June 24, 2022

Dear Guild Family,

Today we officially enter the Portal of transformation. The Guild office is closed from now through July 10 for staff rest and rejuvenation, and then from July 10–15 for a staff retreat where we will begin digging into our transformation work and planning for now through FY23. You can find more info about the Portal in our recent blog posts.

If you have an urgent matter between now and July 15, you can contact our Executive Director, Quanice G. Floyd, at quanicefloyd@nationalguild.org.

We will be back in the office on July 18, and from then until the completion of our strategic plan in 2023 we will be engaged in deep reflection, research, planning, and dialogue with you. Stay tuned for more information about how you can join us in the Portal, and help shape the future of the Guild so we can better serve the field of community arts education. If you’re signed up for our email list, you will also receive periodic emails sharing what we are unpacking, learning, building, and shifting.

We are so excited for this next chapter of listening, connecting, and creating! See you in the Portal!

June 23, 2022

Today we share the bittersweet news that after 4 years of service, Development Manager Kate Riley is leaving the Guild to pursue new opportunities. Among the many contributions she made to the organization during her tenure, she secured emergency COVID funding, renewed relationships with lapsed funders, learned to accept Salesforce (her words!), and harnessed the creativity of the field to sustain the Guild’s work during a time of tremendous disruption.

“Working alongside a team of fun, dedicated and creative spirits has been an extraordinary privilege and has shaped the way I move through the world. The Guild is a unique and vital part of the arts ecosystem that is poised to transform the field. I am better for having been a part of it.”

We thank Kate for her contributions to the Guild, we will miss her and Grover (the adorable Boston Terrier pictured above) on our Zoom screens, and we wish her the best on her next adventure!

June 17, 2022

Over the past couple of years, there have been more conversations in the ethos about self care and the importance of rest. As we collectively deal with ongoing stresses related to the pandemic, racial injustice, climate change, a culture that encourages mass violence, etc., it takes a toll on all of us, and it’s critical that we care for ourselves so that we can continue to show up for each other. Since long before the pandemic, People of the Global Majority and people with disabilities have been urging us to understand the importance of rest to our wellbeing—particularly the ways that capitalism systematically denies rest to the most oppressed people in society, impacting their ability to live fully, resist, and thrive.

We at the Guild will mark our entrance into the Portal on June 24th with a two week office closure, because in order to prepare for our upcoming journey of transformation to more fully embody our Racial Equity Principles, we need to be rested and able to bring our full energy to the work. From then until the completion of our new strategic plan, in an act of community care, we will hold off on our long-established programs to allow for deep internal reflection, research, planning, and dialogue with you. 

Our time will be spent creating space for meaningful conversations about what you want and need right now; how the Guild can best make an impact as a national organization supporting community arts education; and how we can work to repair harm and shortcomings the Guild has caused throughout our organization’s history—as well as examining Guild practices and programs through an anti-racist lens and identifying what needs to shift in our organizational culture. Interrupting the constant cycle of production and burnout and allowing ourselves to rest can be important steps towards ending cycles of institutional harm and getting right with ourselves and others.

The Nap Ministry, founded by artist and theologian Tricia Hersey in 2016, created a framework called “Rest as Resistance” by which we are deeply inspired.

“Our work is seeded within the soils of Black radical thought, somatics, Afrofuturism, womanism, and liberation theology, and is a guide for how to collectively deprogram, decolonize, and unravel ourselves from the wreckage of capitalism and white supremacy. We believe our bodies are portals. They are sites of liberation, knowledge, and invention that are waiting to be reclaimed and awakened by the beautiful interruptions of brutal systems that sleep and dreaming provide.”

—The Nap Ministry

Everyone deserves rest—not only on special occasions, and not only in order to improve our productivity. Our fullest capability to challenge oppressive systems and imagine new ways of being becomes accessible when we stop rushing, and rest. The Portal will afford us the time and space to worldbuild an organization centered in racial equity and liberation. We hope that someday in the near future, everyone in the community arts education world will have the ability to regularly recharge, reflect, dream, and reconnect to our common purpose. This is a future that we believe is possible if we work together to make deep shifts, one organization at a time. 

 

If you had more time to rest without any guilt or shame, what would become possible for you? Who in your life do you wish was allowed more rest?
 

