In this episode of All Power to the Developing, Desire Wandan sits down with Dr. Chris Hoff, a narrative therapist, educator, author, and host of The Radical Therapist podcast. We get to know Chris and the journey that brought him to this work, while exploring the ideas that continue to shape his practice. Chris introduces us to narrative therapy and its unique way of relating to people, problems, and the stories we tell about ourselves. Together, they explore identity, relationships, radical helping, imagination, and what becomes possible when we challenge the stories we've inherited and create new ones together.

In this episode of All Power to the Developing, host Des Wandan sits down with Dr. Jim Martinez, human intelligence researcher, educator, and author of the Collective Development Substack, to explore what artificial intelligence reveals about human intelligence, consciousness, creativity, and development. Rather than asking whether AI will become conscious, Jim challenges us to rethink what consciousness is, how AI is reshaping education and society, and why the future of technology should be centered on human development rather than prediction, productivity, or profit. Together, they discuss AI's promises, limitations, ethical challenges, and the importance of building a future that expands our humanity rather than replaces it.

https://jimmartinez802.substack.com/

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Minna Kim, in conversation with host Desire Wandan, introduces us to the world of Collective Care Pods, small online or in-person support groups that meet regularly over an extended period to provide emotional support and encourage the mutual growth of its participants. With roots stretching back to 2014 and the Bay Area Transformative Justice Collective, Care Pods proliferated during the pandemic when many people began turning to each other for survival and support.  “Isolation and loneliness are a worldwide epidemic,” says Kim.  “Modernity—colonialism, capitalism, patriarchy—is working really hard to keep us isolated, but we know how to be together.  It’s an ancestral instinct of survival.”

Andres Marquez-Lara is the Founder and CEO of UFacilitate, a global facilitation company that works with foundations, NGOs, and multilateral (inter-governmental) organizations to help their leaders deal with what he calls the “messy human stuff”—egos, cultural differences, miscommunication, conflict—that put their missions at risk. UFacilitate has worked in 40 countries with groups such as the World Food Program, The Nature Conservancy, Easter Seals, The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, The Rockefeller Foundation, and many others.

Marquez-Lara, an East Side Institute Associate, attributes his successful approach to leadership development to social therapeutics. “The world today is not predictable, and rigid hierarchical leadership no longer works very well. ... No one person can figure it out. It must be figured out together.  We think the best lead

ers lead from behind.  They are those who can create social environments that help people to perform differently, try different things and figure out together where they want to go.”  In this conversation with host Desire Wandan, Martiquez-Lara talks about his approach to leadership and facilitation, his ideas for the decentralization of A.I. and his newly released book, Ritual 2.0.

In addition to leading UFacilitate, Marquez-Lara teaches leadership development in various executive programs at Georgetown University. He is a Senior Fellow at the Center for Excellence in Public Leadership (CEPL) at George Washington University. He is also an Advisor at the Emergence Project for Purposeful Entrepreneurship at Stanford University. He and his work have been recognized by Ashoka and the American Academy of Certified Public Managers.

LINK to Purchase of Ritual 2.0 - - - - - - Here is the link to purchase it and get a free excerpt: https://linktr.ee/Rituals2.0

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Welcome to All Power to the Developing, a podcast of the East Side Institute. The Institute is a center for social change efforts that reinitiate human and community development. We support, connect, and partner with committed and creative activists, scholars, artists, helpers, and healers all over the world. In 2003, Institute co-founders Lois Holzman and the late Fred Newman had a paper published with the title “All Power to the Developing.” This phrase captures how vital it is for all people—no matter their age, circumstance, status, race, ethnicity, gender or sexual orientation—to grow, develop and transform emotionally, socially and intellectually if we are to have a shot at creating something positive out of the intense crises we’re all experiencing. We hope that this podcast series will show you that, far more than a slogan, “all power to the developing” is a loving activity, a pulsing heart in an all too cruel world.

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Hector Aristizabal—one of the pioneers of performance activism—was born and raised in Medellín, Colombia, when it was the most dangerous city in the world, and his country was suffering through a bloody fifty-year civil war. Educated as both a psychologist and a theatre artist, as a young man, he was arrested and tortured by the military and later forced to flee into exile in the U.S., where he worked as a therapist, primarily with the marginalized and traumatized. In 2000, Aristizabal founded ImaginAction, an international network of artists and facilitators using performance and imagination as tools for social justice and community healing. It has worked with communities across the United States, Latin America, Europe, the Middle East, and Asia.

When the torture at Abu Ghraib, Iraq was exposed, he created Nightwinds, in which he reenacts his arrest and torture.  His performance then flows into a participatory workshop in which the audience, turned participants/performers, engage the traumas in their lives and communities. Aristizabal has brought Nightwinds to 50 countries, including many war zones from Afghanistan to Rwanda, Northern Ireland to Palestine, Ukraine to India. As he puts it, “We can heal only in community. We can’t heal on our own.” 

