“Rootwork | Grounding Community Arts Education Beyond the Pandemic” is an online learning series about how to create programming informed by, and supportive of, the many, varied lived experiences of our communities in the unique context of this moment.

How can arts leaders, teaching artists, and advocates ensure that their programs and initiatives are community-led and community-informed? How are artists and collaborators identified and brought into programming processes? How can arts organizations serve as economic and capacity-building engines for their communities? What questions must you ask yourself as you build coalitions for policies that advance the arts in schools? In this session, participants will learn how they can build their own internal strategies by asking themselves key questions and learning how they can use them to ensure their spaces and practices are activated with intention for sustainability, community-connectedness, and policy wins.

Access to slides here.

Links to videos in presentation:

1st video https://drive.google.com/file/d/1fKdT_y9_Ull-MrzyY-yH5FYrIWiDEZk2/view

2nd video https://drive.google.com/file/d/1bXwRF_5pCNCn2k1Huy_fCyqSUVemJS8U/view

 

Presenter:

Karla Estela Rivera, Free Street Theater, Chicago, IL

 

ASL English Interpretation provided by Dresden Lamar, Selena Flowers, and Mark Ormita from ProBono ASL

 

The “Anti-Racism as Organizational Compass” series offers the opportunity to listen to intimate conversations with six BIPOC-led arts organizations that center anti-racism in mission and practice.

In this session, our dialogue facilitator, Masharika Prejean Maddison, spoke to key stakeholders of Lion’s Tooth Project, including Natalia Guerrero, Fatmata Bah, Daria Blue, Daniel-José Cyan, and Calia Marshall. Lion's Tooth Project is a community project based in Brooklyn, NY in service of LGBTQIA+, Immigrant, Black / Indigenous, and POC youth. Lion’s Tooth Project believes in the healing power of community, story-telling, art, and connection to the earth. Through photography, herbalism, mentorship, and self-expression, Lion’s Tooth Project’s goals are that youth reconnect to their innate belonging to the land, life purpose, and reclaim their power to speak their truth. ASL English Interpretation was provided by Pro Bono ASL and Selena Flowers, and Benjamin Smith.

Speakers (Full bios here): 

Fatmata Bah (They/Them), Peer Lead

Daria Blue (They/Them), Peer Lead

José-Daniel Cyan (He/Him), Teaching Artist and Partnership Manager

Natalia Guerrero (They/Them), Founder

Calia Marshall (She/Her), Community Partner

In this time of physical distance, our responsibility to cultivate intentional support, creative arts experiences, and belonging must remain at the forefront. With our communities at the center of our work, let’s join together to build strategies for sustaining networks of care, for nurturing social arts communities, and for creating equitable and accessible opportunities for our most vulnerable.

Access to slides here.

 

SPEAKER:

Calida Jones Musician; educator; social justice and arts advocate

Director of Engagement at The Hartt

School Board Clerk for El Sistema USA

President of the Connecticut Arts Alliance

 

ASL English Interpretation provided by Dresden Lamar and Mark Ormita from Pro Bono ASL.

 

 

 The “Anti-Racism as Organizational Compass” series will offer the opportunity to listen to intimate conversations with six BIPOC-led arts organizations that center anti-racism in mission and practice.

For our second conversation in the series, our dialogue facilitator, Masharika Prejean Maddison, spoke to key personnel of Ashé Cultural Arts Center, including their executive director, Asali DeVan Ecclesiastes and their chief creative officer Frederick (Wood) Delahoussaye. Centering the arts of the African diaspora, Ashé believes in the arts’ ability to be a catalyst for social change and in the power of a civically engaged community, specifically in their neighborhood of Central City located in New Orleans. As their co-founder Mama Carol says, their charge is “to fly in leaps and gusts of provocation, instigation, inspiration and aspiration…to call for and exhibit the higher standards of justice, integrity, and kindness for all…to be brilliant concoctors of opportunity, creators of vision, navigators of bs, advocates of culture, and defenders of children… to make real the majesty of dreams, to make plain the magic of being, to manifest the difference between perceiving and seeing!”

ASL interpretation provided by Rorri Burton and Selena Flowers from Pro Bono ASL. Verbal Descriptions will be provided by speakers in the introduction.

The “Anti-Racism as Organizational Compass” series will offer the opportunity to listen to intimate conversations with six BIPOC-led arts organizations that center anti-racism in mission and practice. 

