Performing Our Future

How to Spot a Community Center of Power

Effective community-led cultural work, organizing, and economic development must be anchored in communities’ centers of power, where all residents of a community can come together to speak and act for themselves.

Community centers of power are essential building blocks of a future where we own what we make. But if you’re new to populist practice, they can be tough to spot. So Roadside developed a handy guide that you can download.

Performing Our Future Statement

The Performing Our Future coalition met for the first time in Uniontown, Alabama in July 2018. Following that meeting, the delegations co-authored this statement, which lays out the common understandings and goals that lie at the center of the coalition’s work.

How to Conduct a One-to-One Relational Meeting

One-to-one relational meetings, practiced by community organizers working in the tradition of the Industrial Areas Foundation (IAF), are a basic building block of building community power. This guide, co-created by Roadside and the Letcher County Culture Hub (letcherculture.org), walks you step-by-step through the principles and practice of one-to-one relational meetings. It is best used in the context of an in-person training. 

Three Approaches to Making Change

Roadside’s work is rooted in populism: a political tradition neither left nor right, where the people in a place co-create their community and keep the value of what they make. (This genuine, democratic form of populism is not to be confused with pseudo- or “shadow”-populism: the long line of authoritarians who have mimicked populist rhetoric to push an agenda of exclusion and fear—not rule by the people, but rule by the mob.)

Through telling their own stories rooted in shared traditions and values, neighbors representing a wide range of backgrounds and perspectives find themselves working together, often toward profound and even radical change. This kind of work—and this kind of theater—has animated generations of American movements toward democracy; “populist” was the only political label Martin Luther King, Jr. would accept.

This chart contrasts the populist approach to making change with two other, better-known approaches: moderate liberalism and progressive activism.

How We Work

With leadership from Roadside Theater, the local delegations of the Performing Our Future coalition are creating a future on our own terms by building on the practices that have sustained our resistance to exploitation, deindustrialization, and displacement:

1. Grassroots cultural work is how a community tells its own story and makes meaning together, through its material, intellectual, emotional, and spiritual traditions and features.
2. Broad-based community organizing is how a community builds its own power to act together across divides, advances shared interests, and overcomes shared challenges.
3. Community wealth creation is how a community develops its own economy through recognizing its latent assets and turning them into shared value.

Led by laypeople and professionals working in equal partnership and rooted in communities’ centers of power, where all residents of a community can come together to speak and act for themselves, each of these practices strengthens the other two. Cultural work grounds wealth creation in a community’s cultural assets and grounds organizing in a community’s traditions, values, stories, and creativity; wealth creation focuses cultural work and organizing on awakening and working from the community’s assets; and organizing focuses cultural work on building a community’s collective power and keeps the wealth-creation agenda in the community’s hands.

About: Performing Our Future

Performing Our Future is a multiracial coalition of rural and urban communities working through culture to build power and wealth. Our goal is a future where everyone belongs and everyone's contribution matters -- where together, we own what we make. Performing Our Future was initiated by Roadside Theater, emerging from Roadside's decades of community cultural development residencies across the country and internationaly. 

Performing Our Future Coalition Governance Structure

In 2019, the Performing Our Future coalition co-created a structure of governance and decision-making, to provide clarity and transparency for its collaborative work.

How to Map the Power in a Community

Power mapping, practiced by community organizers and policymakers, is a key first step in analyzing the power relations in a community and identifying key organizations and individuals to build relationships with. This guide, co-created by Roadside and the Letcher County Culture Hub (letcherculture.org), walks you step-by-step through one simple approach to power mapping. It is best used in the context of an in-person meeting.

How to Facilitate a Story Circle

Story circles, co-created by Roadside and the Free Southern Theater / Junebug Productions, play a central role in community cultural and economic development (CCED). This guide, co-created by Roadside and the Letcher County Culture Hub (letcherculture.org), walks you step-by-step through the deceptively simple process of facilitating a story circle. It is best used in the context of an in-person training.

Putting the "Art" & "Culture" in Community Driven Development

The work of Roadside Theater and the Performing Our Future coalition is rooted in communities’ culture—which we define as how people make meaning together, through their shared intellectual, spiritual, emotional, and material traditions and features. Culture, as well as its intentionally crafted expressions (art), play three key roles in a community-driven development process:

1. Process (the seed): grassroots cultural work—story circles, community plays, and more—creates the conditions where communities work across differences and learn to speak and act for themselves.
2. People (the root): as communities start speaking and acting for themselves, they begin to re-imagine and re-define themselves —by telling their own stories, building their own power, and recognizing the value inherent in their culture.
3. Products (the shoot): once communities can speak and act for themselves, build collective power, and recognize their own value, they can start turning that value into community-owned wealth of all kinds. 

The particular power of our work comes from investing deeply not only on the shoot--the products of culture, easy to see-- but also on what happens beneath the surface.

Letcher County Culture Hub

The center of Performing Our Future’s first phase was a community cultural development residency in Roadside/Appalshop’s home county in the east Kentucky coalfields—during the final days of the century-long coal mono-economy. This residency resulted in a play, The Future of Letcher County, as well as the formation of the Letcher County Culture Hub: a county-wide network of community-based organizations, working together to build a future where “we own what we make.” The Culture Hub would later become a founding delegation of the Performing Our Future national coalition.

Performing Our Future Coalition Strategy 2019-2021

In 2019, the Performing Our Future coalition co-authored its first comprehensive strategy, to provide direction for the following three years of collaboration.

Working Definitions of Key Economic Terms in Community Cultural & Economic Development

Since 2013, Roadside/Appalshop has collaborated with the Economic Empowerment and Global Learning Project at Lafayette College to develop the methodology of community cultural and economic development (CCED). This glossary, a work in progress, offers definitions of some key concepts that have emerged from our work together.

How to Organize for Community Cultural and Economic Development

Roadside collaborates with partners near and far to build community cultural and economic development (CCED) projects. This guide, emerging from those collaborations, offers a way to start.

Performing Our Future Coalition Delegations

The local delegations of the Performing Our Future coalition represent diverse regions, histories, and perspectives. At the same time, our communities share a legacy of resisting exploitation, deindustrialization, and displacement.

Free Think: "How a Bakery is Restoring Hope in an Appalachian Mining Town
By Doug Dais

Follow this link to access this article: https://www.freethink.com/videos/appalachia-poverty

ArtPlaceAmerica: "Appalachian Solidarity with Black Lives Matter"
By Sarah Westlake: Editorial Director, ArtPlace America

Use this link to access the article: https://www.artplaceamerica.org/blog/appalachian-solidarity-black-lives-matter

Secular Communion in the Coalfields: The Populist Aesthetic and Practice of Roadside Theater
By Ben Fink

Roadside Theater is a populist theater company. Refusing liberal elitism, activist vanguardism, and the authoritarian pseudo-populism of Donald Trump, Roadside creates original plays in grassroots partnerships that cross racial, political, and rural-urban lines. Roadside combines theater production, community organizing, and economic development to create the conditions for residents of the Appalachian coalfields and their neighbors across the country to confront exploitative power structures and divisive culture wars, tell their own stories, build and share power and wealth, and work together toward a future where "We Own What We Make."

Building Economy & Community With Cultural Assets
By Ben Fink and Mimi Pickering

This article, co-authored by Performing Our Future’s lead organizer and the director of Appalshop’s Community Media Initiative, was published by the National Endowment for the Arts in the book How to Do Creative Placemaking.

