 The way this works is we have 45 minutes of discussion at this inner circle amongst the folks who are here. The rest of us in the outer circle practice active listening, mark down our thoughts, comments, things, questions that come up, and then we kick it out for 45 minutes of full group discussion afterwards. This panel will now go until 1230 instead of 1215, so just to make that note. And off we go. Hello. So I'll just remind you that we are talking to each other, even though it's weird to talk to each other with a microphone. And there is rumor that I have struck fear in the hearts of panelists everywhere by my approach of yesterday's timing of you. And I think that's a good thing. So what I would love to do to start, we have a really eclectic panel in terms of people coming from really different places versus yesterday's panel where I think people coming from a more particular artistic perspective. So what I'd like to do is have you start by going around and introducing yourself. I'd like you to keep that introduction to 90 seconds, but to really talk about what brings you to the table today. And so if you could pick kind of the key things, and then at 90 seconds, you'll see me pick up my microphone and start to interrupt you. But I'll try to do it with great gentleness. So if anybody wants to start, and then we'll just make our way around. Anybody feel ready to do an introduction? Thank you so much. All right. The person she was, or is it on? Hello? Yep, there you go. I was the person Carl was speaking of. Carl has scared me. I am Patricia Jones, or Dr. Patricia Jones. And I am with Karpaback Theater. I am a part of the CAR project, which is the Creative Arts Integration Project. And I'm a veteran. So I'm here at the table serving in that magnitude. I have a lot more time. So you want to talk a little bit about that? All right, great, great. I'm trying to save mine for later. OK, great. Let's send it around. I had the benefit of introducing myself earlier. So I won't reiterate that. But I'll share some things of, I think, why I'm on this panel. And it gets into, I'm actually happy and comfortable with saying I'm not an artist. I have really spent, I started out, learning about the arts. And I have a background in the arts. But I have been very centered and very happy in the role of administrator and really lately advocate. And this is part of, I think, a culminating part of my own career as an administrator is really working in this field with the veterans and with the veteran artists and with the artists and everybody across the continuum. And for the record, again, I'm Merita Wester. I'm with Americans for the Arts, senior director of arts policy. Thank you. Madison Cario. And gosh, I don't know what to start. I'm many things. So let's talk about my job. What pays the bills right now, I'm the director of the Office of the Arts at Georgia Institute of Technology. And it's a really wonderful opportunity for me because I get to be an artist, an administrator, a curator, and the science geek that I am. So I have a background in environmental science and electrical engineering from the Marine Corps that I finally get to kind of come out about. And so many coming outs. I am also going to be really honest with you all. I'm really full and super nervous because I will say that in this room in the last 24 hours, I have brought even more pieces of myself together. And this is crazy. Just when I think that I've got it and I know how to be an administrator and a veteran and a scientist and a technologist, I don't think that until this morning, as I was reviewing what I was going to say, that I really had a clue how deeply moved I am. Like, my cells are vibrating. This is amazing. And I'm terrified. So I'd say some words that we can't publish. But I'll say thank you. Hi, everyone. Maurice to call. Same. So a couple of different levels. I am the Artist of Residence at TCG. We run a program called the Veterans of Theater Institute. And what we're trying to do is to teach veterans how to write plays and also how to work in technical theater. So we're working in three sites right now. Fourth site, we're hoping to get up and going in August. So Rhode Island, Providence, Rhode Island with Trinity Rep Company and Brown University and Providence Community Libraries. And North Carolina with Cape Fear Regional Theater, Fable State University, and Methodist College. And now we just opened about third site last week, actually, in San Diego with La Jolla Playhouse. And we're working with the MFA students in the theater program there. And the final site, the final pilot site ASU. And we're hoping to get that up this fall semester. So that's what we're doing in addition to that. I was in Marines. I was a Marine, Artilleryman, and Infantryman. I'm also a playwright, so I'm at Brown University, trying to find some right place. I'm Art DeGroote, Executive Director of Military and Veterans Affairs at Kansas State University. I finished my doctorate, as was mentioned yesterday. And I researched the lived experience of post-911 year veterans as they transition as a human life event from a phenomenological perspective. I also witnessed during this convening I had an amazing life experience witnessing the performance of Joe Good's resilience work with veterans. It became very, very personal to me. And I discovered the power of art as an appropriate platform for telling veteran stories and not just as an appropriate platform, but I think the prominent platform where journalists, historians, others really have not, in my opinion, told the human stories of veterans. And so I think this is one of the most important parts of my work. I've been involved now in five veterans art programs and projects at various roles. I'm definitely learning every day. This has been an important convening for me to feel more connected to this community. So I'm just glad to be here. And this is a very powerful thing. I'm also scared and nervous. This is a very powerful collection of people and talent. And I feel really privileged to be here about it, but I'm also on edge. Stay that way. Good morning. My name is Umoj Abdul Ahad. And I'm here representing Copyback Theater. I'm a Vietnam veteran. And I talked to a guy the other day, and I told him I was a Vietnam veteran. He said, I thought all of y'all were dead. So I have a real important reason to be around this table. I have a son that's a Navy who's in the Navy. I have a son-in-law that was in the Army. I have three grandsons that was in the service. I have one now is playing with the Army Jazz Band. He's a drummer, and he's good. And my oldest grandson just told me two or three weeks ago, maybe a little longer, that he and his wife were expected the 22nd of this month. So when I talked last night about us really looking at how we can effectively make a change and not have all the stories about war, I believe the Pentagon probably meets like this, and they have no more power than we do. We can stop this. So it seems like everyone's using their NPR voice, so I will as well. My name's Sam Pressler. OK, I can't do that. I listen to it every morning, and I became a monthly contributor. You should too. But my name's Sam Pressler. I am the founder and executive director of the Armed Services Arts Partnership, or ASAP, for the Army People, Not the Alcohol and Substance Abuse Program, and also Comedy Boot Camp. I, too, am very humbled to be at this table. When I was in college just starting this work, I was looking up to Maurice and Phil Kly and Mac Gallagher. And so being at the same table as Maurice is pretty awesome. So I started this program when I was a sophomore at William and Mary was very fortunate to get a few fellowship fundings to work on it full-time and have no background in the arts, except for performing comedy when I was in high school. Didn't serve in the military, my grandparents did. So not, oh, wow. And so what ASAP does, to make a long story short, we help veterans reintegrate into their communities through the arts. We serve veterans, service members, and military families. Our approach includes intro-level classes, which for veterans and their families, they're about seven to 10 weeks in length, stand-up comedy, improv, creative writing, storytelling. They all culminate with public performances. And then our big thing is not stopping there. We provide long-term alumni support through workshops, meet-ups, performances, et cetera. Thank you. Good morning to everyone. My name is Nolan Bivins. I come to you this morning by way of a little over 32 years of active duty military service. I retired as the general officer back in 2008. And I'm kind of at the table by virtue of a relationship with Bob Lynch, Americans for the Arts. And I would say I'm here primarily because of the strong and passionate feeling I have about the subject we're talking this morning is healing. And what I believe is that healing happens within community. I wish I could have quoted that. That comes from another book that I've read, but it resonated with me. And I think it is a collector that allows me to think about this work of bridging military and art communities with that one notion that healing occurs in community. And it's just not the physical, the mental, the social aspect of it, but it is the whole concept of healing. And so what I spend my time today, these days doing, outside of running a business, is passionately advocating to all of those that I can influence with this notion of how art can contribute tremendously to the benefit of our veterans, their families as well. And I think the family is a key component that we make a chance to talk about a little later. Thank you so very much. Thank you. Thank you for that. That was great. And I'll turn my