The Ties that Bind

Tonight is the night!

After months and months of meetings with Dana from ACRJ, we are finally about to embark on our workshop. Tonight at EastSide Arts Alliance nine artists and activists will gather for a two-part workshop called The Ties that Bind: Changing the Culture around our Strong Families.

I’m, of course, feeling apprehensive and excited. I keep telling myself- if I were participating, I’d be thrilled. It is just a bit different to be holding the space.

The preparation for this workshop has been really different than I imagined it would be. Because we are working in collaboration with a social justice organization with really particular organizing practices and really developed campaign visions, we’ve ended up doing lots and lots more behind the scenes work. We’ve met every week at ACRJ’s office to develop a vision for the workshop that supports the work of ACRJ. When I approached them, they were just beginning to ask the question of how culture change happens, and how cultural work can be integral to their policy and community work. Through national conference calls and many thrown out ideas, we finally found that we’d do this workshop with artists within the context of ACRJ’s Strong Families Initiative. reproductivejustice.org/strong-families.

Using the frame of families, we are asking artists to participate in improvised collaborations, and then a longer-term collaboration in order to get a better collective sense of how creative work supports movement work and how movement work can infuse creative work with strength.

The process of multiple re-envisionings of the use and framing of workshop with ACRJ has felt like a huge element in the process of community teaching. Working so closely with a community organization, with lasting community change as its mission, means that the teaching must be relevant and useful to this long-term vision and to the community it involves. It’s been, in the end, a lesson in organizing. We’ve been trained by ACRJ to do outreach in the way they do outreach. We’ve worked through the framing of issues, and pushed back on that framing as well. All the hours of preparation, have actually felt like a process of community teaching and learning, all this before we’ve even gotten to the workshop space.

So, after all that, we are embarking. I think that we have a really tight and exciting balance of conversation, activity and reflection. We have amazing, inspiring people coming, and have delegated and practiced so much that I was giving directions last night in my sleep.

More soon, about how it goes.

Love,

Tessa