Principles of Working in a Community: Resources for Social Change

Written with the assistance of the faculty of Resources for Social Change, Alternate ROOTS.

Alternate ROOTS is an organization based in the southeastern U.S. whose mission is to support the creation and presentation of original art, in all its forms, that is rooted in particular community of place, tradition or spirit. As a coalition of cultural workers, we strive to be allies in the elimination of all forms of oppression. ROOTS is committed to social and economic justice and the protection of the natural world. It addresses these concerns through its programs and services. Resources for Social Change (RSC) is a program that emerged out of a series of conversations that began in 1993 and crystallized in 1994 with the Community Arts Revival in Durham, where we showcased our pilot set of Community/Artists Partnership Programs. It is a mobile lab for arts and activism, originally charged with turning the core values of Alternate ROOTS’ mission into teachable methods and strategies for work by artists and community partners. Our intent is to facilitate interactive and participatory gatherings and art events in communities that honor and utilize the experience and expertise of all who are present. In this context, we see ourselves and other participants as both teachers and learners.

As a group of community arts practitioners we have developed a set of principles that guide our work in the face of the many forms of oppression that beset our world. With community at the center, we have identified five principles, which we use or try to integrate into our process. They are “Shared Power,” “Equitable Partnership,” “Open Dialogue,” “Individual & Community Transformation,” and “Aesthetics” — an approach that includes questioning and experimenting with various roles of all arts disciplines in our culture.

It is somewhat easily understood that art can challenge our individual and collective imagination, but can it also be a wake-up call or a call to action? Can it be an organizational tool; a search engine for collaborative projects that aim to provoke lasting change and turn community goals into long-term community solutions? In this framework we all are on a journey, and that concept of “journey” includes infinite manifestations — the trip from the origins of a discipline, what we were told or we discovered; the journey of discovery of communities and arts practitioners whose culture and principles and/or economics may be totally different from ours; the process of learning to confront resistance to injustice, which enables us to transform economic, emotional or systemic situations; the journey of understanding the sharing of power; the journeys of artists trying to make the arts relevant to today’s world; the journey of each of the training workshops, working sessions, learning experiences and artistic events. We are all on a journey. RSC proposes tools to make our journey a learning experience and promote dialogue.

The common grounds I found were made of passion and resistance, two major criteria of artistic quality.

Our work builds upon modeling and evaluations of previous projects. We examine pre-planning expenses, selection of trainers, artists and other resource people, workbook materials, presenting strategies, host-organization relationships and creative output, in form and content.

For example, at an arts convening we might attempt to create a text through a collaborative, nonhierarchical process, encountering people of different disciplines, diverse voices and an understanding that the hard and scary art-for-social-change work requires rigorous evaluation of excellence as well as of criteria of excellence at every step. Below is an explanation of how we model this text as a typical RSC, Alternate ROOTS “Learning Exchange.” It is expressed on three levels: The portions in italics are the voices of different artists that have worked with RSC. These sections are the most abstract, exploring a moving mind in action. The text in capital letters represents the framework RSC uses for its projects and the regular text represents the examples of what has happened or been investigated during different steps of different projects.

THE WORK STARTS IN/WITH COMMUNITIES. RSC IS INVITED INTO A COMMUNITY OR AN ARTIST CALLS RSC TO MOTIVATE AN ARTISTS/COMMUNITY PARTNERSHIP. THE WORK OF RSC MAY BE AN OFFERING SUCH AS A WORKSHOP IN A CONFERENCE, AN ASPECT OF A LARGER PROGRAM OR THE FOUNDATION PIECE OF A NEW PROJECT. TO DETERMINE THE NATURE OF THE PARTNERSHIP, UNDERSTAND ITS GOALS AND DEEPEN COMMUNICATION, RSC CONDUCTS A SITE VISIT OR INITIAL QUERY, WHICH MAY RANGE FROM AN ONLINE SURVEY TO A WEEK LONG RESIDENCY.

A half-day workshop at the National Performance Network Annual Meeting was designed following a survey, which proposed such questions as, “What do you see as the role of the artist in a community arts engagement? How do you define ‘community’? How can a workshop about working in communities advance your professional development?”

Preparation for an earlier three-day Learning Exchange in Biloxi, Miss., began when an RSC member, along with the Mississippi Arts Commission’s Director of Arts-Based Community Development, traveled to six communities in southern Mississippi and met with 50 people representing 37 organizations, agencies and community efforts. The site visit here gave ROOTS a presence with the potential audience – hands to shake, eye-to-eye contact, exchange of thoughts, someone to identify with — factors important in building trust and acceptance.