timer off now. I'd like to get everybody's voice in the room to start, which is really great. And so thank you. You have eclectic backgrounds, but you're all referencing the power of art, some of you as with experience in the arts and some of you coming more from the outside. I just wonder if you could reflect a little bit personally, because I feel, in a way, this conversation has gone deep fast over the course of this one day and a morning that we've been together. And I wonder if you could just talk a little bit about the power of the art. Even if you want to talk anecdotally a little bit about that or in your direct experience about that, I'd love to just put that into the center of the table. OK, so Patricia again. For me personally, that's what I'll bring into this to answer your question. I am a veteran. And after I got out, I went to graduate school. After a while, I ended up in Knoxville, Tennessee. I'm working on my doctorate. And I had a class where a group of local artists or activists came into the space and introduced what they were doing. And for the class assignment, I was to go and do some work with one of these groups. And just so happened, Carpetback Theater, Linda Parris Bailey and Andrea, were present. And they were discussing the peace speed. And as I sat there as a veteran at that time, no one knew I was a veteran. I didn't identify as a veteran. And I knew I had to work with them. After I heard them describe that peace from last night, I had to work with them. And so I committed to doing that. And Linda invited me as my assignment to participate in a story circle. And I don't even think Linda was aware of it. But after I participated in that story circle, that was the first time I ever told my story, ever. No one knew my story. The only person who knew that story after I told it and those in that circle was my professor, who read the paper that I wrote about it. So I share my story with this group. Emoji was present. And it was received in such a powerful way, a powerful way. I was in a place where my story had been taken from me. My narrative had been taken. I was robbed of my story and my narrative. And I was just existing and not living because I was in fear. I was on that brink where life for me was almost over. But I came into that space. I told that story of me suffering from PTSD, post-traumatic stress disorder, and how I ended up becoming a felon because of an act that was committed that I didn't have a title for. I didn't know how to name until several physicians within the VA told me that it was PTSD. This thing exists. And I told them they were crazy, but I was not a Vietnam vet. This was not real. I am not an old. So I also came to discover I experienced military sexual trauma as well. And I know that that's not a lived experience for every woman or male within the military, but it happened to me. And that was the first time ever in that circle that I was able to say that. And after I left that space, my life was changed. And that's why I'm here. And it took, I don't even know how many years later. It was a lot of years later, just reason. Linda, and Andrea, and Moja, and others who were in that circle, I was able to share with them that story and the impact it had on me, being able to share that with you, with them. But Carpet Bag didn't stop there. They invited me to take my story and change it into a digital story, but I had to do it myself. So I had to go through their train-to-trainers program. So I wrote my story in 3,300 words or less and created a video, a digital story, which is like three minutes, with images and everything about my story. And then I went and started pursuing that even deeper. And I started to do that with Story Center as well, the Center of Digital Story, telling with Joe Lambert. And now I'm a digital storytelling facilitator, but I am the owner of my story. And that's what I want to help others do, be it veterans or not, because we are human. And what we experience are human issues. Thank you so much. I would add about the power of the art. I think there's kind of internal and external powers. I really think it's very powerful when the creative class is intermixed with the warrior class. And I think the real audience is our non-veterans. And so that's the majority of people I mentioned this either day, that they're not exposed to these stories and the reality of those that voluntarily serve in uniform, not as heroes and not as victims, as a life choice. So I think it's very powerful for me and my work to use the creative work of you here towards having a voice to the civilian audience. We've heard a lot this conference about how reinforcing it is, how therapeutic it is for those that have served. Your work is representing their lives in a very appropriate and honorable way. And that's important. But I think largely it's the external audience. And it's kind of interesting that most people that go in the military, warrior class, are very disconnected from the arts world and very few veterans. It's hard to bring a veteran or a currently serving military onto our campus 17 miles from an army base and with free tickets and a bus and all kinds of incentives to bring them into a theater. And it shouldn't be that way. But once they do, this becomes a part of their lives. And so I guess my last comment to be is I hope through all this work, we're doing social work and art is a catalyst to understanding this. But I think there's also a value of bringing the arts into the lives of our military and veterans. And that's missing. They get entertained, they don't get art. And I think they deserve that. And I'm a veteran and I felt the power of my own life of the art. And so that's a gift intrinsic to them and that community that doesn't get art. So I'll kind of come at this, probably from like the VSO approach. Is there any other VSOs at the table? Okay, cool. So I think the first piece is thinking about accessibility. It's particularly in the veteran service space, you typically see the newer type of VSO organizations are not that diverse, right? It's younger post-911 veterans, oftentimes white and sometimes more biased towards officers than enlisted. What we found through our programs at least is just you get an incredible diversity through those programs. So we have in any one writing group that we do in Hampton Roads in DC, we'll have someone who's just out of the service and 90, 92 year old world war two veterans. And that's because the nice thing about writing or some of these things is it is accessible. So you see a really diverse range of ages. I think racially this is something that has surprised me personally is right now over 50% of the people who participate in our programs are people of color. When you compare that to the overall veterans population in this country, 82% are Caucasian. So we're finding at least that the arts are bringing out a lot of the more underrepresented veterans. And then finally, you know, less than 10% of veterans are women, yet 40% of the people who participate in our program are females. And considering that we do stand up comedy, which is a very male dominated art form, we're finding that our classes are usually 40 to 50% female. So I think the accessibility piece is important. I think the second piece I like to talk about is the diversity of what can come from the arts, right? It's, you know, for us as art educators, we're not guiding towards a therapeutic outcome. That is, we're expressly saying that we don't do that because we're not qualified to do that. But what can come of that, when you give people an opportunity to build skills and have a community and express yourself, that can create a renewed sense of purpose and expansion of that identity beyond just being defined by what happened in the past, but what you're contributing moving forward. And for some healing benefits, right? I think the other piece to what art says giving those veterans a platform and a voice on stage and having them tell their stories to an audience of civilians or people who are less connected, that boosts awareness, that boosts understanding, and ideally that boosts more engagement, right? We're bringing those communities closer together. So I think just the diversity of what can come from it is really important. It's great, Sam, I wanna add to that, thinking about joy and invitation, to taking accessibility to invitation, and what I found in my work at Georgia Tech with engineers and with veterans is this notion of I used to do that, or yeah, I played piano, but that was before, right? Fill in the blank before I served, before I got back. And so just through conversation, lunch, is a lesson learned from the conversation yesterday, lunch is a great way to start. And you start by just being in the room, and what I found is whether it's engineers or engineers who are also vets, we will start there and then, well, what do you do? And I'm embarrassed to tell them, I come in as a vet, right? And I'm like, oh, a vet. And then I go, I'm also the director of the Office of the Arts. And they're like, oh, I knew you weren't just having lunch with us, right? You have an agenda, you know? And we just, we let that lie. And usually it lies when I hand the card, right? On my way out, I'm like, here's my card. And they're like, oh, I didn't even know we had arts. And then we come back and we have this conversation. And then they say, well, what do you do? And I'm like, well, you know, dance, theater. Like, oh, I used to, right? And we start there. I'm like, oh, we used to play trumpet. Well, we've got extra ones. If you ever want to, if you ever want to, you know, just get on the horn again. And they're like, really? I could do that? And so, not necessarily making things, we just found a