In the first conversation in the series, our dialogue facilitator, Masharika Prejean Maddison, spoke to key personnel of ATNSC: Center for Healing & Creative Leadership, including its founder and executive director, M. Carmen Lane, Imani Badillo, Intern at ATNSC, and Arthur Russell, Education Interventionist. ATNSC, which takes its name from the Ataensic (Atsi’tsiaka:ion) creation story, is an urban retreat center and social practice experiment in holistic health, intergenerational dialogue, leadership development, and Indigenous arts and culture in the Buckeye-Shaker neighborhood of Cleveland, Ohio. Listen in while they speak to what it means to uphold the roots of its organization and create a healing space which honors the community in which it resides. 

ASL interpretation and CART captioning provided by Pro Bono ASL. Verbal Descriptions will be provided by speakers in the introduction.

As co-learners in this series, the Guild for Community Arts Education kicks us off with a transparent sharing in a panel discussion of our own anti-racism journey, told by current board members and staff, with dialogue facilitator Masharika Prejean Maddison. We interrogate the roots of racial inequity within American society and specifically within the Guild, which ultimately led us to start building an anti-racism foundation. We speak to the journey of making this shift in an 82-year-old institution with roots in the settlement house movement, which promoted, among other things, the assimilation of immigrants to American culture. We will also look forward towards what it will take for the Guild to become an anti-racist organization.

Facilitator: Masharika Prejean Maddison, Founder, Lightwell Coaching and Consulting

Speakers:

Nancy Ng, Co-Executive Director, Creativity & Policy, Luna Dance Institute, National Guild for Community Arts Education Board Member

Sandra Bowie, National Guild for Community Arts Education Board Member

Heather Ikemire, Chief Program Officer, Naitional Guild for Community Arts Education

 

ASL Interpretation provided by Pro Bono ASL 

Interpreters: Rorri Burton, Selena Flowers

 

Captioning in video is auto-generated by Youtube.

Time stamps are included in the YouTube description.

This 7-part training is designed to provide a framework for community arts education partners to foster high-impact K-12 arts education partnerships. This learning sequence investigates essential questions of partnership by exploring real-life, actionable, and replicable tools for implementing and sustaining this challenging work in schools.

Learning Outcomes

As a result of participating in this course, teams will:

• (Know) 
  • Benefits and challenges of school collaboration. 
  • Characteristics of effective K-12 arts education partnerships.
• ​(Understand)
  • How to overcome common K-12 arts education partnership challenges
  • How to merge best practices in partnership with the organization's unique identity and offerings
  • How to identify steps to increase the quality of K-12 arts education partnership.
• (Do)
  • Build a toolkit of practical skills, strategies, and resources needed to establish and sustain effective and resilient partnerships
  • Develop a detailed organization-wide plan/roadmap for building and sustaining resilient and impactful K-12 arts education partnerships now and in the future
  • Solve a partnership-related problem of practice

Our latest issue of Guild Notes is now available online. You can click through pages, read articles, and follow links to learn more. 

In this issue, we focus on Arts and and Anti-Racism. Read the full issue for:

• An excerpt from Favianna Rodriguez’s keynote address, "Culture is Power: Reclaiming the Radical Imagination" at the Guild’s 2019 Conference for Community Arts Education. 
• Setting the Tone and Driving Change: The Board’s Role in Advancing Racial Equity, an interview with InSite Consultants on their conference session and the responsibility boards have to drive transformational change.  
• Conference Reflections by:
  • Joyce Drayton, Founder and Executive Director of Georgia E. Gregory Interdenominational School of Music (GEGISOM), about anti-racism work through the arts
  • Dan Reilly, Director of Innovation at RYSE Youth Center in Richmond, CA
  • Indi McCasey, Arts Educator and Consultant

Dig in to the full issue to learn and be inspired to deepen your own anti-racism work this year. 

Young artists and adult accomplices in organizations like RYSE in California; RE:FRAME Youth Arts Center in Arizona; and Creative Action’s Changing Lives Youth Theater Ensemble in Texas share their unique strategies for centering youth in their organization models. RYSE uses their Theory of Liberation as their guiding post, while RE:FRAME’s FUBU model means that young artists are part of the organization’s staff and board. At Changing Lives Youth Theater Ensemble, the arts are used as a vehicle for facilitating and working through difficult conversations. While different models, each organization has one mission: to center the voices and experiences of young people.

Beginning with a step-by-step introduction from Anne Graham, Executive Director for Texans for the Arts, this advocacy primer uses case studies and insights from experts: Shannon Gangurde, Lobbyist for Texans for the Arts; Brent Hasty, Executive Director of MINDPOP; Christopher Kiley, Associate Director for Texans for the Arts; and Freddy Warner, Chief Government Relations Officer for Memorial Hermann Health Systems. Learn basic steps and the unique challenges that come with advocating for your community. While advocacy can be tedious and unglamorous, the ripples of voices united catalyze change with lasting impact.