doesn't ring. So thank you for doing this. And I would like to introduce the President of the Graduate Center, CUNY Chase Robinson, who will say a few words of welcome to you. Chase, thank you for coming. Frank, thank you very, very much. It's a great pleasure to be here. And it's a great pleasure to welcome you all. For those of you who are new to this building, well, the introductory slides closed with the logo of the Graduate Center. We're very much at the heart of the university as a whole. Those of you who know CUNY will know that it's in the business of teaching New Yorkers. 275,000 students are pursuing degrees at the City University of New York. Another 225,000 students do a variety of coursework at night in the weekends. And the Graduate Center, which is formerly called the Graduate Center and University Center, is very much at the heart of it. It's the heart of it in more than one respect. One is that we sit here in the crossroads of 34th and 5th. Much more important than that is that we benefit from our own faculty, about 140, 150 extraordinarily distinguished scholars and fantastic students. Last year, one of our students won a Guggenheim. One of our students won a Pulitzer. This year, two of our faculty won Guggenheims. On our faculty are Nobel Prize winner. I could expend the evening singing the praises of our faculty and our students. But the second and more important reason why we're at the center of the University as a whole is that we draw upon the extraordinary strengths of the campuses in a variety of ways. One is that their faculty join our faculty in teaching here at the Graduate Center. And the second is that our students, we have about 4,200 students here at the Graduate Center. I know 4,200 students, about 3,800 are doctoral students. And every year they teach as part of their training, teaching in their own classes, about 200,000 CUNY students. So every year the Graduate Center is very much at the heart of the University's project of educating New Yorkers. Now, our premise here at 365 Fifth Avenue is very, very clear. That knowledge is a public good. No other graduate school in the country takes more seriously its public responsibilities or, I think, generates more equity by investing more of its talent. Programs like tonight's signal that commitment. And they signal it by showcasing the importance and the intersection of art and culture and advocacy. Now, I think everyone in this room will know that few have championed that intersection more effectively than Tom Finkelpurl who's here tonight. And we are honored to have Tom. And Edwin Torres, the Deputy Commissioner of the New York City Department of Public Affairs, both have demonstrated a genuine commitment to the arts culture and to the public good. And we thank them for being here tonight. Now, on behalf of the Graduate Center, it's a particular pleasure of mine to congratulate Mr. Torres, who is being honored this evening with the Martin E. Segal Award for Civic Engagement in the Arts, which recognizes the extraordinary advocacy and political contributions that he has made to the arts. Mr. Torres is a good company, Majority Leader van Bremer, who will be joining us later tonight was the recipient of this award last year, the inaugural year. I'll now turn the stage over to Brad Burgess, the Segal Center Associate, who will share more information about tonight's program. Welcome and do enjoy it. All right. Hi, everybody. It's good to be back in the room with you all again. I'm really happy that this is happening. Thank you to Kerry and Salom for helping me put this together. And I'm just going to introduce Commissioner Pinkle Pearl very briefly. All I want to say about the creation of this award is that Marty Segal was the first chair of the First Commission on Cultural Affairs, and that's where our center is named after. So we decided to create this award last year, honoring his legacy of sort of being an endless dot connector. I'm sure many of you in the room knew him and knew of him. And it's important to recognize all of the dot connectors that help us make it happen. And probably we gave this award to Jimmy last year. And this year we might see a big increase in the arts budget. And so it makes a lot of sense to thank the people that helped make this happen. And this year we thought of Eddie because, you know, to fill in for somebody when they're going through personal problems and having to take on added responsibility, it's like I can't even imagine at that level what it's like. And so the fact that he was still responsive and he sent me a personal email back to something that I wrote to him, I didn't expect it in a million years. I was totally caught off guard by that and very personally touched to know. And it was a challenging email. He said, you know, well, you just want to talk to a bunch of executive directors and artistic directors. What about actual artists? Are we actually going to make this program available? These ideas accessible to artists. And I thought, well, all right, that's a fair point. So I appreciate that a lot. And so it means a lot to have to be a part of this team presenting the award. So without further ado, I am very proud to bring up Commissioner Finkelthorough. Thank you so much. Yeah, so it's a real pleasure. I don't know if you guys know that both Eddie and I hold degrees from CUNY, masters from an art history. Eddie has an MFA from Hunter, both of us are Hunter types. And, you know, you talked about in terms of educating the city and affordability, you know, CUNY is just the paragon. I don't know how many CUNY, like, people have been at CUNY degrees or, oh my God. You know, it's great and no debt, right? So one of the big problems, right, how many people who didn't go to CUNY are in debt for their education? I read on the subway, I don't know if you could probably confirm this, that what percentage come out with no debt from CUNY? Three out of four. Eighty or ninety percent. And I talked to a dean from Brooklyn College, said that people who come out with debt from Brooklyn College, the average is $12,000. Something like that, I don't know if that's the exact statistics. But so, to get over to the Eddie, part of what I'm actually here to say. Oh, by the way, everybody knows that the personal problems I was going through, I had cancer, I'm fine, I'm in complete remission. But this is a situation where I came in, I think, one day and I said, Eddie, you're a commissioner, starting on Monday, right? And Eddie has two kids and who didn't sign up to be commissioner. Of course, this is not something he decided. I talked to the deputy mayor and the mayor and they said, fine. But so it was something that he had to do, you know, to figure out how to do on the job immediately. And I've known Eddie for many years. And, you know, of course, he was very popular around the Queens Museum because he was a funder. But aside from that, you know, I felt like Eddie was also an advisor and a friend and a Queens resident, I might say. So, you know, obviously you have a high opinion of that person. But when I came to the Department of Cultural Affairs and I was thinking about, you know, who could be the deputy commissioner, Eddie was on the top of the list. And it's because of both his sort of calm demeanor and his judgment and his values, which I thought would be completely consistent with kind of things we're doing at the agency. But also just, you know, a fun guy to have around, you know, because you have to, you know, spend as much time or more than you spend with your partner is the person sitting next to you. So I would like to also commend Eddie on his sense of humor, all this other thing. So six months I was out. And what happened during that time was everything that was underway, you know, was kept going at full speed. I want to say that, you know, there was another member of the core team of the commissioner's unit was out on maternity leave of my chief of staff. So it was a very short staffed unit. Eddie kept it going. And I just want to say I don't want this to be too long. But one of the main projects that Eddie is running on behalf of the agency is this diversity initiative. And this is something that we really thought about together. We read in for the first moment, we talked to the mayor about it together. He was super enthusiastic. Most enthusiastic he's been about anything that I've talked to him about since. No, which is important because it's one of the most important things we're doing. So the, you know, obviously there was a diversity survey, which I hope everybody has seen with, you know, absolutely appalling results, which we all expected except they were a little bit better than national averages, but that was about it. But sort of the thoughtfulness and the, you know, being on top of the issues one after the next has been amazing to watch, not that I expected anything different. But I know a lot of his, the colleagues from the funding community are here and people have been, who has not either worked as a colleague or been funded by Eddie? I mean, who has put it that way? So that's most of the crap. So if you're going to go to an environment that is filled with, let's say, a diverse group of fabulous art leaders in New York City, I think you get a lot of hands for that. So that's a little long-winded way of saying that, you know, it's been