lot of joy and community just through the practice of what people used to do or I never thought about writing, but I've been journalin' all the time. Is this art? Am I allowed to call myself an artist? Is what I'm making artistic, right? And so language, equity, and welcoming everyone into the room has been a really important part of the practice, both at Georgia Institute of Technology and the work that I'm doing, but also as a vet, as like, you know, trans boundary and keep going back and forth between those things. So just to answer the question, I answered on two levels. I answered it as a veteran who ended up in a writing space and someone who now facilitates those sorts of spaces. So 2008, I was waiting for the new GI Bill to come into place. I needed something to take in a year from school for it to wait, so it wasn't burning benefits. So I ended up at a writing workshop at New York University, all right? The veterans writing workshop and what they have been doing since 2000, academic year eight, nine is creating a space for veterans of, at that time, most of Iraq and Afghan, but it's expanded to get together and write poetry and fiction. So I showed up, they were teaching poetry, thought this was a waste of my time. It's not useful to me. I was gonna end up being a, the goal was to be a federal police officer, or I need to learn how to write a song for it. But what I actually found was a community of people. I made friends, you know some of these folks, all right? So I made friends and that's why I kept going back. And then I realized with the exception of the person I was working with, a guy named Seamus, I hadn't talked about the war. I talked about the war with Seamus because Seamus was a Marine, he was in 3.7 and we could talk about it, you know? And he and I, I had never talked about the war when it was affecting me. So getting back, getting into a room like that and actually learning how to process the war through poetry was life changing. I ended up not being a police officer, obviously. Now, and that would have been a fine choice, but you know, it took a different route in life. Now we are able to facilitate these sorts of workshops across the country and we invite folks into the theater and give them access. But the first thing we do is, and I've been saying this to the people who facilitate the workshops, is what we're really doing is building community. Like these folks are not, they have not all served together. I did different branches, different areas. But we are facilitating community. We're bringing people in a room, we're giving them space, we feed them, depending on the workshop. San Diego, I mean, they're like feeding. But we facilitate work, we facilitate a space where people can just build community, make friends, right? And then we take them to the theater so they get to see the shows, they get to see the season if they want to. And we teach them a thing, we teach them a skill. And at the end of the workshop, the goal is to be able to present that work on a stage publicly if they want it, invite the friends, invite people from the community. So it's, but the first and most important thing is building the community. That's what I learned. I learned that last year in a real way when we did our first workshop in San Diego because that's what I saw. Whatever else comes out of it, that's great, but it's really community. So I always feel of myself in this space as a learner and the great joy of being in this space since literally only since about 2011 is that every single day I learned something new that changes the way I not only think about this work, it changes the way I do this work. And I think I just wanna talk about my experience with how the arts have helped me in that learning journey by just describing a little bit of a timeline of how transformational internally this has been. When Americans for the Arts first came into the space, we were invited into a dialogue. We did not initiate it. It was happening at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center. It was the, you know, impetus was the extreme number of wounded returning back from Iraq and Afghanistan with serious physical and psychological injuries. The arts, as I came to learn, had a long history of being part of war theaters, being part of the military, being part of this, that coming from a civilian population, and I wanna echo everything that's been said about the great tragedy and imperative we need to bridge this military and civilian gap because it manifests in very serious ways. In our society today. And when we first had this dialogue, we held a summit called Arts and Healing for Wounded Warriors, and Walter Reed was fantastic. They were able to bring a military and veteran population together with arts folks, the creative class, if you will, in healing professionals, healthcare professionals. And what we learned from that dialogue was, and it was loud and clear, it's like, if you wanna help the wounded warrior, you don't stop there. You have to be about the family. You have to look at the circle of caregivers. You have to look at the community, so we changed our minds. And then we started looking at the continuum of the arts, which if you're looking just at the healing continuum, and I think I'm gonna end with just saying, I'll warn you that the healing continuum is only one part of this larger artistic ecosystem that needs to be brought together and needs to be looked at as the ultimate holistic system. But if you look at the healing continuum, what I started to learn was creative arts therapists, those who are licensed working in art therapy, music therapy, we're gonna hear a lot more about that. They have not necessarily been new to this environment, but they have been in VA systems. They've been part of a closed system that doesn't necessarily allow their work and their benefits to be as visible as we have the luxury of being on the nonprofit side. But when you look at the manifestations of that, and I'll give a very, very specific example, there is relatively speaking, given the size of the agency, handfuls of creative arts therapists working in VA's. And the expression of that, I was introduced to by a very long-serving VSO, Veteran Service Organization, American Legion Auxiliary, largest volunteer association, women who have been supporting arts in our veterans' medical facilities for a very, very long time, through the National Veterans Creative Arts Festival. And the first time I went to the festival, which is the culmination of a lot of work that happens at the local level, a lot of work. And we were able to tour the exhibit of visual artists who are the recipients of the medals in the competition and see the performances. What I was struck by, and I was really new, this was probably 2012, 2013, and they may have started, each and every one of these service members, and it was completely intergenerational, from Vietnam to Gulf War, to whomever was part of this larger system. And that's what I also understood. There's the Iraq and Afghanistan conflicts, sadly, but also positively, initiated a different kind of conversation that allows us into an intergenerational space. And when I talked with every single one, and I talked to every single one, they may have started out that art is therapeutic, or I'm addressing therapies, or I'm doing this. When they were in front of their artwork, describing what they were doing, they were artists, they were talking as artists. That was the transformational journey. And then further probing that along, again, the continuum, artist, patient to artist, but then they were talking about, and you know, there's a gallery in my local arts district that I'm gonna be in a show, or I'm gonna be doing this, and I'm connecting with the community. And then we kind of fast forward a couple of other years, and along these same trajectories, I start to meet all of the fabulous veteran artists that are out there. And I learned a lot from people like Ramon Baca, Maurice, people who are like, it's like, hey, you know the thing is? It's a fallacy to say you have to bring arts to service members and veterans. When we had the draft, artists were drafted. And you return to what you do. We don't have the draft now. That doesn't mean artists didn't sign up. And when people return this reintegration, it's a fallacy that the arts are only about therapy and therapeutic and educational. They are about, and we need this. And I wholly endorse the brilliance of, we need those veteran artists' voices and the experience because we have a populace that is largely clueless and uneducated and disconnected. So we need the voices that are about engagement. We also need to know that for our own creative industry, and I will credit this quote forever to Joe Bethanti, the former State Poet Laureate in North Carolina who made veterans issues his project. He said that in his mind, the stories that are coming out from veterans are really some of the most significant historical underpinnings of what is gonna be our cultural voice. And we need to look at how we as a creative industry integrate those voices and elevate those voices and support those voices. And I'm done. Thanks, great. Great, yeah. I'm gonna hand you this one right over here, there you go. Yeah, the great comment before because the people who did get drafted were many things. And as I think about the arts and all the other, I guess, facets of human life and how we can make a difference and make a change, the word comes to me, the two words really, it's change agent. And I think that that's what we should see ourself as. And what I work on myself is trying to be that change that you want everything else to be. I try to actually work on that personally because that's what