"Building Economy and Community with Cultural Assets"

By Ben Fink and Mimi Pickering, Appalshop

https://www.arts.gov/art-works/2016/building-economy-and-community-cultural-assets

When a friend visiting from Philadelphia compared Whitesburg, Kentucky, to Stars Hollow, all she got from us was a blank stare. Turns out Stars Hollow is the setting of Gilmore Girls: a small idyllic town, rural and intimate, yet diverse and open-minded. When our friend arrived in Whitesburg—a former coal-mining town in one of the poorest and sickest Congressional districts in the country—she thought such a place could exist only on TV. Twenty-four hours later, she had changed her mind.

What did it? Was it coffee and breakfast at a local restaurant, whose owners routinely keep it open for community events? Or late-night drinks at a new bar where the proprietor, a former opera singer, spent an hour discussing the finer points of vocal technique? Or the time spent browsing books and crafts at an Appalachian heritage store, enjoying music at a cooperatively owned record shop, sharing stories with locals of all ages and political stripes, or sampling homemade moonshine at a family-owned distillery?

More than anything, probably, it was the general sense that things are happening here. Yes, the coal industry is pulling out, and jobs are on the decline. (At last count, there are fewer than 100 coal-mining jobs left in Letcher County.) Yet young people are starting tattoo parlors and artist collectives. Senior citizens are fighting to keep their defunded community centers open. High school students and retirees alike host programs on WMMT community radio. And the independent weekly, the Mountain Eagle, still bears the masthead: “It Screams!” In the face of economic decline, the people of Whitesburg are building a new economy.

How did this happen? Ask many people around here, and they’ll point you to a strange-looking building on the edge of town; painted on the walls is the name “Appalshop.” Founded in 1969 as one of ten Community Film Workshops funded by the War on Poverty’s Office of Economic Opportunity, Appalshop includes a filmmaking company (Appalshop Films/Headwaters Television). youth media training (Appalachian Media Institute), a theater company (Roadside Theater), a record label (June Appal Recordings), an extensive archive, and the aforementioned community radio station (WMMT) broadcasting to at least three states. Together, these projects constitute the largest body of creative works about Appalachia in the world.

What does all this have to do with building the economy? Turns out, a whole lot. From its origins as a career-training program for young Appalachians, Appalshop has always been about economic development. It creates jobs both directly, for local filmmakers, musicians, recording artists, archivists, and educators; and indirectly, through extensive partnerships with artisans, growers, chefs, tech companies, healthcare providers, school systems, and governments across the region. These partnerships are a key element in Appalshop’s role as “culture hub,” a dynamic center of cross-sector cultural activity.

Yet Appalshop’s biggest economic role may be in creating the conditions for creating jobs. A national leader in grassroots arts, Appalshop has pioneered the practice of “first voice/authentic voice,” creating culture of and by the people of Appalachia, not about them. Appalshop documentaries have no narrator: every word is spoken by the people being documented. Roadside Theater plays have no script: every word comes from stories told and recorded by participants. Appalshop’s administrative offices are filled with old-time musicians, radio hosts, filmmakers, visual artists, organizers, and community activists: at Appalshop there is no producers-versus-consumers, servers-versus-served, us-versus-them. There is only us, here, together, building our collective voice in a region where so many feel voiceless.

In the words of the economist Fluney Hutchinson, who has worked in developing communities all over the world: “Strengthening the capacity of residents to exercise voice, agency, and ownership over their community affairs is essential to their ability to create communities that they value… That’s the kind of economic development that ensures that we all are invested and remain invested because it represents and it recognizes our unique ability to contribute to it.”

Hutchinson and his institute, the Economic Empowerment and Global Learning Initiative at Lafayette College, have been working with Appalshop since 2013. Together, we are building on the Appalshop model of bottom-up, culturally based economic development, a model which may turn many more high-poverty American towns into Stars Hollow.

PolicyLink Features the Letcher County Culture Hub

PolicyLink, the national policy research and action institute, has been a supporter of Performing Our Future since its early days. The Letcher County Culture Hub was the only rural member of PolicyLink’s first national cohort for Arts, Culture, and Equitable Development. Performing Our Future leaders often collaborate with and present alongside PolicyLink staff on issues of equity and racial and economic justice. This profile of the policy implications of the Letcher County Culture Hub was released by PolicyLink in 2019.

Kentucky Communities Unlock their Cultural Wealth to Lead the Way Forward
By Abbie Langston and Lorrie Chang

http://www.policylink.org/blog/letcher-county-culture-hub

Letcher County, Kentucky is at the very heart of Appalachia, a region as rich in history and culture as in natural resources. Over the last 10 years, the county has lost more than 90 percent of coal jobs that had sustained its economy. About 98 percent of residents are White and 80 percent voted for Donald Trump in 2016.

At first glance, this rural area might seem to have little in common with diverse urban centers like Detroit and Pittsburgh. But the challenge of advancing a just economic transition in coal country is not dissimilar  with the challenge of building an equitable economy in metropolitan regions once dominated by steel, automotive, or other manufacturing sectors.

Like these cities and other “company towns,” Eastern Kentucky citizens once drew their lifeblood from a single industry, and now face the challenge of charting a new economy. One resident likened coal’s hold to addiction. The coal companies proclaimed, “you mine the coal and we’ll take care of you,” she explained. When coal collapsed, this dependency left communities in fear and desperation. So it’s no surprise that many residents have welcomed the prospect of a proposed federal prison as another economic anchor to fill the void

But across the political spectrum, a consensus is building that Letcher County’s future cannot depend solely on one company or industry. A group of community-led organizations have formed the Letcher County Culture Hub, a network designed to foster and develop residents’s agency and assets, and build on the strength of its own rich cultural wealth. Today the growing list of partners include volunteer fire departments, businesses, community centers, and artist and cultural organizations collaborating with elected officials and other local, regional, and national organizations. Partners bring together resources and work in consensus to pursue common goals including reviving cultural events like the region’s bluegrass festival, founding new social enterprises including one that employs formerly incarcerated people, and expanding opportunity such as broadband Internet.

The Letcher County Culture Hub is also a part of the Arts, Culture, Equitable Development Initiative, generously supported by The Kresge Foundation, for PolicyLink to expand the impact of six community based organizations across the US in equitable development and policy change through arts and culture.

Centering Grassroots Power: Self-Determination through Arts and Culture

The Letcher County Culture Hub was born out of Appalshop, a 50-year-old multimedia arts, culture, and workforce development center that supports residents to tell their own stories, strengthen Appalachian culture, and work for more just communities.

With its arts-and-culture focused mission and deep roots in Letcher County, Appalshop took a unique approach to economic development: unlike traditional development that begin with a plan for a community to develop assets, they began with the community and the assets within it. Ben Fink, an Appalshop organizer who collaborated with community leaders to start the Culture Hub, explained, “This isn’t a project about saving Appalachia. This is a project about Appalachians saving ourselves.” From this perspective, culture isn’t just a way to add local flavor to economic development or market products; it is the very context and medium that make economic and social relationships possible. As Fink put it, “culture means more than music, dance, or art. It means paying attention to the language, interactions, and how meaning gets made.”

For the Culture Hub, starting with culture means starting with the methodology of story circles utilized by Appalshop’s longtime collaborator Junebug Productions, an African-American arts organization rooted in the civil rights movement. Story circles create a space where all voices are equal, identify and build on common bonds, and generate ideas from the intersections and contradictions between stories.