absolute honor and pleasure to work with Eddie and there's nobody that deserves this more, but don't think that just because you got this award, anything's going to get easier. But with that, I want to just, with heartfelt thanks, here is Eddie Torx. So I've just got to say Tom has things, other things he could be doing tonight, right? Tom could be at this dump called the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Going to this thing nobody's ever heard of called the, what is it, the costume ball? Something like that. And instead, he chose first to come here and talk to us. And that's the reason I came to the Department of Cultural Affairs, because Tom makes decisions like that. The fact of the matter is that Tom is the reason that I came to the Department of Cultural Affairs. To know that, first of all, you know, when Tom and I spoke about, you know, the field and the need to really invest in the people that work in the field. You know, we look out at the cultural community and we see people who, driven by their passion and driven by their values, have chosen to make sacrifices to show up every day and do work that is difficult, that is unglamorous, that is oftentimes unseen. And we really said, you know, we really need to invest in these people. Now, I've been very, very lucky. I came up close to a decade working at the Bronx Council on the arts where I really felt genuinely invested in by our leader and had various subsequent experiences where, you know, through honestly dint of good luck where I genuinely felt invested in. For a leader to go through the effort to get cancer, to give me the opportunity to spend six months acting commissioner, I don't know how many other leaders would make a sacrifice like that. And Tom, it's typical of you that you would do something like that. And I just want to say thank you. The gentleman who got this award before me, the first recipient of this award is Jimmy Van Bremer. And, you know, he's tied up. And so, you know, I think he's going to join us later on this evening. I do need to say something about Jimmy Van Bremer because he's been such an advocate for this field. He's been such an ally to this field. And for me to get this award, there we are. Okay, good, perfect. I was just saying nice things about you, Jimmy. As I was saying, for me to get this award the year after Jimmy Van Bremer gets it is such an honor for me because he has been such an advocate for this field and such an ally to this field. And it is so humbling to get this award the year after Jimmy Van Bremer gets it. Now, with all of that said, and I could sit here or stand here all evening and say things about Jimmy that you already know. But all of those things, you can match them up against this story and they would work for me. You know, recently Jimmy had held a hearing at the City Council about the diversity work that we're doing. And Jimmy is a real champion for diversity and culture. And so at that conversation, our Deputy Legal Counsel had just recently been promoted to Chief Legal Counsel and Deputy Commissioner. So she's now my colleague. And so I introduced Jimmy to her. Her name's Kristen, she's great. And I introduced Jimmy to her and said, Jimmy, have you met Kristen Sikoda? She's now my fellow Deputy Commissioner. She's a Chief Legal Counsel. And he said, yes, yes, yes, I know her. And I introduced her in the manner in which I introduced her to everybody. I say, she comes from the arts. She is herself a performer. She is a dancer. She came up through Urban Bush Women and she's been in Mama Mia on Broadway. And he said, I do know Kristen, but I didn't know that you were on Mama Mia on Broadway. So you must know every word to every Abbason. And she said, yes, I do. And he said, I know every word to every Abbason, too. I'm a gay man. Now, take all of his advocacy and all of his alliance and you put it up against that line. And that's why I love Jimmy. For me to get to work with Tom Pickle-Pearl at the Department of Cultural Affairs, I just spent a day with the capacity building team. We just expanded our capacity building program to serve cohorts of cultural organizations in low-income neighborhoods. And this was something that, for me, to be able to do this at the Department of Cultural Affairs is a real dream come true because it's a real opportunity to invest in our neighborhoods. And it's important. And it's something that I'm really excited about. And Perianne Carson, David Mandel, would you give a wave? Perianne and David work for our capacity building team. And the fact that we've been able to invest in our neighborhoods and to invest in our cultural organizations in our neighborhoods in this well, in this way, is the kind of thing that Tom Pickle-Pearl made possible. And one of the gentlemen at the meeting said, at one point, after like six hours of our going through process, said, this could only happen during this administration. Like this really, he, like me, grew up in the South Bronx. He said, growing up, yeah, I wouldn't even go into Brooklyn. And that's the kind of thing that really means something to us. You know, this is the opportunity for us to act as public servants, to really learn from all of you. And it's not easy to be public servants in that sense. You know, right now you guys are going through this process thanks to Kerry McCarthy and Salim Zagai and Michelle Coffey. And I have to thank you for doing this process because this is really an opportunity where we are in the position of learning from you. And you know, we all come up through the education system and we're basically taught that being a learner is kind of a low status position, that being an expert is a high status position. But when you're a public servant, you're really a learner and you're here to learn from the people that you serve. And that's difficult to do because when you learn, you have to say, I didn't know that prior to this. You have to say, I knew something but I was wrong. And that's a tough thing to do. It's a humbling thing to do. It oftentimes takes a lot to step up and say, I'm here to learn from you. And thanks to Tom Finkelperl, thanks to Kerry and Michelle and Salim. Thank you, Jimmy. We have the opportunity to do that with all of you. And so it is a real privilege to work with you in this way. So thank you. Jimmy, we want to come up here and just go for it, even though we're a little out of order. I think everyone would love to hear what you have to say. Thank you very much. Good evening, everybody, and I am the homosexual. In reference so far and all of you, please join me in dancing queen. Thank you very much. No, I'm not going to sing. But I do want to say thank you to everyone at CUNY in the theater. In particular, you honored me last year, and it was a very, very special moment. I have something very similar to what you now have, Eddie Torres, in my office. And I see it every day, and it means a lot to me. And I also believe very much in this gathering, because the power of advocacy is so, so important. And all of us are really brothers and sisters in the struggle to get more for our city, for the children, for the seniors, the immigrants, for every single neighborhood, regardless of economic status. And so it means a lot. And I love being a champion at City Hall for all of you and for everything that we hold dear, along with the two folks who we've already heard from. And Tom Finkel-Pearl, may I add, looks dashing in a tuxedo. Absolutely dashing. And if you weren't married, and I weren't married, and you weren't straight, and I weren't gay, just saying. But he's a great... It could have been. It was just a couple of things needed to fall into place that did not. But Tom is a great man. We were talking about you earlier today at the Children's Museum of Manhattan, where we did a tour, it seems like 14 hours ago. And it's been a great day. But everyone loves Tom. Everyone loves Tom, not just because he's a nice man and because he had a health issue that he had to overcome, which he did. We love Tom because of what's inside Tom and that he holds all of you and everything that we hold dear so, so preciously close to his heart. And he's such a champion for good in this world. And he knows that anything really, really good that matters has art and culture somewhere at its heart. So thank you, Tom, for everything that you do, all that you mean to me, to the city, to Eddie, to every single person in this room. So a big round of applause for Tom. And I was supposed to actually hand the baton to Eddie Torres, our deputy commissioner. And I'm sorry to be late, but this is also not like the Miss America pageant, you know what I mean? So I don't have to give him the crown that I had last year. He has earned it all on his own. And obviously everyone here knows Eddie Torres' work and I want to say they're a great team. They're an amazing team and they've done amazing work and Eddie has handled his tenure here well and unexpectedly serving as the acting commissioner, which is not an easy thing to do, but he has kept the Department of Cultural Affairs and our community strong while our fearless leader was getting stronger and for that we all are very grateful, Eddie. And I know that as good and as progressive as Tom Finkelperl is, that you share those very same core values and all of us believe in that. So when I was asked to be here tonight