really happens that you very well know is actually personally. And so I've seen over the years how that happens, how it really works. And I definitely have seen it as a community and we talk about community, common unity, how we actually can make a change. But I think when we're in settings like this, we're comfortable, we're not comfortable at all. But when we go home, it's like art or whatever it may be. Somebody thinks little of you or less of you, so you don't actually express yourself, your true self when you're around other people because my granddaddy used to say, it's easy to be black in the black community. But it ain't quite easy when you're around other people and they talking about you and saying names and you have to say, well, hey, that ain't cool because they've made fire you or do whatever. So I want us to from now on say what ain't cool around people who need to hear it. They need to hear it. They need to hear it because that's a change agent. That's a change agent. Now, I'm in Vietnam and I'm sitting around and all the guys, Latin, Latinos, European Americans from Tennessee, Mississippi, Alabama, we sitting around and everybody saying, man, this is crazy. What are we doing over in Vietnam? So one, the only African American said no Vietnamese has called me nigga. It was everybody. Everybody, I don't want you to hear this carefully because this story is very seldom told. You knew that on Kent State, kids were written killed because of Vietnam. You knew that Jackson State and all these other places. But in Vietnam, people who were driving tanks and driving planes and shooting M16s and whatever, they were saying, this is crazy. What am I doing over here? So we united in Vietnam. The go look at the movie called, sir, yes sir, no sir. I think it's what it's called. But it's about Vietnam veterans in Vietnam saying the same thing the students were saying on campus. Saying the same thing that people were saying everywhere. Now when you got a guy driving a tank saying, this is crazy, he may turn that tank around. And everybody knew that. And when he's driving a B-52 and he's over somebody and he said, oh man, this is crazy. He may turn that plane around. And that's what happened. I used to work with what is called an Afro. And in the Air Force, in any branch of service, you can't do that. You got to have a certain kind of hairstyle. So I have my family send me some tuxedo. I don't know if you know what tuxedo is. Real thick grease makes your hair stand down on your head. And so I have my hair down and all the rest. So every night when I would go to, don't we know we had, I was in the Air Force as a security policeman. So you'd have to stand up and hide straight, your arms, your shoes, shine and all the rest. He would always say something about my hair. Man, will you please cut your hair, blah, blah, blah. And this is in Vietnam. So I came in one morning as a guy from Philadelphia and I'll be brief. He was a barber. And so I asked him, I said, do you know how to shave heads? He said, yes, I do. I said, I don't want you to shave my head. He said, what? I said, because if I can't wear my hair the way I want to wear my hair, I'm not going to have any hair at all. We was 548 guys in that unit. That morning I got my hair shaved. They said, I'm going to do that. I'm going to do that. When we came to work that night, there was 545 people. 540, change agents. I'm talking about being a change agent. That's what I'm talking about. All shaved their heads. One bit about four or five guys didn't shave their heads. That next day we had orders to be separated. Yes, indeed, I was at fan rank. No, I was at fan rank. The next day they sent me to Benoit. And they separated us. They sent us a dinning, quaintree, and all the rest. So I'm just saying that using the arts as one thing, important, but use your life. Everything that you do, if you don't like what's going on, change it. Change it. But don't be afraid. Don't be afraid to say it in front of other people who may think something's wrong with you because something's wrong with them. It's something wrong with all of us. I don't end with this. I got on the bus the other day. I do a lot of walking. I try to walk 10 miles a day. Turn 70, 10th of February. Right on, right on. Right on. I got on the bus and this guy said to me, European American young guy, he said, hey brother, we the same, man, we the same. I said, we sure are. He said, but people are scared of you. I said, scared of me, why? He said, because you're different. I said, everybody on this bus is different. I mean, nobody on this bus is the same. Everybody on this bus is different. So we're different. But let's make our difference. Great. So Nolan, I wanna actually let you jump in because we were only gonna get through one question in this panel, but yeah, it was a good question. It was a really good question. Yeah. All right, that's good. Okay, thanks, thanks so much. The power of the arts. I think that was the core. Yeah. And I think we see the power of it. And I do have to pause for the other veterans that are around the table with me this morning. And I feel obligated to make sure you all know to whom much is given, much is expected. And I consider my life really one of being exceptionally blessed. So I have to say to you all, thank you for your service. I feel a special commitment to say that to you this morning and for whatever that may resonate with you, just take it as coming very sincere for me. Because I think that it kind of leads to the thought about the power of the arts. I think the power of the arts as I have come into this is that it creates a pathway for experience between the two communities. And experience is the core of what I realized that while I had it, I didn't take it into my day-to-day existence as a soldier. Though it was always around me. I'll never forget when I changed command as a brigade commander, the Sergeant Major came in with this big picture. I'll tell you what my family thinks about it later. But it came in with this big, huge picture that an artist in my command had decided to make of me, of a picture. And I was totally flabbergasted because I am the most humble person in the world. I was totally embarrassed. And the point of what resonated to me was that to your point that the artists are in the military. I later on became Chief of Staff at Southern Command and the boss came in and says, hey, I want to create a band. What? It's a military organization. And it was a joint organization of that. So we created a band and we just put a call out and said, hey, we're going to create a band. We want to go around Latin Central South America and we want to use this as a tool to do cultural diplomacy. And this person came out, came to drama, that person had a one, two or three of them had guitars that we didn't know they had. And three months later, we were touring. It really was a huge experience. So I think that the point of that is the power of the arts I think creates a pathway for experience with communities. And I think that that is really important when it comes to the military community today and the civilian community. Many in the room have heard me say, I think there's more similarity than there's disparity. I would ask you just think about this for a moment. You know, what's the difference between Sandy Hook, the Battle for Fallujah and the crisis that we were experiencing between the police force and our communities today? What's the difference and what's the commonality on that? And I think the fact that there's trauma across all of that spectrum means that what military service members are experiencing in combat is very similar to what our grade school kids are spending in grade school. And our communities are full of that. And so when we talk about helping our service members, we really talk about helping our community. This is a huge connection there in my mind right now. And it comes back to this notion that I think power arts creates this pathway for experience for us to start communicating, start sharing those experiences. Our experience should begin to understand, one should begin to understand that communications is open. And I will say this because yesterday one of the powerful thoughts that came to my mind is that group was, we're talking. And someone said this and I think it's this idea that whatever you do as an artist or whatever we try to do as a community of artists, always at the time that you're creating, and that's what I love about artists because they're always creating, I understand that now more than ever, but when you create be intentional about collaborating with the military. Make collaboration an intentional part of your creativity because I think that's when you're gonna draw that again, experience very early on that portrays itself in the work that you're doing and the healing that you're trying to help with. Thank you. This is great. Just a couple things to say. I mean, it's interesting that in some ways this gathering is premised a bit on the notion of divide, like that there's differences in these communities and we're trying to bridge that divide. And then I think this conversation is of course kind of upends that notion about the real connection that exists and it's actually elevating those connections versus starting with divide. So I feel like that is really great. And I think Nolan, you ended us on a really important point about just the way we, how to do this work well. Like how do we do it well together? And I think that's really, feels like where this conversation is headed. So how do we do this work well? And just to kind of pull one other thing out, which I think is like just, you know, true for every single person that sits in the room, which is the fundamental