This has been a crucial process for the Culture Hub whose constituents span a wide spectrum of philosophical beliefs and political leanings. Fire chief, former mine owner, and conservative political activist Bill Meade reflected, “If you told me I would be here at Appalshop three years ago, I would have never believed you.” Appalshop has long been viewed by some with skepticism for its progressive political orientation in a place steeped in conservative traditions. But by building from the common ground of culture, the Culture Hub has bridged long-standing divides and forged new bonds of collaboration. Story circles, community plays, and other cultural-based approaches have allowed participants to not ignore their differences, but to work across them through shared values and aspirations. Meade, a founding member, is now one of the network’s central leaders. He has played an integral role in economic development, helping launch the county’s first large-scale solar project with partners; and the arts, playing a lead role in Appalshop’s recent play The Future of Letcher County.

Playing the Long Game: Rooting Culture in an Economic Model

For over a hundred years, Appalachia has been dominated by an economic model that suffocates rather than encourages creativity, new ideas, and self-determination. The Culture Hub’s vision for the next hundred years is very different: build a culture of entrepreneurial spirit, interdependence, and unbounded imagination among residents who believe the future is theirs to create. This is why their mission is not just job creation or economic development. Instead, it is guided by the broader principle, “We own what me make.” The goal isn’t to employ everyone; but to create the conditions for everyone to enact their cultural, civic, and economic agency; identify and build on their assets; and find self-directed ways to turn them into community wealth.

The Culture Hub is playing the long game to redefine who owns and designs the narratives, strategies, and policies that will define Appalachia’s economic transition. Policies or programs alone cannot achieve true equity — a society in which all can reach their full potential — without shifting the culture of how people relate and make meaning and value together.

By building trust and a common voice through the intentional, collective production of culture, participants recognize and act on opportunities and needs in ways that might not be possible in traditional planning processes. As Fink explained, “honestly I think there was some shame about, you know, feeling helpless…[These deeper opportunities and needs weren’t] going to come up but for the kind of really intentional work around relationship building and strengthening that we did.” Because the Culture Hub roots development in people and their stories, participants are able to “not only to tell a different story about themselves, but also to act on that story”. Residents can rewrite their story from helpless to empowered and shape the solutions that turn this story into reality.

The Culture Hub is expanding. What began in 2015 with four partners is now nearly 20. Furthermore, the Culture Hub joined community cultural organizations in the Black Belt of Alabama, Mississippi Delta, West Baltimore, and rural and urban Wisconsin to found an emerging coalition. This project, called Performing Our Future, brings grassroots partners alongside economists, researchers, and technology developers together to advance community-led, culture-driven development on a national and international scale. The Culture Hub and the coalition continue to look for collaborators and funding to support work in which all people, voices, and perspectives make their own future and own what they make.

ArtPlace America Features Performing Our Future

Performing Our Future’s initial work was supported in part by the national art and community development (creative placemaking) fund ArtPlace America. In the following years ArtPlace remained an ally, publishing several features about the project.

“Creatively Building Power, Wealth, & Ownership—Together”

https://www.artplaceamerica.org/blog/creatively-building-power-wealth-ownership

“Our work starts with large numbers of ordinary people sharing stories, through story circles, relational meetings, and community-led art-making of all kinds. Through that work, expressing and bringing life to communities' shared traditions and values, people recognize how much they share. That goes even for people who thought they had nothing in common, who have long been divided along political or economic or racial or religious or rural/urban lines. […] There was a lot they didn't agree on. But they all could find themselves in the story of communities protecting and strengthening their centers of power […]”

“The biggest challenges are all external. They stem from over 40 years of national, state, and local policy that favors corporations and other big institutions and takes resources away from communities working to tell their own stories and build their own power and wealth. The communities involved in POF have borne the brunt of this policy shift. Think about a situation where all levels of government deemed it okay to dump a mountain of coal ash in people's backyards, despite demonstrated and ongoing health issues. It also shows up in less obvious ways. Think about the dominant model of ‘trickle-down’ community development funding, where the emphasis is on sector-specific projects run by professional organizations with predetermined ‘deliverables.’ Communities, and their grassroots leaders, tend to be the last consulted and the least supported. It even affects the way we think about ‘artists.’ Too often it's assumed that an artist is an individual entrepreneur, as opposed to a representative of a community that expresses that community's inherent genius. These are ways of thinking and acting that hurt community-led work and disempower ordinary people in all the communities we work in.”

"The Many Environments of Creative Placemaking"  

https://www.artplaceamerica.org/blog/many-environments-creative-placemaking

“I consider the county-wide hub to be a naturally occurring rural cultural district, grounded in rich folk traditions and geographic assets—and also facing equally strong social, economic, and health challenges. Over the last two years, as a creative placemaking project of Appalshop funded by an ArtPlace America grant, local residents successfully worked together to connect their post-coal natural environment with their traditional and contemporary art-making unbuilt environment. […]

“There was a lot to celebrate that spring day on Cowan Creek. Three new businesses were being incubated. Existing economic and social enterprises were being revitalized and expanded. Two long-standing cultural institutions, the Carcassonne Square Dance and King’s Creek Bluegrass Festival, were newly financially stable and planning for the future. A wide array of arts and story-sharing activities inspired new thinking about what is possible for the community and region.

“The [Roadside play] reading gave voice to the pains of poverty and addiction as well as hope for recovery. A vigorous dialogue among attendees followed, with one observer characterizing the play and discussion as creating a safe space to help rebuild the fabric of possibility for unity, healing, and progress here.”

“Building Power Through Culture in East Kentucky”

https://www.artplaceamerica.org/blog/building-power-through-culture-east-kentucky 

“One thing that’s different about Appalshop, compared with a lot of nonprofits, is we don’t do ‘community engagement’ or ‘community outreach.’ We aren’t looking to ‘help’ or ‘save’ the community. We are part of the community, no less and no more. And the way we work with our neighbors is through stories. Stories are how we learn, how we make meaning out of our lives, how we understand who we are and what we can do, individually and together. […]

“When we work together to make places where we all feel like we belong, we can feel safe enough to open ourselves to people and ideas we might otherwise fear. When we build a culture and economy based on shared agency, voice and ownership, we can live with dignity and own the value we create. That’s what we’re imagining here in east Kentucky — and with a growing network of partners from rural and urban communities across the country.”

Performing Our Future: INSTITUTE (JULY 2016)

POF INSTITUTE: Thursday, July 14 – Monday, July 18 2016

As part of its Performing Our Future initiative, Appalshop hosted a national Institute from July 14-18 of 13 teams of artists, scholars, and community leaders sponsored by Oregon State, University of Florida, Wilfrid Laurier University (Ontario), Iowa State, Ohio State, Cornell, Virginia Tech, Syracuse University, Arizona State University, University of California Davis, and the eastern KY-based Mountain Association for Community Economic Development. Participants explored the questions: How can arts and culture promote individual voice and collective agency, unbounding a community’s imagination and ambition in order to create the conditions for economic development? How can a community organize itself to build an economy that’s broad-based and sustainable? Institute activities engaged teams in investigating the history, animating ideas, and policy environments for arts- and culture-based economic and civic community development; training in methodologies for economic development based on community cultural assets; immersion in Appalachian culture (including discussions with Appalshop’s filmmakers and radio journalists and a square dance at the Carcassonne Community Center); art making, including a 23-hour production period in which each participant chose to create a short play, short film, set of photographs, music recording, or radio documentary in collaboration with Appalshop professional artists and their community partners; and collaborating within their university-sponsored teams to generate arts- and culture-based development plans to take back to their home communities.

The Institute was a collaboration among Imagining America: Artists and Scholars in Public Life, a 100-college consortium dedicated to creating democratic spaces to nurture scholarship that draws on the arts, humanities, and design; Lafayette College’s Economic Empowerment and Global Learning Project; and Appalshop. Performing Our Future is made possible by the generous support of Doris Duke Charitable Foundation's Fund for National Projects, National Endowment for the Arts, ArtPlace America, The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and The Hearst Foundation.