to help honor you, we jumped at the opportunity and I want to say thank you for everything that you've done for this community and all that the Department of Cultural Affairs is hard at work in trying to make sure that access and equity are our core values that we live by and that we govern by and the people are sitting right next to you are going to make sure that we do all the things that we're saying we're going to do because Karen is going to... She's right there watching you and I know she's tough, but... And my job is to keep fighting for more funding with all of you and we've said that to the mayor and I know that Tom and Eddie are in a position where what they're able to say is a little bit different than what I'm able to say and what you're able to say, but let's just say I know what's in their hearts and if we can get $40 million this year Tom and Eddie won $100 million for culture and the arts so we're going to do everything we can Was that a yes, Eddie? But thank you so much all of you also for allowing me to be your champion at City Hall I love this job more than anything I love being a champion of the arts and culture in the City of New York and working with great visionaries like Commissioner Torres and Commissioner Finkel-Pearl and most importantly all of you we will get to the Promised Land so with that, thank you very much I'm just going to hand it over to you Hi everyone, so in continuation of all this gratitude that we're expressing I'm going to say thank you Eddie, Tom and Jimmy for all of your advocacy as public officials it's pretty awesome to see that and I know that we are all very grateful for that so thank you So we're going to continue with this celebratory theme for tonight and highlight some other wonderful work that our arts and cultural advocates are doing on the ground but before we get started I'll give a quick introduction and a little bit of context as to why we're all here for this forum and thank you all for coming by the way My name is Salim Zagai and I am with the New York City Cultural Agenda Fund in the New York Community Trust The Cultural Agenda Fund is a collaboration of seven foundations that have pulled resources to help strengthen arts advocacy and influence cultural policy I have to look at my notes here and advance equity in the city's cultural sector The fund is spearheaded by two co-chairs, Michelle Coffee of the Lambit Foundation who's standing back there at the New York Community Trust, my boss and we have a couple of our other funders here today too from the Booth Ferris Foundation and then we also have additional funders from the Stavros Nyarkov Foundation the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation David Rockefeller Fund and the Rockefeller Brothers Fund which is one of our newest donors These funders are really, really awesome to work for and I have to say that this has been an incredible project to be a part of So as a group of foundations you all know that we make grants that's what we do but in the spirit of fostering collaboration among arts and cultural advocates we also bring folks together for convenings and as some of you know we also have had a technical assistance program that we provided to arts advocates last year So I'm going to give you a little bit of context for that but we just want to say thank you to Frank and Brad from the Siegel Center for inviting us and co-organizing this forum It's something that they do well and it's something that we love to do too so it's a wonderful partnership that we've established here and... Okay, some context So between April and September last year the Cultural Agenda Fund brought together 49 representatives from arts and cultural organizations from across the city so expanding artistic disciplines boroughs, budget sizes, staff levels for a series of trainings and workshops and some topics included racial justice leadership communications, framing and messaging and then we also offered some design workshops to help advocates think creatively and generate some new ideas about projects that could help improve advocacy coordination in the city and also advance cultural equity So at the end of that series the fund invited proposals for our planning grants from select groups to help develop their ideas into actionable projects collaborative projects that they could potentially implement and so in December of last year we made six month planning grants of $15,000 each to help these groups further develop their ideas and so I'm really, really happy to say that all of those groups are here today to share with us a little bit more about their works in progress and then, you know these kind of span topics so it's really awesome to see so we're excited for that and then the, just so you know the planning periods are supposed to actually end this summer, mid-summer so around the end of June at which point the fund will then invite proposals for implementation grants substantial implementation grants to actually carry these projects out over the next year so we're super excited to see where that goes Each group tonight is going to offer a really brief presentation we've given them strict time limits and we have some pretty visuals for the company what they're going to say so you know we've also included on your seeds a document that includes additional information about all of the projects that will be featured this evening so you know folks won't be able to say everything that they want to but we encourage you to reference that document for more information and also take that with you when you leave tonight and, sorry after that the best part we're going to open the floor up and try and solicit some feedback from all of you about where these projects are headed learn more about the planning processes also try and understand some of the successes and challenges some of these groups have already accomplished and then we're also interested in hearing more in terms of ideas that you all might be thinking of as you hear some of the stuff that's going on with these projects so start thinking about that as folks present we're actually going to go in order of the program so you'll see the names of the organizations there that are lead grantees and they have their partners co-presenting with them so without further ado we're going to get started with our first presentation from the New York City Arts Coalition and 1% for Culture we can hold the mic I want to put my notes down thank you so much to Majority Leader Van Bremer Commissioner Finkel-Burl and Eddie I can't think of bigger advocates for the arts if we hadn't had you behind us we probably wouldn't be all here as a group and of course to Carrie and Michelle and their cohorts at the community trust for recognizing the critical role of advocacy in our city I'm Ann Denin the co-chair of the New York City Arts Coalition which is a 30 year old organization composed of cultural groups large and small citywide representing all disciplines and the coalition works on the city and state level as an advocate for policy issues and increased funding for the arts in New York City 1% led by Heather Woodfield was funded six years ago founded six years ago to press for increased in cultural funding to 1% of the city budget we're at 25% .21% point yes its supporters includes arts organizations businesses, elected officials individual citizens and since its founding its leadership 1% has expanded its goal to become a full fledged advocacy organization for more than a year the two organizations have discussed emerging to provide the New York City Arts community with one strong robust sustainable organization that would be a place a go-to place for the field we represent all disciplines theater, film, visual arts dance so on and we would work with the many strong advocacy organizations for individual disciplines along with the local arts councils which are focused on the specific geographic area as we talked with all of you in the sessions Salah mentioned we began to see a greater and greater need for an organization to provide services to everybody and coordinate the voices of all the groups doing advocacy so during the sessions Heather and I spent our time focused on how this might be achieved and what a new merged advocacy organization might look like on the business side we knew it had to be financially secure and sustainable and it needed to find programmatic goals which would ensure it met the needs of the community to this end a committee has been formed to explore and facilitate along with a professional facilitator this transition she happens to be in this room and coats the committee is comprised of leaders from large and small institutions and we're seeking input from organizations citywide we want to define and put in place a new stronger and more effective advocacy organization combining the strengths of the coalition and one percent so for the last year on the program side and by this we don't mean activities but some of the values and priorities we've gleaned from all of you are promoting and this is probably it's listed first because it is first promoting equity inclusion and diversity across New York we want to work collaboratively collaboratively with cultural organizations throughout New York City which we have been doing and we want to expand that define citywide priorities around cultural policy support