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Some resources about rest, dreaming towards action, and joy:

Rest is anything that connects your mind and body. (The Nap Ministry / Tricia Hersey)

Rest, Respect, Reciprocity (Deem)

Communal Dreaming (Annika is Dreaming / Annika Hansteen-Izora)

Joy & Recovery (whitesupremacyculture.info / Tema Okun)

May 26, 2022

As we announced on May 3, 2022, the Guild will be entering what we’re calling a “Portal” of transformation at the end of June 2022. To allow for this process of realignment, reflection, and relationship building, we will be holding off on producing our long-established programs from July 2022 through the completion of our strategic planning process (which will begin in 2023). 

What does this mean for membership?

We are grateful to our members for continuing to support and connect with us during this journey. We get to be part of a really special community of arts educators across the country, and we’re all in this together. 

While we do this deep dive to realign and create our new strategic plan, some of the programs and publications that members usually get discounts and/or exclusive access to—such as the Conference for Community Arts Education, CAELI, GuildNotes, and the Benchmarking Data Report—will be paused. Access to past issues of GuildNotes and the Benchmarking Data report are still available to members, and as always, members will have full access to our Resource Center, Guild member emails, and free posting to our Job Board during this time.

While we’re in the Portal, we will add a 6 month extension to all memberships with start dates of January 1, 2022 and later. If you have already renewed this year, you will see this change in your membership end date reflected within the next few weeks. If you have any questions about this, please email membership@nationalguild.org with “Membership extension” in the subject line.

A “pay what you can” option continues to be available to all members, regardless of your organization’s annual budget. If your organization is able to pay regular membership dues this year, and you are excited by this process of deep reflection and realignment so that we can better support the field in the long run, we invite you to invest in this national community by paying the calculated dues amount.

If you have any questions regarding your membership, please email membership@nationalguild.org.
 

Not yet a member? Join us!

If you find this work exciting, please join us in this journey, and invite people in your networks to become Guild members too! You can learn more about membership here.

     

May 26, 2022

Today we share the bittersweet news that after over 15 years of service, Heather Ikemire will be leaving the National Guild to pursue the next chapter of her arts education career as Deputy Director of Lifetime Arts, a national leader in creative aging (and beloved partner organization of the Guild). Heather’s last day at the Guild will be June 1st. 

During her Guild tenure, Heather worked collaboratively with Guild staff, board, and practitioners across the country to responsively and equitably reimagine Guild programs and practices to build the future of community arts education. Heather shares: “For me, the integration of creativity, knowledge-sharing, and relationship-building is at the heart of imagining and developing a more just and sustainable future.” 

Wearing many hats over the years, Heather has led in the areas of programs, communications, research and publications, and membership, and has served in her current role as Deputy Director of Learning and Engagement (formerly titled Chief Program Officer) since 2014. In her prior role as Director of Communications, Heather successfully led the Guild through a name change and rebrand that resulted in an increase of new memberships by 88%. She also worked alongside the board and staff to develop the Guild’s first-ever organizational values.

Over the years, Heather has played a crucial role in organizing and sustaining broad-based coalitions to advance the field of community arts education and raise its visibility and impact—particularly in the areas of teaching artistry, creative aging, and creative youth development. Heather led the Guild’s role as a backbone organization of the Creative Youth Development National Partnership and the creation of the CYD National Action Blueprint, developed in concert with more than 650 stakeholders. She also led the Guild's large-scale, multi-year investment in Catalyzing Creative Aging, which has contributed to a 37% increase in Guild member organizations serving older adults during just the past few years. 

   

Heather helped to reduce barriers to participation in Guild membership and make changes to programming, which resulted in the Guild’s national network becoming broader and more diverse. We particularly saw growth in engagement with program staff, teaching artists, young creatives, and BIPOC leaders, as well as more diverse types of community arts education organizations and programs. During Heather’s tenure, the Guild integrated racial equity as a focus throughout all of its programming, and shifted policies and processes related to program applications, registration, and design in order to increase equity and accessibility for independent artists and practitioners, small-budget organizations, BIPOC leaders, youth, and people with disabilities.

The Guild primarily served executive leaders at the time when Heather first joined staff, and she led efforts to amplify the critical role of leadership at all levels (e.g. teaching artists, program staff, youth, etc.). Heather developed the programmatic vision for the Guild’s comprehensive Leadership Campaign (2017–2020) which raised $3 million to support leadership development work through this lens. In 2015, Heather led the Guild’s transition to becoming a “network of networks” with the introduction of its Member Networks structure (currently on pause). Member networks aligned to the Guild’s key initiatives (e.g., Arts in Education, Creative Aging, Creative Youth Development) and also provided affinity groups (e.g. for leaders of color; for similar organizational types).