Excerpt: Community Cultural Development as a Site of Joy, Struggle, and Transformation

Published in “Arts and Community Change: Exploring Cultural Development Policies, Practices and Dilemmas” (Routledge, 2015). You can purchase the book here.

Free Think: "How a Bakery is Restoring Hope in an Appalachian Mining Town
By Doug Dais

Follow this link to access this article: https://www.freethink.com/videos/appalachia-poverty

Brookings Institution: "How a Conservative Coal County Built the Biggest Solar Energy Project in E. Kentucky"
By Ben Fink

Follow this link to access this blog: https://www.brookings.edu/blog/the-avenue/2020/03/26/how-a-conservative-coal-county-built-the-biggest-community-solar-energy-project-in-east-kentucky/

Virginia Tech Institute for Policy and Governance Features Performing Our Future
By Max Stephenson

Pondering Kintsugi and Community Change in Appalachia
By Max Stephenson, Director, Virginia Tech Institute for Policy and Governance

https://ipg.vt.edu/DirectorsCorner/Soundings/Soundings060418.html

On April 21 I traveled to Whitesburg, Kentucky, a small community of fewer than 2,000 people located in Letcher County, in the mountains of the eastern part of the state, with a group of gifted graduate students. We took the trip to participate in a “Culture Hub celebration,” as the event was called by Appalshop, one of its principal sponsors. This special day had been preceded by two years of efforts by the Whitesburg-based communications and arts nonprofit and its partners to bring together disparate organizations and actors from across the eastern Kentucky coal mining county. Appalshop and its collaborators are seeking to mobilize these various groups in the face of deep social polarization and fractures in the region. These have arisen as the area has experienced the pronounced decline of its primary industry, coal mining, in recent decades.

That continuing hardship has created social challenges and fissures in the communities of eastern Kentucky and other areas of Appalachia, including high rates of unemployment, a major opioid crisis and a related and growing hopelessness among many individuals about their future.  A significant number of families face profound daily challenges simply to ensure shelter and sustenance for their own. These difficulties have been intensified by a growing polarization among residents within the region along partisan lines, encouraged by fear-and hate-based state and national party politics. In short, the area now suffers not only from a catastrophic economic decline its residents did not create, but also from a wide-ranging set of social maladies associated with that ongoing seismic shift. State and national political leaders have exploited these in turn for purposes of partisan electoral mobilization, resulting in a deepening of the anxiety and social divisions already apparent within the area’s communities.

We went to Kentucky to join Appalshop and its partners in celebrating the entities that had joined what the sponsoring institutions have dubbed the “Performing Our Future” Project, of which the Culture Hub is an integral part:

Performing Our Future is the working name of a growing collaboration among communities across the country with histories of exploitation, in which residents work together to create a future where we own what we make. … The claim of Performing Our Future is that (1) communities with histories of exploitation also share traditions of resistance; (2) this multigenerational resistance has always drawn on the inherent genius of the spiritual, intellectual, emotional, and material life of these communities; and (3) this same cultural genius can also provide a means for these communities to imagine and work toward a future where everyone belongs and everyone’s contribution matters.[1]

The day featured musical performances by Old Time and traditional Bluegrass artists, a demonstration of lining-out singing by a nationally known local group of Old Regular Baptists, a bountiful and delicious meal prepared by, among others, the members of a local volunteer fire department, and a reading of an Appalshop-Roadside Theater play, derived from story circles, with parts played by local citizens. That performance concerned the past and possible future of Letcher County, and squarely addressed the economic woes of the region as well as its opioid crisis and their many negative impacts for residents. It was followed by a vigorous dialogue among attendees concerning the issues the performance had raised.

At one level, all of this can be understood as a long-time community cultural development organization’s efforts to join its arts-based methods with those of more traditional asset-based strategies in an attempt to assist its home jurisdiction’s residents to become aware of their manifold capacities and talents in the name of crafting a way forward amidst cataclysmic economic change. This would not be inaccurate, but I believe the issues at stake go deeper than this description suggests. This is so because of the profound social challenges and divisions created or exacerbated by the area’s continued economic decline and by false corporate (coal corporation) and partisan claims that these are readily reversible because they are the product of overweening government action and not the result of ongoing economic globalization and changing market realties.

When viewed in this broader context, the ongoing Performing Our Future project is not simply or primarily about economic possibility, but about finding the ways and means to rekindle the sinews of connection among the residents it seeks to reach, who now are too often unwilling to countenance, let alone acknowledge, their common humanity and brokenness in the name of fear, rancor and misconceptions. Performing Our Future seeks foremost to repair the fabric of possibility that binds Eastern Kentucky’s residents one to another during a time when both external and internal forces have torn and continue to tear those citizens apart. If this shared singular political and social challenge cannot be overcome, the region will not move ahead, whatever its economic possibilities.

This line of reflection brought to mind, by way of analogy, the ancient Japanese art of Kintsugi, the practice of repairing broken porcelain or pottery with resin mixed with gold dust or other precious materials. The arts organization My Modern Met, has described its character and origins succinctly:

Kintsugi art dates back to the late 15th century. According to legend, the craft commenced when Japanese shogun Ashikaga Yoshimasa sent a cracked chawan—or tea bowl—back to China to undergo repairs. Upon its return, Yoshimasa was displeased to find that it had been mended with unsightly metal staples. This motivated contemporary craftsmen to find an alternative, aesthetically pleasing method of repair, and Kintsugi was born. Since its conception, Kintsugi has been heavily influenced by prevalent philosophical ideas. Namely, the practice is related to the Japanese philosophy of wabi-sabi, which calls for seeing beauty in the flawed or imperfect. The repair method was also born from the Japanese feeling of mottainai, which expresses regret when something is wasted, as well as mushin, the acceptance of change.[2]

To succeed, Performing our Future, like the Kintsugi artisans, must acknowledge the innately imperfect character of the communities and populations it would serve. Its architects must find ways to help residents rebuild the shattered connections among themselves, recognizing that democratic possibility rests with, and ultimately can only arise from, them. To do so, its leaders and organizers must focus on the innate in that population and believe that its inherent imperfections represent not so much defining drawbacks as attributes on which fresh ties can be constructed in new and sustainable ways.

Like the Kintsugi artisans, too, those involved with the Performing Our Future initiative must build first on the capacities of the communities they would serve and seek to unleash those.  While these may not alone be wholly sufficient, as one bowl cannot suffice to serve a dinner party, for example, they cannot be allowed to wither or to be heedlessly cast aside since they represent potentially key attributes and possibilities. Put simply, the capacities of the residents of Appalachia represent its dearest and most vital resource and those possessing them must be convinced to join together to work for their shared good and for the freedom that only they can create and preserve.

Finally, Kintsugi artisans recognize that the jar or bowl they mend has changed as a consequence of their interventions to repair or recreate it. Nevertheless, those modifications inevitably must retrace the brokenness of the previous material. Since that is so, and in that sense, for these artists, that which is changed must build upon and join the old. More, the repaired object evidences a new found aesthetic as well as functional possibilities. A mended bowl is different because now usable and because in its fresh form it reveals a beauty it did not previously possess, but it was constructed on the foundation of that which preceded it, irrespective of that object’s prior fissures and shards. Kintsugi artists seek not to obscure the old object, but to highlight it and the possibilities that its renewed incarnation represents. These arise precisely because of the “new” object’s relation to the entity that lies within it.