arts education act as a resource for elected officials while advocating for cultural policy and funding and act for it's not on here I don't think but act for a resource for all of the arts organizations whether it's helping you to keep lists if it's providing introductions if it's doing the dirty work that all of us are doing individually now a clearinghouse whatever you collaboration and unity we feel are probably our strongest tools and Heather's going to give you an example of how working together on a citywide campaign around this year's city budget who can make such a big impact it's been widely supported by the majority leader which we are very grateful but it's only one example of an initiative a strong unified organization so so we wanted to present this as an example of the kind of collaboration that we have been working on and have been hoping to do and 1% and the arts coalition got together with the CIGs and several program groups late last year to form a citywide campaign in support of an increase in cultural funding I had to turn these slides in on Thursday we now have 160 active partners in this campaign so we're growing rapidly these are some of the great images that we're sharing and you can see some of the diversity of geographic location and discipline and focus of different organizations that are engaged with this campaign and are creating wonderful shared graphics we think it's a great example of using research for the benefit of advocacy we've created one pagers for every single council district in the city as well as some borough wide one pagers and one that's citywide up here we have a map of district 26 because I need to be here and also because I live there and some of the data that we're looking at and those I'm going to show you what these look like are we look at the number of cultural organizations we're looking at employment we're looking at education using the data for arts and schools looking at artists by teaming together with the arts councils and using their data and looking at where we're affecting seniors through the SUCAZA program and then I just want to give a little plug to please save the date for May 19th at 10am we're going to have a press conference at city hall it's going to feature the majority leader as well as Ruben Santiago Hudson and some other exciting guests soon to be announced and we hope that you will all be there in support of increased funding for culture and we hope that this new organization can build on these kind of collaborations where we unite and bring the cultural community together not only around issues of funding but other policy issues thanks so much hello everyone give me a couple seconds here so we're going to have a slide show of images playing as we speak to you for the next five minutes my name is Raquel Deanda I'm a member of the People's Climate Arts Collective which is a network of artists and cultural organizers that work in service of social movements in New York City and I'm Tammy Shapiro I work with Movement Net Lab which is a think and do tank that supports network social movements and network infrastructure through a variety of tools so we have been in an incredibly beautiful exploratory process working on a planning grant with arts and democracy and the laundromat project to essentially strengthen the skill sets of New York City artists, organizers, educators and advocates who are wanting to work in service of social change and one thing that we believe is that there's a huge amount of wisdom in this city that already exists of people who are looking at how arts and social change connect and they're looking at how this works from a variety of different angles some people are working in policy some people are working in community some people are working in the art world some people are looking at how to change how to make narrative shifts and if we think about this and think that on the table we have all the puzzle pieces what we're trying to do in this process is figure out how to put those puzzle pieces together so we're collaborating over the course of these past few months in developing a city-wide social movement arts program which could be a series of trainings workshops, mentorship programs gatherings, experiential learning programs that directly support artists and cultural organizers working in service of social change so as I said MovementNetLab supports networks in a variety of ways we do training for networks and network movements we help create infrastructure we support infrastructure we also facilitate the overall strengthening of relationships and partnerships within a network so that's what we're doing in this process here our goal is to create an overall more connected network of artists, activists organizers, educators so that they can better share information learn from each other and improve the overall effectiveness of the community and also in some ways the efficiency so that people can go where they need to find what they need so phase one began with mapping our current landscape it began with mapping our current landscape and also in us wanting to spend a lot of time getting to know each other's programs what are we doing as organizations who are we working with what are our value systems then we started to look externally and we started to map this program and Tammy's been, sorry, mapped the network that we know, that we exist within and Tammy has been helping us begin to visualize that you might start talking about the map that you see behind us in a little bit but that was phase one so we just have to do it manually yeah so phase two is all about building relationships and finding out what's out there so it's through a series of one-on-one conversations and interviews about what a collective program could look like with people who are engaged in creating socially engaging workshops and trainings so first is this one-on-one process and then we will collectively shape what this program's going to look like through a variety of means including an in-person gathering that's going to happen on June 7th so there has already been a tremendous amount of learning to date and we expect that there will continue to be the first and maybe seemingly obvious one is that there is a very complex landscape of diverse groups that really have the desire to connect with one another and to work with one another that at times it seems like are doing very similar work and work that is overlapping so what we're really wanting to do is be able to create a place where we can all get to understand our work better and sometimes these groups haven't collaborated with one another or maybe they don't even know that the other group exists and one thing that we continuously return to is that we don't want to reinvent the wheel, we don't want to create something new and really what we're trying to do is build upon existing work and look at the legacy of this work that's already been happening look at the organizations that have been doing this work to really understand the nitty-gritty nuances and the history of it so there are a variety of tools that we use to help strengthen and develop networks as I was saying earlier we started with this process of mapping now mapping isn't a directory, it's not about where people are, it's about what they're doing and what relationships exist and what relationships, if they existed could strengthen the overall network so we started by engaging in this process through a series of conversations but a tool like this is only important if we do something with it so we learn a lot through the process the process is incredibly important but it's not about creating a map like this just for the map's sake it's about using it as a tool to strengthen and develop what's already existing and that's what we're in the process of doing right now so one last thing is just that we really are seeking an approach to social change that works both inside and outside the systems because we believe that cultural shift precedes policy shift and working to influence the popular discourse that surrounds institutions is an essential ingredient in getting those very same institutions to actually start to shift for us so, thanks Good evening everyone, my name is Francis Lucerna I'm the co-founder and executive director of Ibuente which is a 34 year old community based human rights institution as we like to call ourselves located in Williamsburg we've been working with primarily the Latino community in Williamsburg and in North Brooklyn and focused on leadership development holistic leadership development and we do that primarily through arts and culture we have, and I'm doing a solo act here but many of my colleagues are sitting in the audience and I hope during the question and answer we'll have an opportunity to really talk about the process that we've been going through our project is creating a blueprint for affordable cultural healthy communities I think we all landed in a space of really understanding what is happening in the city today and the incredible leadership that we have to have an opportunity to really start to envision what culturally and equitable culturally equitable communities would look like and certainly in the space of the rezoning that's going on the opportunity to really inform that I think for all of the groups natural occurring cultural