Cultural Organizing for Community Change 2019
BOLD (Builders Organizers and Leaders Through Dance) with Chanon Judson, Urban Bush Women, photo: Shannel Resto.
On Sunday, Dec 8, 2019, artists, neighborhood leaders and cultural workers from across the city and guests from communities across the nation gathered in Gowanus for our annual Cultural Organizing for Community Change workshop. The convening and sessions were hosted in arts spaces including Groundswell, Brooklyn Children’s Theatre, Reel Works, and the Gowanus Houses Community Center.
The day included a participatory discussion about what cultural organizing is, audience mapping activities, a movement exercise, and breakout sessions. For a full slideshow of the day, visit our Flickr page (photos: Shannel Resto).
Sessions included:
photo: Shannel Resto
Augusto Boal’s Theater of the Oppressed and Civic Practice with George Emilio Sanchez, performance artist and social justice activist
Participants were introduced to Boal’s Theater of the Oppressed games and exercises and how they impact our individual imaginations and shape how we view the world around us. They were involved in various forms of collaboration ranging from individual, dyads, and group activities. George is Performance Director of Emergenyc for 13 years, a program that explores the intersection of arts and activism. He teaches at the College of Staten Island.
photo: Shannel Resto
Art as Medicine and Megaphone with Ricardo Levins Morales
This session explored social justice visual art as a kind of collective medicinal practice. Artist Ricardo Levins Morales shared examples of art in use at the levels of immediate conflict, organizing strategy and long-term cultural change (and the urgency of linking all three in everything we do). An example touched on is the current application of a narrative strategy to challenge police power in Ricardo’s home city of Minneapolis. Participants generated medicinal art strategies for organizing situations and strategic dilemmas they are currently grappling with.
photo: Shannel Resto
Praxis! Pop Ed and Co Creating a Tree of Knowledge with amalia deloney, Arts & Democracy
Everyone is a teacher and a learner! Popular education is a highly effective strategy for sharing information, building skills and developing leadership. In this interactive workshop, participants used pop ed tools and methodology to co create a community knowledge system that represents the wisdom that resides in a community, and which can be harnessed to create solutions to the challenges they face.
photo: Shannel Resto
Gowanus: Fighting for Environmental and Housing Justice Along the Canal, a walking tour with Michael Higgins, Social Justice Tours (and organizer with Fifth Avenue Committee and Gowanus Neighborhood Coalition for Justice)
Gowanus is a community of public housing, brownstones and increasingly new luxury development along one of the most polluted bodies of water in America. What does the city have planned for this community and what will it mean for its future as it faces both gentrification and climate change? Michael Higgins led a walking tour and discussion of the history of environmental degradation and an emerging movement for housing and environmental justice along the canal being led by the Gowanus Neighborhood Coalition for Justice (GNCJ).
photo: Shannel Resto
Strategic Performances with John Malpede & Henriëtte Brouwers, Los Angeles Poverty Department (LAPD)
LA Poverty Department makes devised performances and their artists are people who live and work in Skid Row Los Angeles. LAPD makes performances that connect the experience of people living in poverty to the social forces that try to limit and determine that experience. Their projects have changed narratives and policy and continue to be effective means of resisting gentrification and displacement. In the workshop participants did a variety of activities including a physical warm-up, and making up work based on concerns coming from everyone involved and imagining how those concerns can be addressed with compassion, then transformed and overcome.
photo: Shannel Resto
Sensing Stories: Connecting Through Words with Roohi Choudhry, writer and editor
The scent of fresh naan from a clay oven. Scratch of wool against your chin from a favorite scarf. Rain against the windows of your fourth grade classroom. We use our senses to remember and connect with the world around us. And it’s through visceral sensory experiences on the page that we can reach out and connect with readers, too. In this workshop, participants learned how to mine their sense memory to write evocative prose that draws readers in. Through prompts, discussion and games, they unearthed the stories that bring people together to create authentic change.
Hear Us Roar: Music in Direct Action with Charon Hribar, Poor People’s Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival
Drawing lessons from a history of struggle, the Poor People’s Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival places music at the heart of a movement and works to ground and strengthen organizing through the power of song. This workshop and strategic dialogue was designed to help us build our collective capacity to use music in more effective, sustainable, and inspiring ways for these times. Responding to the growing actions taking place in our streets, participants strategized together and shared experiences of integrating music and singing in current day protests. They learned songs that have been used in Poor People’s Campaign action, talked about “action logic,” and explored how to innovate new ways to use music in the streets and revitalize longstanding traditions of participatory singing.
BOLD (Builders Organizers and Leaders Through Dance) with Chanon Judson, Urban Bush Women
This workshop drew on BOLD’s self reflective and collaborative learning processes to investigate “work life integration.” It was an opportunity to share personal practices, organizational policies, and employ our asset based organizing lens to notice deeply what we Require, Value, and “Know for Sure” about working sustainably and joyfully. Urban Bush Women and session participants received a brief welcome by the Gowanus Houses cast of Theater of the Liberated, who performed their new piece, WOKE!
The day also included an exhibition by:
400 Years of Inequality, whose Organizing Committee is a diverse coalition of organizations and individuals calling on everyone– families, friends, communities, institutions–to plan their own solemn observance of 1619, learn about their own stories and local places, and organize for a more just and equal future. Learn more here.
NOCD-NY co-sponsors Cultural Organizing for Community Change with:
This program is supported, in part, by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council. Thank you to City Council Member Brad Lander, the National Endowment for the Arts, and you for help in supporting this workshop.
