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TAs, as Arts Workers, are valued, lifted up, and weave together for a stronger society.

REFLECT--
Let go of doing everything. Celebrate victories/successes

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Rooted together in history. Seeds land and take root and spreads. Contains the power to heal, build bridges, provide sustenance, shade, support community building and continuity, maintains and reinforces multiple stories and ancestors.

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Equity + Advocacy + Bridging + Community + Play + Curiousity + Radical/Revolutionary Imagination + Ritual + Authenticity

Intentions: Bridging national communities of artist disrupters & teaching artists to radically reimagine and advocate for new ways of cultural impact.  Honoring and embracing everyone's unique gifts. (circles)

A setting that honors and embraces change & curiousity.  A setting that consistently seeks to ask what is this moment asking of us in support of Teaching Artists and the times we're in.

Tactics: Investment into our futures.  How are the youth involved?  Reaching back (sankofa) Consistent space in collaboration with teaching artists.

Review: Acknowledge the root, so  how are those in community with  TA's impacted.

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Working, getting messy, mixing boundaries and structure, and then reforming the structure to play some more.

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The thing I sometimes forget about gardening and growing is that it requires a lot of shit. Literally, bags of shit. It’s someone’s job to shovel the shit out of the chicken house or cow field or wherever, someone’s job to bag it up in a plastic sheath covered in bright flowers so no one thinks too much about what is inside and instead focuses  on what it will eventually lead to. But everyone knows those bags are full of shit. And the gardeners will scoop it out and do what they need to do with it.

What you need to do is mix that shit with the last fall’s dead leaves and withered stalks, breaking up the packed ground that has been compressed by the cold season’s rain and snow. And if you mix together all those leftover and used up bits at just the right time, when the weather is warming but the rain hasn’t yet stopped, something magical will happen.

All that shit turns into fertile soil where a seed can take hold and have what it needs to grow.

And every gardener knows this. Hell, even most non-gardeners do. But there is a difference between knowing and what you feel when you have to wake up and stand in the rain on a dark, cold day, carrying a shovel and surrounded by shit, instead of staying inside with a blanket and tea dreaming about the flowers to come.

How do we decide to wrap the vine of the banyan tree around a root, knowing it will be a generation before it becomes a strong support? How do we trust that our work will not be undone?

Storytelling is what turns a pile of shit into a noble purpose.

Storylistening is what reminds us that we need to continue tending the hardening vines that were wrapped by our mothers.

What is a governance structure that includes storytelling?

An annual liturgy of the shit shoveler?

The biennial repainting of the banyan mural with new tendrils emerging?

Governance through art-making.

Decision-making in circles of storytellers.

Commission an artist each year to create our annual report as a work of art.

Each storytelling circle within the organization creates its own story over and over:

The governing/mission circle (tending to our Big Story)

The programming circle
(bringing in artists and thinkers and storytellers from our community and other sectors)

The fundraising/sustainability circle (How do we keep our story going?)

The outreach and advocacy circle (telling our story to others)

The support and resource (PD and funding) circle (How we take care of our storytellers)

We write our story as we go along -

The Year of the Tree

The Year of the Boat

The Year of the Bridge

The Year of the Satellite

This is the year of the Shit. Let's turn it into soil.

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The prompt first sent my brain toward immersive theater/choose your own adventure novels — I don't think change is linear or predictable so wanted to explore a ToC that was also non-linear and likely unpredictable. A frame/whole, complicated by internal "currents", like an ocean. I started by sketching out one way the six story components might fit together and then jotting down observations and wishes in various areas as they came to me...