Heather has made significant contributions towards building a strong internal team and an adaptive organization. From Summer 2020 to December 2021, she was an integral part of the Guild’s Interim Management Team (IMT) as the organization searched for its new Executive Director. Alongside Ashley Hare and Adam Johnston, the IMT built a strong, human-centered, and adaptive team and work culture able to nimbly respond to the incredible challenges of a global pandemic, while continuing to ask difficult questions and build a foundation for the Guild’s next chapter. 

“As I transition out of my role with the Guild, I do so with tremendous gratitude to the National Guild community,” says Heather. “Throughout the years, I’ve heard many Guild members and conference-goers refer to the Guild as their ‘home,’ and it has been my home too. The staff and our collaborators across the country have felt like family. I’m so proud of the many things we’ve accomplished together, and very excited for Quanice Floyd’s leadership and the work underway to collectively reimagine a Guild that fully aligns all that we do, internally and externally, to our core values and racial equity principles and policies. I will forever be a champion of the Guild and our field, and look forward to being an active participant in Guild programming for many years to come.” 

Heather has been a fierce advocate for creative aging, and we are so excited to see her continue to build on this at Lifetime Arts. We thank her for all she has contributed to this organization, and wish her all the best in this next step of her journey!
 

May 19, 2022

On May 3rd we announced our plans to slow down, learn how we can better support you, and put our values and principles into practice by entering what we're calling a Portal of transformation. In this spirit, we’ll be holding off on producing our long-established programs from July 2022 through the completion of our strategic planning process (which begins in 2023). You can read more about this here.

Why are we calling it a “Portal”?

A portal is a way of getting somewhere new—a gateway to the world we want to build together. We're inspired by the ways that science fiction, speculative fiction*, and afrofuturist* artists and writers are able to bend the oppressive and limiting constructs of our reality through their art. This work often uses concepts like portals and time travel to imagine new ways of reconciling and healing the past, as well as creating new paths forward into the future. 

In articulating the journey we're about to embark on, we wanted to nod towards these traditions and underscore our commitment to tap into collective creativity throughout this process. The Portal is a representation of the space we can meet in together to do this important healing, connection, and liberation work.

Here are a few of our favorite mentions of portals to rest, healing, and liberation:

• Talk: “Rest as a Portal of Healing” with Tricia Hersey of the Nap Ministry
   
• “A Portal into Afrofuturism” (article about NationX, a project of Brooklyn-based creative studio & design lab Intelligent Mischief)
   
• Kwayera Archer on love as a portal (if you benefit from captions, please click the CC button on Youtube).

  Watch the full presentation (with ASL interpretation).

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What's your favorite book, movie, tv show, story, etc. that involves traveling through a portal? Drop us a line at guildinfo@nationalguild.org with PORTAL in the subject line!

 

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*Here’s a short, non-exhaustive reading list of speculative fiction and afrofuturist work by Black authors:

• Parable of the Sower and Kindred by Octavia Butler
• The Broken Earth Trilogy by N. K. Jemisin 
• M Archive (part of an experimental triptych) by Alexis Pauline Gumbs 
• Skin Folk and The Salt Roads by Nalo Hopkinson
• The Memory Librarian by Janelle Monáe, Yohanca Delgado, Eve L. Ewing, Alaya Dawn Johnson, Danny Lore, And Sheree Renée Thomas

May 9, 2022

Congratulations to our staff member Natalia Vilela, who has been promoted to communications manager!

Natalia joined the Guild staff as communications coordinator in July 2021. She has since provided much-needed communications support and contributed her significant talents towards program promotion, graphic design, and social media.

This new role brings a transition from part time to full time hours, further increasing our team's capacity. During our time in the Portal, Natalia will play a key role in reimagining our communications strategies and practices.

May 4, 2022

We're excited to announce that Robyne Walker Murphy, executive director of Groundswell, has been elected to the National Guild of Community Arts Education Board of Trustees. 

Ms. Walker Murphy has been involved with the Guild since 2012, presenting at several national conferences, advocating for the power of social justice education, and serving as our director of membership development and engagement where she started the first network for BIPOC leaders, emerging leaders and launched a network for organizations in rural communities.

"I am excited to return to the Guild as a Trustee during this exciting time of new visions and possibilities under the courageous leadership of the talented Quanice G. Floyd. It is truly an honor to serve the 400 members of the Guild whose work I love and respect."—Robyne Walker Murphy

We welcome Robyne and look forward to having her on our board!

