ART IS CHANGE: Strategies & Skills for Activist Artists & Cultural Organizers

Jazz musician, composer, educator Henry Robinett has the kind of calm, purposeful trajectory that allows him to ignore the detritus, and collect the sublime and the quirk, all in service to making and recording extraordinary award-winning music and helping heal heads and hearts in the largest prison system in the world.

How are jazz legend Charles Mingus, the world famous Manhattan Plaza artist residence, and Henry Robinett connected?

How does a jazz guitar virtuoso and composer end up working at Folsom Prison?

How can an open to all music program work in a place as racially segregated as a prison?

Is there turning point for people trying to learn and master an instrument?

Music.... ( Change, by The Henry Robinett Group)

Bill Cleveland: That’s the Henry Robinett Group. So needless to say, its jazz time on Change the Story / Change the World. My guest, musician, composer, educator Henry Robinett is cool. Not just old -school hip cat, vernacular cool, but truly low in temperature. That’s because Henry moves through the jingly, messy stuff of life with a focused persistence -- the kind of calm, purposeful trajectory that allows him to ignore the detritus, and collect the sublime and the quirk, all in service to making and recording extraordinary award-winning music and helping heal heads and hearts in the largest prison system in the world. We talked as the truly terrible summer of 2020 was closing up shop. As usual, we started with our guest’s backstory.

This is Change the Story, Change the World, a chronicle of art and transformation. I’m Bill Cleveland.

Before we join Henry. I would like to share something I’m really excited about. As some of you know, the Center has been providing in-depth professional development opportunities for creative community leaders across the country for the past two decades. Last year we joined up with the University of Massachusetts’ Arts Extension Service to create a new 13-week online course called Creative Community Leadership.

So, starting on February 4th, Kathi Bentley and I will be offering a rigorous, engaging learning opportunity for anyone interested in exploring how art centered strategies and tools can help us rebuild and reform in these turbulent times. And, when we say anyone, we mean it. Artists, arts administrators for sure, but also folks involved in social service, community development, philanthropy, education, city hall--- we think the time is ripe for creative community change agents of all stripes to roll up their sleeves and get to work. So, if your interest is piqued do a google search for Arts Extension Service – that’s Arts Extension Service or click on the Arts Extension Service link in our show notes. And If you want to know more about Kathi and myself go to our Episodes 1 and 5. Now on with the show.

Part 1: Practice

Bill Cleveland: The nice thing about these conversations is that the people I'm talking to know their story.

So, Henry, you and I go way back, with a quarter of a century in-between. Over that time, my experiences set me on a path to what has become the name of this podcast, which is Change the Story Change the World. That's my change theory, which is artists creators can help address critical community issues with seriousness and the power of our work--If we're smart and we're patient--can actually change things significantly. So that's why I'm talking to you because, you’re one of those folks, and one of the things we'll explore is how in the world you got down that road. But let me begin by asking you, how do you, describe what you do in the world? What is your work?

Henry Robinett: I've always been inspired by art, and I've always been inspired by the idea of being an artist. And I want to say I probably grokked that in my early childhood because my mother loved the arts. She loved literature, she loved painting, she loved music, classical music. And so, she would take me to museums. And there was a time when I was interested in painting and I wanted to do paint, oil. Even as a little kid, I was inspired by the Impressionists van Gogh and Monet and Degas. We went to Paris and saw all these great artists, and I wanted to emulate that. So, I took classes and oil painting, and at my elementary school, they hung a bunch of paintings up, and that was very exciting, and I think the idea was, even before I understood it was self-creation self-expression and as I got older, it seemed to me that the artists are the ones who really create the world. They're the ones who inhabit the creativity. They're the ones who design the chairs, they design the houses, they designed, the roads that we use. But, more than that, they actually create an aesthetic that every age can be identified with.

So, if you're studying the twenties, you really have to go back and read the literature, the twenties, you have to listen to the music of the twenties. You have to look at the paintings of the twenties. It's just not, it's just not a dry historical thing. So, I think in a very cheap way, the people who make the world are the politicians, but, in a very real way, the people who make the world or the artists. They define the world that we live in. And that's what always inspired me.

BC: Okay so let’s say you're in a conversation with relatives that are distant, or people that you meet for the first time. What do you say to them when they say, 'Oh, Henry, what do you do? what's your thing? "

HR: That's always funny. Cause I tell them, “I'm a musician " and they chuckle and go, "Yeah, that's great. But what do you do?" Oh, I know that your passion is, but how do you make a living? What do you do in life?" I say, "I play guitar, I'm a musician." And, and I've lived various places in the world and the West Coast, my life here, I've always had a problem with that. when I lived in New York in the seventies, I never had that issue. I would just, people say, what do you do? I'm a musician. Wow. That's great. Never what do you do for a living? similar. [When] I lived in Germany and people just accepted, Yeah, they're a musician.

BC: So, you mentioned earlier about your home, your family, and that making, creating, and enjoying and experiencing those things, were a regular part of your everyday life. What set you on the journey to actually become a serious, maker/creator, with intention to be a professional in that arena?

 HR: I just think there's a picture. Somewhere in the back of my mind a guy, which would be me sitting in a little grotto or an attic with the little beanie on and a goatee, maybe smoking a cigarette and having a, coffee or a glass of wine, and he is an artist. That is what they do. So, it's the person who is painting or the poet who's writing or the musician who's playing. But for me, the musician who's playing really meant someone who practices every day. I somehow got this notion that you're not defined by the last gig you did. You're defined by the last practice session you did.

In a couple of different places, I was in middle school and there was a vocal music teacher and I always wanted to be musician. I just always wanted to be a musician. And I felt at this point I was probably 12 or 13 years old, that time was passing me. I had this idea that great musicians really started by the time they were six, and look, I've blown it. I've really blown it. So, my vocal music teacher was someone that most people really did not like, but she loved me, and I loved her. They didn't like her because she would get off on these huge tangents. This was during the Vietnam war and something would happen, and then she would give a lecture about Nixon and about Vietnam and they would go, "Oh my God." But she loved me. She just absolutely loved me, and I told her one day, think I want to pick up an instrument. I finally decided I want to be a guitar player, and she got so excited about it. She says, first let me tell you, let me give you a tip right now. “I practice every single day” and I looked at her. She was old. She was an old person. She was probably in her forties. I said, “you practice every day?” And she goes “If I don't have time, I still do a half hour just scales”. And she showed me the muscle by her pinkie on both sides and they were big and fat. They look like Arnold Schwarzenegger muscles, and I just got the idea. this is what you do.

And the other story that helps define this for me is, I had a very famous cousin of mine, a jazz musician by the name of Charles Mingus. He died of Lou Gehrig's disease; I think 1979. Well in 1977, I lived with him in New York. And I was on a practice tear. I was practicing six hours a day, and there was a magical time when he would get up at three o'clock in the afternoon, and he was sitting there, he was in a wheelchair and watching television. He was watching this movie with Sammy Davis Jr. Called A Man Called Adam, which was real interesting because Sammy Davis Jr. played a Miles Davis, character playing trumpet, So I'm sitting there watching this movie with Mingus, he said, "What are you doing?" I said, "I'm watching the movie with you." He paused, " Musicians, practice." Cause he was being my mentor. I say, "I practiced six hours today." He paused and said, "Musicians practice". So, I went, "Oh, okay." That hit me, that, okay. If I want to be a musician, If I dream about being a musician on that caliber, that's what I got. Those are the kinds of things that I have to listen to. Yeah. Yeah.

BC: Did he, ever get to the point, or did you ever get to the point where he was, mentoring you in your, in your musical journey as a musician, directly.

HR: Little bits. He would have me get some music that he had written and, he would have me read it. And that was a real challenge because it was written for piano, two staves, and look like Chopin. I wasn't the best reader, so, I struggled along, and he was saying, "Take your time, do what you can do." And he would give me tips. He would say, "Get your guitar" and would show me how to do things. 

We lived in these condos, it was a condo full of artists called Manhattan Plaza and it was subsidized housing for artists. It was great, cause you had some very famous musicians who lived there, and once a week, twice a week or something, they used to have a big band, like in the basement of the people who live there. And so, I'd go down there and play. He came down to watch and listen. And that was a big deal because he was the greatest of all the musicians who lived there. So even these famous musicians would go off. And so right afterwards, he came up to his place on the 43rd floor. And there I was it, so he said, "What are you doing?" I said, "Rehearsal and stuff", he said, "You're supposed to hang. You're "supposed to hang with all the men." I go, "I'm hanging with the greatest musician right now. Why would I want to hang with those guys when I can to hang with you?"

BC: So, one thing when I listened to your solos and of course I could be projecting on you is that I hear a horn influence. And yeah, listening to it, to those lines and, and voicing your guitar that way. Am I hearing the right thing?

HR:  I was just talking to someone about this recently. Had I had the courage to change, I probably would have changed to the tenor saxophone. But I was already well enough along on my way of playing the guitar I started playing the guitar just because I fell in love with Jimmy Hendrix, but I really listened to Charlie Parker, John Coltrane, Yusef, Lateef, Cannibal Adderley and the piano players, Chick Corea, Herbie, Hancock, Oscar Peterson. The, these are the guys that I really listened to, and the language of the music was what was, most important to me as opposed to the tambour of the sound of the guitar.

So, I could listen to the music and just imagined I saw the fingers on the fret board, John Coltrane was playing, I didn't see a tenor player. I saw a guitar player, in my mind. So, I just translated all that stuff. And I said, it might help me come up with a style that's more of my own, that doesn't really sound like anyone else. And, once again, Mingus used to say, “Play your own shit, even if it stinks." So, I thought that"

BC: You're stuck with it.

 HR: Yeah. Yeah.

Part 2: Basements

BC: So, when you talk about, rehearsal, I recall one of the first encounters I had inside, the Department of Corrections and we had, an interesting, gig. It was the Kronos String Quartet.  They were based in San Francisco. Their persona, their character was, "Yeah, we're a string quartet, but we're not like any string quartet you ever heard." And they typically wore motorcycle jackets. So, they came into the California Medical Facility at the time, it's Solono now, and, and they did a concert. Instead of wearing their motorcycle jackets, they wore tuxedos, which was great, and they played in the gym on top of lunch tables, literally, and they played a lot of music that these guys had never heard. And then, at a certain point they, they segued into Purple Haze.

HR: I was going to say Purple Haze that's one of the big hits

BC: And everybody, jumped up and yelled, just like you do it, all those string quartet, experiences, but then afterwards, and this was really probably the most important part of bringing artists in this is that not only that people got to hear what they did, but they got to ask questions

HR: yes.

BC: And, and I'll never forget this guy that said. “wow. you guys are really good and, and you probably been doing this for a long time, and they all shook their head. Yeah. and he says, so when was it that you got to stop, all that, practicing He assumed that if you make it, you coast?”

And as far as they were concerned that the current on a string quartet had made it, so they must have reached the, the downhill part of their career. And I'll never forget. Joan, Jeanrenaud, who was the, cello. she said, “when I was young, I practiced two, three hours a day and everybody went, "Oh, wow, that's a lot." And she says, “You get older. You have to add to that....

What was the path that led you into cultural philanthropy?

You were involved in some contentious debates about the appropriateness and value of public art when you worked in Flint Michigan. What did those struggles teach you?

Are you thinking that when ... the doors reopen, when the streets repopulate, that there's a particular role for the makers and creators in our community to help with that. (pandemic reconstruction)

Bill Cleveland: Now, if you peel back the wrapping on a concert, play a festival, a poetry reading, or an art exhibit in most American communities. You'll find the indelible fingerprints of what arts folks call funders. These arts funders come in all shapes and sizes. There are local, state, and national funders on the public side. There are individual donors, and then there are private individuals and foundations whose contributions are often referred to as cultural philanthropy, which, in 2017, contributed nearly $3 billion to America's artists and arts organizations. Needless to say, the people who manage the programs that grant these funds have an interesting job.

Who wouldn't want to give away money to deserving folks in their communities? But, as is often the case, it's harder than it sounds. The job certainly comes with the power to influence and do good. But, also the responsibility to apply that influence judiciously with the clear understanding that gifts given with the best of intentions can do harm as well.

Throughout my career, I've worked with many funders on the giving side and as a recipient, and advisor. Along the way I've had the privilege of collaborating and learning from some truly creative and insightful souls. Shanita Johnson, who is the Arts Program Officer at the Geraldine. R Dodge Foundation, is one of these. As you will hear in this episode of Change, the Story, Change the World. She's one of those unique people who can deliver both the good news and bad inherent to her work, all the while, maintaining the trust of the people in communities she serves.

This is Change the Story, Change the World, a chronicle of art and transformation. My name is Bill Cleveland.

In my conversation with Shanita Johnson, we start off with a short discussion of prison arts and the possibility of sharing videos of prominent poets performing at the Dodge Poetry Festival with incarcerated writers. After that we explore Sharnita’s journey into the world of arts, philanthropy and her work at the Geraldine R Dodge foundation.

Part One. Call Me Community. 

BC: Yeah, I’m good. I had my first, zoom concert.

Sharnita Johnson: Oh, saw your, music stand, your guitar.

BC: Yeah. Yeah, there's a prison choir. The Oakdale Choir run by Mary Cohen. They have this thing where they have guest artists come in. They use Liz Lerman's, critical response process. And so, I played the song and then they gave me all this feedback on it, which was fantastic. Yeah, it was really cool. So, one issue with prisons, is that, outside/inside digital access doesn't exist.

SJ: Yeah.

BC: So, they have inside systems and those inside systems are like from like 1975.

SJ: Wow!

 BC: One of the things I'm thinking of doing is accessing your poetry festival videos and then trying to figure out a way to download it.

SJ: I think that would be such a beautiful thing to do with this to really get the poetry to people who are the most isolated, who need to have this inspiration and joy. yeah.

BC: And these are writers. These are people who are there. They are hungry to hear people who do what they're trying to do at the highest level. Yeah.

For our conversation this morning I reconstituted my questions, in a way that hopefully will make them a little fresher. So almost everybody I talked to, my first, subject is how they define their work and what they do. And I’ve been asking people what their street name is, what their handle is. my friend, Sandy Augustin, she said, "Oh, I'm a navigator". And of course, Leni Sloan was a gun runner for the arts. Sharnita, have you got one that pops up for you?

SJ: Actually, it's funny cause I have a very good friend that calls me "community." Like whenever I tell her about my work is "Oh my God, you are so community." And actually, when I left the Ruth Mott Foundation, they gave me a wand and I think a Tiara that said, "Queen of Community."

SJ: So, it's interesting because, I didn't grow up in a household where we volunteered, my dad had his own business, so he worked all the time. My mother worked full time. I'm the youngest of six kids. So that sort of volunteering at a soup kitchen or serving on boards, that just wasn't my life growing up. And I think it was so important. Because my family moved from public housing into, we thought we were middle class. We were probably really working class, but that was so important, and I think my parents just really felt all those battles have been won. They had made it into, the next level and they thought that the protesting and the advocacy and the marching and the community organizing and the door knocking, they maybe hope that was done.

SJ: So, I didn't experience volunteering and philanthropy and community in that way really until I was an adult, until I started to understand that things weren't equal. And things look different for, even in my own family. everybody didn't have the same opportunities and, there was disparity there. And then, I was the first college graduate in my family on both sides. proudly we have many more now, but that was quite a feat.