It seems to me that to succeed, the Performing Our Future effort must manage this same alchemy in concert with the residents with which its artisans have elected to work. They, too, must help to create a different beauty amidst a population who must become aware of the remarkable capacities they collectively represent during a time of suffering and in a period of rancorous individualism and demagogic appeals. I have enormous respect both for these residents and for those who would assist them in this profound collective work. The future health of our polity may well depend on the vitality and ultimate success of such efforts. One may hope all involved recognize their signal democratic significance.

Performing Our Future: RESEARCH

PERFORMING OUR FUTURE (POF) is a national arts-based initiative on community and economic development – please see the press release at https://goo.gl/DjHk3Q. POF is a collaboration among Appalshop and its Roadside Theater, Lafayette College’s Economic Empowerment and Global Learning Project (EEGLP), and Imagining America: Artists and Scholars in Public Life (IA). Three initiatives under the banner of POF are currently taking shape for 2016 and 2017: POF FORUM; POF INSTITUTE; and POF RESEARCH.

POF: RESEARCH

Co-Principal Investigators:

• Gladstone “Fluney” Hutchinson, founder and director, Lafayette College’s Economic Empowerment and Global Learning Project, and professor, economics
• Scott Peters, faculty co-director, Imagining America, and professor, development sociology, Cornell University

Proposed Design:

Performing Our Future (POF) can be viewed as a theory of change:

• The work of interweaving two development paradigms—one from community arts and the other from agency- and asset-centered economics—can help struggling communities break out of bounded imaginations about their identity and potential.  In doing so, it can identify and awaken latent assets that can enliven and enrich not only a place’s economy but also its civic life and culture.

In Eastern Kentucky, this theory of change is being tested through a relationship between Appalshop and Lafayette College’s Economic Empowerment & Global Learning Project (EEGLP).  In the process, we think something is happening that can be instructive for other struggling communities, and for scholars, artists, funders, policy makers, and government agency staff.  The main goal of our research is to understand and make sense of what is happening, including what is being learned by POF participants.  Through our research we seek to contribute to conversations about development in academic fields and literatures, government, and philanthropic institutions.  Through both the research process and products, we also seek to contribute in useful ways to the work on the ground in Eastern Kentucky.  Our intention is to use this research to inform a larger and longer initiative with partners in other locations.

We propose to take a narrative orientation to our study of what is happening and what is being learned through Appalshop’s and EEGLP’s relationship and work.  As we inquire into what’s happening, what we’ll be trying to find out is, What’s the story?  There are, of course, many stories to be told.  A narrative orientation requires us to see the world as being richly storied in multiple, diverse, and often conflicting ways.  People tell and re-tell stories and narratives of themselves and their organizations and communities.  They also re-story themselves and their organizations, communities and world, producing counter-narratives to dominant “master” or meta-narratives.  The value of this re-storying process is central to the theory of change POF’s creators and participants are testing.

As we use narrative methods to elicit and construct stories of POF participants’ experience and work, we’ll be looking for backstories; origins and influences; plots and sub-plots; surprises; uncertainties; puzzles; breakthroughs and epiphanies; truths; push back; resistance; disagreement; key moments and turning points; hope and joy; despair and sorrow; comedy and drama; dynamics of power and interests; missing voices and characters; active verbs; front, back, and off stage action.  And more.  We’ll keep things relatively open at first, in order to allow room for people to tell stories the ways they want to tell them.  As we construct stories we will read them individually and in small groups, asking what strikes us as being interesting and important, surprising or disturbing, puzzling or confusing, and the like.  We’ll also generate and pose questions we think the stories might be able to answer, including the ones we generated at our January meeting at Lafayette (e.g., How can our communities develop the ability to tell stories that imagine, and create, a new reality?).

Press Release: Performing Our Future

Across the U.S., there’s a growing recognition that art and culture can drive community and economic development. But it’s rare when those artistic efforts include rural communities and their colleges, or focus on bringing together all parts of a community, including its poor and working class residents, for development that is equitable. 

A new initiative, Performing Our Future, is creating a model for how to do just that.

Over a two-year period and with funding from the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation, ArtPlace America, and the National Endowment for the Arts, three communities in different geographic locations will demonstrate how artistic expression leads to community-wide empowerment and how the assets of local culture can develop economic sustainability.

A union of economists, artists, and scholars is behind the initiative’s methodology: the rural arts and humanities institution Appalshop and its Roadside Theater; the economists and students at Lafayette College’s Economic Empowerment and Global Learning Project in Easton, Pa.; and the national consortium of 100 colleges advancing public scholarship, Imagining America: Artists and Scholars in Public Life. Key elements in the methodology include creating public performances based on local stories and mapping community assets to identify opportunities for value and wealth creation through market exchange.

“Appalshop and Roadside Theater have long been national leaders in making art for communities, with communities, and by communities with transformative results,” says Ben Cameron, Director of Arts, Doris Duke Charitable Foundation, which this week announced a $225,000 grant to support Performing Our Future. “We are thrilled to support this project, which promises to increase both appreciation for their work and the impact of their work even further.”

To enrich learning, ensure national impact, and develop and disseminate findings, the three local projects will interface with each other and with the national research team of economists, artists, scholars, and students.

The local college partners in each community will be drawn from Imagining America’s network of more than 100 higher education institutions elevating higher education’s public purposes.One of the project sites is Appalshop’s home of Letcher County, Ky., a county in the nation’s poorest and sickest congressional district, which has developed and enacted Performing Our Future’s methodology for two years. Through Appalshop’s award-winning films, radio, music, and theater productions, community residents are exploring new strategies for entrepreneurship to replace the decline of the coal mining industry. In collaboration with Lafayette College’s Economic Empowerment and Global Learning Project and Imagining America, Appalshop is leading a process for its community to translate the region’s cultural assets into new and expanded businesses, leadership development programs, and tourism.

ArtPlace America recently recognized Appalshop’s critical role in community planning and development with a $450,000 investment in Letcher County, Ky. “ArtPlace was thrilled to be able to invest in Appalshop and its partners as they investigate the role that performing arts and folk arts can play in re-imagining and growing Letcher County’s economy,” says ArtPlace America Executive Director Jamie Bennett.  “We look forward to working with them as they share what will be a national model for communities both rural and urban across our country.”

Core research questions for Performing Our Future include the ways in which culture and artistic expression shape individual and community identity, expand imagination, and influence microeconomic incentives and behavior. The research will draw on the learning of Lafayette College’s Economic Empowerment and Global Learning Project, which, in addition to Appalachia, has undertaken successful projects in Easton, Pa.; rural Honduras; the Lower Ninth Ward in New Orleans, La.; and Jamaica, winning recognition as a model of public scholarship – a rigorous research process that is driven by community expertise, and which fosters a rich environment for discovering new knowledge and student learning.

“We are excited to be a part of this important project, particularly since it exemplifies one of our major goals: providing students with opportunities to use their education to benefit communities in need,” says Lafayette College President Alison Byerly. “It’s also a powerful example of how art can change lives in concrete ways, a strong argument for the power of a liberal arts education.”

Lafayette College’s participation is supported, in part, by a generous gift from trustee George Jenkins, Class of ’74.

Dudley Cocke, artistic director of Roadside Theater, and Jamie Haft, assistant director of Imagining America, will co-direct Performing Our Future. Gladstone “Fluney” Hutchinson, associate professor of economics and director of Lafayette College’s Economic Empowerment and Global Learning Project, and Scott Peters, professor in the Department of Development Sociology at Cornell University and faculty co-director of Imagining America, are co-principal investigators of Performing Our Future’s research.

To get involved, please contact Jamie Haft at 315-345-3931 (cell) and [email protected].  