districts, groundswell the point, elders share the arts Dance New York, arts and democracy and has to see collaborative I think we all share a real belief that any planning that is going to involve the future of a community should be led by the people in the community and that arts and culture are the bedrock of a vibrant, stable neighborhood and that they must be primary and essential elements in any planning process that we're talking about and so it is our intent to create a framework so that community based organizations, cultural groups artists, elected officials local leaders, etc. can integrate arts and culture in large scale neighborhood planning processes what we're doing is really calling and pulling together the wisdom and experience of all of the organizations that have been doing this work for many many many many years in communities and with the people in communities in dynamic projects, arts projects and other projects that really give voice to the people in their communities but also gives them kind of support to really understand their power to create change so in terms of this blueprint that we are creating we have been engaged in and we're looking at three aspects the first is interviews and what we are doing every partner is interviewing elected officials community based organizations, arts organizations small businesses artists and who have either participated in large neighborhood planning processes or who are facing the prospect of one what we hope to really be able to integrate is their perspectives, their experience and to really lend to our deeper understanding of the challenges facing different community stakeholders around these kind of community planning processes and to help develop the guiding questions for this blueprint the other questions that we're looking at is what would be useful for you in this blueprint what does a culturally healthy community look like from your perspective what has been your experience with rezoning and other large scale planning processes and what assets in your neighborhood that a planning process should really be built on I had the opportunity to interview councilman Antonio Renoso who represents Williamsburg, Bushwick and Ridgewood Antonio is really incredibly powerful in this process because he was a person who was really born and raised in Williamsburg he's lived through that process and now as a leader has an opportunity to really influence it and one of the things as you see some of his comments here really centered around the idea of respecting the primacy of community and that any process or any individuals and to do that kind of processing or process in community should really respect the people the institutions and the history of the community they should do their homework by doing some mapping and understand what are the assets and the institutions and values of that community that need to be preserved and need to be built on and also he said something very interesting community must drive the planning process and government should see itself as a resource to that plan which I thought was really profound I think what I came away with was an affirmation of the fact that arts and culture when you focus on arts and culture in a planning process what you bring back into that process and in center of that process is the heart and the soul of a community very often I think Antonio spoke about this in the interview very often when those processes are done from the top down or from the outside community it's all about the technical aspects of what planning should look like and the heart and the soul of what really makes a community a community and what makes people feel invested and safe in their communities is really not in the equation and I think that was something that really moved me and I think is driving us in the second thing that we're doing is case studies and the obvious is the obvious each partner is giving an example of what planning processes that are really driven by people and the people in the community really look like we ourselves at Appuente are offering up our experience of a 10 year initiative which we call a green light district initiative which is a 10 year holistic sustainability community initiative and at the center of it is our arts and cultural development of cadre which is our community arts development and resource exchange which really focuses on artists of color, Latino artists primarily who live in North Brooklyn and how in which way they can come together as a network and a powerful network not only to create venues for to continue to be vibrant in the community but also to lead change in the community we also have something broad like that as well as what you will see in the study Groundswell which is and we're focusing on the Transformer Restore Brownsville project that they did which is a two year five mural project in the community of Brownsville and really what these studies we hope will really give is a narrative policy background and of course visual examples of what cultural community planning can look like and also we'll highlight the principles and tools we have identified that will frame the framework of the blueprint in conclusion I think what we hope in this process is to have some tools tools that we can give out to the community that they can use in terms to something like a printed poster where they will have all of the aspects of how and in which way these processes can help can happen we are also looking at ways that we can maybe pilot a blueprint in a neighborhood or one of our organizations and ways that we can potentially support that developing a training program and workshops out of the tools that we're going to create so that the partners can contribute to other neighborhood processes and finally maybe an online platform for the blueprint to be disseminated thank you hi everybody it's good to see everyone again and well we're getting my slides up I just want to do all my thanks to the partners and the cultural advocacy fund and to deputy commissioner and I think and I think Jimmy van brainers left but he's right I can be tough and and sweet anyway it's been really an amazing process I direct arts and democracy and naturally occurring cultural districts New York and have been involved in three of these processes so it's really been learning a lot I've been entrusted to talk about the naturally occurring cultural district led group but there's a bunch of amazing partners in this and I just want to read them really quick arts and democracy arts east New York Bronx council on the arts Casita Maria friends of the Highline groundswell the laundromat project Mocata El Puente Staten Island arts university settlement goals and the center for health equity it's what we've all come together to do is to look at how to really incorporate arts and culture in public housing in ways that really honor the leadership and self-determination of the public housing residents and at the same time to reconnect communities the public housing communities with the outlying communities that they are part of and then what we want to do is learn from this work in public housing and use what we learn to engage in other sectors and particularly we're focusing on public health how this ties into advocacy I think this is a good example of and in the slides I should say are just examples of the work of all of our partners with public housing residents this ties into advocacy because you think of two things that are really essential culture and housing and looking at how the advocacy can connect between the two all people have the right to a good place to live and all people have the right to participate in their culture and so this project is bringing those two together the other thing that we're doing is looking at how we can really gain all these new stakeholders who are involved in this process who will care about both housing and arts and culture and come to all of the different tables that are where planning and policy are being made coming up our planning process what we did was we really built on existing work so we had a round table and naturally occurring cultural districts had a round table that brought all different stakeholders to the table some of the people here were there and had a conversation about what are some exemplary projects and what could we do be doing better and this included city agencies elected officials and people doing the work in communities and artists so what we did what we heard over and over at that round table is we needed to talk more with residents we needed to have these conversations we had some residents at the table but we needed to have more and we needed to go where people were at so the way we've been doing that is multiple we've looked at the groups that are already working in communities and had these conversations with residents integrated with the artwork in some cases ongoing mural making in another case with friends of the Highline who's here they've hired an artist to lead an arts led process planning and discussion which is going to end up with documented in an artist in a book that's created by the group we're having dinner conversations intergenerational interviews we're having a group of leaders young activist leaders that work with a number of different activists housing groups around the city come together and talk about how arts