Seeing Art as a community builder. Perceiving images of the community before arriving; images of home community; images of an artist, a group of artists, a diverse team; those images after one week, one month, or one year. Having a passion for seeing, hearing and dreaming. Having perceptions of oneself, of family, of our main communities, of European Americans, African Americans, Latin Americans in the Southern States of the U.S., in neighborhoods, in the communities. What is a community? Distinguishing our thoughts locally and globally.

WE DIALOGUE ABOUT ISSUES, GOALS, ASSETS, NEEDS, RESOURCES, LIMITS AND RISKS. WHAT DO WE NEED TO LEARN, SEE, HEAR AND IMAGINE?

Undoing or dismantling racism may be the thread running through all RSC creative events. We view racism as the “ism” that holds us all back: in the South East, our communities, our country and in the world. How do prejudices fill a void? Why does racism still exist in organizations when “good” people are working hard to eradicate it?

Everyone is heard on matters of controversy. We see the unfolding of our conversations as a rare opportunity. For “Uprooted: The Katrina Project” (a touring project involving 12 performers and staff), early conversations facilitated by RSC members set the stage for the process of collaboration among the artists.

What is the role of the artist in the face of the devastation of one of North America’s most beautiful and productive cities? What can be done to improve the structure under which RSC trainings take place? How much funding are we expecting?

For “Uprooted: The Katrina Project,” artists designed different activities for each performing site: to bring displaced Katrina survivors and local residents together for work they could do collectively; to help potential arts partners and others envision collective work; and to create participation in community dialogue with a forward moving purpose. Such a dialogue can become a brainstorming of possibilities. It may generate images, stories, scenes, technical opportunities, lesson plans, creative partnerships or even in-kind funding. It may generate a list of plus & delta, do’s & don’ts, sketches, reports and individual journals.

As public writers, storytellers and cartoonists, we attempt to capture what we have seen when our eyes are closed. The difference between impact and internalized oppression; pride of differences, fear to lose a sense of difference, needs to communicate difference, with clothing, social rituals, questioning beauty criteria, resistance.

We use artistic work to address issues of social and economic justice and the elimination of oppression so blatantly revealed in the wake of the worst natural and man-made disaster in our country’s history.

WE DEVELOP A TENTATIVE PLAN OF ACTION, IMAGINE AND SHARE THE DRAFT.

We decide who is going to be the Lead Trainer/Artist. Someone who has been through previous teaching and learning experiences proposed by RSC. This person then builds a team by looking for facilitators and resource people who can deliver on the needs identified, thinking in terms of varying arts disciplines, previous work in or knowledge of the region, and a range of skills and approaches. Also considered is what the team would look like to the people who are being served in regards to gender, race, and age. For “Gathering at the Crossroads,” a pre-U.S. Social Forum event, the discipline-specific workshops was led by a pair of facilitators who represented both local and national perspectives. They were also intergenerational, pairing veteran or seasoned artists with emerging and/or younger artists. We promote an apprenticeship structure.

The choice of a leader, a torchbearer? an enabler, a team builder, someone who will not give up… before – before what? Articulate ideas and creations as an anthropologist would. Be the face at the crossroad when confrontations arise?

The group defines together a format which conveys community within the Project, looking at overall goals, self-interested goals, shared needs, personal needs, and social influence. Everyone reaches for a thread developed through the planning, which acts as a through-line or a framing device. We search for balance, hearing gossip, politics, and thoughts that are not expressed, impossible to be expressed or not the right time to be expressed. What do we need to learn? There is a level of relational therapy for everyone as local people and RSC members meet “outside the box,” beyond conventions and coded practices.

WE INCORPORATE EVALUATION INTO THE PROCESS AND THINK LONG-TERM

“How do we integrate the arts in community activism / empowerment work?” “How does collaboration between artists and other organizations aids and supports pre-determined objectives?” These questions as well as the ones about funding and budgets are incorporated along the main thread of our projects as a way to establish a true learning exchange in the final evaluation. For example, in Charleston these questions were an inseparable companion to the planning and implementation of “Making Art, Making Home,” a partnership with the “Evoking History” program of Spoleto Festival USA. The goal was to generate new ideas and relationships among individuals and organizations concerning the role of the arts in social change and economic justice, especially as it relates to issues of housing and land use in the region. A vivid discussion on how race and power impact the writing of history came out of the presentation, at the beginning of the weekend, of the film in progress “Shared History.”[1] This dialogue set the tone for very creative outcomes that took place over the following two years: an Internet conversation published on the Community Arts Network[2] and a reading of the conversation where, in an attempt to cross cultural barriers and to understand the various ingredients in that soup of words, people switched from authors of their own words to performers of others. The reading was called “Switching Roles — Jumping Fences.”