And so, I really think becoming aware, for my parents, it was very important for us to be in that bubble. where everything is safe. You don't have to worry about what you're going to eat. You don't have to worry about where you're going to sleep. We've arrived. and I think as an adult, I really, during undergrad, I started to see, Oh, I am in a privileged place through the hard work and sacrifice of my family. And so, I think as I got into the nonprofit sector and started to volunteer on boards is when that really started to gel for me. So, I was probably my early twenties.

BC: So, there's a, a path that led from. you're growing up in your bubble, to this world of philanthropy, and in a particular area --- not just philanthropy, but cultural philanthropy that has your street name right in the middle of it “community.”

SJ: Yeah.

BC: What's that journey.

SJ: As I reflect, I’m at the point in my life where I am thinking about legacy and what my story is. And while I'd like to think in some ways, it was because of my own hard work. And, and it was a lot of hard work., in many ways I think about it as a destiny.

Now, I'm not saying that the universe plotted out my life and said, this is what you're going to do. but it really sorta was, there were just some inflection points where I'm very clear that there was a bigger force that wanted me to be in places at tables, doing things and saying things and moving things beyond what my small mind could envision.

BC: A part of your biography is a particular, attention to the story before the story, the history. could you talk a little bit about, the role history has played, in finding your place in the world?

SJ: Sure, so, I do think, I joke, I majored in English, in undergrad and I minored in history and I didn't want to teach, and I didn't want to be a journalist and I didn't want to write novels. So, what that got me was unemployed. Like out of undergrad, and then just fell into, some writing at a publishing company and some opportunities to, work as an art assistant. And I bought art for magazines and all that fun stuff. And, and then I got into the nonprofit sector. And my first role in the nonprofit sector was at the (Charles H. Wright) Museum of African American History in Detroit. And that's a big museum that exists now, but the precursor to that museum was, which was about the third iteration of the museum. but I got there at a really important time in my life.

And I think a really important time in the, museum's life. and I learned a lot and I was surrounded by all of these incredible people. And at that point I realized that I had a bigger mission, that this job wasn’t making my career. Although it was very foundational and a first step, certainly. But. I have been again, put in places and situations where I could be a voice where I could be an advocate. That really led to a number of other positions in other arts, and cultural, and healthcare organizations on the fundraising side. And so, I was a fundraiser for sort of the first half of my career, but it never occurred to me that I could be on the philanthropy side.

Because I never saw anyone that looked like me, a black woman in philanthropy, in a city like Detroit, which is where I'm from, which has I think the population is like 90% African American so it just never clicked. that was something that I could do, even though I certainly had the skills and the education, et cetera.

Until I did see someone who looked like me, a black woman in philanthropy, who became a mentor to me and, helped pave the way for me to get into the field, which was not easy. I certainly had. some people actively, working against me getting into the field. but I certainly have lots of people who were very helpful, and opened doors for me in opening those doors and working hard and being so gratified by the work that I was able to do, led me into this really kind of crazy philanthropy career. Cause whoever works at four foundations, it's hard enough to get into one, I’ve been so lucky, and been able to do work that I still see, years later is still very active in places like Flint and Detroit. and have I've had the opportunity to. Work in all kinds of philanthropy. So, a startup foundation, a $9 billion endowment foundation, smaller foundations. And now I'm a mid-sized foundation, mostly doing arts grant making and along the way, learning so much and honestly, this journey has given me the opportunity to meet people that I can't even imagine that I even know, it's been so incredible --- people like yourself, Bill. Like why would we know each other? We're like opposite sides of the world, different generations, different paths yet you have been a constant in my life over the years since we met in Detroit, by the way,

Part Two: Animating Democracy

In the next part of our conversation, Shanita talks about a historic meeting convened in the fall of 2003 in Flint, Michigan, through an initiative called Animating Democracy. The event also sponsored by Americans for the Arts was described as a national exchange on art and civic dialogue.

Animating Democracy is an influential player in the development of the community arts movement in the United States. They're focus, at the time, was supporting artists across the country who were using arts-based tools and strategies to stimulate civic, dialogue and community organizing in communities in conflict around issues like discrimination, poverty, education, immigration and jobs.

BC: Everybody I've talked to has, you pointed to a particular moment or story where, particularly people that are involved in this nexus of art and community building community development, where a light bulb went off and they saw that it was more than just a nice thing. That there is some power there. And I'm wondering if one of those stories rise up for you? I know Flint was a, was an important moment in your life.

SJ: Definitely. And I have lots, I'll say that. cause I've been so lucky, over the years, but I think something that was really transformational for me was the final convening of the Animating Democracy Initiative, which was a Ford funded initiative. They had their convening, and there was some work in the community up to that point. So, there were some projects happening. There were, internationally renowned artists coming to Flint, working with community and actually, writing plays, performing, writing music. Doing visual arts. and it was at that point that I really understood the impact of the arts to just regular people. Like it doesn't have to be a thing that you have to get dressed up to buy a ticket to.

That is something that is inherently existing in communities and neighborhoods. and then a place like Flint that is, again, a working-class blue-collar town. But they have a world-class museum. There's a symphony, and then to compliment that all of these community-based organizations that are doing, tap dance and African dance and folkloric dance and music. And so, it really shifted what I considered what was the value of community and the arts and the way that the arts can impact community in a transformational not a transactional way? And so that kind of really shifted my thinking and really led to a big public art project that was pretty contested at first. It was a grant to an organization that was doing community murals around the city, which meant in some instances, regular people, not artists were actually doing the art making.

And some of the pieces were contested by some folks because the aesthetic wasn't what they expected. And the culminating project was a large-scale mural in a prominent downtown location. So, there was a lot of push back because people were really worried. Like how big, how prominent, where is it going to be?

And who's going to actually paint it. so fast forward, there were a number of community meetings were pretty hostile. People came to the meetings to meet the muralists who actually happened to be from the Flint area, from Beecher. Hubert Massey and they were mad and then the next meeting, some more mad people would come.

And then he just had such a way with people and he's so personable and he's such an advocate for public art. He believes that so important.

Hubert Massey: When you give functionality to artwork, it has it a very important role other than just being a piece of artwork that hangs up on the wall.

BC: That was Hubert Massey describing his work, the Crossroads of Innovation at the TCF center in Detroit. 

HM: This right here is the, uh, the tile piece that's on the side. Hopefully here. This is the strength of the community and the suitcase represents the deportations of Mexicans back down to, um, Mexico during the thirties or so. I listen to people's stories and I translate those stories into pieces of our work.

My thing is to talk about the revitalization of the city. And how to, uh, sort of give a, uh, a visual narrative on the positive things about communities, on how we can make a difference. Yes,

SJ: So, around the third meeting, people were warming up to him. And he was asking them, what's important about the city to you? What do you love about the city? How'd you get here? And by the fourth or fifth meeting, people were coming to the meetings with photographs of their parents saying, “My parents, my dad came here to lay the bricks on the downtown thoroughfare,” which is made out of red bricks, or “My parents, my grandparents came here, and my grandfather worked in the factory,” or whatever the story was.

And he incorporated all of those stories, into the mural. And, over time really became an important fixture. We set him up in a downtown studio. And folks could just wander in and ask him what he was doing and sharing the story. And that culminated in, an amazing mural that is in a prominent downtown location and is quite a source of pride, I think, for many people in the city. But that again influenced me in so many ways because we had so much opposition, even from elected officials around it.

So, it really gave me some pause to think about what, how do we make something as maybe amorphous as a large-scale mural that nobody knew what it was going to look like important. To everybody in Flint and particularly the people in the neighborhood that it is located in. And I think we were pretty successful with that. And in fact, one of the commissioners from the Historic Commission who was a very vocal opponent of the mural, because it was in a historic neighborhood, we found out that when we went to the hearing and he said, “Murals are graffiti, and they should not be painted on buildings.”

So again, fast forward, we were able to get the mural on the building because somebody brought to that little studio on Saginaw street a photo, an old...



You artists are volunteers right?

What does sustainability mean when you are working with vulnerable people and communities?

What does "with not for" mean?

Where does the work fit? In the altered landscape that has emerged around us? 

Pacia Anderson: ...And though distance may divide

or routine in time

rendering your spaces high as the tide

Still the look that holds tight

two the ends of the flash back

I am rich memories

I am fond intensity

Held in place by the mere desire to create it

When one comes alive

When our atoms collide

With twin flames, one desire

Sacred names

bathed in fire, bathed in fire, bathed in fire

fire, fire, fire, fire

Still life pretty and shinny

I could hold its sweetness in my hand

Tickle the linchpin

Stroke the beautiful danger

A delicate malevolence

The simple and gentle miserable symbol

hold this opus

the explosive closeness

So focused that I didn't notice

the dagger in my back...

BC: That was Pacia Anderson, or as she calls herself Pacia Elaine Anderson, one of the three remarkable women we have dubbed, the DIVA Cats, who shared their wisdom and stories in our last episode. In that conversation they talked about the different paths that led them CAT, the nationally recognized Community Arts Training Institute, at the Saint Louis Regional Arts Commission. In this episode we dig deeper into the CAT story with questions like: What makes a CAT, and what difference does it make in places like Ferguson and the Peter and Paul facility for unhoused men. 

From the Center for the Study of Art and Community, this is Change the Story, Change the World. I’m Bill Cleveland 

Chapter 4: Re-imaging the Village

BC: So, Con. You've been involved now in putting pen to paper around practice a couple of times you got your beautiful little book, and the workbook that you've created for Americans for the Arts. So, you've forced yourself to sort of answer some of these questions, what's this for? what do we what are we learning here? What have you come up with? 

CC: Well, I was one of those TIGERS that Pacia was talking about and. At the beginning of the end of the year long journey, one of the assignments was you have to you have to come up with a research project and you have to get a mentor and you have to check in regularly. And next week I want to know what it is. And I remember the consensus of all the faculty and the people who were there, the other 11 people, was that you need to write a book and you need to look at where you've been and what you've done. So, I, welcome that opportunity to get all of these stories and connections and all the different parts of my life that have been overlapping to get them on paper actually illustrated the book, which surprised the hell out of me. I find it's it's a continual job to to figure out with people what this co-creation looks like and to Give voice to the fact that transformation happens and Roseanne reminded me of the tears of transformation that have happened with the community arts training.

by the way, Peter and Paul, the community service organization for which I work, we are very CAT infused. The former development director, the co-founder of the Arts Collaborative, that I manage at least four staff members went through CAT, but also four of my guys from the arts groups went through a cat. And that sort of 360-degree thing to happen is very humbling for me. Because I kind of feel like I'm at the center of it, But at the same time, stuff started growing And people make a lot of assumptions about what they see or hear. When I tell them what I do, you're like, oh, so "You artists are volunteers right?" "No! We're professional artists. Everybody gets paid and they get paid well" because I won't have it any other way" They may say, "Oh, well, isn't it nice that those men are able to learn some arts and crafts stuff?" 

No, we don't use paper plates or pipe cleaners, and to Pacia's point, we are not trying to help them. They are learning to figure out how they can help themselves. And so the transformation happens at that individual level, and happens at the program level once the program directors realize they are creating a more authentic relationship with people, through creativity as they began to tell and hear each other's stories, I mean, none of us expected that particular level of intimacy and support. And all of a sudden, they were not people on their own journey out of homelessness or poverty or drug addiction or whatever. They were people working together to help each other. Now, It didn't did work for everybody, but the guys that did work for they come back. There was one guy after we published our first book, he was recalcitrant. He was defiant. He didn't want to do it. We felt we made that book. We bound that book. The day that we put it in his hands, he started to cry, and he said, oh, my God, I can't wait to show this to my grandmother.

So. the magic is, there, and I feel blessed to be that person who can say this is who I am, and this is who we are, and we're going to figure out together how we're going to go forward. 

BC: So, one of the things you just described, which is to me. It's kind of home base. Which is as a species, we do not survive without our capacity to connect to our fellow human beings Basic cooperation, succor and sustenance, that is spiritual, that is physical, that is emotional. And I think many of the gentlemen that you interacted with bear some of the consequences of being separated from their connections, to their community, to their families, to their peers. what you just described. Is an intentional recreation of the of the village, the ritual, the practice of being together in a supportive way where the power of our story together manifests unencumbered. And isn't it amazing when people are given access to it, even though they would say, I don't know anything about this art stuff. Right. It's like a magnet they come right to it. they know what's happening when they're in it.

CC: Yeah, it's you know, there's they go back and forth between I want to make some stuff. I want to sell some stuff. I want people to see my stuff. But what keeps them coming back is the commitment to a relationship, I think. And I really feel like. I do it, Pacia does it, Roseanne does it. We hold the space for what it is that we believe, and even if there's a long dry spell, we hold that space and people come to count on that. And because we can hold the space and because people can count on it, that's where what you're talking about, where the village comes from.

And the US Department of Arts and Culture, for which I am a cultural agent, imagines what it would be like if all aspects of daily life were infused with arts and culture. So much so that It would be who we are and how we live, not something we do and call it art group or art class or art program or whatever. So that's my goal, people being creative feeling good about themselves and keeping the process going. And if a product happens to come out of it, oh, golly, that's great.

Chapter 5: CAT Stories

BC:  So the jackpot of this conversation is for you to share a story that personifies what it is we've been talking about. Is there a story that rises up for you, that represents the value of being serious and committed to the work and its potential in community? 

PA: So, my story, the story that I'll share is one that I've shared in our Americans for the Arts workshops on arts-based community development and wanting to be respectful that. Oftentimes, we're a part of the story, but it's not our story, so I'll do the best that I can to tell my part that I have played in this particular story and. went through my CAT class. During the time of the uprising that followed Michael Brown's murder. It's important because in St. Louis, that was a before and after moment. The region is completely changed by the events of that summer. Even the feel in the air is different. I would liken it to the way people say America felt different after 9/11. All right. There's a different sense of being. So, our CAT class, we had our first class on August 1st, 2014. On August 8th, 2014, a group of my friends and I who all live in the same neighborhood. a CAT from twenty ten myself, another who was in our class, one person who ended up being a CAT the following year, we had just ended a weeklong summer camp called Cherokee Street Reach, making art with young people in the neighborhood for that week. 

So, our CAT class was August 1st. We ended our camp August 8th. Mike Brown was murdered. August 9th. We had our second class, August 11. Our class was an intensive, so instead of once a month, over several months, we were once a week for three, sometimes four hours, while the city in the county was on fire. And while activists, artivists were doing all this work, creating responsive pieces. Sitting on boards and commissions, being citizen journalists, being street medics, this is the fire that our class was forged in and we were such a tight community of people because it was 16 from one neighborhood. And so it was deeply, deeply, deeply impactful. Cherokee Street, where Con has a studio a block away from where I live, is a commercial district in St. Louis. It's separated by two wards, surrounded by four neighborhoods, largely black, swiftly gentrifying or slowly gentrifying, depending on who you ask. So, there's all these political and social things happening during the time of this class. 