The civil war in Colombia ended in 2017 and after 28 years in exile, Aristizabal returned home to use performance to help ex-combatants on both sides of the war and their victims find “the medicine in the wound.”  He founded Re-conectando which creates healing rituals and brings participants deep into the forest—“the womb of Mother Nature,” as he puts it—to reconnect with life, human and other-than-human.  In this beautiful conversation with host Desire Wandan, Aristizabal shares his life story, focusing on his current work on social healing in Colombia.

www.Imaginaction.org

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Welcome to All Power to the Developing, a podcast of the East Side Institute. The Institute is a center for social change efforts that reinitiate human and community development. We support, connect, and partner with committed and creative activists, scholars, artists, helpers, and healers all over the world. In 2003, Institute co-founders Lois Holzman and the late Fred Newman had a paper published with the title “All Power to the Developing.” This phrase captures how vital it is for all people—no matter their age, circumstance, status, race, ethnicity, gender or sexual orientation—to grow, develop and transform emotionally, socially and intellectually if we are to have a shot at creating something positive out of the intense crises we’re all experiencing. We hope that this podcast series will show you that, far more than a slogan, “all power to the developing” is a loving activity, a pulsing heart in an all too cruel world.

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Performer, Playwright, Poet, Painter, and Photographer, José Torres-Tama began his passionate work as a political artist on the stage he built onto the back of his taco truck.  Born in Ecuador, raised in Jersey City, NJ and in New York City and based for decades in New Orléans, he currently tours the United States with his very witty, insightful and very powerful docu-performances pieces—Aliens, Immigrants & Other Evildoers and United States of AMNESIA Dare to Remember—which are based on hundreds of interviews with “undocumented” immigrants living and working in the U.S.A. Join José Torres-Tama as he takes host Desire Wandan (and all of us) on a righteous rant and militant meander through the mess we find ourselves in. To order one of his famous “No Guacamole for Immigrant Haters” tee-shirts, click here: https://torrestama.com/index.html

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Welcome to All Power to the Developing, a podcast of the East Side Institute. The Institute is a center for social change efforts that reinitiate human and community development. We support, connect, and partner with committed and creative activists, scholars, artists, helpers, and healers all over the world. In 2003, Institute co-founders Lois Holzman and the late Fred Newman had a paper published with the title “All Power to the Developing.” This phrase captures how vital it is for all people—no matter their age, circumstance, status, race, ethnicity, gender or sexual orientation—to grow, develop and transform emotionally, socially and intellectually if we are to have a shot at creating something positive out of the intense crises we’re all experiencing. We hope that this podcast series will show you that, far more than a slogan, “all power to the developing” is a loving activity, a pulsing heart in an all too cruel world.

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In this conversation,  Aurelie Harp talks with Lois Holtzman, co-founder of the Eastside Institute, about how gender, race, and other identities can both liberate and constrain us.

They examine identity politics, feminism, and the limits of binary thinking, and discuss how performance, play, and relational practices can open possibilities for more inclusive, collective futures. If you would like to see this interview in video form, as well as the rest of Aurelie Harp and Womanity's work 

Womanity's YouTube Page: https://www.youtube.com/@womanityproject6740

Womanity's Website: https://www.wemanitycoaching.com/

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Welcome to All Power to the Developing, a podcast of the East Side Institute. The Institute is a center for social change efforts that reinitiate human and community development. We support, connect, and partner with committed and creative activists, scholars, artists, helpers, and healers all over the world. In 2003, Institute co-founders Lois Holzman and the late Fred Newman had a paper published with the title “All Power to the Developing.” This phrase captures how vital it is for all people—no matter their age, circumstance, status, race, ethnicity, gender or sexual orientation—to grow, develop and transform emotionally, socially and intellectually if we are to have a shot at creating something positive out of the intense crises we’re all experiencing. We hope that this podcast series will show you that, far more than a slogan, “all power to the developing” is a loving activity, a pulsing heart in an all too cruel world.

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Wycliffe Barsa is the co-founder and CEO of Kosi Africa, an ambassador for the Global Play Brigade, and a graduate of the East Side Institute’s flagship program, the International Class.  Here he shares his journey from living on the streets as a child to his work today promoting and transforming education in Kenya, and, in the process, developing young leaders as visionaries who will return to their communities to help them generate new possibilities. 