need to be able to be the voice of our own story, right? Just that fundamental need. And so I kind of just put those things out there. What we're gonna do is shift gears. We're gonna stop talking amongst ourselves with microphones and you'll go back to your seats and then we'll open this up to a broader conversation. But thank you so much for that, thank you. And sometimes it's hard for me to ask people questions. But I made a commitment that when I got in front of prominent individuals in the space, I would challenge them with a question specifically surrounding art in the military. And I'm happy to report that officers like General Petraeus and a national security advisor that I had an opportunity to bend the year of, when you challenge them with anecdotes about the connection of art in the military, each and every one of them has one. My favorite one is from a former commandant of the Marine Corps, Jim Jones. He was tasked with going into Hezbollah. He was fighting Hezbollah and you'll have to excuse me, I don't remember the country, cold. And they asked him, he was in the Pentagon and he was going around and he was touting cultural diplomacy and connecting community. And his buddies in the Pentagon were like, Jim, why are you talking about cultural diplomacy? You have every military asset at your command. You can basically go in there and borrow some words from this morning, turn the country to glass. And yet you're talking about cultural diplomacy. He said, we are there and Hezbollah is winning. And let me tell you why Hezbollah is winning because Hezbollah is going in and they're giving money to the hospitals and they're connecting with the community. And in the future, that is how we're gonna win wars. Thank you. Thank you. Art, and then who's next up after art? And there another, yeah, right here, thank you. I'm gonna speak from sitting down because I am always shorter and more to the point when I sit and stand. I don't know why that is, but I wanna kind of respond back a little bit about how does the warrior community and the artistic community work? And I think in my example, I think there's, and we see this forum, there's some of us that are intermediaries. We were veterans, we have cultural capital in that community, even as veterans, as formerly serving. And so we have generals and sergeant majors and friends that we can talk to every day. So we have cultural capital still in that community. Yet through these forums and the work we do brought in with the opportunities with arts projects, we also start to build some of that. And so one thing about cultural capital, it's transferable. So I can go to the general at Fort Riley and say, hey, we're bringing Baystrak Live to our campus community or theater. We'd wanna bring the cast out to your post. He would allow me, he would trust my opinion that that's appropriate more than his entertainment director as a government employee. So I think the point is how we do this work moving forward is we need to develop more intermediaries, people that have cultural capital in both sides of the artistic community and the military veterans community. And that helps everyone. And Annie Hamburger kind of mentioned my role, she's very flattering how my role was in Baystrak, but it was. I got to do things that was really hard for her to do, hard for the presenter to do, hard for the booking agents, hard for the creative people, but I could get things done for them that they couldn't do for themselves. And so I think that's a role that should be developed and talked about in all these projects moving forward. Who is your intermediary after you choose a project? That's great, thank you. You're up and then Helen back there. Andrew Siemos Lee with Carpevac Theater in Debra and Speed, Killed My Cousin. I am so glad that, and I can't find you visually, no. Yes, looking right at me as a matter of fact, that you made the comment in regards to the school community and what's going on with the war and what's the difference in the war and this kind of thing. And I'll tell you why. I posed the question yesterday in a discussion that we had about a dilemma that I go through. I, in the land of pretend, I play an Iraq veteran and have been on tour for the last six months or so as such. And one of the dilemmas that I was running into even last night and have ran throughout rehearsals and things like that is my mentality in regards to this particular character, this particular soldier and so forth. And there's a lot of concentration on mastering being something that I'm clearly not, right? And you know, how do I, what am I sitting right? Am I looking right at you? Is that how your head goes? Is that the way they are? They are, they are. And there's this dilemma that has grown with me through the process that I've been trying, that we have to talk out consistently as a cast because it makes me very upset. Is this us and them? Us and them? I can't seem to get right being one of them, you know? Them. And what I have gradually learned throughout the process of this role and interaction with veterans and interaction with the military community and workshops with folks with PTSD and so forth and so forth and so forth is this. We are the same. It's just a different narrative. It's the same pain, it's the same trauma, it's the same everything. And until that character became a human being for me, I couldn't walk. I can totally be a human being. And so I am so glad that you begin that conversation about the fabric of that. And it is very helpful to those of us in the arts that are trying to walk those characters out to remain human. And then it all makes sense to me. Thank you. Thank you. Helen Stoltzfuss, Black Swan Arts and Media, Oakland. Maybe because I'm sitting on the outer circle, I feel like I wanna ask a question sort of as an outsider or standing outside for a minute. We talk about military and non-military that they are to each other, often the other. There's this gap there. And that is very true. I would like us to see this conflict, this gap in a larger context of our society. Which sees many communities as the other. I mean, that's our dilemma. I don't know if everyone agrees with this, but I think we are trying to figure out as a society, as an American society, how can we live together? How can we find what we have in common and build on that? That's what I feel like I want to do as an artist and what I think many of us here are trying to do. So I want to expand the question. So from General Bivens saying, make the military the intentional partner in your collaboration. I wanna say make the other. We now live in a society where Muslims get attacked on the street. I just took a friend who's a Muslim from Iran to the airport. She's self-deporting because she can't deal with the stress anymore of what people say to her and of her life being turned upside down. So this is not unrelated to this conference, to this issue because these issues are all part of a larger issue of how do we listen to the other? Yes, we wanna hear our stories told on stage and that is important. It's really important for veterans to tell their story and to hear their story on stage. Can they sit in a theater and listen to the story of an Iraqi, of an Afghan, of a Muslim? If we can't do that, then we can't figure out how to live together and that, to me, is the larger issue within which all of these questions sit. It's the larger context, so. So, some thoughts on that. I will let other people get to that with more well thought out thoughts. So there was one question that was asked in advance of us that I think, given the moment we're in, is worth also throwing out there and is it possible to be critical of the military that still work as an artist in collaboration with you? I thought that was a really interesting question. And the second point was, or are there boundaries around subject matters that can be taken on by artists? And I think I will concede my age, like I don't, I haven't experienced this globally, but there have been peaks and troughs in terms of support for veterans in the military. Obviously, in Vietnam is a low point. Iraq and Afghanistan, it's been a relative high point. We're now, I've started to experience this potentially the start of a trough, both with the administration coming in and their kind of zero-sum mentality towards military spending versus domestic spending. And to some, it feels like you're taking from what we're doing at home to bolster an already large budget. And I think what's so important in this is to actually find the artists who may not be supportive of the military. I wanna work with people who have never worked with the military because that's how we invite people into these experiences. So you can, so my concern in all of this is that we go back to that place with Vietnam and we do what we're doing right now with local law enforcement officers. I will concede as a white male, I don't experience the brunt of the criminal justice system. I know the criminal justice system is broken, but I also know there are humans who are police officers who are doing their jobs in a broken system. And my concern in all of this is that we dehumanize the veteran and the service member in the same way that in some regards we've dehumanized the police officer. And I just, that's kinda why I wanna invite in these people who may not have had that connection to speak to maybe their constituencies that have that disconnect. Yeah, I think you raised a really interesting question in part that question that we didn't get to about what are the topics that we can't take on or what are the disconnects in part stems from having been arrested for trespassing on government property at a Naval nuclear weapon station when I was in my 