Observations:
Focus Groups held with community members unearthed:
• a desire for an open space for discussion and project development within a supportive community environment.
• the feeling that spaces to consistently show up to open and guided discussions, ideate, learn skills and strategies, practice applying them to interest areas, reflect and keep each other on track are common on college campuses but difficult to find as an adult in the world.
Intervention:
Together with behavioral scientist Max Henning, we created a 6 month bi-monthly virtual space where 25 participants were guided through:
• considerations of their unique value,
• exploration of individual and community interests to unearth points of overlap,
• root cause analysis & development of shared visions,
• scope and stakeholder analysis,
• prototyping & reflection.
Outcomes:
• The scope of pursuits ranged significantly, with participants collaborating to create experiential garden to table science education classes at a local middle school to poetry, artpieces, proposals for the city & workshop offerings at the garden.
• Attendees expressed the process was "inspiring and clarifying," "hopeful in witnessing passion in others and seeing how each person has things they can contribute," "empowering in considering one's own gifts, sharing ideas and hearing fresh angles, without the second guessing that often comes when in isolation," "calming to have a space where you don't need to convince others given the nature of self-willing attendance," "satisfying the hunger to be involved with others."
• Max Henning and I and refined a model and curriculum that can be used to implement this kind of program more effectively in the future (in terms of format, experience of attendees and impact).
Quote describing the experience from attendee:
“Put a bag of cookies in the break room and it might sit for days. Open the bag and leave it out, and within an hour, all the cookies will be gone. We are happy to take a tiny slice off the thing that’s being shared, but we hesitate to open the bag. The same is true with all of the initiatives in our culture. Design, movements and ideas are all trapped, waiting to be opened, and then the rest of us will happily pile on. Open the bag.” - Seth Godin
Observations:
• It is not uncommon for people to become numb and sink into hopelessness when facing the range of challenges in their lives and world at large.
• Creating different scenarios and exercising one's imaginative capacities can atrophy for many reasons.
• If we do not claim our own narratives and assumptions, we can get caught holding onto stories that are created by others that may not serve us.
• "The fictions we tell bleed back into reality" - Monika Bielskyte
• Places are often seen as problems needing solutions rather than abundance needing to be unleashed.
Intervention:
• Designed and facilitated 15 community members in a 5 part playful speculative design workshop series. Alongside learning about transition design and ecology, participants playfully created personal and regionally relevant visions of desirable futures & identified tangible pathways to step into them.
• Collaborated with Maesa Pullman, musician and local community leader, to put on a performance in Griffith Park where within a greater story and alongside affirmations from Maesa's community choir, participants shared their artifacts from the future.
Outcomes:
• Take a look at the takeaway from one of the performance's attendees here.
• Each participant created & shared tangible art-pieces that reflected the stories of their imagined journeys into desired futures.
• Participants experienced increased senses of self efficacy, confidence and commitment to act, a desire and willingness to engage and the formation of new friendships and collaborations. See below for participant feedback:
“The whole workshop was so uniquely creative, thought and heart provoking, and brought me so much joy. I think it’s truly visionary the way you bridged community building, ecology, somatics, mindfulness, futures thinking/speculative design, art, storytelling, performance…like so f****** cool. . . .so light and playful but also challenged us and invited us into new ways of being in all the right ways. The world needs more of this.”
“Strengthened a muscle I didn’t even know was weak: optimistic imagination.”
“Strengthened a muscle I didn’t even know was weak: optimistic imagination.”
“It was so fun to try on new ways of thinking and to create art and stories from those lenses. It felt like I was a kid in a way, imagining possibilities for a better world that we want to live in.”
“Each session left me feeling grateful for the opportunity to explore in this way, grateful for meeting new people who are light hearted and deep thinking, and grateful for the real possibility of living into a world we all want to be a part of.”
“I loved thinking about the future from a space of embodiment and connection to the natural world. I always appreciated when you brought us back to those spaces and integrated fun ways of not getting stuck in our left brains/logic like the piano. I loved the dress up to help us get out of our current worlds. I appreciated room for both individual thinking and collective thinking. And the final performance was sooo fun to be a part of. It was so cool to merge with the orchestra that was working in parallel to us.”
Inquire for theory of change document to learn more or engage you or your team in these workshops!
Additional Workshops:
Contracted local artists to offer 70+ mission aligned workshops to community members. For the full 2022 - 2023 Event Archive, click here.
* While contracting and curating these workshops, it was a priority to balance creating a safe space for artists to consider the word they want to create and what is inspiring them to act on with when and how to converge given the limitations of the space's facility use policies and ensuring the npo's educational goals and objectives were being emphasized.