What makes Kosi different from most non-profits is, Barasa says, is sustainability. Instead of relying on outside money, when Kosi approaches a school, it does a Resource Audit, asking the school what sort of resources do you have and how can we work with you, the parents and the larger community, using those resources, to together solve these problems?  “We’re not there to help the community; we’re there to work with the community,” he explains.  Pointing out that in English “Kosi” means “Go” or “Keep Moving,” Barasa continues, “Development is how the whole community comes together to move and grow and create power.”

https://kosiafrica.org/

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Welcome to All Power to the Developing, a podcast of the East Side Institute. The Institute is a center for social change efforts that reinitiate human and community development. We support, connect, and partner with committed and creative activists, scholars, artists, helpers, and healers all over the world. In 2003, Institute co-founders Lois Holzman and the late Fred Newman had a paper published with the title “All Power to the Developing.” This phrase captures how vital it is for all people—no matter their age, circumstance, status, race, ethnicity, gender or sexual orientation—to grow, develop and transform emotionally, socially and intellectually if we are to have a shot at creating something positive out of the intense crises we’re all experiencing. We hope that this podcast series will show you that, far more than a slogan, “all power to the developing” is a loving activity, a pulsing heart in an all too cruel world.

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“Live theatre is a way to co-dream,” says Anthony Moseley, Chief Programming Officer and Artistic Director of Chicago’s Collaboraction theatre.  “It can connect us at a really deep level that allows us to drop seeds of new emotions and new possibilities.”  Moseley joins host Desire Wandan to discuss his artistic and political journey and the role that the multi-racial, multi-cultural theatre that he leads plays in not only bringing theatre to, but creating theatre with, the poor communities of Chicago.

Collaboraction, under Moseley's leadership, has devised hundreds of plays with young people and adults from Chicago’s poorest and most violent neighborhoods, plays that have been performed in parks and community centers across the city and cheered on by tens of thousands of audience members.  Most of its performances are followed by a “crucial conversation” where the audience members engage with the issues raised by the play.  Since the pandemic, Collaboraction has produced 150 digital pieces and the film adaptation of its play, Trail in the Delta: The Murder of Emmett Till won a Chicago/Midwest Emmy Award.  Collaboraction is about to open its new cultural center “The House of Belonging” in Chicago’s Humbolt Park neighborhood.

“The company itself is a collaboration,” says Moseley, “a never-ending devised piece of theatre.”

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[email protected] | 773.230.9981

collaboraction.org

House of Belonging Capital Campaign

Winner of a 2022 Emmy Award for Outstanding Achievement for Human Interest, Long Form, and 2023 Emmy Award for Outstanding Documentary  for The Lost Story of Emmett Till: Trial in the Delta

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Welcome to All Power to the Developing, a podcast of the East Side Institute. The Institute is a center for social change efforts that reinitiate human and community development. We support, connect, and partner with committed and creative activists, scholars, artists, helpers, and healers all over the world. In 2003, Institute co-founders Lois Holzman and the late Fred Newman had a paper published with the title “All Power to the Developing.” This phrase captures how vital it is for all people—no matter their age, circumstance, status, race, ethnicity, gender or sexual orientation—to grow, develop and transform emotionally, socially and intellectually if we are to have a shot at creating something positive out of the intense crises we’re all experiencing. We hope that this podcast series will show you that, far more than a slogan, “all power to the developing” is a loving activity, a pulsing heart in an all too cruel world.

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Kathleen J. Guillaume-Delemar, President and CEO of the Center for Community Progress shares the work of the Center in helping communities across the country transform vacant lots and abandoned buildings into community parks, food co-ops, dignified affordable housing, and other vibrant examples of mutual aid and grassroots community power.  Guillaume-Delemar, a first-generation Haitian-American who grew up in Flatbush, Brooklyn, during the crack epidemic, when vacant lots in her neighborhood were gathering places of desperation and despair.  Describing herself as a “compassionate revolutionary” and an “unapologetic thorn in the side of society,” she is now leading efforts from Flint, Michigan, to Lafayette, Louisiana, to transform urban ruins into centers of community power and hope.

Kathleen's  upcoming event is the National Land Bank Network Summit on September 8-9 in Detroit. Please click the link for more information. https://communityprogress.org/nlbn-summit-2025/

sign up for newsletter! https://communityprogress.org/newsletter-signup/

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Welcome to All Power to the Developing, a podcast of the East Side Institute. The Institute is a center for social change efforts that reinitiate human and community development. We support, connect, and partner with committed and creative activists, scholars, artists, helpers, and healers all over the world. In 2003, Institute co-founders Lois Holzman and the late Fred Newman had a paper published with the title “All Power to the Developing.” This phrase captures how vital it is for all people—no matter their age, circumstance, status, race, ethnicity, gender or sexual orientation—to grow, develop and transform emotionally, socially and intellectually if we are to have a shot at creating something positive out of the intense crises we’re all experiencing. We hope that this podcast series will show you that, far more than a slogan, “all power to the developing” is a loving activity, a pulsing heart in an all too cruel world.

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