20s. And so having some very strong feelings about the military at that time. And so I wonder if maybe we could even talk about that a little bit about, I mean, we're talking about a lot of the things that connect us, but what are the things that, and we don't have to go here, but we might wanna go here, what are the things that are real challenges in terms of that connection. So yeah, Mike, and did I miss somebody else? Is there a two? Yes, and then back there, yeah. Hi, I'm Michael Reed from ASU, ASU Arizona State University, Gammage. And I've heard an incredible amount of information over the past day and almost a half overwhelmingly so, I would say. We've done a lot of work with military over at least the past 15, more like 20 years in regard to programs for military families and working with wonderful artists that are in this room, the folks from Bass Track, Carpet Bag, holding it down, Veterans Dream Project. And in the space of being an arts presenter on the largest state university campus in the country in all these very large, complex issues we're talking about, I'm trying to, at the end of the day, when we leave here, I'm trying to, I wanna try and, from that idea of all politics are local, somehow operationalize some of these massive ideas that I personally cannot take on, but I can take on pieces of connecting people who would otherwise would not be talking to each other. So in the best ways possible, and I invite any conversations that might happen in the next day to help me in that quest, I wanna affect some micro change so that it can plant seeds where we are and continue to maybe move towards a macro change. I don't have the answers. We've tried some things that have worked really well and I think the point about intermediaries is a very important one when we're talking about this type of work with stories about veterans who have seen combat and most of us have not. So know what you don't know. So I'd like to explore that and we've done that to a certain point, most recently with the great folks at Carpet Bag. So I'm just sort of putting that out on the table to examine because these are monstrous, very large complex issues we're talking about, where in each when we go back home, how can we plant that seed or start a little network that is addressing some of these things and I'm gonna be concentrating on that. Yes, so you're spot on the point you make about operationalizing and it is a big idea so let me just come right down to the road. I think that a way, just a thought, everyone sitting in this room probably is a part of some group, some foundation, some artistic adventure. How about just invite one military person to sit on your advisory board, start there intentionally because you want that voice to be brought in and you want that voice to be. That's very simple, I mean that's why I went down to that level and I'm not pointing at you necessarily but I was trying to give it as a generic example of how you can really practically do something right today, change your community by saying I am gonna have that voice sitting around the table when I create because it begins to happen there. I was just gonna say, given a lot of the additional comments was made from the outer circle that I think we have to always remember and this is what demystifies is I think for a lot of the military folks is that we are talking about human experience. When you talk about a person, Vietnam and I know also a couple of real World War II Korean veterans who kind of still live under their beds and the point of that is it's a human experience that we're beginning to engage on and what we're trying to participate in and being a part of. And particularly now I think we need to be aware that I think Marita talked to this is that this truly is a spectrum but it's a spectrum in a lot of ways. It's from the child, the family, the service member and it expands all the way out to the entire organization but it's also a spectrum in the sense of going from healing, particularly creative art therapists being a part of that community all the way out to just dealing with this general human experience I think that you were referring to a moment ago about we all are experiencing trauma. So how do we deal with those are huge perspectives. So I think you have to figure out where's my dot in that matrix from individual experience all the way out to community and from the fact that I'm trying to deal with healing or am I just trying to address this bigger or wider issue in the culture. And I wanted to just kind of close with this idea that as we do this particular in the military community I'm reminded of a quote that I always try to live by is that it's better to light a candle than to curse to darkness, right? And so a lot of times in the military experience and this gets to I think the reentry point that was made I think at the end that we recognize that when you jump into this thing you're jumping into a possible potential state of darkness, right? It's just the nature of combat, it's the nature of war you're gonna probably go down that path. But if we do it also with the idea that I can light the candle at the end that will also bring balance to our efforts and I think our initiatives. At least that's what I try to maintain is I counsel and talk about these things I want to light the candle but I know sometimes the talking about the darkness is gonna be very, very necessary to get to that point. But I do it so intentionally knowing that I have to have that balance and I think if we do that because there's a lot of ways and a lot of opportunities that you can then put that balance in terms of not just focusing on one side and really create the idea of what I call the total experience of the military community. My oldest daughter beats me up with this all the time and she says, we got to remember the children. And she says that because she came through my experience as a child and so if you talk with her, she will, like in reentry, that there could be a child standing there telling a story too. And so she's investing her life in trying to create that story because he's so important. You will not understand the military experience. I mean every person here in the military that's got experience will tell you that aspect that their family was vital and significant to whatever happened in their lives. But oftentimes when you see a portrayed is portrayed from the service members or the spouses that was actually in the military perspective and not from the family or through that particular lens. So I just strike that as balance and I'll sit down and shut up like my mom told me. And so one of the things that I keep hearing and I think it seems like one of the more important questions that keeps ruminating is how do we continue to look at bridging that gap and not just bringing in military personnel who may happen or happen to have been artists previously. Obviously that's an important aspect of it but then how do we reach those populations as artists who don't have that connection with the arts maybe as viscerally. A couple of things I wanna bring up here is just the number one the idea of meeting them where they are. With that idea in a couple of weeks I will go down to San Antonio for what's the Air Force Base that's down there Randolph, right? Randolph Air Force Base? Yeah, so I'll go down to Randolph Air Force Base. There's this event that happens annually, Freedom Flyers Reunion and the reason I go to it is because my uncle was an Air Force pilot who shot down, spent seven years in the Hanoi Hilton, came back and every year for the last few decades they gather there and now of course my uncle is dead. He's been dead for a couple of years but my father and family friend have continued to go and for the last four years since I've lived in Austin I drive down there and I also go and one of the amazing things that I find there is that these are all very, the people that are part of this Freedom Flyers Reunion are all very military still, even though they're retired. They maintain their military bearing there when they're in the presence of everyone but they're still telling stories, right? I mean, and this came up yesterday is that, yeah maybe they're not telling it to the public but when they get together those stories do come out so they're doing the art there themselves in the presence of each other. So then the question becomes how can we meet them where they're at? How can we get in some of those spaces and obviously some of the spaces we can't get into but how can we get into some of those spaces not as we're bringing this to you, you're coming to this area or this space because of us but we're coming to this space because of you because you're telling your stories and those stories are amazing. So that's one thing and then the other thing is playing the long game, especially when it comes to issues that are difficult for us to hear like some of the stories that we're in reentry, right? There's some things in there that I as a veteran would kind of recoil from a little bit. How do we approach those stories and maintain our political sense of, all right, I have my identity, I know what my politics are. I'm going to listen to your politics knowing that I may not agree with them and knowing that at some point in time I want to challenge them but playing the long game and understanding that stories of empathy can actually do greater change than an immediate political assault on those opinions and so I think playing the long game becomes a very important part of this work. Great and I'm just going to give us some order here so because I have a lot of hands. So it's going to be Anthony and then it's going to be Liz and then Emoja and then Linda and then Madison and then