Our CAT class ended in November and shortly thereafter, the decision to not indict the officer who murdered Mike Brown happened. And so, we were on fire again. In the midst of all of this In the aftermath of all of this uprising, in this unrest, we found ourselves being asked to community care give. Right. Can you come to the neighborhood school down the street from Cherokee Street? we don't know what you can do, but can you just come and be present? We don't have any money, but if you have just some time. Right. And so, we went there, and we invited some of the artists who were still on the ground in Ferguson by night there in this elementary school by day showing the response of artwork that they were doing, wearing t shirts that say unarmed civilian. And these were CAT's. And so things just snowballed. And we we formed a group, in the fire of response and caregiving and unrest. So Cherokee Street Reach was born out of CAT's, out of the uprising, doing what we can do, which was show up for the young people.  

So maybe a year and a half later on Cherokee Street, there was an abandoned lot. we use to do, some murals. There's still paint on the basketball court right now from that. And people on the street had asked young people, what should we do with this lot? And they said, we want to play basketball. So a basketball court ended up being on patch of grass and rough and tumble concrete And it activated the people in the neighborhood, the young people, the artists activated that broken down lot space and turned it into something magical. And there weren't, you know, raised garden beds and flowers It looks like the neighborhood. Right. And that's why it was the neighborhood. the neighborhood named it Love Bank Park for the bank shot. this was a big deal because there aren't any basketball hoops on the south side of St. Louis in city parks because of really old racist policies.

 So, you know, young people who come from all over to play in this park, but some days we don't know where Street Reach and Love Bank begin and end because they were both born in the aftermath of a socially and economically and politically changing climate in the region. But specifically, on this street, because it divides towards both of the aldermen for those wards on both sides of the street have been serving for 20 years. And in that time, they were both unseated by young progressives who actually, helped love Bank become, what it is. One of them where we're actually going to repaint some signs and make some murals up there starting this week. I know he's going to be there. 

BC: You’ve been at it for quite a while in that neighborhood. Are there young people from Cherokee who have taken that journey with you? 

PA: When we started Cherokee's Street Reach, we started it because there was a young man on the street. We wanted to, quote unquote, help him. Right. And we had all these ideas about how we were going to help him and get him into these different programs. And ultimately, just through the council of people like Regina Martinez, who I mentioned earlier, other people who were aware so full circle. 

 I mean, the circle is more like an infinity loop. We're going to repaint some signs, look at Love Bank and do a mural and I got some grant money through some neighborhood organizations and two of the young people who I'm hiring to be art assistants. One of them is this young man who is running around the street six years ago with nothing to do.

I'm sure that Roseanne and Con can both attest to it, you don't really clock out from these kinds of things. you don't take your teaching artists or community care or counselor or administrator hat or smock off when you go home. Right. So the biggest way is that the work has shown up is that it's always present, you get phone calls, you get emails, you're invited to come to this thing, you don't, clock out, you know, It's like your partner or your child or your parents that you care for. Right. It's omnipresent. It's always kind of over here.

That story, I feel like just really demonstrated other ways that it has overlapped. you know, community care and the politics of the thing and the built environment and these questions about ownership, we talk about in our workshops who made something versus who created it So, yeah, so, Yeah, I just love it. 

BC: Thank you, great story, Con, you got a story?

CC: In nineteen ninety when I moved here to work with the Social Service Agency, after about four years and I joined the Board of Peter and Paul Community Services. And in nineteen ninety-eight was my CAT year. I was in the second class. I went to a board meeting and Tom Burnham was the director of Shelter Services, was talking about a project that he had going on. Then we had single room occupancy hotel in St. Louis that was being renovated by a developer. They were going to take guys from the shelter and move them into this SRO and they could live there for free and they could save their money. And as they were working, they would be assigned to a realtor, a banker, and a team of people that would help them figure out how they were going to buy a house. it was very ambitious,

I'm like, Tom, we got to document this. I'm seeing maps. I'm seeing pieces of paper. I'm seeing people on the margins on three ring binder paper. And most of us are to the right of the red line and we have a safety net. But the people that you're working with are on the left side there's a lot less room. there's danger there's holes in the side of the paper. People fall in those holes. And so this is like a map to me, Tom. We've got to give it some maps. Became a thing for me at that particular point. 

Sitting here thinking about these stories, I realize that. All along the way, I've been helping people make maps you know, the murals are not really murals They're maps of where people live and how people move through this thing we call the social service system or the continuum of care. Mapping and murals and stories and all of these things that were all set in motion by my CAT training

This is my favorite story of all time. I think I'm sitting in my studio with six men and I have this mapping exercise where, you know, you map your neighborhood where you grew up. Here was the corner store. Here was the school. It was the church. Here was my best friend's house. Just map that map a place

What’s A CAT?

How does your work show up in the community?

What questions should activist artists be asking?

November 17, 1998, St. Louis Missouri. The subtly illuminated room is filled by a circle of 18 utilitarian chairs. A large sheet of butcher paper spans backstage wall. At the very top, a five-inch-high hand lettered heading shouts out “SESSION 1: GETTING TO KNOW OURSELVES.” A series of questions are scrawled underneath. 

What is Art? -What is Community?

What is Community Development?

What is the History and Ecology of Arts-based Community Development?

Where do I fit in this landscape?

A young woman carrying a backpack approaches the circle tentatively. She scans the wall briefly and takes a seat. Over the next ten minutes, she is joined by other women and men until the stage is filled with the stuttering chatter that often accompanies the awkward dance of new acquaintance. A few minutes later a lull in the murmuring chorus is filled by the piercing sound of a bell. The voices in the circle fade as the cyclic ringing descends on the group like a sonic curtain. After a few seconds, a woman sitting in the chair furthest from the room’s entrance breaks the silence. “Welcome everybody, to the St. Louis Arts Commission and the Community Arts Training Institute. She leans forward and carefully places a pair of Tibetan temple bells onto the floor next to her chair.” I can’t tell you what an honor it is to be sharing this circle with you this afternoon.”

In this episode of CSCW we will explore how a small arts training program called CAT help build a powerful network of creative change agents and established St. Louis MO as an innovative leader in the burgeoning community arts field. 

Bill Cleveland: From the

and Community, this is Change the Story Change the World. I'm Bill Cleveland.

The long and circuitous journey that led to the ringing of bells opening the Community Arts Training Institute, or CAT, began with a phone call some four years earlier. Dyan Wiley, then with the Arts Extension Service of the University of Massachusetts at Amerst, (AES), wanted to talk about creating a community arts training course for their summer institute for arts administrators. We both agreed that the time had come for this. Spurred by the availability of US Department of Labor (CETA) arts job funding in the late 1970’s, the number artists and arts organizations becoming involved in arts- based community development had been growing year after year. By 1994, community arts programming was showing up all over the country—sometimes with amazing results.

Unfortunately, this proliferation was also exposing some significant problems throughout the nascent field. --- Namely, that many of the artists and arts organizations involved were unprepared for the extraordinary complexity of the work. 

The result was a three-day intensive.1 The curriculum for the Community Arts Partnership Institute was conceived and presented by Dyan Wiley, community arts veterans Bob Leonard, and Alice Lovelace, and myself in the summer of 1995. The highly experiential, arts-infused program emphasized the history and dynamics of social change, the development of equitable community partnerships and deep reflection about the high level of responsibility inherent to the work.

In the fall of 1997, Ann Haubrich, a participant our second summer institute, contacted me to talk about creating a similar program for the St. Louis Regional Arts Commission or (RAC) where she worked. For some time, RAC had been funding community arts project. The ups and downs of that experience convinced Ann that it was time to start professionalizing the field in St. Louis. To really serve the region, we agreed RAC’s Community Arts Training Institute or (CAT) program would need to have an annual presence. We also felt it should be cross-sector, which meant involving both artists and professionals from other arenas, like human service, healthcare, and public safety. The resulting five-month intensive had an cross-sector faculty and a curriculum designed with and for the local community.

Now in its 23rd year, CAT has produced a network of over 350 arts, human service, health care, and community development collaborators who are using the arts to help build healthy communities throughout the St. Louis area, and helped establish St. Louis as a national community arts/creative placemaking hot spot. 

A few months ago, I had the privilege of speaking with three women who have been deeply involved in the CAT as both participants and faculty over the years. Con Christeson, who was a member of CAT’s second class has established both a local studio / laboratory and global constituency as a community artist and trainer. Pacia Anderson, a 2014 CAT fellow and continuing faculty member, Is an award winning poet who has applied her skills as a writer and organizer in service to community programs all over the St. Louis region. Roseann Weiss, who coordinated CAT from 2004 to 2018 recently, joined with Con and Pacia to take a CAT inspired workshops sponsored by Americans for the Arts to communities across the country. That is, until the pandemic effectively shuttered the world. 

In this episode, the first of two devoted this trio we are calling the Diva CATS, Pacia, Con, and Roseann share stories about how they became so deeply involved in the global community arts movement in one of its epicenters.

Part 1: Where the Heck Are We? 

Bill Cleveland: Let me begin by just asking checking in with each one of you as we go around, you know, obviously with the world that we live in currently. How are you doing, Pacia? Why don't we start with you? How are you doing?

Pacia Anderson: I am well, When the New World first gave birth to itself in the middle of March, which is a benchmark for a lot of people who work in the so-called gig economy or artists who are teachers. You know, it was weird. There was a feeling of this oddness in the air. But I think I've adjusted I've come to rest that. hopefully never go back to the way that things were. Being so overly taxed in every aspect of our lives physically, mentally, emotionally, creatively, always in pursuit of the do, you know, I'm really grateful for the time of sequester so we could practice rest. Also grateful for that time, because now when I feel myself falling back in that pursuit of the do, that's what feels odd, you know. So, I'm doing well. I'm feeling grateful for this shift and for living in just a new way of being that we actually had the time to sit still and imagine.

BC: Thank you, Con, how is your journey? 

CC: Everything that I was doing, including teaching at the universities, turned on a dime. And the stress of performance was juxtaposed by the sense that I've really been given a gift, and I have not been able to make art with other people except for one group. And that group of HIV positive men were locked down in their residence by a very wise program director, and because of that, I was able to spend some time each week creating a magic carpet and imagining not only what happens after homelessness, but what happens to after you survived a pandemic So it was a gift for the most part. And I've learned a lot from the parts that we not easy, but there were definitely lessons.

BC: So, Roseanne.

RW: Yeah, this is really been. A moment of thoughtfulness. I find this juxtaposition of intersecting upheavals, in and how we must relate to each other right now in spaces like this. And upheavals in the streets because of the things that have happened and the things that have been revealed to us. Those things also make an internal upheaval, right? So, I don't feel very peaceful right now, I feel very much like there is a disturbance. And I'm not sure what's going to happen. I tend to be an optimistic person, so I believe that we are going to figure this out, but I think it's taking the world a long time to understand the moment that we're at, because there's no going back. And first, you have to understand where you are to understand where you're going. And I think we're all still trying to understand where we are.

BC: I spend a lot of time talking to myself, I Walk five miles every morning in a park and there are people there doing what people are doing in order to survive this. They are singing into the sky by themselves, they're drawing things on the sidewalk, messages to people, they are dancing. and then I'm I'm there talking to myself, and so every day, it's Covid Chronicles 

To me, the most striking thing has been the fact that. It makes complete and absolute sense that our struggle with our racial history is manifesting right now and. The reason I say that is, is that this is a stress test for each individual, for families, for everything in society and I believe that at moments like this, the cracks that are most most vulnerable, that are ready to go, that have been there for the longest, that have the deepest pain attached to them, are the ones that are closest to the surface and ready to pop.

Part 2: The Road To CAT

BC: So let me segue into the first story I'd like you to tell. And that's your personal story. So let me begin with the first question and Pacia we'll start with you. What is your work in the world, and how did you come to it? 

PA: My work in the world, is to see, observe, use, inspire, color, and imagination, and contemplation as a way of living out our purposes for being here on this planet. And, I do that in a variety of ways, sometimes it's just sitting on my porch shooting the breeze with my neighbors. Other times it is working in schools and rec centers and with different organizations as a teaching artist, teaching poetry and spoken word, history, language, visual art. Sometimes it is sitting on panels and boards and talking about civic duty and arts-based community development. And sometimes it is being in neighborhood and community meetings, yelling, or telling jokes, or railing against the system, or complimenting someone on the food that they brought. the center, the intersection of all of that is community. How do we gather what do we do when we gather? How do we make sure that everyone knows that they're welcome? How do we make it so that we can continue to do so for a purpose that benefits all of us and encourages the best parts of our humanity? 

BC: How did you come to this. What led you to become the Pacia force of nature that you are 

PA: How I came to the work, I feel like the work either came to me or was always there. In considering this question, I had to go like way, way, way, way back. I was born in the late 70s. I grew up in Springfield, Illinois, and our family had some challenges. And so I spent a lot of my three to 18 year old self in the foster care system, actually aged out when I was 18. 

PA: And our situation was really unusual because my foster mother and my birth mother had a really wild, and crazy, and weird, and loving relationship. So, my mom would just come by the house. Sometimes we would just meet like we were family. So, we were afforded an opportunity to still have this relationship with my mother. The point being, I had these two mothers who were, you know, just awesome in their own way. My birth mother, was a songwriter an artist, you know, and I didn't really acknowledge that until I felt like it was OK to give myself permission to say that I was an artist, too. And she loved to write letters. If my if you made my mother angry, she would write you a ten-page letter and put it in the mail. Right. If she got bad customer service, she would write a letter. So, I have these memories of like my mom, like expressing her art through writing these songs and writing these letters. We got free cable a lot because she was writing these letters.

But then my foster mother, was a super-duper church person. She was 60 years older than me. So we were always going at it. But she did these really amazing things. she was a nurse. And so she would go off to all these disasters, these floods and things and volunteer with the Red Cross. And she ministered to people who were in jail every Saturday, and over the course of her life, had taken in like 40 or 50 foster children. And when she found out that I was into poetry, she, literally made me like every Sunday get up and say these poems, right? So I had this mother who was an artist and then I had this mother who did all this work in community. And I never even considered how that was part of the makings of me until a couple of years ago, 

And so I feel like the work kind of came to me in the same way that I used to have to make my bed and wash dishes every single day, and I hated it. Now I get up and I make my bed right away and I get done eating. I do the dishes right away, these two, you know, my mother and my foster mother kind of like showed me very, very early on what it means to be an artist and what it means to work in community. And I feel like I'm kind of the product of that. 

BC: Wow, what a beautiful story. Everybody's story is. So unique, so unique. Con, what's your unique story, how do you define what you do and how did you come to it? 

CC: So, I grew up in a pretty insulated giant Catholic Irish family in Nebraska. I don't remember needing for much, in spite of the fact that one time I saw my dad's paycheck and we had there were five sisters and two brothers, and his paycheck was, I don't know, six hundred dollars for the month And he was an alcoholic. All his brothers and sisters were alcoholics. But somehow, we managed to live in this neighborhood with two hundred other children and all went to the same school. And all through school and in college, I did a lot of creative things: calligraphy, dance, drama. Just, you know, working with other people, thinking together, moving together, engaging a creative process was what always made me happy.

And I met the father of my children when I was in college the first time and married him, moved across the country several times. I. was in graduate school but did not ever finish because I spent six semesters in the ceramics department studying with Wes Smiley, who taught me many things about life. And I decided I just couldn't do that anymore, I just needed to figure out what I want to be when I grow up. And this was at the age of thirty-eight.