For media inquiries, please contact Kristine Y. Todaro, Lafayette College director of special projects & media relations, at 610-330-5119 (office), 484-554-4984 (cell), and [email protected]. 

Time Magazine: "Meet 27 People Bridging Divides Across America"
By Ben Fink and Paula Green

Ben Fink and Paula Green: "Personal Politics":

Follow this link to access this article: https://time.com/collection/apart-not-alone/5809175/meet-the-uniters/

Americans for the Arts: "On Cultural Organizing and Performing Our Future"
By Ben Fink and Denise Griffin Johnson

Americans for the Arts "Arts Blog" 

Follow this link to access this blog: https://blog.americansforthearts.org/2020/04/21/on-cultural-organizing-and-performing-our-future

Building Democracy in "Trump Country"
By Ben Fink

Written by Performing Our Future’s lead organizer in the months following the 2016 presidential election, this reflection connects the national turmoil to the deeply local work of Performing Our Future’s first phase. Originally published by Bill Moyers, it was republished by Salon.com, AlterNet, the US Department of Arts and Culture, and the Springboard for the Arts Creative Exchange. It also inadvertently launched the Hands Across the Hills project (handsacrossthehills.org), when a resident of the Pioneer Valley of Western Massachusetts read it and took us up on our invitation to connect and collaborate.

Building Democracy in “Trump Country”

By Ben Fink

http://billmoyers.com/story/thursday-building-democracy-trump-country/

A lot of people don’t believe me when I tell them Letcher County, Kentucky, is one of the most open-minded places I’ve ever lived.

I might not have believed it either, before I moved here a year ago. I’ve spent most of my life in cities and suburbs, and I arrived with all the assumptions you can imagine about Central Appalachia and the people who live here.

But if you’ve been here, or to similar places, you know how wrong those assumptions can be. Yes, some people fly Confederate flags. One of them, down the road, used to share a front lawn with an anarchist environmentalist, and they got along fine. Yes, my northeastern accent sticks out. And as long as I’m open about who I am and interested in who they are, I’ve found almost everyone here is ready to open up, take me in and work together.

Letcher County went 79.8 percent for Donald Trump. He won every county in Kentucky, except the two that include Lexington and Louisville. Around 3 a.m. on election night, I woke up in a panic as three celebratory gunshots from next door shook my house.

The next morning it was hard to get out of bed. Was this still the same loving, open-minded place where I went to sleep last night? Did I belong here anymore?

My phone rang; it was Bill. Bill is fire chief in one of the remotest, poorest parts of the county. He and I had worked together a lot over the past year, most recently on a project to get energy costs down at the county’s cash-strapped volunteer fire departments. Bill and his crew do a lot more than fight fires; they look after sick neighbors, get food to hungry families and otherwise work day and night to take care of their community, for no pay.

Still, Bill isn’t your average partner for a social justice-oriented nonprofit. He’s a former logger and mine owner. He’s campaigned for some of the most right-wing candidates in the area. And his interactions with public officials have been, well, colorful.

I let the phone ring. I didn’t think I could talk to Bill that morning. He was going to be happy and peppy — he’d just won, after all — and he’d ask me how I was. What could I say? I’m doing bad, Bill. Four-fifths of this county just elected someone really scary.

Finally, I called him back. He greeted me as always: “Why hello there, young feller! How’re you this morning!” I hesitated: “Honestly, I’m not doing great.”

Turns out he wasn’t either. His close friend and longtime secretary was dying of cancer — and without her help, he’d need a few more days to find the power bills I’d asked him for. I told him of course, take the time you need, and that I was very sorry to hear the news. She would die a few days later.

I work at the Appalshop — originally short for “Appalachian Film Workshop.” We were founded in 1969, with funding from the federal War on Poverty and the American Film Institute, as a program to teach young people in the mountains to make films. A few years later, when the government money stopped, some of those young people took it over and re-founded it for themselves.

Ever since, it’s been a grass-roots multimedia arts center: a film producer, theater company, radio station, record label, news outlet, youth media training program, deep regional archive and sometimes book and magazine publisher. It’s put the means of cultural production in the hands of local people.

At the Appalshop, we work with stories. Stories are how we learn, how we make meaning out of our lives, how we understand who we are and what we can do, individually and together. The story of Appalachia, as told in so many reports from “Trump country,” tends to be pretty depressing: broken people, victims of poverty and unemployment and addiction, clinging desperately to a divisive and hateful politics as their last hope.

My phone call with Bill, like so many other moments I could describe, hints at a different kind of story. A story suggesting that even after Election Day, we might not be as divided as we think. That even those who feel like we “lost” the election could ultimately win, together. And that if what we’re doing works here — listening to each other, caring for each other, working with each other on common ground toward common goals — it might work in other places, too.

One thing that’s different about Appalshop, compared with a lot of nonprofits, is we don’t do “community engagement” or “community outreach.” We aren’t looking to “help” or “save” the community. We are part of the community, no less and no more. One day, several months into my job, my boss pulled me aside and told me to stop starting sentences with “I’m not from here, but….” “You are from here now,” he said.

Of course, not everyone else from here loves what we do. I hear the term “Appalhead” now and again; I’m told it was real big five years ago, at the height of the so-called “Obama War on Coal.” It’s easy to call out the misinformation behind the label. No, we’re not all from New York and San Francisco; more than half of us grew up here. No, we’re not marching in liberal lockstep; our staff meetings can involve heated political debate. And no, we don’t hate coal miners; but industry executives and their political allies would like folks to think we do.

Still, if I lost a well-paying job when a mine shut down, and I saw people who claimed to be from my community raising money to make a film about how awful strip mining was instead of doing something to try to help my family, I’d probably be resentful, too. That resentment, I think, is a lot of what this election was about. County by county, the electoral map of the whole country looked a lot like Kentucky. Urban went Clinton. Rural went Trump. Rural won.

For those of us who don’t like how the election turned out, we’re left with two choices. We can keep ignoring or ridiculing the resentment my neighbors feel, and calling them ignorant and otherwise illegitimate for the ways they think, talk and act. And we’ll keep getting the same results. Or we can listen and try to understand where they’re coming from, even when we don’t like it, and see what we can build together.

Because either way, in this election we learned that rural people have power. Whether we like it or not.

The work I do is rooted in the Popular Front of the 1930s, when people came together across all kinds of differences to build power and fight against fascism. They understood power very simply, as organized people plus organized money. Since then, some organizers in this tradition have added a third term: organized ideas.

That’s the formula I use every day: Power = Organized People + Organized Money + Organized Ideas.

If we want to understand the power in rural America and how it can be organized differently, first we need to know — who’s got it? Who, exactly, has been doing the organizing?

The answer is, as usual: not us. The bigotry and violence of the Trump campaign wasn’t the product of our people, money or ideas. My neighbors may not be up on the latest social justice lingo, but they are not hateful.

No, the organizing took place far away. What we get, on both sides, are the bumper stickers, the prefab identities sold by the people with power to make us feel powerful — even as they use our power for their own benefit.

During the election our county was full of “Trump Digs Coal” signs, but the week afterward the top headline in our newspaper The Mountain Eagle was: “Don’t expect jobs mining coal soon, McConnell warns.” Again, though, if you’re a coal miner who lost your job and you’re convinced Obama is to blame, it makes sense that a sticker on your car could make you feel better. Like you’re fighting back.

So we’re left with the all-too-familiar story of “us” versus “them.” “Our” “good” bumper stickers — and energy-efficient foreign cars — versus “their” “bad” ones — on a clunker to boot.

