Growing Systems of Success

Harry van der Velde, Dasaratha Rama, Felicia Young and myself convened to explore Felicia’s journey on the path of using art to enact social change to save a network of community gardens in New York City. Her journey takes her from New York, to India to explore some of her ancestral roots, and back again to New York, where she has been at the heart of a 3 decade long movement to inspire and engage community members to create the change they know is needed. In this case, the project began as a need to protect community gardens from the voracious jaws of capitalism, long before the critical impasse of climate change was on our radar.

EarthCelebrations: the power of art and social change Photocredit: William Bouassa Jr.

Felicia’s work is now focused on climate change, and the very real and grounded applications of the work she has already done to enliven and protect community gardens, and to extend the work into our current context of the climate emergency we are facing. So without further ado, here is our session — enjoy!

If you want to know more about Felicia’s work or if you live in New York and want to participate, check out a bit more about the Earth Celebrations project right here. To go deeper into Dasaratha Rama’s work, we invite you to check out her tools and learning journey on her website or join her facebook group.

I’m a media experimentalist, and am pleased to work with Rama by ‘playing it forward’. This means experimental play, using tools to grow our capacities as a network. With that in mind, I include a ‘howto’ (thanks Sam Hahn!) for creating peer to peer media as a practice. Thanks so much for reading, sharing and, if you like, clapping for this work!

Felicia’s power: graphic art by Harry van der Velde

Thanks so much to Harry van der Velde, rama.dasaratha, and Felicia Young for playing it forward!

This process, open source styles:

• find someone whos work inspires you
• ask them if they would be open to share their work with you in a recorded session
• connect using your preferred video conference software — we used zoom
• choose person to record
• consider ‘good beginnings, and good endings’. This means that both people are ready, know who will introduce the piece and as you come to the end of your session you have a wrap up, with appreciation and next steps
• ‘shoot for the edit’: if you are the recorder, count down so the participants are synchronized and connected going into the session, and give a beat at the end of the session before you stop recording. The goal is to have a complete piece that doesn’t need editing
• warm up with a check in, decide the flow and focus of the session; choose who will record, and who will speak first
• if you are following a discovery series format, one person will explore the other’s work, and then switch roles
• aa checkout is very useful for this work. This is a harvest of the learning, and is rich because we are still in the flow of it all. I record the checkins and checkouts as separate segments… and often there are amazing nuggets in them
• make an agreement about where to upload the media; make explicit if you want to review it first, what level of privacy or openness you would like to use; if you want to share it broadly, within a small group, or privately for development purposes
• Upload; gather any links or images you may want to share with it
• Write a blog embedding the video, links and images. You can pull a frame from the embedded media for a banner, or you can hack a banner from photos of the participants by laying them out on your computer and taking a screenshot; and of course you can be creative with what you may have
• if the person wants to review the media first, wait for signoff; share the draft blog with them for any changes or additions; then share as agreed!