and culture can help with their organizing and we issued a report coming out of the round table with recommendations and with that report you have the URL everybody can see it, it's online now and we're going to have a report party where we'll report we'll talk about the report but we'll also talk about what comes out of this planning process and how people can get involved in next steps and we'll let you know when that's going to be and hopefully in one of the public housing cultural centers just a quick comment a few comments on things we're learning and I just wanted to read a quote because it came, this was said at the round table and I think it just really stuck with all of us and this is Nicholas Dugan who's a historian of public housing public housing raised city neighborhoods and substituted all the myriad spaces for arts and culture with a singular community center how do you work your way towards rich community life when all of these spaces have been lost and that really is our driving this is our purpose is to figure out how to answer that and some of the things we're learning is that well I already mentioned one that we need to be listening to the residents and the residents need to be in the leadership about figuring this out we learned at the same time that residents are concerned about arts and culture as a possible harbinger of gentrification and that is coming up as a concern we need to take it seriously we're learning that successful programs include sustained culturally appropriate work that recognizes the talent culture expertise and leadership in the housing communities and we're learning that arts and culture which we all say all the time doesn't necessarily mean anything to people who haven't been included in arts and culture so we're learning how to shift our language so that we can ask the questions in a way that people don't feel left out by the questions and then finally we all hear these horror stories about NYCHA and how the decades of disinvestment and how they're just trying to provide good housing and so we've learned that we can't expect NYCHA to be in the business of producing cultural programs but we've also learned that a lot of great programs are happening where NYCHA might be a partner or it might be with a department of youth services in the cultural centers that we don't necessarily have to depend on NYCHA to be the leader in these programs and that there's all kinds of opportunities out there for us whether in planning processes around housing or they're in all the different place based initiatives that are going on in the city some of which have not yet included arts and culture and we're going to make sure they do so again I'll look out we'll send an email out and let you know when our report release party is and you're all invited thank you good evening thank you so much for having us my name is Binta Van Joseph I'm the director of marketing at Brick I'm joined by my colleagues and cohort representatives Betsy Smolian our executive vice president Huang Wang the general manager at Mark Morris dance group and Cherise Jones from Makata we didn't have our representative from Tafana but Tafana is also part of the cohort for this particular fellowship program the downtown Brooklyn fellowship program and many of you who live in Brooklyn will know that this picture is old because the neighborhood has already changed but it is a fellowship program and we consider it a very innovative opportunity for four collaborative organizations that all happen to be co-located in downtown Brooklyn to design together a more equitable opportunity for arts managers in the space and in a neighborhood that happens to be very rapidly changing the first organization Brick as you know is the leading presenter of free cultural programming in Brooklyn we're happy to lead that charge we turned 38 years old in June the second Mark Morris dance group is a preeminent modern dance organization with deep community roots and for a long time Tafana is another prestigious presenter focused on revitalizing the performance and the study of Shakespeare much differently than Brick and last but not least Makata a visual art presenter with programs focused on amplifying issues facing underserved communities of color so my colleague Betsy will take you through a bit of the detail around the project and we would love to entertain any questions before presenting arts organizations but we've covered quite a broad so the goals for this project were to create a one-year fellowship program that would be replicable that would create a cohort of young people and give them a route into arts administration what we're seeing in our organizations is that the route that many young people take into arts administration which is a very popular field but many of them come in through unpaid internships that's how they get their experience or they go and do an art history or related masters program and these requirements are both things that tend to restrict access for people who can't afford them so we're looking to break down those barriers we wanted to provide a paid fellowship program that's a route into arts administration that really gives people a very robust year of experience and lets them sort of start their professional networking and more broadly speaking the point of this is to look for candidates who are from underrepresented groups, candidates of color more broadly bringing diverse outlooks to our organizations and increase diverse candidates available for all arts organizations in New York and what we've done so far in the last several months we engaged in a field research study to learn about fellowship programs fellowship programs in the arts fellowship programs in city government all different kinds of fellowship programs and we also reached out to colleges and universities around Brooklyn and to some extent around New York to find out about what the recruitment effort would look like for this kind of program and what kind of partnerships we could expect we held a day long conference among our group and brought in some experts in the field including people from Oregon Shakespeare Festival from the Coral Foundation and Kemi who if you don't know is a very successful graduate of the Walker Arts Fellowship Program which is a really successful program that we looked at as a model and we're now in the process of commissioning a curriculum study because one of the things that we came to realize was that if we want this to be not your typical internship program we wanted to have a very robust professional development mode so we want this group to be coming together very regularly throughout the year and doing not necessarily a classroom but partly a classroom program where they're getting a real basis for arts administration work and although we're all pretty comfortable working with people day to day to help them learn arts administration doing a classroom thing was new to us so we're working with a consultant who's developing a curriculum plan for us so our program design really is in three parts one we're planning it as a cohort model we want this group of young people to form and be able to support each other and learn together and start their learning community and their network and this is a quote from the Posse Foundation who are one of the four runners of this idea that a small and diverse group can serve as a catalyst for increased individual and community development second thing is work experience this is going to be a critical part of our fellowship program we want all the fellows to rotate through all four of our organizations so that they get a little bit of a taste of each specialized in one area of arts administration but be able to try out at least one or maybe two others and these are the areas that we've identified that among our organizations we can support marketing development, production and tech administration and finance programming and education and finally like I mentioned we want the program to have a very robust professional development model we did a lot of listening of people who have either gone through or run fellowship programs and we think people we need to mix both hard and soft skills so some of the examples were how to read a financial statement business writing and business speaking and then a broad range of leadership skills one of the examples people gave was giving receiving feedback, communication skills and then diversity and inclusion awareness, the overall goal is to bring different perspectives into the arts so we want that to feature in the professional development and that's it, that's our program Hi, I'm Mark Rozier from New York Foundation for the Arts we don't have any slides as you recall we were our team was Art Works Out Allison had volunteered to do a workout routine here while we were actually speaking but it was unfair for her to do all the heavy lifting and so we're just going to do our thing so our group is again focusing on arts management and sort of increasing the pipeline of people that come into arts management and looking to increase the numbers of people of color who come into the pipeline we felt that this group that is composed of seven organizations has a deep expertise in visual literary and performing arts communities we are Harlem Stage we are Brooklyn Academy of Music the Brooklyn Museum the Lark