Thoughts on readings from Beginner’s Guide to
Community-Based Arts
Contact – Cultivate trust, mutual understanding and
commitment as a foundation for your
creative partnership.
Research – Gather information about the people, places and
issues you are working with.
Action – Produce a new work of art that benefits the
community.
Feedback – Spark community reflection, dialogue and
organizing to spread the impact of the
new work.
Teaching – Pass on new community-building skills to others
to sustain the impact.
This text
is rich with experience and insight on building relationships within
communities and ideas on helping the community to bond and grow. Being able to think outside the box and
approach social issues within communities in ways that reaches the heart of the
community and mobilizes them to come together for a particular purpose and agenda
is not an easy task. Reading about how different
communities were impacted by utilizing art in an outside the box way to do so makes
me excited to be part of this course.
As I read
the other collaborative course blogs I am getting excited to see what comes of
it all. Because I live in a suburb area
of Waterville, I am excited to see the architect students’ project in
Waterville unfold for real. I was unable
to get to the first art student collaborative piece and am still a little
uncertain as to how it will unfold. I
can see how our collaborative course projects are following the above outline
from the book, more so at this point in the course that I could earlier.
Shared experience
builds relationships. It’s what we’ve
told our youth in the groups where I am part of the volunteer staff. Coming together to create something is an
excellent way to build relationships. I
can see how the busy community members who participate in interviews can
consider themselves as part of the project and therefore have a vested interest
in the outcome. I am excited to see the
project come together. Prayers for good
weather for the out of doors piece!
As a person who has been interested in homelessness in
Maine, especially among our most vulnerable populations, developing ways to
provide safe shelter for people as well as providing ways to help meet their
other needs, I am very happy to be part of this course. It is much more than I anticipated upon
reading the course description when signing up.
I like things to HAPPEN, so this is probably the hard part for me. I think that sometimes planning boards get all
wrapped up in themselves and their governing power, so much so that they make
moving forward hard when there are pressing needs, harder than it has to
be. I hope this is not the case and that
there will be progress made soon. The
needs are there and are not declining.
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