It is offered to learners as a way to tap into their personal intrinsic motivations and humanity. We address uncomfortable issues: race, sexual orientation and human needs. And art as an uncomfortable issue. Evaluation becomes a springboard for creative activities.

We assess our progress on the road to shared ownership. The creative and destructive power of our language(s) must be named and responsibly wielded in our interactions, intersections and interfaces, artistic and otherwise. And, what kind of control do the artists want to have about their relationship to the audience?

WE INVOLVE OUR HOSTS AND ATTEMPT TO COLLABORATE WITH MANY LOCAL ORGANIZATIONS AS WELL AS LOCAL INDIVIDUALS

We organize pre-event community meetings, working together to reach mutual understanding and propose decisions. In a Mississippi project, “Animating Communities through the Arts,” as a result of the site visit, we modeled community arts projects in small groups, each group being involved in a different situation: artists working with a school or a church-based association, artists researching a neighborhood history, and projects generated by artists to explore the extent of arts reach. Spellman College, Alternate ROOTS and the U.S. Social Forum organizer decided in preparing “Gathering at the Crossroads” to use the story-circle[3] process to focus communication on: “When did art and activism intersect in your life and how will it inform your work from now into the future?”

Practice, practice, practice. Passion.

Conversations as artistic events. Interviewer equals interviewed and they constantly switch. Recording as a sharing of tools.

Work with organizers needs to be at the center of our shared responsibility.

Ways community members are interwoven into process and practice are evaluated for excellence. Evidence of collaboration. Impact. Internalized oppressions? Paolo Freire’s “Pedagogy of the Oppressed” is a presence.

THE EVENT MAY BE ANYTHING FROM A ONE-DAY LEARNING EXCHANGE OR A TOWN MEETING TO A MULTI-YEAR RESIDENCY WITH ONE OR MORE ARTISTS.

We make every authentic effort to practice the principles, striving to undo racism and other forms of oppression. The event may start with the sound of a horn, a parade, various ways of presenting who is in the room, a silence. Projects by RSC of Alternate ROOTS include “Animating Communities through the Arts” in Biloxi, where the charge was “to employ and model our principles in planning and implementing a learning exchange that would address the needs and goals of diverse artists and organizations from different Mississippi communities”; “Making Art, Making Home” in Charleston, in which the goal was a transformative experience in the dialogue of race and class; “Arts in Focus: a Greater Vision for the 21st Century” in Lexington, Ky., where our principles helped guide the understanding of “artists as citizens” and worked to build a fair comprehensive community cultural plan; workshops with youth leadership programs of Project South; and mentorship for Community/Artist Partnership Projects funded by Alternate ROOTS through grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Ford Foundation and the Nathan Cummings Foundation.

All of us, artists, activists, arts administrators and educators who have been participating in RSC programs have used and shaped, with no copyright attached, the principles of “Shared Power,” “Equitable Partnership,” “Open Dialogue,” “Individual and Community Transformation” and “Aesthetics” in designing art programs or creating long-term art projects/process/products. “Uprooted: The Katrina Project” and “Changing the Beat,” an experiment in collaborative work among artists of different disciplines and backgrounds, as well as an experiment in audience building, are two vivid examples. We understand and practice popular education with story circles, socio-metrics or mapping exercises, creative imaging and physical sculpturing. We plan long-term.

“Equitable partnership” as a base for communication. “Language” as sound and meaning. Trading cultures. Imagination as subversive.

A movement between pushing the envelope and translating the content.

Engaging a critical dialogue about aesthetics and social change.

Questions and comments documented in the evaluation of the Community/Artist Partnership workshop at the National Performance Network Annual Meeting highlighted the deep need for critical dialogue through the RSC principles: ”How do you work through the problem of representing a person other than yourself, through their stories, ideas, language and /or movement? How do you remain true to yourself as well as to them?” (Power and Aesthetics); “Style vs. political ideas and real life events/issues” (Aesthetics and Transformation); “Activating imagination as a transgressive act” (Dialogue and Aesthetics); “Children are at the roots of transformation” (Partnership and Transformation); “Community Transformation parallels that of the world” (Transformation and Aesthetics)

Where and who are the judges? Where does the money come from? How does it color RSC principles?

Process-oriented projects and product-oriented projects - Can the artist still carry a traditional role as a witness and an eye opener, through only representational means?

WE EVALUATE, DOCUMENT AND KEEP AT IT.

Evaluation in order to create personalized maps, maps of our dreams as well as maps of possibilities. And then let’s start again… energized.

We do repeat, test, model, abandon. We open… Our signature remains a work in progress.

Evaluation is a step that becomes part of the Transformation principle. Connection is made between history and today’s action. We plan for post-discussions, post-writing, continual dialogue and artifacts. We pay attention to who is left with what? What is taken and by whom? We draw the itinerary of the project.