the New York Foundation for the Arts the Park Avenue Armory and Printed Matter of those groups we sat down and we thought about the issues that face all of us some of which were just brought up which is this under representation of arts administrators excuse me of color and how this is really potentially a huge problem for the field we feel that equitable hiring is vital for the strength and relevance of our organizations both to support excellence and innovation in nonprofit leadership and to ensure that the work we do itself is inclusive and equitable so we said our interest is looking at ways to increase the diversity of the workforce at New York City cultural organizations both in terms of finding diverse candidates for job openings ensuring appropriate hiring practices and policies and looking at retention protocols because the issues that you have in terms of retaining administrators of color are not the same as you have in general in terms of retention so Mark will talk about some of the steps that we've taken to address that and Terry will bring up the back end of the conversation where we have landed so far so in terms of in terms of lessons learned and some obstacles that we faced our initial plan had been to send out to all of you a list of hiring practices that were sort of best practices in the field to ask everyone to implement them and to start testing feedback and where they stood and how they were working and at the first meeting when all seven of us got together we went through the list and realized that none of us could commit to actually doing all of that either because some organizations were large and they had a human resources department and therefore there were certain things that they just couldn't do because they had a human resources department and they had policies in place and they had certain structures others because they were small and there was one person or two people who were involved and therefore they couldn't do all of that so we took a step back on that which Terry will talk about what that step is and the other thing we wanted to do was do networking events for administrators of color because we know that in fact well everyone identifies sort of a pipeline project the people in the group were saying well we're here so where is the pipeline project we're all here why are we not sort of moving and so our plan had been that we would have networking events that were not only for administrators to talk to each other but they would have involved so that they would start to learn who is in the field not for poaching purposes but when they had job listings that they could send them to a broader network of people as we began to work on that we realized which you know we perhaps should have realized sooner that for 90% of the organizations there's not an HR person there's not one person whose job that is and if we don't have an HR department everyone you know hires their own staff so we're sort of rethinking how we can do that so that it's not just I mean there's a benefit to having administrators talk to each other but to try and get the HR component involved in that so we're sort of retooling the networking piece to figure that out and now Terry's going to talk about where we are where we are is we retained a consultant to help us develop a really short quick survey with the focus on how do you do retention how do you do on diversity pieces nothing I mean similar obviously to what DCL LA sent out but much much briefer and much more offering an opportunity to sort of like really get into like what are you doing how do you do it tell us about it with the hope of putting together some stories based on that as far as best practices goes we hired an organizational development person who does work with corporations as well as nonprofits around diversity and inclusion issues sort of help us get to the points and the questions that we really needed to ask to get the best information and then also she's going to help us move forward with the best way to sort of present it going forward some of the thoughts being we talked about the networking opportunities which you think are really important there are already networks that exist that are trying to increase diversity in the field some obviously people in this room are working on that as well we also are all part of our own different cohorts or groups of organizations based on probably discipline that have their own opportunities for networking and sharing information that we hope to tap into those as well we've also found that mostly just from our own personal conversations and also our experience at our institutions that diversity inclusion please piece is a value that's an institutional value which makes some people uncomfortable so it's very difficult conversations to have and so what we hope is to provide an opportunity and a place where people can feel like they can go talk about what challenges they may have and look to some other organizations to see how their approach to get to see what will work best across discipline size of organization and that type of thing we sent out a survey a really short survey not a revolution to send out a survey but you know that would be helpful and then when we get the pieces back they're going to get analyzed obviously we're going to pick out the best pieces that you share and then work on maybe I'm thinking this the way I think by borough to like have other existing things that are already happening and other boroughs how can we sort of incorporate what we have learned and what opportunity there is to sort of share that information and sort of like come up similar to what some of the other groups are doing to have an ongoing conversation with people about these things because I know from a larger organization it's not going to happen in any sort of really really quick way but there might be an opportunity in a smaller organization if you only have a few people sort of implement things to a much more quicker degree and I also know that some of our ideas around increasing the candidate poll about you know leaving job openings open for a certain amount of time I mean the level of work that that's going to sort of create for the person who is like looking for someone in addition to the person who's sort of taking in the resumes and that kind of thing how do you sort of cope with some of those unintended sort of um issues that come up so um I think that is what's the something else you're going to say You just want to ask everyone to fill out the survey Oh right You should have all done it on Thursday if you're not the right person in your organization to fill it out please pass it on to whoever is the right person in your organization to fill it out and if you didn't get it you know check your spam folders but also you can talk to any of us and we'll make sure that we get it out to you It's due May 11 we'll send out reminders don't worry but again if you're not the person in your organization who deals with it please just make sure to pass it on to that person and then do a quick check in with them to make sure that they have done it well Thanks So I know we are behind schedule a bit and by that I mean maybe a lot so I think what we're going to do is just go ahead and open it up to discussion and questions from the audience if any of you have pressing questions for any of our presenters we can take those now and maybe engage in about five to seven minutes of discussion No one Okay, well I have a question to start us off So I actually I know our last presenters Mark and James and Terry kind of address some of the challenges in working with other organizations right especially when there are pretty big differences in terms of size priorities discipline what have you I'm wondering if some of you some of the other presenters can speak to the challenges that come with collaboration with other organizations with artistic cultural workers with residents the idea here I think is I'm reminded of something that Francis said in our workshop series last year about at the center of all this work critical mass in order to do that we really have to have a variety of actors engaged in this work so can some of you speak to some of the challenges that come with collaboration and then what's helpful in terms of moving that work forward A separate subject that Heather was touching on NYC inspires and this is the campaign around the 40 million dollar request asking the administration and the council to increase the budget split equally between the city owned CIGs and the program groups so that's a large body of people ranging in size from really small to really large and the cultural institution groups not completely but many of them being the very large organizations have really big staffs and they've been working for many years on this kind of group collaboration and ask of the city it's the first time the program groups have been so cohesively coordinated that we're still a long way off I encourage all program groups to sign up at hashtag what is it Heather? it's got a big press kit you can make it work for your organization you can tweet, you can Facebook and it's growing and we're pleased about it but that's the huge diversity we see well I know so I'm just going to put you guys on the spot for a second I know that you kind of have existing partnerships maybe with Mark