And I remember standing in my garage and I said to myself, OK, I have to pick, I have to pick the music, the dance, the theater, the whatever, whatever. And a voice said. creativity is creativity, you've been given all the tools. And I I heard the voice, I don't know from whence it came, but I can clearly still hear it. And I left that marriage. I left that small town and I left one child behind because she was missing high school. And I came to St. Louis and after about six months, I got a job as GED teacher. And oh, by the way, since you're an artist, could you do art in the shelter five hours a week? I'm like, sure. 

The shelter Con is referring to is a St. Louis facility for unhoused men where began to teach painting and drawing. She also collaborated with a photographer who to give the men camera’s so they could photograph and share what she was calling A Day in My...

In the beginning there was a word, the word, a word, I don’t know but that word doing its best o state afloat at the confluence of time and space spinning at the hot center of the minds-eye vortex had no choice but to go forth and multiply and…beget a Story 

These are the first few lines of a prose poem called Story story, which will be shared in full later in this podcast. It comes from the soundtrack of a film of the same name that explores the evolution of "story" as an essential aspect of human development and history. In this episode I will share the story of Story story, what prompted it and how it evolved. Along the way we examine some threshold questions: Where do stories come from; what is their function, and most importantly, what is their power for good or ill?

From the Center for the Study of Art & Community, this is Change the Story / Change the World. I’m Bill Cleveland.

Part 1: Art and Upheaval

In the early spring of 2005, my wife Carla and I found ourselves unpacking in a small, well-appointed room in a 15th-century Italian palazzo named Villa Serbelloni, overlooking the blue expanses of Lake Como. We had traveled to northern Italy at the Rockefeller Foundation’s invitation to spend a month as residents of the Bellagio Retreat and Conference Center. I had come to write, and Carla, to paint. My book project, called Art and Upheaval, would tell the stories of artists working on what I was characterizing as the world’s frontlines, which translates literally as eleven communities across the globe facing extreme conflict and disruption. 

During our time there, we shared meals and good cheer with the dozen or so artists and scholars who were our fellow residents. Many mornings Carla and I started our day across the breakfast table from a poet from Maine named Wesley McNair and his wife, Diane. Wesley’s poems, which I came to admire a great deal, were powerful, intense, and often very personal. 

One morning, he shared a work in progress describing an abusive encounter between a New York couple and a clerk in a roadside store near Wesley’s home in rural Maine. Like most of his work, it was short and unsparing. By the time he looked up from the page, there was no mistaking the deep sense of violation he felt when fair weather and fancy cars heralded the annual migration of a particular species of callous interloper to his beloved rural refuge. 

Over the next day or so, I pondered the story — particularly the blithely self-absorbed couple whose fast-accelerating BMW concluded the poem. No doubt, the clerk had been mistreated, and by extension, the community sullied. But I also felt an intense curiosity about what those two were talking about as they continued up the coast. Did they have any idea what they had left in their wake? Were they oblivious, or sorry? Did they argue? I guess you could say I was interested in the “other story” revealed in that disturbing scene in the store. Who were these people, and why did they act that way? 

These questions led me to reflect on my work at the Villa. I was spending my days exploring the lives of artists working to heal and provoke change amid appalling conflict and trauma in places like Northern Ireland, Watts, California, Milosevic-ruled Serbia, and post Keymer Rouge Cambodia. My efforts to animate these harrowing and inspiring stories respectfully and compassionately had been humbling. In the process, I found myself caught up in, no, actually overwhelmed by the infinitely faceted, interconnected nature of these human narratives. I had convinced myself that my job was to make sense and meaning of all these threads. But the weave of people, places, and history I was trying to represent, the layer on layer, shifting, bubbling, boiling nature of the lives and events I was encountering; was seriously fogging my lenses. 

I pressed on, but in the spaces between my book and time with Bellagio colleagues, a side-saga appeared. What emerged was my first attempt to acknowledge and understand the nature and power of human story-making. Indeed, the landscape I was exploring was immense -- the ubiquitous, indelible presence of stories; the fragility and mutable nature of stories; the powerful connections between the story and the imagination, story and belief, story and history, story and learning, story and the human struggle with power and difference – and on and on. Was I tilting at windmills? Likely so, but I had a head of steam, so I spent a day writing whatever came to mind and filed it --- working title: Story, Story. Maybe it was a safety valve because the foggy skies over Art and Upheaval soon cleared.

There are hundreds of dead-end writing threads scattered across my hard drive that will never see the light of day. For some reason, though, I found myself being drawn back to Story story to poke and prod. At some point, I started including excerpts into talks I was giving to artists and organizers working for social change. I did this because I had come to believe that the care and feeding of stories are central to all change work. If you challenge and change the dominant narrative of a place, for good or ill, you will have taken a potent step towards community change. The shorthand version is --- Change the Story, Change the World.

A slightly longer version is embodied in what follows in this podcast, namely a reading of Story story with an accompanying soundscape crafted beautifully by composer Judy Munson. But that’s not all. As we indicated in the intro what you will be hearing is the soundtrack of the film version of Story story based on an extraordinary suite of 30 photo collages created by artist Barry Marcus. And truth be told, one reason for sharing Story story here is to entice you to check out both the film, and the newly completed book version. Links to both can be found in the show notes accompanying this episode. 

Part 2: Story story

In the beginning 

there was a Word

The Word, a word,

I don’t know…,

but that Word

doing its best to stay afloat at the confluence of time and space

spinning at the hot center 

of the minds-eye vortex

had no choice 

but to go forth

and multiply 

and…beget a Story 

In no time at all 

that Story was whispered, and sung,

and gestured, and shouted

until it gave birth to another story---

and another and another

that, well, given the fruitful nature

of humans and stories,

grew to become a family, a village, 

a whole land of stories

all alive in time

to the pulsing rhythm 

of all the story hearts 

and story souls

beating then, and now

and forever in the 

always emerging meta mother-story of the world

Now, if you, my friend

here and now

can feel that rhythm 

If you can move your feet and sing

and lay yourself down 

in the groove 

of that tall tale dust and music

If you can swim in the roiling roux 

of all that telling, and listening, 

you are tapped into in the crucible of the signifying, sanctifying transmogrifying power of stories 

Yes, if you are plugged into that 

You are holding a beaded parasol in the second line 

of all those story births and passing’s

If you are tapped into that

Well it may just be that you are 

on your way to taking your place

as a link in the chain, of makers and tellers 

And if that’s true, 

Then you better listen up:

Where do I start

Well, I’ll begin with a warning

We all know about stories, right? 

Stories are fun, stories frolic, stories amuse, 

YEA

But stories are also nimble, tricky, malevolent,

And, and … 

well, you can fill in the blank. 

Some say if you own 

“the story” 

Then you’ve got the power, 

--the juice 

But Others declare, stories are free- can’t be owned. 

Then there’s those who say if you are creating the story then you are making the future

 and that stifling the story is killing the future

and the past. 

What we do know is that every person, every family, every community 

is formed and shaped

by their stories.  

And, if we don’t know.. our story

If we can’t shout out

the story of who we are, where we came from, 

where we are going 

we lose our dignity, 

our humanity,

our souls

as in East Germany,

as in Chile, 

as in Cambodia,

As in Sharpeville, Tulsa, and Wounded Knee

as in Attica, Solovetsky, Parchman, Soledad, 

 as in Toul Seng, and Dachau

These particular stories teach us that 

Tyranny is story subjugation driven by fear. 

Here’s how it works:

One-- Keep them from telling the story.

Two-- Ignore the story.

Three-- Control the story by altering or editing it.

Four-- Romanticize the story

Five-- Simplify the story, 

Six-- Trivialize the story

Seven- - Twist that story with a lie

Eight- Buy, then smother the story

Nine—Steal, then lose the story

Ten— YEA If all else fails, just kill the sucker

But, we all know

stories do not die

After the smoke settles

those fugitive seeds,

Those Neruda, Malcolm, Biko spores 

murdered, buried, forgotten 

FORGOTEN until they wake 

yea, the rain and the sun

Tug on memory’s twitchy trigger

and they rouse… Yea, those seeds 

remember, once again 

 to sprout and flower,

growing with a vengeance

that will not abate. 

Just like the kudzu vines and blackberry canes that 

crowd our lanes and clog our fences

And of course, you all know the story about neighbors and fences, right?

good fences ---make good neighbors and…

well, I don’t know 

is that true? 

Actually, Mr. Frost didn’t seem to think so---neither did Mr. Aesop

But, both knew that a good story 

Could set powerful, unpredictable things in motion 

Like an altered chromosome 

or the floating spill of a new idea 

caught in the hot updraft of a Santa Anna wind

And as those incipient stories swoop and swirl

Some fall 

Some collide 

And a few join together

At the hip

At the shoulder

At the third eye intersection 

of self-interest and common ground

And those tall tale partners

Become democracy zygotes

Youre THINKIN’ WHAT?

but, it’s true,

Democracy is the art of collective story making.

Democracy says: 

LISTEN UP! “Here is the story to this point—Let’s decide together what’s next… and make it real… together!”-

Now, this making thing 

That it appears

We’ve always done

that we call art

These are the tools we 

use to nudge our stories 

out into the world

But it’s important to remember

The artists hands 

made that animal thing 

that bison on the wall

that became the words 

that begat the first story!

That gave birth to the 

First tale tale

The first myth 

The first joke

The first rumor

The first vexing, no-easy-answer question

And Hey,

if you’ve got a mystery messing with you

You’ve got to use that story making hand

to help you paste it fast into the rest 

of your world defining window 

Do it quick, cause, you know, 

unanswered questions 

don’t sit well with us humans 

If you don’t, that fugitive cipher, 

ignored, and out of context, 

IT will suffocate you in its shadow

I know, I know you’re thinking, 

well, that sounds kind of melodramatic

But, you can’t ignore 

the trickster’s spin

Cause disrespected stories

ARE nascent shadows. 

You can’t close your eyes to them

because the shadow GROWS with neglect

Out of sight and out of mind

They just bubble and ferment,

And mark my word

Those untold stories,

Those unpeeled stories, 

Those stifled stories,

left to fester---

are very, very dangerous

Bottom line, 

If you hold your ears,

if you only pay attention 

to your own ECHO 

its hard to listen,

its hard to CONNECT TO the rest of the stories

Hovering all around

And you need that…

WE need that…

to survive together.

This is because 

Everything out there is translated for us, 

to us, by us, through us

by story. 

For good and for ill

Everything we see, hear, touch, taste …feel 

is just pregnant with story 

ready to give birth to another 

and another 

helping us make sense and meaning 

in this confounding jumble of a world

Sense and meaning?

WELL, That’s just story breath and story fire

Feeding the future in the 

mind’s eye furnace of 

Imagining What’s next

And You know, that imagination thing 

It’s just a muscle up in there

Working overtime 

generating more power than it consumes 

as it chugs along raising the temperature 

in the hot house of stories.

Talk about power. Change the Story, change the world

Man, but you know, it goes both ways. That privilege thing. 

Privilege is imagining your story, is THE story

   AND THEN If you are rich

you can buy all the stories you think you need regardless of where they came from. 

Not only is that corrupt, Its just plain undignified. 

  And that’s no small thing. Cause you see Dignity is the unfettered imagination, the untethered voice, the unleashed story. 

And Wealth be damned, If that story holds great meaning you can touch a million hearts 

Or just a precious one 

 Empathy happens when 

I tell you my story 

and you tell my story back to me --and I nod my head.

Art well the art holds the story, but only just--- 

for a while 

The artist says, “This is how the story goes at this time and this place.”

Sometimes that story sticks around

Sometimes it mutates or migrates. 

Sometimes it escapes

What we call Improvisation is fishing for those fugitive stories 

New stories get born 

when improvisation and imagination converge

bending time and space wide enough 

for story sperms and the story eggs 

to find each other and join. 

But of course, 

there are no new stories

And all stories are new

Some people say

Look, Have a seat while I tell my story

Some say

Have a seat 

while I tell someone else’s story

Some folks say

Have a seat while I tell your story

Some artists say

Stand up 

we have a story to tell

I say,

Once upon a time…

Thank you for being here, for tuning in. Please join us for our next episode. Change the Story / Change the World is a production of the Art and Community. It’s written and directed by Bill Cleveland. Its theme and soundscape are by Judy Munsen. 

And please if you have been provoked or inspired, join the continuing conversation, and check out our show notes at the Center’s website at www.artandcommunity.com. Please know that subscribing to Change the Story / Change the world is a great, no cost way of supporting out work. 

Special Thanks to Camila Guiza-Chavez for her beautiful performance of "Over the Rainbow" that introduces this episode.

What is the role of the imagination in the development of the child?

What distinguishes Waldorf education?

How does Waldorf education prepare its students for an increasingly ambiguous and unpredictable future?

How can creative education best respond to the significant changes that have been taking place in our society?

What is the role of story in the education of the whole person?

Bill Cleveland:  Imagine this, the camera zooms in on a vibrant, festive scene that somehow matches up perfectly with that rainbow soundtrack. We see kids dancing, playing with puppets parading in costume laughing and singing “Somewhere Over the Rainbow.” You know, kind of Disney-like only, unlike the Disney I grew up with, this rainbow movie is not all white. Quite the contrary. There is no dominant hue here either playing games or on the walls and windows which are truly beautiful -- awash in subtly shifting colors, textures, and fairy tale images. But this isn't just a kid movie. There are adults here too. Quite a few actually moving purposefully watching joining in and leading -- yeah, well, teaching. That's right, you guessed it, it's a school, K through 8 to be exact. And given all the fun and games and extras, you're probably thinking it's a special school. One with a curriculum that caters to the uniquely special needs of the special students who are privileged to go there; clearly one of those schools they call public in Great Britain and private here in the USA. But there, you would be mistaken.

The Community School for Creative Education was authorized by the Alameda County Board of Education to operate as a Waldorf inspired charter in the fall of 2010.

Alejandra Baez: We all embrace what Community School is about. It's about equity. It's about love. It's about caring. It's about bringing the best to the children, especially in San Antonio, that we're so proud of. This is a dream come true.

BC: That was Alejandra Baez in the school's front office describing the impact the community school has had on Oakland San Antonio neighborhood.

Today, like most public schools in California, the Community School is currently serving its students from a distance. To learn more about the school's unique history and approach I spoke with Ida Oberman, the school's founder and executive director in late September of 2020.

From the Center for the Study of art and community, this is changed the story changed the world, a chronicle of art and transformation. I'm Bill Cleveland.

Part One: Free and Proud.

BC: Good morning.

I O: Good morning. I'm sorry, I'm late.

BC: No problem. No problem. You know, time is, is a completely different construct in the in the digital universe. We could be any place and anytime

I O: Were you playing your guitar this morning?

BC: I play my guitar in between everything I do. Yeah. Yeah. So first of all, thank you so much for taking the time to share your story. And as you know, I've spent a good part of my adult life being associated with Waldorf education. So I'm particularly excited because your brand of this educational journey is different than the typical one and particularly here in the Bay Area. So I'm just going to begin with a question I start off with everybody, which is what is it that you do in the world what's what's your work? What's your mission?

I O: So my mission is to work with others to ensure that an intercultural Waldorf option is available to any community of families who so choose, regardless of income, regardless of race, or class or color, returning to Waldorf education's original intent almost to the month 101 years ago.