RSC has created a downloadable workbook available for free at www.alternateroots.org. Its principles have influenced the roots and the buds of “The State of the Nation,” a yearly festival in Mississippi/Louisiana; “You Comin,” a project linked to the Social Forums movement with video-recording of very short dialogues between two people who have never met and who would not meet without this created opportunity; “Creative Convergence,” a festival celebration and gathering for artists, activists, cultural workers, educators, students and anyone interested in the intersection of art, social justice and community action in Baltimore, Md., and many more

Closing

The process of developing Resources for Social Change and that of dismantling racism run parallel. Some would say they are of the same paradigm in the process of destabilizing bodies of knowledge that are partial, incomplete and at times totally false. Art history, history and social-behavior studies have the power to fashion our institutional memories, the way they are taught and dispersed through the media. But they are the history and studies of a limited class of people. They don’t do justice to a past that includes stories of inequalities and positive resistance. They go on “bleaching” neighborhoods and active communities, turning down or off minority voices.

People feel that if change occurs, everything will fall apart. As Derrick Bell states in “Faces at Bottom of the Well: The Permanence of Racism,” even those who might know right, want to do right and have the power to do right, “simply watch, mesmerized into maintaining their unspoken commitment.” Actions and behaviors become so ingrained they are like second nature. And so is the perception of art in the dominant Euro-American culture.

Through our activism we develop partnerships, initiate collaborative art experiences and create community-based art, which means we involve nonartists in an experience with no known outcome - one we together decide and shape. We attempt to bring out the unspoken, unspeakable, underlying issues that are generated by the present dominant culture. In doing so as artists partnering with communities or creating temporary communities – and not necessarily organizations — we engage our artistic and social responsibilities in the making and the aftermath of the project.

The Principles

POWER: We focus our awareness on how power is organized, used and shared in a community. Because our work is based on equitable PARTNERSHIP, we work toward sharing the ownership of the work at all levels, including but not limited to conceptualization. DIALOGUE: We plan and create content through listening to several different perspectives. AESTHETICS: The notion of beauty is inextricably connected to our notion of justice. TRANSFORMATION: We aim to provoke long-lasting, personal and social change — one person at a time. We intend for personal change to lead to institutional, systemic, social and cultural change. EVALUATION: It does not mean we are all going to do the same thing, or all have the same criteria for evaluation, but we will all be aware of the necessity to create a space for complementarities. In sharing the ownership of the work, we dismantle the fabrication of heroes, geniuses, criteria of beauty and artificial symbols of a dominant culture, which we are conditioned to believe is forever.

RSC strives to introduce people of every class, every race, and every walk of life in a search for a sustained social change, through the arts. When the artwork, the event or the learning exchange takes shape, it becomes common ground, a step that may then influence our social memory. We understand temporary events as necessary elements on a comprehensive thread — a line through — growing an understanding of a necessary social and artistic activism. Where art and activism run parallel, meet or intersect there may be room for consensus and dissent.

This essay is part of the Community Arts Convening & Research Project, 2008, funded by a Nathan Cummings Foundation grant to the Maryland Institute College of Art. The essay was reviewed and selected by the project's Editorial Board: Ron Bechet, Xavier University of Louisiana; Lori Hager, University of Oregon; Marina Gutierrez, Cooper Union; Ken Krafchek, Maryland Institute College of Art; Sonia Mañjon, California College of the Arts; Amalia Mesa-Bains, California State University Monterey Bay; Paul Teruel, Columbia College Chicago; and Stephani Woodson, Arizona State University.

Gwyléne Gallimard is a visual artist with a background in research and experimentation on collaborative ways of producing art including public art and participatory outdoor installations. Based in Charleston, S.C., she also brings experience gained as an activist artist in her birth country of France.

Hope Clark is working on her Master’s degree in Service, Leadership and Management from the School for International Training. She served as the Resources for Social Change work group chair for Alternate ROOTS and works in Chestertown, Md., with Karen Somerville, founder of the African American Schoolhouse Museum and Council, on the Story Circle Project in Kent County.

NOTES

[1] “Shared History” is the extraordinary story of descendants of slaves and slave owners who explore their 260-year-old connection at Woodlands, the South Carolina antebellum plantation where their ancestors worked and lived. Shared History is a co-production of Felicia Furman Productions and SCETV in association with the Independent Television Service.

[2] CAN, Community Arts Network. <http://www.communityarts.net>

[3] ©2001 Roadside Theater Roadside Theater P.O. Box 771 Norton, VA 24273. Phone/Fax:(276) 679-3116. http://www.roadside.org/storycircle.html

Original CAN/API publication: September 2008