May 3, 2022

 

Dear Guild Family, 

Thank you for caring for our communities through the arts, using creativity as a powerful tool for transformation. Thank you for how you responded to the pandemic—dealing with impossible challenges, and coming up with brilliant solutions grounded in love. You inspire us every day. Thank you for the deep questions you’ve been asking in order to create paths forward in this new world and in the community arts education field. 

Over the past 100 days, we have been having some important conversations that are centered in the love that we have for you all. Although a lot of our programming offers opportunities for learning, the truth is that we are constantly learning from you. During the Groundwork: Healing within Community Arts Education series last fall, so much of what was shared by advisors, presenters, and participants resonated deeply with us. Here are a few lessons that we’re hearing particularly loud and clear: 

• As organizations that are rooted in community, we can’t gloss over the deep, messy internal work that’s required to put liberatory values into practice.  

• It takes time and energy to unlearn the oppressive behaviors and practices that all of us have been taught, and to re-train ourselves to follow new paths. 

• Rest, dreaming, and healing are an important part of our everyday lives, and in order for us to build a just world, we must recognize them as such. 

As we sit with these lessons, we recognize that in order to support you in ways that are consistent with our values and our racial equity principles, Guild staff and board need to slow down and realign ourselves. The tradition of science fiction and speculative fiction tells us that it takes time and space to imagine and dream up a world before you can build it. And that work, in itself, is radical and profound. We’re dreaming up a way of getting where we want to go by entering (what we’re calling) a “Portal” of transformation.

In this spirit, we will be holding off on producing the Guild’s long-established programs from July 2022 through the completion of our strategic planning process (which begins in 2023). It’s become clear that a constant program cycle doesn’t allow us the space we need to move with intentionality, make sure we’re fully embodying our values, and supporting you all. This time in the Portal will allow us to focus on our relationships, learn, reflect, process, and ultimately build new policies, practices, programs, and a strategic plan that are human-centered, community-centered, and grounded in liberation. 

The most exciting part is that YOU are coming into this Portal with us. The internal work that we do during this time will be guided by your needs, desires, creativity, and love for community arts education. There will be multiple ways for you to join us in this space of reflection, shaping, and building. We’ll be listening to what you would like to see from us, and what we should work towards together as a movement.

It is thrilling to have this space to connect with our creativity and community! We acknowledge that it is a privilege to be able to claim this time, and we believe this expansiveness should be available to each and every one of us. We want to thank organizations and individuals like Allied Media Projects, Pretrial Justice Institute, Stronghold, RYSE, the Nap Ministry, Kwayera Archer, and many more for showing us that stepping outside the grind for a while to focus on our own transformation is not just possible, but necessary.

As Prentis Hemphill says, “We each exist in a constellation of love.” Thank you for being part of ours, and for being a force of growth and change in the world.  
 

Yours in creativity,

The National Guild for Community Arts Education

 

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We’ll be sending more info in the coming weeks about what this will all look like. In the meantime, here are some answers to questions you may have:
 

• When is this starting?

  • We will officially enter the Portal on June 24. Between now and then, you can come talk to us at Community Conversations, and members will continue to receive weekly emails.

  • On June 24, we’ll begin our time inside the Portal with a 2-week office closure for staff rest and rejuvenation. 

  • Staff and board will hold retreats to begin digging into our realignment work.
     

• What does this mean for membership?

  • We are grateful to our members for continuing to support and connect with us. As always, Guild members will have access to our Resource Center, Guild member emails and our Job Board during this time. Learn more about membership in the Portal here.

  • If you are renewing membership during 2022, you will have an extended membership. 

  • Guild membership is pay-what-you-can. If you have questions regarding your membership, please email membership@nationalguild.org.

  • If you find this work exciting, please continue to invest in the Guild, and invite people in your networks to become Guild members too!
     

• Will I still be able to get in touch with the Guild?

  • Absolutely! We encourage you to connect with us and share your thoughts and questions at any time. You can email us at guildinfo@nationalguild.org with PORTAL in the subject line.  

  • Portal Cafes: come have virtual conversations with Guild staff about how we can build the field we deserve together. Details to come!

  • While we’re in the Portal, we will be sharing “Transmissions” about what we’re learning, who we’re learning from, and how we’re putting it into practice.

    • Make sure you receive our updates! Sign up for our email list, and follow us on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter

 

Stay tuned for more information, including how you can be involved!