BC: Yes, because the first Waldorf school was in fact, a publicly available school for factory workers?

I O: It was an openly available school. That title free Waldorf education was then proudly held. And when I went to the Waldorf school in Tubingen, in Germany, very close to Stuttgart, the founding site in the 1960s. We were always so proud of those letters "free" "frie" by the free Waldorf school. And it was not just freedom of heart in mind, but also of pocketbook.

BC: So for those people who are listening who are going, Waldorf Yeah, what, what is that? What? Could you just do an elevator description of what Waldorf and the Waldorf movement is all about? Yes,

I O: Of course, I'd be glad to. While their education is cousinly related to Montessori, which many of your viewers might be more familiar with. They were from the same time about 100 years ago, Dr. Maria Montessori in inner city, Rome, Italy and Dr. Rudolf Steiner in inner city Stuttgart, Germany. And what brought them to the fore is that they recognize that education was not just a matter of educating the head, but it was educating the heart in the hand.

And, just one more point of reference, when Maria Montessori really understood learning by hand and all project-based learning very much grows out of that. Dr. Steiner added to that the emphasis of the heart that everything is a matter of the heart. And we have brain research now that confirms that if we do not have relational trust, if we are not engaged with our heart, then learning can't occur with the head. So 100 years ago, Rudolf Steiner focused on head heart and hand. The other important thing is that children are not shrunk adults, but that there's actually a developmental arc to learning and to living, and that children should learn in different ways, in sequential ways, in scaffolded ways, and meaningfully scaffolded ways as we go through the years of our lives. So it's head heart and hand. It's developmental. And it's deeply relational -- that if we do not have a relationship, we will not learn. So at the heart of Waldorf education is relationship which actually means love.

BC: So most Waldorf schools are, in fact, like Montessori, private schools, but your school is a little different. Could you describe how it's different and how that came about?

I O: Gladly, so many Montessori and Waldorf schools became private school options, contrary to the intent of either founder, we should say. And when Waldorf education came to America in 1928, it was beautifully and thankfully bankrolled by a couple of deep pocketed funders, and first with intent of large scholarships, but then money's dried up and as things changed and it became a much sought after private school option. What we did from our founding on (before founding) is say let us return to the original intent as you say, it was for the children of the workers of this Waldorf Astoria cigarette factory, it was free because this Waldorf, factory owner Emile Molt bankrolled the effort. And at the time, that that was that if we do well, then other businesses will recognize and there'll be a continual bankrolling to make up the difference so that rich and poor, girls and boys, different cultural backgrounds could all live together. That didn't happen. So now we recognize if it's not the private sector, closing the delta, we need to go back to what we know. This is the gift of public education where America has been so leading for over a century. That we ensure that through the public system, this option would be available to all. 

And so, ten years ago, I started working with fellow community leaders, fellow parents, through a very respected community-based organization -- one to build relationships and trust for me to also learn a lot. I sat at the feet of organizers who've been working in Oakland for decades, so that I could learn about community organizing, and then work with other parents who so chose to first see what is Waldorf education, many parents have never heard of it, actually, almost all. And if they heard anything, they knew it was white, wealthy, and weird. And we were going to show that it was so much more. And so we did it. We started with the support of a very wise organizer to visit Waldorf schools, private Waldorf schools, the beautiful San Francisco Waldorf school, the beautiful East Bay Waldorf school. We also visited public Waldorf charters, we had to say none of them look like your children and you they're all highly white and wealthy. But let us see what if this is for us. What if this is for our community what is for our future, and it's the parents who visited, with thanks to that gracious hospitality of the Novato Waldorf School, The Napa Waldorf, School, the Sacramento public Waldorf schools -- they came back and said, "Oakland is ready for Waldorf education', where others said, "Is Waldorf ready for Oakland?" And we've proven to be so.

Part Two: Not Done, But Unfolding

So when you started, did you consider this an experiment? Or did you have a sense that in fact, the conclusion, the foundation, the ground was was fertile for this to be planted here in Oakland?

I O: I did not see it as an experiment in the sense of, it's never been done before. because we were resting on the shoulders of 100 years of elders and wise sages. I didn't know that it was a deep innovation, as Dr. Steiner said that none of it is imitation, but innovation, none of it is replication, but research and Waldorf is not done but unfolding. This is what Dr. Steiner taught. So in that spirit, it is the most deep extension of his teachings. I did know that there was great risk involved because it's so bumped up against many conceptions that had been, I almost want to say encrusted, but at least sort of rigidify into being regarded as Waldorf truisms. Where I would suggest it and runs exactly against what Dr. Steiner in the founding teachers taught, most fundamentally, that the Waldorf curriculum needs to be deeply responsive to the community it serves, that the Waldorf organizational structure needs to be deeply responsive. And mostly, Dr. Steiner said, teachers need to be "velt mensch" they need to be people of the world -- it needs to be responding to the call of the future today to build a better world, not looking back to the reality of 100 years ago. So this is not replicating 1919. This is building 2025

I O: A great way of putting it. So, if we could move out of the story and the history and the intent, if you could take us into your school. So, what's the story of the school, what's the feeling of the school that a new student might feel when they walked through the doors? What's happened,

I O: The story of the school, the history of the school in what people feel, maybe I'll slip that in first, say what you hopefully feel when you come in where people report, and then that the story and the history, I would think that everybody feels You are welcome here. And hoping that it's you come in a stranger, you leave a friend. That everybody knows when they come that they'd like to stay. And it's not just because of the welcome of the people, but it's the beauty that we learn from Waldorf education. The Lazured walls, and music that filters through the halls, the children that are holding hands and singing as they walk. I would also say that it's among the most diverse schools in Oakland. I think we would also see that it's a deeply community-based organization. So when you come in you see community met, families come in and are very active in our always buzzing Family Resource Center. There's an open door between classrooms and Family Resource Center and the outside world. But community leaders come, the local pastors come, and they offer mentoring, the local food bank comes and helps build with us so that we offer food services to our community, etc.

The history of the story of the school my personal history is that I myself Dutch and moved to Germany when I was nine and have a family that's Jewish. So, it was very scary in the 60s. And the one place our parents enrolled us, just because they'd learned that this was a school that might be more tolerant of non-German speaking students was the Waldorf school. And so, in that time, those following 12 years that I was at the Waldorf school, I felt it to be so embracing of me. That it was about learning through the arts learning through music, learning through recitation, learning through relationship, and so feeling that I'm leaving, becoming a very strong leader for others. Then, I was able to go to America for college, to Stanford PhD, but always knowing I so got that inspiration from Waldorf education. That wasn't a hammering away direct instruction, but really letting me live with my fellow students through the arts and beauty and purpose. So, the story of the school is wanting to bring that to our school as well. And that is really what binds our teachers, our parents and our children. We now have our graduates coming back very loyal.

BC: The school has a name and interesting name, the Community School for Creative Education. So could you talk a little bit more about what that means? Creative education?

I O: in 2007, when I was really thinking about starting the school in Oakland, my mother, my elder mother, and I did a trip through South Africa to learn about the Waldorf schools there because that has such a deep legacy of Waldorf schools really being far ahead and boundary breaking in terms of integration long before apartheid had been abolished legally. And there I went to the Rudolf Steiner college that had just gotten through it very conscious name change, to rename themselves, Center for Education. And I asked why they said, because if you say Rudolf Steiner College, only people who know Rudolf Steiner will come, it's inward facing if we say Center for Education, it's outward facing. And I brought that to Oakland, and spoke with our families who are leading, and said, "What do you think of Center for Education?" And they said, that can be but one word has to be in there too. And that's community, because we are a community school, hence, Community School?

BC: Yes. And could you talk a little bit about the importance of the imagination for your school, for developing children, and how that shows up in what happens for students in the school.

I O: I think that now we more and more feel it, as particularly now, under COVID, when we're all pressed against our screens, how life-giving imagination is. And sometimes it feels ephemeral. But, if we realize that imagination is really at heart, thinking about the relationship amongst things that have not been yet, that's when you create new things. Imagination is where you actually can bridge what is before us right now. And think of a better, more beautiful world. And beauty is important, because that is also about relationship -- relationship of colors, relationship of matter, relationship of people. So that imaginative power means not only preparing the children, this distinguishes our school and Waldorf schools overall, it's not just to prepare the children to succeed against the benchmarks that have been set to win on in the race that has already been outlined. It is to think of new benchmarks, it's to blaze new trails to build a better tomorrow to build something that has not yet been yet. And that is creating a better future. That's the ultimate purpose of education.

BC: Part Three, Education From the Inside Out.

My experience with Waldorf, and probably one of the things that was most important to me, as a musician, and as a writer, and a person who's been involved in the human creative process for my whole life is that coming into the school, seeing the school feeling the school and learning about the curriculum, there's a child's development deeply involves their imagination, and how critical that is. Could you talk a little bit about how that shows up in the classroom?

I O: Thank you, I think I'd need to really go back to the point that learning is developmental. So it will show up differently in our kindergarten than in our eighth grade. But each set of the way it is that the children are creating out of themselves. It's that education from the inside out rather than the outside in. So in kindergarten, it's the free play. Just as in eighth grade, it's the free imagination of your class project, of how you're doing a literary project, how you're doing a woodwork project. But it is always that it...

Why is our democracy struggling, What's wrong?

How can the process of community art-making help strengthen a struggling democracy?

Under what conditions can we rise to our better selves?

What is the artists job when our collective capacities are threatened?

Bill Cleveland: I met Milenko Matanovic on the US/Mexico border. We were there to confer with a couple of dozen other citizen artists from both countries to explore the audacious idea of creating a common ground cultural space, that literally straddled the border physically and creatively. The aim was to establish a creative laboratory for arts-based strategies for changing borders from dividers to cross community connectors--- not just for North America but for the whole world. Like I said it was audacious. 

Anyway, one amazing outcome from that cross-cultural collaboration festival was that one of the two countries actually signed on to crazy idea. I’ll leave it to your imagination to figure which one opted out. Another important outcome was the birth of the Pomegranate Center, which has served as the platform for Milenko’s community collaborations for the past three decades. In the decades since that border summit, I have come to know that challenging assumptions, poking holes in the impossible, and good-times-for-all are hallmarks for Milenko's way in the world. As an artist and designer, as a writer and speaker, as a teacher and philosopher, as an organizer and provocateur, Milenko Matonovic above all a hands-on maker and doer--- a creator on a lifelong journey to help communities realize what he views as the real American Dream -- grassroots democracy.

Our conversation took place in February of 2020, just as the gathering storm of the pandemic was appearing on the horizon.

Part 1: An American Dream

BC: I like to dive in and first of all, begin with you describing what your work is.

Milenko Matanovic: My work now is to think about the invisible currents that are moving through our society, and try to answer the question, how can a democracy work better? So, I'm interested in questions that are much more than questions of an artist, a traditional artist would ask. I think that something is happening in our society that should be worrisome, and I'm trying to look at that now that I have the privilege of more free time, and reading, and researching, and talking with my colleagues like yourself. Something is going on and I'm trying to understand what it is and I'm trying to provide some answers. 

BC: So given that there is a long history that preceded this particular moment where you are in a space where you can reflect, could you describe how you came to this and just a bit of your history and obviously touching bases on your on your artistic career, but also, the time you spent, in the trenches at the pomegranate center? 

MM: Sure. So, I'll go way back, I grew up in former Yugoslavia in a truly remarkable city with roots going back 2000 years. A kind of city where you walk and feel safe and you explore all the time and you bump into friends. Architecturally designed around the principles of placemaking because it was intuitive to the people who built that place. It's not by coincidence that we had to invent the term placemaking because it was lacking here. It was not needed in that city. 

So great, great memories of the city, great memories of spending several in a tiny village that basically existed in a pre-industrial fashion when I first visited it. But the society itself was a little bit foggy. It was like people were covered with heavy blankets and the joyfulness, the lightness, the excitement about the future, the optimism, creativity, all those were qualities lacking from the daily culture that I bumped into. I had a sense early on that something was wrong with that picture. You know, I think in retrospect, the leaders, political leaders in former Yugoslavia worked very hard to keep an arranged marriage between different cultural groups going, and that all exploded, as we know, in those atrocities after a hard hand of Tito disappeared. I was born only three years after the end of the Second World War, so my early memories was of very humble existence. You know, we turned off the lights because if police would see lights in two rooms from the street, they would knock on your door. So, the energy was so precious. 

Memories that everybody was trying to tell me who I should be, and who I should become, and how to behave, and I've rebelled against that. I looked with envy across the Atlantic Ocean to the United States, and I said to myself, here is a country where people deliberate their future together. They go to town halls, and they float different ideas, they wisely select the best ideas and they join their forces to make them happen. You know, that was the idealistic perception of healthy democracy, and I had this yearning for that state of affairs because it was utterly electing lacking in my early experience. Nobody ever asked me what I thought.

BC: So, you became an artist [chuckles] 

MM: That's exactly right. That's led me to the only place where I could go and still keep some kind of integrity with myself, and I was very lucky to bump into friends who were thinking similar thoughts. Long story short, I ended up working with a collaborative artist called Group OHO, which is kind of a combination of two Slovenian words or "oko," for eye "uko," for ear. And we said that's kind of the media in which will be working in the center. The senses will engage.

But I think, you know, I started in a very traditional way. I painted and I start to make some sculptures. But then one summer I discovered the different approach that shaped my entire career afterwards. Everybody was making objects, and what was the most important is the object that they were created. And I scratched my head and said, what if I start playing by different rules, which is that I will always try to learn from the setting first and then I will do something that highlights the setting rather than boast my own genius, and so this idea of collaboration has been with me for a very, very long time. But that was kind of a conscious beginning of that journey. 

BC: So could you talk about some of this work, share some examples of how It actually placed the setting and the foreground. 

MM: So I use the simplest of materials, like wooden sticks and string, connecting them together into a long snake and put them on top of the river, they would float on the river, and start visualizing the invisible currents that were under the surface of the river. So. So what kind of art is that? It's an art that highlights something in a relationship, right? It's not Milenko putting sticks in the river. It's highlighting what was there already. So, it is this idea that collaboration can be expressed in any way, not just between people, but between the artist and the river. I had summer jobs in the printshop, and I would beg them to sell me for very few cheap money, discarded roll of newspaper paper. about maybe 400 feet long. And I would take it to the rolling hills and fold it in the gravity of the hills would start shaping this pathway. So again, is art the paper? No, the paper was just a method to highlight something inherent in the situation that I found. 

BC: And, then you left Slovenia to expand on these ideas, but your idealistic view on the United States didn’t exactly pan out, did it?

When I came to the United States, I was shocked to discover cities lacking those qualities that I became familiar with and become became second nature to me in Lubyanka (the Slovenian capital). Walk-ability, fresh food, bumping into friends, a sense of community. All of that was lacking in many cities that were designed much better for cars than for people. So that shocked me and the other thing that shocked me is that when I would go and start to attend public meetings, I remember the very first one I attended in the United States had to do with widening a bicycle path on the shoulder of a of a street. And I went there because I was a bicyclist and I wanted to learn how true democracy works. And I was shocked to discover that it was dominated by a few very, very selfish people whose argument it was that they would not want to widen the road because we just don't want bicyclists obstructing our entry on the road when we exit from our homes 

BC: So, your bubble burst, but it didn’t deter you did it? Instead you went into inquiry mode and problem-solving mode, right?