The bumper that gives me hope, though, is the one parked in front of our building the day after the election. It had a “Make America Great Again” sticker and a sticker for WMMT-FM 88.7, the community radio station run by Appalshop, which broadcasts news and music across central Appalachia and streams worldwide. WMMT has 50 local volunteer DJs, from all political positions.

Including this guy. Old Red hosts the First Generation Bluegrass show on Thursday mornings. He plays great music, has a terrific radio personality and likes to make fun of Al Gore on the air. When I hosted a show last summer, I went on right before him.

One morning I played “Pride,” a haunting song by Ricky Ian Gordon about a gay man discovering he has AIDS and finding home in the uprisings of the mid-1980s. Near the end of my show Red came into the studio, as usual, and put down his pink bag. “I heard that song you played while I was driving in.” I took a breath. He continued: “I don’t know a lot about this stuff. I think I know what ‘L, G, B, T’ means, but I’m not sure about ‘Q, I….’ Can you help me?”

When Red steps into that studio, he feels safe enough to admit he doesn’t know something, and learn. Even from someone like me. Because that studio is a place Red knows he belongs. He gets to broadcast his music, his voice and his ideas, whatever I or anyone else might think of them, to five states every week. Just like scores of other people — including relatives of folks locked up in nearby prisons, who call in to our weekly hip hop show “Hot 88.7 — Hip Hop from the Hilltop and Calls From Home.” We can’t always see them, but they are part of our community, too.

A few years ago, with the coal economy on its last legs, a new generation of Appalshop leaders started working with a Jamaican economist named Fluney Hutchinson. Fluney has done development in poor areas across the world, sometimes with the International Monetary Fund.

But he doesn’t work through loans, austerity and government takeovers. He works, basically, through organizing. Or as he puts it: “Strengthening the capacity of residents to exercise voice, agency and ownership over their community affairs is essential to their ability to create communities that they value.”

He recognized Appalshop was already doing this, through radio and theater and other media. But he asked, how could we do more? How could we help build an economy where everyone had voice, agency and ownership? Where we can work and act and vote out of hope for a future we’re working to make, instead of out of fear of a future we feel powerless to stop? […]

Basically, Appalshop would use its resources and relationships to do broad-based organizing. We would build a wide network of grass-roots organizations working to strengthen people’s voice, agency and ownership, starting in Letcher County. Each organization in our network would support everyone else’s work, connect each other with resources, plan projects to bring value and wealth into our communities, and bring together organized people, money and ideas.

What does this look like? It looks like a remote community center getting the support to reopen the longest-running square dance in the state of Kentucky, with guests from around the state and around the country.

It looks like the county volunteer fire departments, led by my buddy Bill, working together to start an annual bluegrass festival that made $10,000 in its first year.

It looks like starting Mountain Tech Media, a new cooperative for-profit corporation, under Appalshop’s roof. And at the same time, working with our regional community and technical college to start a certificate program in tech and media skills — to create a complete community-based pipeline to employment for young people in the area.

It looks like people and groups of all kinds coming together and recognizing that we have power, and together we can build more. That we don’t have to wait to be saved. That we can create markets on a scale to attract the attention of investors — and keep the value of those investments in our community.

It looks like a certain drink at the new Kentucky Mist Moonshine, Letcher County’s first legal still, run by a Republican businessman who’s now a close partner in the Downtown Retail Association we helped found. It involves apple pie moonshine, cider, a little sour mix, cinnamon, sugar and apples. They call it the “Appal Head.” (They made me a free one recently; it was delicious.)

And it looks like the young girl who recently came to a painting party hosted by our youth media institute. She said she’d wanted to come for a while, but she was nervous because she didn’t know anyone. Before she left, she left a note with the Institute’s director: “Thank you, Kate. I have this feeling and I just can’t explain it. But this feels like home.”

At the start of 2017, Appalshop is 48 years in (and still learning, of course). But I think we’re onto something. When we work together to make places where we all feel like we belong, we can feel safe enough to open ourselves to people and ideas we might otherwise fear. When we build a culture and economy based on shared agency, voice and ownership, we can live with dignity and own the value we create. That’s what we’re imagining here in Letcher County, Kentucky.

Can a project started in Letcher County go nationwide? We’re ready. Want to work with us? Let’s talk. We like visitors. Above the doors of our local library, in the words of Letcher County author Harry M. Caudill, is our standing invitation to all: “Come Look for Yourself.”

A Brief Introduction to the Organizing Principles of Appalshop/Roadside Theater

Remarks from the opening plenary of the Appalshop/Imagining America National Institute – July 14-18, 2016.

Facilitator: To start this next session, we want to quickly get on the table several questions that this Institute is making you wonder about.

Audience member: How do you find language to explain the value of the arts to economic development people that doesn't position arts as a value added, like a thing that's nice to have when you get everything else sorted?

Audience member: What's the background on the term "unbounded imagination"?

Audience member: What does the end of poverty look like?

Audience member: How do I apply these methodologies to an urban setting?

Facilitator: Thanks. Now with these questions in mind, we turn to Dudley Cocke, the Artistic Director of Roadside Theater, who will speak to the two questions that frame this Institute: 1) How can arts and culture promote individual voice and collective agency, unbounding a community’s imagination and ambition in order to create the conditions for economic development? 2) How can a community organize itself to build an economy that’s broad-based and sustainable?

Dudley Cocke: For 47 years Appalshop has been testing the proposition that from the personal stories of the people – their emotional, intellectual, and spiritual life – art can arise. And the specificity of that art can connect with people anywhere.

Based on our experience, we are convinced that culture has a fundamental role to play in community economic development, and I will speak briefly about the Community Cultural Development methodology Roadside Theater has developed over three decades of touring across the United States. The knowledge that eventually became codified as our methodology came up through the trial and error of working with rural and urban communities alike for the purpose of helping them develop themselves. A fair share of this development work occurred in cities. For example, in the mid-1990s in Dayton, Ohio, we helped facilitate a cultural development project with 110 community story circles occurring simultaneously over a two year period. The Dayton folks named the project The Enormous Radio. The methodology is always shaped by the local community and its needs, and works equally well in urban and rural settings.

A question I wish to pose for us here at this Institute: How do we tap, activate, and catalyze all of a community’s emotional, intellectual, and spiritual assets for the purpose of inclusive community development toward well-being? This begins to answer the question, “What does the end of poverty look like?” When Roadside says “community,” we typically think of a geographically bounded group of people, which is not to say we don't understand communities of spirit and tradition that are not bounded geographically.

There's an underlying assumption in our work to tap a community's cultural assets: that every community is culturally rich. Economists might point out that such assets may be latent and unrealized. So when we are invited into a community, we enter optimistically, believing in its inherent emotional, spiritual, and intellectual genius. The glass is half-full. So our methodology’s purpose is to make public in the community its own abundance – its vast well-springs of intellectual, emotional, and spiritual creativity waiting to be tapped.

In our wide experience, the biggest barrier communities face to realizing their abundance is exclusion. Few, if any, communities are whole; they are divided, typically by race, class, sexual orientation, religion, and more.

I have a question for you: Can you name a physical space in your community where everyone feels equally welcome?