we'll go from there, sorry. That's as many names as I can remember. Sam, I think you mentioned something about anti-military or government or, and that triggered this hot sensation in my chest and my holistic counselor told me that, and being more in touch with my body that that's triggering something. So in reaction to that, our work, Comet Hippies was spoken word, a performance group of Latino and Black combat vets and we struggled early on with sharing our narratives and the idea that speaking up about things we disliked about the military or the government is somehow makes us less patriotic. We had a lot of discussions about that and continue to have those discussions. I came to a point within myself where I said these other performers, these men are my brothers just like in the military and that I support them and their freedom of this expression because we've served in the capacity to support that freedom of expression on a grander scale and that I'm going to love him and support him in sharing his truth and speaking it. And we've kind of had to make peace with that and say that that will not resonate with everyone and that's okay and that if we consider it art some people are going to look at it like a painting and say, I love it. Others may look at it and go, I don't like that and others might go, I just don't get it. So we've made peace with that idea. I just wanted to raise the collective consciousness on this idea of the impact of people of color who serve and that narrative needs to be further explored and it's challenging, it's scary, it's also exciting and it feels like an awesome responsibility to be a part of that work. So I just wanted to share that. Thank you. Thank you for letting me have the microphone again. I just want to say I think Artistic Practice lets us hold our differences, our real differences. And when we had a residency at the Portsmouth Naval Shipyard, we were there for, so a dance company and residence for 18 months in the shipyard. At the end was a week long festival with an event every day on the yard and off the yard because the public wasn't allowed into the yard. One of the biggest issues for the Portsmouth Naval Shipyard is that it was on the toxic dumping list. So the community that lived around the yard, many people hated the yard because it's environmental contamination. The people in the yard of course had other, well, all kinds of things were going on. When we worked on that dilemma, it turned out that, so the question I have in my mind as an artist is, how do we stay open to influence? How long in our process and how do we help people stay open to being influenced? So when we talk about these differences of opinions, we have, yeah, we have them. I came to the yard with a lot of duress around the budget, the size of the budgets, but how and when can Artistic Practice and our skills around that help us hold ourselves to be open to influence so you can actually have the conversations. Turned out the yard was way open for it. The people who weren't were the environmentalists. Absolutely would not, they would talk to us, but they would not sit down with the yard. Wasn't that interesting? And so we ended up doing a performance at a church about reconciliation where we dealt with this, but all we could have were the voices. We played the voices he said, he said so you could hear the language. So I guess what I'm coming back to is are being open to influence? Yes, I came to the yard, I had very strong feelings, I expressed them, but in the manner in which those happen and with whom and how did we open up those so we could hear those differences? And that brings me to this wonderful discussion we just heard and from both Sam and Maurice about hearing, about skills building that I left Madison said, you just make a community and I can play my trumpet again, get people in the room. These are not a dichotomy. Just getting people in the room and having a community is not at a dichotomy against the fact that we also want to build skills. Victoria and I were talking last night, how hard is it to get people in the room? It can take months to get people into the room. That's a set of skills. Then we're in and then there's this amazing evolution where you're really holding people, as you said yesterday, Sam, accountable. And I'll just say, when we're with old people started, there was a wonderful 84-year-old woman in the company, they'd be were going into the schools doing shows and each of the old, old, old people would get up and she'd go, I'm 84 years old and she'd lift her arm up and everybody would applaud. And she came to me about three weeks in, she said, this is not enough, I'm just lifting my arm up. Give me something to do. It's not, don't coddle me. Challenge me. And I think that's also where we go with our differences. Challenge us to, you know, so I, and I'm back to just artistic practices as this wealth of skills that we're hearing from and building so many things. Great, Emoja, Linda, then Madison. Okay, yeah, Quincy Jones, I think some 12 years ago, he wanted there to be a secretary of the arts to be part of the administration. And, you know, there was a movement going on, there was petitions to be signed and all that kind of thing. And I think primarily what I'm saying is, how do we, how does the art community not necessarily only portray or work with veterans in trauma? How do we try to circumvent this? And this, I pray this is not redundant, but this is what I'm feeling. Is that Johnson, Lyndon Johnson, did not feel comfortable running for a second term. So he said, I'm not gonna do it. George Bush felt comfortable going into Iraq. So we have to make people feel comfortable when they're doing right or doing something that's life-giving and life-sustaining. And we have to make them feel uncomfortable, uncomfortable when they do something that we have to spend 50 years trying to make up for. We're gonna have to do something anyway. We're gonna have to do something anyway. We're gonna spend the next 100 years coming here. Where are we gonna be? I don't know if I'll be here or not, I'll probably be gone. But, you know, we're gonna have to be expressing this and saying this and that kind of thing. But I'm really truly saying I feel, you know, because I'm in a lot of sessions all the time with a lot of different people. We have the power. We don't exercise it because we don't believe we do. That's why we don't believe we do. We don't think that we do. We think that we're limited in. And so if we think we're limited, then we're limited. It's just that simple, it's not complex. If you think you're a star, then you're a star. If you think you're a piece of trash, then you're a piece of trash. Because you act that way, we all act that way. And the stars at certain places and a piece of trash that is another place. So it's not that real complex. So I'm saying that we have, and I appreciate Linda Parris Bailey and her husband Emmanuel, the whole carpet bag staff and the whole carpet bag aggregation because I've been given an opportunity to go a lot of places and meet a lot of people and grow. That's important, because I'm growing here. When I go back home to Knoxville and talking about locally, we have five people running for city council. Before they could join this movement, we call it the 2017 city council movement. In our city, it's gonna be five people elected to city council because the five that are there are term limited. So three years ago, we started working on 2017 to get five people who gonna handle a $400 million budget to see how we can make change. So I'm saying we can do it, you just have to think you can do it. You have to pray on it and fast on. God, help me do this, and we can make a change. You know how you think you're gonna say one thing and the conversation rolls back around and you know you're gonna say something really different. So this question of how we all come together and to make change, I think the realization, and I approach this from the point of view of somebody talked about being a demonstrator and I was a peace activist, I continue to be a peace activist. But the dilemma is, and this phrase keeps coming to me, the degrees of separation are small. They seemed when I was growing up and every male cousin I had was going to Vietnam and we were talking about, you know, it was the Canada, it was the Vietnam. We were very present with that. And then I think there was a time when we got disconnected from that. And it really didn't matter, it mattered to me personally, but it didn't really matter what your politics were because the reality was what it was. And I think as we got kind of disconnected from what we forgot about, there's only that much separation between you and someone in the military, that much. We went from those people who were drafted to those young people who are going into the military because it's an employment opportunity. And just as my cousins went, my nephews are now going, right, so there's just this much separation. So it's the belief that we can change, of course, but it's also being able to stimulate these conversations and that's really what it, for me, what it comes down to. And to look at that small degree of separation and continue this dialogue every day because we gotta be about saving people's lives, whether they're returning veterans or they're people going to war, that's it. Hey Madison, so I just wanna get to Michael's point on something that, real practical, that we can take home to bring to our projects. So I do a lot of work with engineers and artists and a lot of train wrecks happen because we don't speak the same language. Being in academia, you have lots of acronyms, military, lots of acronyms and there's an assumption that everybody knows