Morris to a certain extent and so is it easier to kind of work on existing partnerships and really build those out a bit further than it is to create new ones I'll go back a little bit to your last question which was what are some of the challenges and advantages of collaboration you know where we are in the Brooklyn cultural district we have so much interest in seeing where the district is going and making sure that the district continues to represent the people who were there before all the diversification as well and we can't grow with it and we can't do that by ourselves so there's always challenges I would say the biggest challenge is just time you know we're trying to do something and it's the night of their gay one we can't get it done but the value of it is just huge bringing the other artistic disciplines into the fold different viewpoints different audiences so the value of it is just we can't do this by the downtown Brooklyn arts alliance so the downtown Brooklyn arts alliance is an organization made up of 37 plus cultural organizations located in downtown Brooklyn and we provide mostly leadership workshops for junior level members of the arts organizations and some professional development sharing workshops so if there are HR representatives across organizations they may have a panel to share best practices with organizations that don't so we are sort of part of that group and actually Brick is one of the founders of that organization and so that at least allowed us to have an existing relationship and intent and common goal but to Betsy's point it's time I mean someone has to lead and pass the torch of baton and share and communicate back and forth but I think we're all the reason why we participated from the beginning is that we all want this so even if everyone doesn't return Betsy's call she's going to move forward because enough people have and no the only thing I would add is you know our goal is to try and find a sort of baseline in terms of hiring practices that it feels like all organizations regardless of size can implement which we'll see whether that is a foolish pipe dream or not but I mean in terms of this collaboration and this notion of size I mean that's what the ultimate goal is is that we would then be able to say look here are practices that should really help you be able to improve hiring they may not be everything but here's a core here's some other suggestions you know send them out to the cohort and hopefully people can implement them and there can be some tracking to see that if in fact they are effective which means that they could then perhaps go out to the larger cultural sector and perhaps even the larger nonprofit sector so we'll see thank you this isn't a question really but maybe a resource particularly for folks doing the fellowship work and the staff retention work all of us in our cohort we did the undring racism one day workshop and about six months ago I started participating in something called the anti-racist alliance and it was I got an invitation through Quoro which many of us have done Quoro also in the room and I started going and it's a monthly Monday meeting from 12 to 2 you bring your lunch and it's blowing my mind I'll say and it's about 50 folks in the room mostly social service workers there's no one in the arts there which is fascinating and it's just deeply reminding me how complicated and long-term and deep this work is and any of our today's session was about informed trauma and it's about the reminder that trauma particularly from racism is so generational and so old and that if we're going to endeavor to do this work around retention and staffing and fellowships like we have to the organizations have to do the deep work too and so I just offer that you're happy to email me I think it's a pretty much an open session but it really does come from the social service work and these are folks doing you know housing homelessness child welfare like really deep traumatic work and I just it's I've had in my mind like is this something that we can really learn from as a sector and step into in our own way in our own work because there are different issues that we face but it's just it's really I feel like my mind is kind of freaking out with how much work there is to do but really excited that there are people who are doing it and how do we connect to them so anti-racist alliance and it's four organizations coming together and it's a monthly meeting you can email me and I'll yeah I don't know that you know all 50 of us should show up at one meeting because that would probably get me kicked out but it's I can send information I can talk with them about other comments or questions Sandra hello my question is for a point in the group that's doing the blueprint for rezoning this is an amazing project and my question is are you also working are you just working to create a blueprint for those that are being rezoned so much of Brooklyn is not being zoned it's just changing and so for example our catchment area is just changing and so can the blueprint also or will the blueprint also address issues for those organizations that are that are facing constant change but it's that's not planned change it's just happening I think definitely what our idea is and our intent is is just to offer it out to all communities I think you know in New York City right now you be hard-pressed not to find a community that's not undergoing some kind of fundamental change certainly in our experience of Williamsburg we always call it round zero of gentrification and you know development gone awry right but I think that that's the impetus and I think for others that are part of this group I think we feel the urgency of really having the voice of community and the values and the vision and the hopes and the desires of community as it exists to really play a leading will be the leader in that transformation and so this blueprint hopefully will just give communities and the people in communities an opportunity to say this is possible and this is the way you can do it and these are groups that have done it and are doing it and possibly I think the idea of this critical mess have an opportunity to say and we have allies out there and potential partners who will help us do this and I think we have time for one more commoner question otherwise you should use it how you feel it's more about your view okay well I think we want to respect everyone's time some folks might have to wake up their kids or grab dinner but we do have so we'll have light refreshments afterward for everyone to chit chat and meet folks if you haven't met each other already any last pressing comments one question I had for folks is I'm sort of wondering if anybody's imagined or is planning on imagining to scale their ideas outside of what seems possible to what seems necessary you know so is there a way to take to look at how many jobs you would need to create to actually hire enough administrators of color to make an impact what is the scalability issue in the field for us to take into account jobs and housing are the major issues and how do we provide housing when 40,000 people apply for 86 spots uptown at an artist's housing residence and so I'm just wondering if you thought to scale it to the moon what are the giant needs so this is around the public housing but one thing that came up in our round table that I keep thinking about a comment made by a colleague from Community Voices Heard which organizes around public housing and said this is after we presented a lot of the model projects really exemplary work going on and they said this is really great work but this seems to be service oriented sort of about making public housing better for people rather than organizing oriented which is about let's change the system so that really has stayed with me in terms of all this work really are we making the status quo a little bit better or are we thinking of a new status quo that really is different and equitable at its core I can speak to this big question too one thing that we're trying to think about is what are the larger advocacy goals what are the services the sector needs and thinking about these as things that you might not be able to offer in year one but five years down the road down the road what does this need what should this be built to so trying to not dream ridiculously big dream realistically but think about what would a scaled up organization be and realizing that those things can't be achieved tomorrow so where is the long term path to get there and we're thinking about if it could go beyond this cohort and then in theory to the full non-profit community you know we'd want to be able to sort of show that there's success which would help make the roll out easier by saying look 50 incredibly varied organizations have implemented this and have shown results therefore expand expand expand I mean not in terms of what would the numbers be but certainly if it could go if it could go across the sector I was just saying to Annie if we as a cohort or community can provide that to Department of Cultural Affairs then they can take it and run with it hopefully that's that's kind of how they can be you know take the learning organization learning from us as a community in a field so let's keep our fingers crossed and our you know feet on the ground and eyes on the stars