In touring around the U.S., Roadside artists and producers have encountered many private and semi-private spaces, but for a community to have a genuinely public space where everyone feels equally welcome is rare. To help a community develop public spaces is one of our method’s goals. Here's an example of the problematic. We were working in Choteau, Montana over the course of four years. Choteau, population 1690, is the seat of Teton County. The area’s economy is anchored in cattle ranching and wheat farming. Community members were upset about the loss of their young people to the cities, and the state’s Economic Development Office agreed to sponsor our initial residency. We began with a county-wide oral history and story collection project led by youth. Naturally, the young people were keen to hear hidden and untold stories. From these histories and stories the community members began to imagine performances. Scripts were written and music collected and composed. We began to look for true public spaces for performances, and at first landed on several churches, only to learn even they were regarded as semi-private. Then we settled on the city park with its pleasant band shell. Three weeks before the premiere of the new Choteau musical play, we learned from our Blackfoot partners that the city had built the park on top of their ancestral burial ground. We asked the Blackfoot leaders if this history could be woven into the event, and it was, beginning with a ritual Blackfoot blessing of the grounds. As this anecdote illustrates, our method is not just about public space, but about inclusive community stories performed in those spaces.

Another question I pose to you: Thinking about your own community, do you have a feeling for the full range of stories that individuals tell themselves? Does your community have an official story, and who is left out of that story? Does your community have a cover story, and what's that about? (Of course, being thespians, we’re always looking for narrative tensions and conflict!)

An important goal of our Community Cultural Development method is to help a community create the conditions in which it can better listen to itself in all its multiplicity, complication, nuance, and abundance. Story circles, which each of you participated in this morning, are one of our most important tools.

We know from experience that communities of people across the United States wish to believe in themselves and take charge of their economic and civic futures. Our methodology helps them tap and then distill their inherent intellectual, emotional, and spiritual genius into homegrown artistic expression as a public step toward doing just that.


Thank you.

Performing Our Future: FORUM

PERFORMING OUR FUTURE (POF) is a national arts-based initiative on community and economic development – please see the press release at https://goo.gl/DjHk3Q. POF is a collaboration among Appalshop and its Roadside Theater, Lafayette College’s Economic Empowerment and Global Learning Project (EEGLP), and Imagining America: Artists and Scholars in Public Life (IA). Three initiatives under the banner of POF are currently taking shape for 2016 and 2017: POF FORUM; POF INSTITUTE; and POF RESEARCH.

POF FORUM In 2016 and 2017, the POF Forum will seed dialogue and collaboration around Appalshop’s development of a culture hub in eastern Kentucky. Through the Forum, we seek to make the project’s learning accessible to other performing artists and performing arts organizations nationally.

Fifteen leaders representing the following perspectives will be invited to join the Forum: Performing Artists & Leaders of Performing Arts Organizations; Arts Presenters; Scholars & Community Development Practitioners; and Foundation Officers & Elected Officials.

Diversity will be considered in terms of geography (balancing those in Appalachia and across the country); age (including new leaders); organization types (both flagship cultural institutions and younger organizations, land-grant universities and community colleges, and community development institutions); individuals working at the intersection of fields and disciplines (for example, someone drawing on the arts to develop public health policy); and leaders from key networks (e.g., TCG, AOTR/RUPRI, APAP, ATHE, NALAC). There is a lot going on locally, regionally, nationally, and internationally regarding the role of culture in development; the Forum process will be intentional about finding opportunities for synergy and movement-building among the myriad initiatives presently underway.

The Forum will generate and share new knowledge.

How are performing artists and performing arts organizations:

• helping communities tap their rich cultural assets for economic and civic development?
• sparking and developing entrepreneurship to make such work viable?
• collaborating with colleges in mutually beneficial ways? 
• contributing to field-wide discourse about the role of arts in community development and democracy?

Forum members will probe their own experience and the Appalshop culture hub model to define the pressing issues and describe the innovations most relevant to each of these questions. 

Forum members will have special access to: 

• Unpublished materials (written and in various media) about the Appalshop culture hub;
• Discussions with project leaders virtually via video calls, and in eastern Kentucky in conjunction with public performances, community gatherings, and events that are related to the culture hub;
• Opportunities for creating and publishing new materials about the culture hub.
• The Forum draws on the successful BETSY! Circle of Scholars (https://goo.gl/lQxSBD) created to seed collaboration and dialogue around the recent Roadside/Pregones off-Broadway musical

Heat Map of Roadside's Performances: Researchers at the Economic Empowerment and Global Learning Project at Lafayette College analyzed decades of data from Roadside’s national touring program to create this “heat map.”

Everyone's Viewpoint is Like Part of a Wheel -- College Unbound Interview on Performing Our Future & the Letcher Co. Culture Hub

The College Unbound course “Cultural Activism in the Classroom” interviews Letcher County Culture Hub leader Gwen Johnson and Performing Our Future lead organizer Ben Fink. They discuss their asset-based approach to community organizing and the ways in which they “reach people where they’re at instead of telling them what to do”

Making a Rural Culture Hub

Performing Our Future lead organizer Ben Fink delivers the keynote presentation at the 2018 Rural Talks to Rural Conference in Blyth, Ontario:

https://www.facebook.com/RuralCreativity/videos/185562792363386/

Planning for Equitable Development by Artistic & Cultural Advocates
By PolicyLink

Roadside’s partners at the national research and action institute PolicyLink presented to the Performing Our Future coalition in 2018 about their framework for the role of cultural work in equitable development, including in the case of Appalshop/Roadside and the Letcher County Culture Hub.

Performing Our Future Interviews with Letcher Co. Culture Hub Leaders (Video)

In 2017, researchers from Cornell University and the national public humanities network Imagining America conducted interviews with community leaders in the Letcher County Culture Hub, to explore how participating in Performing Our Future had changed the story they told about themselves, their communities, and the possibilities for the future of Letcher County.

Logos: Performing Our Future Coalition

Economic Empowerment in Appalachia (Video)

Participants in the Lafayette College Economic Empowerment and Global Learning Project reflect on their collaboration with Appalshop/Roadside during the first years of Performing Our Future.

Mining Beyond Coal -- Presentation by EEGLP at Lafayette College

Researchers at the Economic Empowerment and Global Leadership Project at Lafayette College presented to the Performing Our Future coalition in 2018 about their work with Appalshop/Roadside in Letcher County, including the successes and shortcomings of the Letcher County Culture Hub.

Hands Across the Hills Bridges Political Divides (Video)

WGBY (Massachusetts Public Television) reports on the Hands Across the Hills project, started after the 2016 election by the Letcher County Culture Hub and newfound allies in Leverett, Massachusetts. Three years after the election, Letcher County and Leverett residents came together again to work through the tough conversations and find common ground.

Discovering & Debunking Divides in the Heart of Coal Country -- Harvard Law School Podcast on Performing Our Future

http://hnmcp.law.harvard.edu/hnmcp/podcast/thanks-for-listening-ep4-discovering-and-debunking-divides-in-the-heart-of-kentucky-coal-country/

“Divides aren’t natural. They’re imposed. . . .We’re looking to build a bigger neighborhood.”

Ben Fink

In this episode, journey with us to Letcher County, Kentucky—the heart of Appalachian coal country. We’ll examine both the reality of divides that exist where we might not expect them, and the fallacy of divides we create by accepting stereotypes about others—and about ourselves.

Our guest is Ben Fink, an ensemble member of Roadside Theater in Whitesburg, Kentucky. Roadside Theater supports community members’ efforts to design their own solutions to their own problems—by bringing people together to tell their stories, listen to the unique stories of others, and create community and economic opportunity through theater.

Ben comes at the notion of “divides”—and how to bridge them—from a perspective we’ve not yet explored. He challenges us to rethink the very notion of divides. As he sees it, we’ve been sold a false narrative that we are a nation of Red-Blue, Urban-Rural, North-South, Us-Them. Sure, divides exist—at a national level and in our neighborhoods. But when we let divides define us, we give up an important source of power—our shared experiences and commonalities. In this episode, Ben shares stories of what is possible when communities reclaim that power and create their future.