MM: And so that piqued my interest. How come there was such a discrepancy between the ideals of participatory democracy and the reality? And eventually that started to really dominate my work, so even as we build artistic products with pomegranate, we had to learn how to convene meetings in a different way that downplayed those negative, selfish tendencies that I saw that have become the norm, and highlight creativity and forward looking and thinking on behalf of future generations. And this became gradual. My main work, how to design processes where people step up to their better selves. And so, as I said at the beginning, what is my work? That's my work now, too, to ask myself under what conditions can we rise to our better selves? Because right now the default modality is that we are at our worst with each other. And that troubles me because we are robbing ourselves of the possibility to understand, first of all, the complexity of our time and second of all, to prepare ourselves for a future that would work for all of us. So that's kind of how I got through this long journey of more than 50 years.

Part 2: Gathering 

BC: So, one of the things that has always attracted me to the work of the Pomegranate Center is the fact that every time an idea emerges, there's actually a story of the experience of working in communities with people who may seem skeptical at first, but actually end up taking responsibility for not only the ideas, but the manifestation of those ideas. One of them that that I was particularly enamored of was the one in San Diego, which really was a very compressed period of time, and a lot of people in a neighborhood who didn't necessarily know each other very well, who did some amazing projects. Could you talk a little bit about the on the ground experience of helping people really find a sense of common ground and taking responsibility for it?

MM: Well, so that's basically been the model for the Pomegranate Center's work with gathering places, and the method is very simple. So a lot like a young artist in Slovenia where I was the only one in charge of what was I was going to do. Here I had to become a kind of artist that will say, I will serve the desires of the community. And in order for me to do that, I had to trust their input. I could not just serve their anger and their negativity. So, the contract we created with the community is you tell us what needs to happen, but in the process, can you be honest with your ideas and what really ought to happen here, rather than what you do not want to see, which is so often the case? And then we will design it with your help. You have the power of veto, but we promise you that will design it around your wishes rather we learned that there are some architects who would simply not buy into that premise. They knew better. There were specialists who knew better than the community. We will resist the temptation and learn how to really pull out to the communities their best sentiments. 

BC: Actually, another way of engaging people that reinforce the connectiveness and interdependence of community. Could you talk about how that actually works? 

MM: So, we have to develop some tools for doing that. So, ground rules for participation that diminished the negativity. So, for example, simple rules, everyone will participate. Why did we impose that rule? Because we learn without it, few people would have the tendency to dominate the meeting. Or are you willing to change your mind after you hear other people talk about the project, so that we diminished people being fixed on their ideas and has the idea of learning. So, there are tricks to this, and we learn tons about what makes community meetings work. In any case, they are driving this rather than us. We design, they have the veto power, and then we orchestrate a joint series of daylong workshops. Usually projects would go anywhere from four to ten days, depending on the complexity of the project, and they were expected to work alongside with us. The basic idea was we do not work for you. We work with you will add something to your value, but you need to put the skin in the game also invest. The reason why it works so well, and we have some as you mentioned, you are familiar with the project down in San Diego, the Manzanita, a gathering place. But I think what made it work is that there was something specific at stake. 

BC: I had the privilege of helping to document the Manzanita gathering place project in San Diego that Milenko is referring to. In many ways, this was a prototypical Pomegranate Center project, a derelict and blighted road end, a concerned community that just wanted to turn it into a safe and beautiful little where everybody could gather, and connect, and play. From the city’s perspective this was at a minimum, a one year, one half-million-dollar project. Pomegranate and 200 community volunteers, planned, designed, and built it in three months for $20,000. I asked Milenko to share the alchemy that makes something like this possible. 

MM: So what we've learned is when something specific is at stake, it's easier for people to flip from their differences into what can I contribute to kind of a modality, which is powerful. So, when it's abstract, we just argue about how we're different. But when something specific, in this instance was the safety of kids, that dead end street, which the neighborhood blocked off with barbed wire, and then this tiny space, one hundred square yards, something like that, started to be occupied by drug dealers, and everybody knew that. There was an elementary school that used to be accessed through that space until this negative activity started to happen there. So, the project was about doing something to transform it from this black hole, into something exciting and, you know, let's do something beautiful, something functional, and now what they tell me is the community gathers there to watch the sunset because the place faces west towards the Pacific coast and they gather there in the evening, ritualistically kind of and bump into each other. How great right? And the space had to be designed for that kind of an easy encounter.

So, again, the principle I think here is the community needs to be involved. We artists do not do it for them, they do it with them. Artists need to accept responsibility that they will be that they need to put their ego aside. And when they exercise, the ego is within the framework of what the community wants, rather than what the artist wants, and then you invite people to become artists, to turn into construction workers and artisans and crafts people for a few days and let's do something together. And if that's enough right. And surprisingly, people step up to their better selves when we do art together. You know, people are not jerks to each other anymore, is just something about the activity of that nature. Now, let's do the mosaic together. You cannot argue. I would not just say “you jerk, you put this pink piece right here”. You kind of say in that context. Oh, that's interesting. Let me be them. There is that kind of a feeling starts exploding between people. And then I think those are the unexpected results. So, at the end, they feel safer with each other, more trusting of each other and they're excited to be involved again in something similar. That's what a powerful, powerful sentiment that is in our cynical times where people say, watch me not come to another meeting, 

BC: Now, Manzanita was a little park project that had a profound impact on a little community. But you see much broader implications for this work. Could you talk about that?

MM: And so what I'm learning from that, Bill, I'm asking the question, can this be applied more broadly beyond our projects to kind of the way we work between elections when with decisions about new community garden and new library and widening of the street, and you want whatever is being contemplated and often their community meetings, they're complementing those processes. It's not just professionals and government agencies doing it. There is a structured place for people to be involved. Unfortunately, they are involved through negativity, and I'm scratching my head and say, wait a minute, there's thousands of those meetings happening every month in the United States. What if we turn them into laboratories for collaboration and for learning from each other, for looking into the future, for all those good qualities that I dreamt about when I was in former Yugoslavia. That to me, what represents a living, breathing democracy. So, in some ways I'm connecting the...

Dear Listener: In this podcast Erik describes agency and connection as essential elements for emergence of creative people power. If you are interested in exploring this idea further here are two resources that might be of interest.

Creative People Power Web Site & Report @ Springboard for the Arts

Small Towns, Big Stories: Arts-based Community Development Makes its Mark in Southwest Minnesota - A Center for the Study of Art and Community Blog Post

What do the challenges inherent to equitable philanthropy, light rail construction and the sanctity of sacred space have in common?

Why art and culture in these challenging times?

How do human creative capacities contribute to building caring, capable, just communities

Bill Cleveland: So, what do the challenges inherent to equitable philanthropy, light rail construction and the sanctity of sacred space have in common? Well, according to Eric Takeshita, they all meet in a place he refers to as creative people power. Now, Eric is one of those rare individuals who make an impression and a difference by calling upon both the head and the heart. I spoke to him about his life's path in early 2020, just before the COVID justice/stew began to boil over. 

From the Center for the Study of Art and Community, this is Change the Story, Change the World, a chronicle of art and transformation. I'm Bill Cleveland.

Part One: Shoulders, and Ladders. 

BC: You are the first person that I have ever seen use one of those back scratchers. Yeah. 

Erik Takeshita: Oh yeah, I love these. I have one here on my desk, I use it all the time.

BC: That is wonderful. That is 

ET: I have two, I have one here and one upstairs.

BC: There you go. Okay, a true addiction. So, I'll just start. You've had a long and a storied career in a world that spans many realms, some of which don't normally come together, our community development, storytelling, art making being a potter. So, I'm just going to ask, how do you describe what you do in the world? 

ET: I’ll try to answer your question by naming what I'm most interested in. And my passion is this nexus of, of how art and culture can be leveraged to create a healthy, more equitable, and sustainable world and planet and community. I have been very, very fortunate to have had a number of different platforms from which to pursue that passion. I've had the opportunity to work in the community development sector, I've had the opportunity to work in the arts community, I've had a chance to be an artist, I've had a chance to work in philanthropy, I've had a chance to work in government. But what I would say is that through the through line for all that work is really the, for me, it's this intersection of how art and culture really ties to building healthier and stronger communities, particularly within historically marginalized communities, communities of color, in particular, and other historically disinvested [communities]. So that's what I do, right, I do work, but really, it's about supporting those communities, by helping them tap into that the power of art culture that I believe exists in every person in the community. And really trying to help support and facilitate the unleashing and channeling of that energy.

I think one of the important things I will mention is that there's no such thing as an art desert, which is sometimes just false. Art and Culture exists everywhere and is available to everyone. Perhaps it needs to be supported somehow seems to be nurtured or it needs to be brought out. But I think that it exists, and it needs to be celebrated and facilitated. I think it's much like, you know, kind of how there is solar power, because the sun exists, or there was wind power because the wind exists, and what we need to do is perhaps sometimes create the capacity to harness and transmit that power that exists. I want to give credit to Helicon Collaborative and Springboard for the arts, because those are ideas that come out of their credit People Power Report. So, this idea that the people power that exists, and that we just need to tap into it. And I very much believe in it. 

BC: So, there are some people who would say that we live in a very challenging time, and the issues of the day are daunting. Why would something like art and culture be a primary resource for addressing these kinds of things? Why art and culture? 

ET: I guess I would actually challenge the first part of that statement, which I mean, should be sure we live in challenging times, relative to most many of our lifetimes. Sure, things are kind of interesting right now in terms of geopolitics or climate change. But when we look back at the 20th century, we go back to the civil rights, the Vietnam protests, you know, Kent State, you go back further to World War Two and the Holocaust, the depression, the Great War, the flu pandemic. So that's the 20th century, right. So, I guess, I feel that we have a distorted view of history. I'm not diminishing the difficulty of the pain and suffering. I will be interested in how this era in this period plays out in history.

Second, as I would say that art and culture is always essential. And, in fact, it's perhaps most essential in most trying times. Right? It is, is perhaps the most essential when we as individuals, and we as communities are struggling, because it's actually part of what makes us human. It's part of what creates our connections to our humanity, but also our connections to one another. But it's it can be the kind of glue that can help bind this together and common experience and inspiration and ideas. So, to me, the answer is, it's not, why would we do it? It's that in those challenging times, it's the very time in which we must fight. That's, that's the path forward. That's the way that we will emerge from any challenges I think we have right is by seeking that inspiration by seeking that meaning making by seeking those connections that art and culture can uniquely help to provide. 

BC: So how did you come to this, you have a pretty clear outline, and focus for your work. I would imagine growing up there were not a lot of people doing what you're doing now. And yeah, so what's the path? 

ET: So, my path is one of a lot of luck is what I would first say. I've been very blessed, I would be quick to say that I've been given a lot of privilege in terms of the opportunities I was given by family, and by parents, and those that came before me, things in terms of education, and more had the access. I was allowed at early age to explore my creative expression, and I found that outlet through ceramics right through as I went through high school and received a scholarship to go to undergraduate offers on the court. And so, I found that as a as a vehicle for expression. Another piece of my journey, though, is being the son of a social worker, and a public-school librarian. You know, this idea of service, this idea of needing to give back.

Another piece of my journey is that I'm a fourth generation Japanese American that was born and raised in St. Paul, Minnesota. And I grew up at a time when I thought you were the whiter black and I was neither. And it was through the arts that I was able to find my place in this geography. Right so through the work of Asian American Renaissance, and theatre, moved from fine arts to really help me find my place and identity here in this community. 

And the other piece, I would say is, and it's also that I might just by biographically for me, it was sent to private high schools and private colleges, I have been given a lot of privilege and a choice along the way to either kind of say, ‘wow, look at me, aren't I great and fortunate, and I'm going to take all my marbles and go home’, or I can make a choice to say now I have an obligation or responsibility to ensure that those are coming behind me have those types of opportunities, right? Like that is I can either pick up the letter behind me, or I can choose to step back now, for those that may be coming as future generations options.

BC: That challenging history you mentioned earlier though, World War Two, the depression, the Holocaust. These are times when selfless human cooperation made all the difference. Some would say, right now we're living in a time when sharing those ladders is really an open question. Could you say a bit more about the sense of responsibility you grew up with? 

ET: I think for me, it's really clear that I have an obligation or responsibility to kind of pay it forward. Like I stand on the shoulders of those who came before me, and I hope to be shoulders upon which future generations can stand by. My goal is to really try to carve a path, to create shelter, to whatever it may be, is needed to support those who are going to be coming in the future, because that's truly how we're going to change the world. It's not going to be one person that will do that. So, you know, my grandfather was a plantation. He was a laboror, he was a janitor and not wealthy by any stretch of the imagination. My mother was the first in her generation first woman to graduate from college. My father was the first in his family. My grandmother, my mother's mother, was born a US citizen and she lost her citizenship when she married my grandfather, who immigrated when you're 16 to work in the sugarcane fields because he was an alien ineligible person. So, my grandmother was undocumented most of her life. She lost her US citizenship, when she married my grandfather, and had to take the citizenship test to get a passport so, she could leave the United States. Even though she was born a U.S. citizen. 

My mom, (their family, was relocated five different times because of highway construction, right? As you're building the freeway in Honolulu, they had a move, they were poor, and they lived in the section of town where the freeway was. And so they had to move five, she went to six different schools and seven years because they kept on having the move. So, these issues around whether it's immigration, or if it's about displacement, these are the stories of my family. Certainly, it's ever happened to me. But I but I know of these stories, I know these things happen. And they shape who I am, and they give me the sense of obligation or responsibility. If I don't speak up, if I don't do what I can, to help others and my family, I need to make sure that…I don't often use the term social justice, I guess, because I don't think it's a social justice, I think it’s about doing the right thing. But for me, that's how I come to the focus of my work. I really see the power of people centered approaches to building stronger communities. So you know, over time we've constantly over in the history we’ve build, you know, having built environments, and the ones that I believe are the strongest, healthiest, best, are those that are driven by and kind of been formed by those that are going to be looking at

BC: What a story, and as long as I've known you, a good portion of that is new to me, and I appreciate your sharing, particularly the generational layers. One of the things that is obvious is that you are not doing work separate from this story of your life and your family. It is organically connected to that lineage and your own personal life experience, which is another privilege to be able to manifest a work that rises up from who we are. 

Part Two: Agency and Connections.

BC: When I asked Erik to share a story or two about his work, it was obvious that this sense of responsibility for extending ladders that translated directly to his work with communities, he began by describing a new program he helped develop at the Bush foundation in St. Paul.

ET: The story that I would say that is top of mind for me comes from my most recent work, which was at the Bush Foundation, which is a private foundation that's located in St. Paul, that that serves North Dakota, South Dakota, Minnesota and over 23 native nations. 

At the time, I was stood in a role as director of Community Creativity, really looking at the role of arts and culture and helping foster creative problems in the classroom. Part of it was to recognize that if we want to help make the region better for everyone, we need to help make the region better for those who do least well. And in that process, we also need to have strategies that are geared towards specific populations within that broader goal, we all will do better. So, we were able to create a program where it was really focused on and centered in black indigenous people of color, as well as in rural communities. If you look at the numbers and statistics to say, okay, well, those communities have been historically under invested. And perhaps not coincidentally, those are communities that offer statistically doing least well. You have income, wealth, health outcomes, educational outcomes.