what everybody is saying and nobody does and no one's gonna say that they don't know the subculture language, right? So you don't wanna make people feel stupid and that's what happens and that's why people kind of slowly would disengage from a project. Every culture, every community has a language. So the first thing I do for every project is we start a lexicon and as soon as someone says something we write it down and then we define it. Not only what the letters mean but what it means means, right? Cause Semper Fi, you know when I say that, when I'm really saying, you know, you can actually translate that always faithful but usually when I say it, I'm saying it a little tongue in cheek, right? Semper Gumby. So to be clear, we have to acknowledge that and so we make a list and we're actually trying to build an open source platform to support collecting this language because it's a disparity and it's a block. Beyond the acronyms, when I say collaborate and when a technologist says collaborate and when someone from the military says collaborate, I don't know, they do not mean the same thing at all, at all and we need to own that and that's something really practical that I guarantee will improve every project and if this group, as you are all working on projects, if there's a way that we can just share that through how around I know there's a lot of this, like it would be amazing to not have to spend that time to kind of make that lexicon, thank you. Susan Fader, first thank you to the group, just the intensity and the richness of this, particularly those of you that live and breathe it every day. I'm just so appreciative to be listening on this conversation. I wanted to pick up on something Michael said a few minutes ago that as an organization's been in this space for so many years that many things have worked. Do we trust ourselves enough in this circle among our friends and colleagues to talk about the things that haven't worked so well? Because I find I learn by the things that went awry along the way. So that's my first question, the second one is my funder question of what is it that we're not doing that we might do better? Thank you. You're first, yeah, you're up. Hey, hey everybody, I'm Bert from Carpetback Theater, hello. I am not a soldier. I portray one in Speedkill My Cousin. I'm a soldier in the army of love and I just wanna say this. With art, whether it be performed dance, song, theater, literary, visual, poetry, there's so many forms. It, with art shared, it is a sense of church. It is a sense of protest. It is a strong sense of militia. It's a strong power in shared art. We must keep it alive. And I thank all of the presenters, all the people who in this room are healers, whether you know it or not, we must keep it alive. We have a new president, y'all. He is doing what he thinks is cleaning up America. We must make sure that our art is not time-capsalized. A thing that we don't do anymore because it is, oh, we don't do art anymore because it's either gonna become either black or white. And we don't want that to happen to America. We must sing, we must create, we must keep presenting, we must make art affordable for, maybe if you do one night, free, one night, $3, one night, pay what you can if you perform. We must make sure that we keep art as church, as militia empowerment. That's all I have to say about that. Megan, you got the, yeah, go ahead. Hey, everyone, I'm Megan. I'm here representing Project Women at War from Rivendell Theater Ensemble in Chicago. And what a great conversation this is. Thank you so much. Full of a lot of different ideas. What wanted to jump in and say, you know, as a civilian and as an artist, and you know, I was, I had a lot of reluctance coming to this project, but I felt compelled, like I felt compelled to get involved because I had been hearing a lot of narratives that I felt were superficial or weren't really getting at truth and wanted to investigate that. And that's a big part of motivation for me as an artist. I think of myself as an investigator and an intermediary. Like that term really resonates for me in the field. And seven years now into doing this work, I feel changed by it. It has been one of the most life-affirming, life-giving, changing processes for me in terms of changed in my artistic process, absolutely, but changed as a person because I came in with a certain set of ideas and then challenged them and came to know different things. And also because we focused on women, but there are women in my life now who are not in my life and they are friends. They're collaborators and they're friends. You know, like we show up for each other, we know each other now. And being in those kinds of relationships has changed me. And so I'm thinking about that entry point of feeling compelled and how vulnerable I felt going into the space. And I guess the morning presentation and what I'm hearing today just in this circle has made me think about this challenge to get other civilians on board, right? And as a civilian, I feel like I'm in a position to do that, right? I can go talk to my people, you know? It's like, how do we change dominant culture ever when we're doing social justice work? How do we change the dominant culture? So as a civilian, how do I talk to other civilians about what happened to me and why I do this? And I think about all of the people, and it was funny to see one of the stories in the play this morning of, you know, the liberal theater folks who don't want to have this conversation. That's happened to me a lot. I've been in spaces where I want to talk about women at war and people just shut down and they want to talk about their activism and they don't want to hear anything about what I want to say. And, you know, for political reasons, I'm so interested in that. And today, I guess I just wanted to share out this conversation about how do we get civilians on board? And I'm so actively thinking about that. And those people who, not because they don't know about it, but who know about this work that I'm doing that we are doing and they choose to stay out of the room. I'm curious about that, you know? And I just would want to talk to other people about what those stories might be because as we're naming, we're living in a really fragmented time. And, you know, we're talking about veterans are really like streamlined and there are these programs with, you know, curricula and, you know, designs and you sign up and all that. Well, civilians are like off the hook. They're like out there doing their own thing, you know? There's no one like organizing that. So how might we want to tap into networks to say like, what's the reluctance there? Why are you staying out of the room? Why aren't you hiring? Why aren't you providing resources? You know, why aren't you opening the door to veterans when they're coming back? What are you afraid of? And tap into that and open up the door to kind of explore what that vulnerability is. So, thank you. Great, and just one final comment. Take it. Hi, everyone. I'm Andrea Safart to Action and here with Carpet Bag Theatre too. So I'm feeling really challenged this morning and I want to try to pull together some threads about challenge and risk and are there topics off the table and what is political and going where we're afraid? Because I was in a convening with Captain McGuire some months back where she was facilitating a session and asked the question, what were our stereotypes about veterans or assumptions before doing this work or for those who hadn't, and I'm Arab-American and I stood up and I said, well, my assumption was that you're the enemy. I mean, before I started working with veterans, the conversations in my community, that feeling in the chest that comes up that Anthony talked about is I might think you, the military, are the enemy because I assume you think I'm the enemy. Yeah? And so this conversation about othering and the political environment that we're in, I just have to say from earlier today, there is no such thing as artistic work that is not political. Representation is political. Any time we put anything in the public sphere, it is political. And so the question is, what is it that we're saying in relation to the political context that we're in, right? And so as an artist, this brings me to the role of the artist in society, right? As an artist, I go where I'm afraid. I go where I feel challenged. I feel very challenged in these rooms all the time. I walk into a VA full of veterans, many of whom have served fighting people who look like me and I'm scared. And then I look in their eyes and realize that they're scared that I just walked in the room and that I'm facilitating something and that we all get to be in the re-humanizing process, what allows othering to occur, what allows war to occur is dehumanization, right? The re-humanizing process is being able to go to those risky and challenging places together and be afraid and do it anyway, right? It's what artists train to do and it's what the military trains to do. And so there are these really interesting places of common ground that help us, like Liz was saying about the skills that the artistic process brings, right? That help us go to those places where we can challenge and no topic is off the table and we must ask the hardest questions in order to create the best work and in order to heal together. I'll stop there, thank you. Great, thank you. Thank you everyone for a really wonderful conversation that we're gonna have more time and I know more of you have things to say and we'll have more conversation after we have some lunch. Jamie, take it away. So, thank you. Lunch is available in the lobby outside. It's some box lunch. Feel free to eat in the lobby in here. Walk around.