So, the idea was to really say can we invest in culture in these communities, really, as a way of helping to achieve those other outcomes, right? For me, it was never sufficient to invest in your tech culture as much as invest in arts and culture as a way of driving towards these other community outcomes of health disparities or income disparities or educational disparities. And I named that because to me, the story is thatI believe that the only way that we can change some of these broader social ills is it has to start with the individual. An individual must believe he or she can actually make a difference in their life. And this idea that we've seen over and over that if one is in despair, and one has nothing to lose, then one doesn't actually try to make things better. So, it has to do with hope, and a belief that they can actually make a difference in their life, sometimes called agency. 

BC: So, it sounds like you're starting to do describe a theory, a story of change. If a community is going to move towards social economic health towards justice, these are the foundations. 

ET: Right? So, one has to have hope and inspiration, and one has to have agency at the individual level. [Then] you also need to have connections, right, and I've already outlined for me, like what I saw through the work of Theater MU, or at Asian American Renaissance is the power of having that sense of community that sometimes-called bonding. And finally, that when people have hope, and an agency, and they have connections, that that can then lead to collective efficacy, people can come together, and together they can try and solve. So that's a kind of a necessary underpinning for me about how change happens in communities, and what's interesting to me is that art and culture becomes an easy on ramp for them, it becomes a way to practice some of those skills, it becomes a way to help give people a sense of agency and a sense of hope. But it can be inspiring, and they can participate in things and say ‘oh, I can make a difference in the world’. But as a potter, when I throw pot, I literally take a month lump of mud, and I can transform it into you know, this coffee cup, I can drink my coffee. Like, that's kind of amazing, right. And it's been happening for millennia.

BC: Every day, throughout history and prehistory,

ET: Like humans have been doing this for thousands of years, in a similar way. Like, wow, that's really interesting, too. But I've made a difference little like, there's a physical difference that I've created in the world. So that's, to me, art and culture can help give people a sense of agency, they can also connect people in new and exciting ways. It can be fun, it can be surprising, it can be, you know, in ways that we wouldn't expect. Yet, when you dance, the light rail shuffle with the mayor, your interactions with him changed forever. But because you have a different relationship now to this human being because you participated in this article. Right. So, it can create different connections hoping that agency can then create power that can change systems. And so, to me, what we were trying to do with the Bush foundation was to support art and culture, focus on that idea of building agency help creating connections with an eye towards changing their communities for the better. We selected 40 organizations, all of which were led by or serving people of color and led by rural communities. And we said, you know, what's best we will support you will give you general operating money, we're not going to dictate what needs to be used for, and we will support you and your growth, what capacities you want to build, we will support you by going to a conference, going to do a site visit with another partner, going to training hiring a consultant, maybe we will support that in an unrestricted kind of way. 

BC: So, what's changed?

ET: Just I just heard that that the internal evaluation, we're kind of tweaking, and then we started to see the results that people are doing well, they are picking up that responsibility for themselves, in terms of helping them make those connections, and really helping to build the capacity and that you're then seeing results in the community that you're seeing, you know, more activities are happening, where they feel they're having more impact in their community. And to me, that's the promise, right? To your earlier question about, you know, in challenging times, why our culture. Well, in challenging times, there's a huge opportunity for art and culture to then […] when there's a...

Dear Reader: Barry Marcus' story about Creative Culture touches on a number of questions related to the impact that arts learning can have on youth development. One of these is how active art making can strengthen a sense of ownership and agency in young artists. If this peaks your interest you might want to take a look at : 23 Admonitions, Insights and Ideas from the Great Masters at the Center for the Study of Art and Community's website.

Bill Cleveland: Barry Marcus is clever, funny, and a good friend. He also personifies one of my favorite human characteristics; that's quirkiness. You never know what he's going to do, or say, or sing for that matter.

Barry Marcus:

The duck goes quack, the cow says moo

I say hello, how do you do?

You talk to me and I'll listen to you

Talking and a squawkin’’ till our lips turn blue 

BC: Now, that's Barry singing the title track from his CD of children’s songs. These days, he describes himself as a visual storyteller. Back in the 90s, when I met him, he was not only a prolific songwriter, but also a therapist and a director of children's mental health programs. Although the first spark in our friendship was through music, our enduring connection has been fueled by our mutual passion for exploring the kinds of questions that have sustained our lives work and giving rise to this podcast. Namely, can the creative process be a potent force for healing and change, and if so, how do we do that really, really well? 

From the Center for the Study of Art and Community, this is Change the Story, Change the World and I’m Bill Cleveland. We're calling today's episode creative culture, and today's conversation with creative culture, facilitator, and advocate Barry Marcus took place during May of 2020. For myself in Alameda, California and Barry on Bainbridge Island near Seattle, we were coming to the end of our third month living at the intersection of six feet and Sequesterville.

Part One: Rhythms and Seasons.

With your permission, I would like to ask you to recount a piece of your history. A focus of bringing creative process to bear on very difficult circumstances, particularly for young people that you were serving at the place called Families First. Would you be willing to talk about how it came about, how you came to it, and what happened?

BM: Well, can I give a little prelude to that? 

You know, I was at the Sacramento children's home for 13 years prior to that. And because of my role as one of the directors, holding the position of intake, and seeing how people translated what an intake summary looked like into their day to day residential care. These kids were 24 hours a day in the care. In both circumstances--the children's home and Families First--these are kids that blew out of foster homes. Multiple, five, seven foster homes are had very acute and dramatic needs to be removed. They were in institutions, and the people that worked with them primarily besides the clinical step are really the line staff, and they're called childcare work. And they would look at an intake summary, and they would see this description of a troubled child, most often, behaviorally, because that's how children experience trauma, and they would define them by their deficits. So, the first thing I did was I created a thing called “guess who's coming”. Instead of saying, here's this broken-down kid and that's it, I said, here's the profile of our newest guests. And the first they thought it was a joke, but it said, Oh, no, I want you to treat this child like a guest. 

So, in essence, what I really knew was that these children could be relegated to the garbage basket, as soon as they entered the door or sometimes even before. I was recruited as a creative person. What I wanted to do is use the institutional setting as a community of creativity, and use the children's lives and their brokenness, his deep feelings, to connect to a creative process that could allow them to be seen different, and experienced different, and seeing themselves different.

BC: So, what I'm hearing is that Families First was really a golden opportunity to integrate your ideas about using the creative process as a healing force for these kids. 

BM: I did some things that children's home, as I said, the “guess who's coming”, but the transition was the CEO of Families First said, “I just want your creativity.” You figure a way to do it. Now I had done a song site called “Our stuff, our song” and it was helping children create their song individually, then bring it together as a group and then bring it to a public a community parents, family, mental health associates, but also the outside community, to give them a chance to give voice to their inner being as an artist. I had a band learning their songs, and I brought them all together to practice, and then the performance became a ritual and a rite of passage, which I always incorporated and all the work I did is as that community, a living and breathing community, and having rituals and rites of passage. We had this amazing drumming thing with a Ghana drummer, and what the kids created was these chants and narratives with reused plastic water bottles as drums, and they were painted and adorned in various ways, and we had a public ceremony and it was really profound and deep and rich. 

BC: Could you describe how creative culture manifested, first of all, and also describe Families First, what its mission was, who its clients were... 

BM: Well, Families First started out as a professional foster care program, and kind of blocks them while I was there growing into a more of a residential treatment program with foster care. It was a range of service program. But what fascinated me about it, as did Sacramento Children's Home was it was its own community, with its own values, its own rhythms, its own kind of timing and seasons in the life of a child who live there. 

Now, before I say anything more about that, who lived there?

Again, these were kids in and out of places like Napa State Hospital. So, they would get in a hospital for all kinds of sometimes it was psychotic, but very often it was assaultive behavior. That parents and other foster family stuff that couldn't handle or was runaways. 

Now, an interesting aside about runaways, we learned in the 70s that girls… well, they were considered offenders only as teenagers, they wouldn't have been charged with crimes for what they did if they were adults. And the crime was they ran away, while we began finding out why girls were running away, and really (…not sure word…) they were molested, and that was your only way of dealing with it. 

So, these were kids that were used to their energies being coming and going, running, and having no sense of permanency. And the residential treatment home, particularly Families First said, we're going to stick with this kid unless it gets really, really dangerous because we know the next step from us, is an inpatient Napa State Hospital, a warehouse still. And we make a commitment to work with the child, and when there was the family, but in the circle of having the community and the physical ground, I recognized the structure was {…} it was like in a Eureka kind of moment. We had individual kids working on their individual stuff, they lived in individual houses, up to 12 kids. So, you had a child who was a member of a group, not only were they a member of the group, they went to the on-campus school, and so they were a member of a class, but together they were all Families First. 

BC: This facility had many components to it. It had an educational component; these kids lived with each other. They had activities all day, they had counseling, talk about how creative culture really meant that creative process was integrated into every aspect of their time in the facility.

BM: Culture is a very big important word in this situation, because it's this kind of inbred system of “this is appropriate, and this is not appropriate”. And by the way, “appropriate” is a power word. Who determines “appropriate”?, you know, I mean, there are conventions, but again, I don't want to do anything appropriate. But what I was trying to point to is, regardless of whether you see the whole fabric or not as a childcare worker dealing with a kid spitting at you, you're still in a culture. This is a culture, and we have the opportunity to both define it and refine it by looking for the creative juices because even as a mental health facility, the only way you solve problems is to be creative. The only way you connect with other people is to create that energy. So, I was also asking staff to stand back a little and give themselves a chance to look at kids as creative. 

Eventually, one of my favorite projects, and actually this is with Oprah, […] we were able to have Oprah come and see them and say, you know, the difference between you and me isn't where I started, It's where I am now. And that happened to me, and the arts, and expression leads me to healing. So, I saw that as an opportunity to build great of culture where the individual does their work, but they can't do it independent of what the group is doing, be it the house or the school.

Part Two: Release the Hounds

BC: So, Barry, individual, group house, school. Is there a particular initiative or project that you feel really, manifested really connected, at all these levels you just shared? 

BM: The easiest thing to talk about is a book, which we did with a very famous artist named Roy De Forest, The Secret of Dogmore Island. And what he did was he gave us cards, just little cards of outlines of what each chapter should be. So, if you read chapter one in your class, you may have an idea but your class or your house, better buy it to fit the overall narrative that they're developing. And it was group collaboration and Bill, as you know, because you were a part of it. It was very profound and deep and rich and complex. 

BC: So, in that circumstance, Roy De Forest created an outline, a visual outline, in the beginning of a story, and then these groups of young people, basically filled in the voids with their own images and their own narrative. Is that right?

BM: Yes, and how it worked is there, you know, there were two sentences per little card. I'm a very big believer in--this is part of creating culture--and having a goal and a process that comes to a conclusion where there is an artifact. Whether it's a book, song cycle, the Davis family mural ceramic, there's something concrete that the whole, the whole community can point to and say, we did that! And also, I didn't mean we did that. But I think Dogmore represents partnership. I brought in our working writers and artists of different kind, and I introduced them as like the kids, and the kids were like them, because they had deep feelings, they had need to express them and they used arts isn't a way to express the complex feelings, complex feelings.

BC: Wow, in a complex environment working together on a really complex project where you have different groups, classes, negotiating separate parts of this one evolving story. Yeah. It sounds complicated.

BM: So, what I think was very specifically embedded in the concept of creative culture, is I said, you can't create your chapter without your whole class. But your class can't rely on the whole chapter being either honored or related to what else is there without all the other chapters by example. Okay, so wait for structure I hired five visual artists Five authors, the guy who wrote the last unicorn Peter Beagle was one of them. 

Okay, so but here's what happened. Let's start with chapter one. The class is getting near writing kind of a sense of a narrative, it's not written and solidified, but they got a sense of who Dr. Dogmore is and who PEP the flea is and all these characters and where the narrative was heading. And one kid gets up and he goes, “Wait a minute, Barry, what are they going to do in chapter two?” And, “How will we know how it ends? We don't want PEF, good example, we don't have to get killed, you can't kill them.”

And I said to him, “Well, you know, you know, we don't know. But one way you might resolve that if you have an interest in how it moves along, and how the whole thing is done is pick what chapter you're most concerned about. Are you most concerned right now about how it will be picked up from you right now. Yeah, yeah, what are they going to do? Well, you know, what would you like to send an emissary or two into group two, and make a presentation on what you've come up with? and how you want them to know about who these characters are and why you love them?.” 

And, and, again, Bill, they chose two kids, and they got up there. And we had a class where even the most troubled kid was saying ideas and coming up and when we left, I asked the kids in group one, are you satisfied and do you… here's a key word, trust group. These are kids that don't trust nothing. And they left and said, we will leave it in their hands. And so, we had these interlacing webs of people coming and going and kind of reading the stories that moved on.

BC: So, they forge partnerships, working together and building the story together. How did the artists and writers figure in this mix? 

BM: The writers would go into classes maybe six times, six weeks, and work with them to refine what it was. And from that, we also had the artists come in and they would work with him to draw their ideas and integrate some of their art, so that it became again a collaboration. You also collaborated with the artists in your class, and so styles came out. 

BC: At this point, some of you listening may be wondering what all this festive collaboration produced. From what I understand, this is how the Dogmore story goes. Dogmore Island is of course an island of dogs, lots of dogs. With big ones, little ones skinny and thick, shaggy ones and short haired, peppy and slow all living together in elative harmony until the questions who's to dig up an answer to a question that is desperately needed to address a problem. A mystery actually, that needs to be solved, that must be solved, or chaos will ensue. Given the number of authors--over 50 and the number of pages, nearly 120--there are lots of surprising twists and turns and tangles in the labyrinth things search that unfolds. Ultimately, of course, all ends well for the dogs and yes, even the fleas who by the way figure prominently in the stories unlikely though satisfying conclusion. After hearing the Dogmore saga, I asked Barry how the real world adventure that produced it ended up 

BM: The end was this big, whoop dee doo, ceremonial ritual, probably more ritual than a rite of passage where the books were released, and the media was there. We had the local media and they were, […] one of the media came up to me said, Barry, you didn't tell us we'd be crying. 

BC: So, when you say books released, you're saying that there was an edition of the book that was printed. And so, a couple questions number one is big picture. What did you want to have happen? and how did that turn out? 

BM: Well, you know, okay, in an individual basis, I want each child to have a sense of self-worth in the project. It's that simple. And to also be able to bridge that air between ‘I’ and ‘we’ and to be able to identify that my success is also made more rich by my group success, which is also made more rich and complete by my communities’ success. I wanted the community into in turn from someone else the childcare workers with all the celebrate and see what came up. 

But I wanted the community of Davis it Davis is a very fine institution of learning the University of California Davis. I wanted them to go Families First, these aren't the troublemakers, these are source of richness. And that was important. Really important.

Oh, one more important thing. I remember when we did the mural, and we had the ceremony in public on the streets, and several, many of the parents came in this woman came up and was hugging me. I didn't know her, and she was crying. She says, “my son had all of his school never got congratulations for his work”. I don't ever remember a teacher saying this is fine work. He was identified very early as learning disabled and behaviorally disordered. And she said, you know, and she just was crying. I I've never experienced this in my life. So that was equally important. 

Part Three: Turning the Page on the Prussians. 

BC: So, at a certain point, you know, my understanding is that if this were to take in essence, if this were to become a way of working at Families First, rather than Barry's project, you needed a buy in by everybody who was on staff. Is that something that you you've felt evolve over time? 

BM: Yes. The first and primarily most important thing was that the CEO brought me in for that purpose. She was a very powerful personality as you remember, and what she said went. So, they expressed the great deal excitement I learned later, you better be excited if Evelyn tells you to be. But I think they gained some excitement. One of the things that just came up again in my gut. When we did the drumming thing, there were five groups again, and it was a public performance, and the kids were coming apart then the night before. And some of the childcare, senior childcare workers came to me and they said, “you know, I don't know you're putting too much pressure on these kids, I'm sorry”. And, you know, maybe I just trusted myself and I said, “I know those guys, they're okay, they're going to do it”. But and sometimes there was conflict. And I have to say, sometimes I think, in retrospect, I over stressed the creative parts and maybe needed to look more at the trouble it was to really serve these kids in difficult circumstance. 

BC: So, here's, here's a question. I remember. very specifically, you're talking to me about how certain kids responded well to their access to making, to creating. What do you think is going on with a young person with a history of chaos and in some cases violence when they encounter not just a little workshop, but an environment that is infused with this way of thinking about the world with making and creating?

BM: Well, you know, if you look at violence, you can call it acting. Children act,...

Episode 7: Sandy Agustin - The Navigator

Sandy Agustin: Why do you want to change? Why do you want to change? Now? What do you all hold true? What do you see as missing? It's asking the right questions, finding really generous and generative questions. And when people get stuck, sometimes we push, and we name what's hard. Sometimes we just shake it up and we have to move around. We have to play a little bit; we have to think and move physically through the space to get to something different. So, in many of the cases of the groups I've been working with lately, I find out that they've had the ruby slippers on, and the ability all the time. They just are looking at things through a lens that wasn't necessarily theirs, you know. 

Bill Cleveland: From the Center for the Study of Art and Community, this is Change the Story Change the World, a chronicle of art and transformation.  I’m Bill Cleveland.

Like Leni Sloan, from our first two episodes, SA: is what one might characterize as a creative polymath. A dancer, choreographer, university and community educator, a producer, a community leader, healer, an artful alchemist whose work in the US and overseas spans three decades. She's fueled her explorations and adventures with questions. “What's your story? Who are your heroes? Where do you want to go? And how can we help you get there?”. I spoke to Sandy in mid-May of 2020 in the midst of the global question, mark that I've been calling Planet COVID. Certainly, a suitable moment for a lively conversation with somebody who describes herself as a navigator.  

Part One, Learning to Drive.  

So Sandy, this may be a daunting task for you because you're so many things to so many communities, and so many different people, but give it a shot. Try to describe what it is you do in the world. 

SA: Okay. I have had to define this more and more right, as the world has gotten more complex, and for me to say what I do is that I'm a creative navigator. If you say, you want to go to a place, let's say you want to go up north to a particular town, my job would be to help you figure out what kind of car is the right car? What kind of fuel is the right fuel? If there are stops along the way, to define why is that the best place, and who are the people that should be in the car or who are the people in those places that you want to see along the way. So, it really is helping me individuals and organizations that navigate where they're going. My methodology is creative, and creative means anything that will get us out of only intellectualizing the story. But to find the heart of the story, that may be writing, it might be movement, it might be being really silly and playful and being humorous, it might be individual writing, and it might be talking in small groups or communicating and story sharing with one other person.

BC: So, the metaphor you're using is the journey. road trip, actually one of my absolute favorite things, using creative tools and strategies to help folks and communities navigate a journey of decision making or change. Can you share an example?

SA:  Maybe most recently, the Regional Arts Council, they're looking at equity and equitable giving, giving to communities that haven't typically been given to before. You want to look at what, what has been your vehicle of choice or inherited vehicle. Are those still the right ones? Why do you want to change? Why do you want to change? Now? What do you all hold true? What do you see as missing? It’s asking the right questions, finding really generous and generative questions, and when people get stuck, sometimes we push, we name what's hard. Sometimes we just shake it up and we have to move around. We have to play a little bit; we have to think and move physically through the space to get to something different. So, in in many of the cases of the groups I've been working with lately, I find out that they've had the ruby slippers on and the ability all the time, they just are looking at things through a lens that wasn't necessarily theirs. You know, I just said an eye exam, right? Which lens is clear one two, or two three? Yeah, well that one works, but it's a lot clearer if I get the right ones that fit my eyes. I can see better; I can see clearer, and then I can function in the world better from looking through the right lenses. So, I feel like that navigation is really helping people find the right lenses, and often times they've had them or they've had access to them. They just didn't know they did.

BC: Now, you've done a lot of work, advancing social change with communities and organizations. Some people may not really understand how the creative process that you use, these methods of inquiry that you use, can be relevant to people dealing with issues of poverty or crime or feelings of safety, or a sense of belonging in the world. Can you talk about that?

SA: Yeah, I have been taking Tango in the last few years, and in interviewing veteran dancers, good leaders will say a good leader’s job is to make you feel safe and feel beautiful. I'm not going to impose something on you, I want to make you feel safe so that you could get there, and that you can shine and feel beautiful. Okay, so I'll just say that as a mover, that one's really resonating with me. In the case of working with, let's say a group of folks that have been struggling with addiction and chronic homelessness who are desperately trying to get themselves together so they can be good parents or good partners, what does it mean to feel safe and good in your own skin? How can building community helps in that quest for oneself?

BC: So, safe and good! Talk about how these creative tools and strategies can help these wounded souls begin to feel safe and good in their own skin. 

SA: So, for instance, would be offering up some creative tools, some designated time for people to focus on themselves, to be creative and exercise something that is really about their own expression. It's their opinion, there's no right or wrong, that allows them to find their own flow and express themselves in a way that they're not invited to very often. In that case, if the individual feels like their creative badge has been shined and polished, and other people are sharing in that, sharing in their work, they're giving an exchanging, it's still sharing story in a safe and comfortable context that allows them then to flourish and perhaps understand each other really one to one human level. So, if communities feel comfortable with the people in those communities, whatever they describe themselves to be, feel confident, safe, comfortable enough to be beautiful to be creative, I think we've got a healthier, more functional community.

BC: So, your experience is that when you make art with folks, these things happen, a sense of safety, a sense of connection, a sense of coherence, and that people who are struggling with issues of substance abuse or poverty or equity, for these folks, this provides a foundation for individual and collective problem solving and action.

SA: You know, it gives them agency in their own lives where maybe they haven't felt control over a lot of things. This is something you can't, you know, can't take that away from me, as the song says. I wonder, you know, there's perhaps a reason why that brain stores music, musical memories in a different place when the rest of the brain can be in trauma. What's sacred about that music? So. what is sacred about those creative juices? You know, when people's brains are otherwise traumatized, there's got to be something about the sanctity of one's own creative expression.

BC: You know, there's an interesting theoretical conversation that's been taking place among anthropologists and evolutionary psychologists who speculate that prior to the development of language in human species, you're describing them making a musical sounds and patterns with the voice was actually an early adaptive behavior that advanced our survival as humans. First, you know, because it's a powerful way to focus the attention of the community, the tribe, and second because it reinforces that thing that you described earlier, which is a sense of identity or agency within that community. So, the answer to your question about why the brain seems to process music differently, may in fact just be that our brain evolved in a way that reinforces those things that work for us in the world, and that music is one of those. 

SA: Yes, and I, you know, I harken back to, I mean my own upbringing was when we had people over which was often, we always had out the tinkling sticks, which are the long bamboo poles, and we did a tinkling dance, which is jumping in and out in the polls, I call it our own version of jump rope or double dutch. The idea was not to get caught by the sticks. […] Tinkling, it means it's a bird. It's mimicking these bird movements don't we always send music and dancing at all our parties. And to this day, people still talk about that. I remember all the parties in your backyard. I took it for granted that it's, it's always been a part of me to celebrate through music and through dance. It's a way of gathering family, It's a great way of sharing experiences, it’s a way of celebrating.

BC: In your sharing this family history, you're touching on your influences and how you came to this kind of work. Could you tell more of that story?

SA: Well, I harken all the way back to as a child grew up again the daughter of a Filipino immigrant and a white mom in Minnesota. A very interesting combination of elements. My mother, who is not a dancer nor was she Hawaiian, took great interest in for some reason, Hawaiian culture and dance and signed me up for hula lessons at a very, very young age. I was nine. And much to my chagrin, I actually started to like it and it somehow moved me to do it. It felt good to dance that way.  

Speed ahead, my older brother had a party planning business. He was 18 years my senior. And whenever the party had a Hawaiian theme, he would pay me $5 at the time, which was a lot of money to do the hula. I learned at a young age which groups of people I wanted to do that with or for, and which I did not, when I felt like a novelty, when I was being condescended to and used in a way and when I was being appreciated for what I was doing, which I took actually very seriously because it resonated in my body. And so, at a really early age, I think I started making a distinction.  

Speed forward, I did perform a lot, I choreographed. But what was most rewarding was when people got involved in the forum itself. I felt like there was more excitement in the room. There was something more to talk about once the performance, or once the time was over, and people felt connected and I felt more connected to them. 

Moving forward in time, as I was doing my own work and invited into places to be artists and residents at a place called the Pillsbury House in Minneapolis, this is early 90s. I wanted to bring other artists into my evening of performance, and so they were drummers, and they were other choreographers and performers, sharing the space. And along the way, [I] met some other artists were involved in a place called intermediate arts.  

SA: I realized that there was a need to share stories and experiences through and around and on behalf of our art. And not only those who are professional artists, or aspiring to do more through their art, but those who somehow wanted to be connected to it, who would say at first that they were not creative. I took that on as a challenge because I really thought that everybody, everyone is creative. They just at some point, we're told, not in these ways. You're not painting like you're not coloring within the lines; you're not moving, you know the body like a real dancer. I pushed back against that because I would see beauty in bodies that didn't look like mine that could really move and express. I was just exposed to so many different ways of being in the world, and seeing the world.

So, at one point, curating an intergenerational series called Thicker than Water, Art as a Family Value, and presenting the work of two very well-known musical families in Minnesota, the Petersons were sort of the family of jazz and Minnesota, and the Buckner family who were gospel. Putting those family women together on the same stage inspired our bookkeeper at the time, who had been born on the Iron Range, was 60 years old, 65, divorced, five children,  avery quiet woman, grew up on a farm, had a background in some bookkeeping, and she came to me after seeing the program a couple of times and said “I have an idea I would like to run by you”. She was so inspired by what these other families were sharing, and she thought I have that in my family. Huh, we had a family reunion coming up. I wonder if we could do it through the arts and creative expression.

So, she had just renovated a duplex, the lower level of her duplex, and she turned that into a gallery, [and] invited all her family from around the country to submit things that they thought were creative, that they wanted to show off, and it was everything from quilts, to the family Bible, to ice skating medals, to carving, and it ran the gamut. She invited everyone and there was just a different energy at this thing, and I actually interviewed folks, they had no idea the depth of the people in their family. I got really turned on by that by somebody else getting turned on to do something really cool, that inspired multiple generations in their own corner of the universe.

That got my juices flowing, and I decided that --again, and learning from other folks like yourself, Bill--when we're when we create the right conditions for people to shine creatively and exercise their creativity, incredible things happen. The spirit in the room is different, conversations are different, people are divided into space differently. So, their engagement, their level of engagement, what carries on after the thing just ripples exponentially, and that is really turns me on. So that's my trajectory. I think.

Part Two, The Rubber Meets the Road

BC: I think this snapshot that Sandy shared about the bookkeeper’s family celebration illustrates how deeply our stories influence the ways we see each other. Through her simple invitation to share, Sandy's friend helped to reveal all those hidden layers and, in the process, nudging their family's story in different directions. I asked Sandy if she could talk more specifically about some of her own experience bringing these kinds of creative tools and strategies to bear in her own community.

SA: Another regular practice that I have that relates is working with young people in the public schools. Storytelling, doing theater, using Augusto Boal’s Theatre of the Oppressed, which is really letting people make change by telling stories through just very simple snapshots, creating shapes and snapshots of a scene with their bodies and changing one element and really exploring what does it mean to change that thing, and how does that change the story.

I am really moved and surprised, not surprised by working with a lot of young people, young kids of color, who are in many cases in dire financial and resource situations, and watching them, take control and take power situations through theater and watching change happen, and hearing their comments and listening to what questions arise, and feeling their level of excitement to get engaged in to make change. It's on a small level, but when we could see something that accessible, that small change, I think bigger things can be built upon it.

BC: Sandy makes mention of Augusto Boal here. There's such a thing as legends in the field of art and social change, Boal certainly qualifies. He was a Brazilian theatre artist who pioneered a practice he called Theatre of the Oppressed using drama to stimulate social change in his native country and around the world. In the early 1970s, his successful work earned him the enmity of Brazil's military regime, which resulted in his being kidnapped, arrested, tortured and ultimately exiled to Argentina. His approach, often referred to as forum theatre, radically shifts the role of the audience from spectator to collaborator in performances that not only explore social issues but seek to mobilize citizen driven solutions. Here's Boal describing Forum Theatre on June 3 2005, broadcast of KPFA’s Democracy Now 

Augusto Boal: “The Forum Theater is exactly the image of the mirror, no. We present the problem because sometimes we know what the problem is. All of us agree we have this problem, so far as the workers that go to claim for better conditions of work or better salaries or whatever everyone agrees. But how to do it we don't know. So, what we do is we present the play, whatever the theme is, whatever the problem is, we present the play, and then we look at it like normal spectators, but at the end, we say, “okay, this ended in failure”.

So how could we change the events, everything is going to change in society in our biological life, everything's always changed, nothing's going to stay the way it is. So, how can we change this for better, and then we start again, the same play and we invite the audience to at any time that they want to say, “stop”, go to replace the protagonist and show alternatives. So, we learn from one another, you have in the scene, the wrong solution, the wrong way, and then we try to see what is the right way --- we don't know. We don't do the political theater of the 50s in which we had the propaganda, you had an idea, you have a message; we don't have the message, we have the questions, we bring them out, what can we do? And democratically everyone can say stop and jump on the scene and try solution or an alternative and then we discuss that alternative and then a second or third, as many as people are there. So, what we want is to develop the capacity of people to create, to use their intelligence, to use their sensibility

BC: I asked Sandy how Boal's approach had worked in the context of a particular class or individual student. She told the story of a fifth grader, she called M describing him as untethered, because he would at times literally wander in and out of the classroom. Sandy asked M’s teacher if she could spend some time with him one on one. Over lunch they talked about what they were doing in class and despite his inattention, Sandy was surprised by how much had sunk in. One particular question she had asked the class seemed to have struck a chord. “If you could, what part of your story would you change?” This prompted him to talk about his parents who had been in prison. Sandy felt this sharing could be an important step forward. She found out when M returned to class and they continued their work exploring story snapshots, which Boal called tableau's.

SA: The story was about in real...