Hi friends!
Through our work this summer of making potions for cultural equity, ArtForce Iowa and Jonny Stax discovered mutual vision, purpose, and values. The vision is to mobilize Iowa’s creative force of artists, educators, healers, organizers, and entrepreneurs to integrate healing, creativity, and justice into the fabric of our daily lives. The purpose is to support cultural transformation toward more justice, equity, diversity, and intersectionality (J.E.D.I.) in our practices, institutions, and broader social systems. After spending the summer brewing Potions for Cultural Equity (www.jonnystax.com/potions), culminating in a workshop at the Iowa Arts Summit in August, we felt called to get the potionmaking process to hard-to-reach youth. These are youth beyond the margins who are so disconnected from mainstream methods of service delivery that they aren’t often included in the list of marginalized youth. This list includes incarcerated and hospitalized youth, youth in the foster care system and justice-involved youth whose parents are incarcerated, immigrant and refugees youth, as well as others’ recently displaced in Iowa. To reach these youth, we will need to reach the teaching artists and youth workers who serve them, many of whom come from marginalized communities themselves.
What is J.E.D.I. Training for Youth Workers?
An arts-based, Iowa-grown training within a supportive environment for ongoing learning and practice development towards justice, equity, diversity, and inclusion/intersectionality. We are beginning with a pilot training co-designed with participants in Spring 2021 to apply ourselves and our practices toward dismantling racism’s effects on how we understand and organize ourselves.
Who should take this training?
We are seeking youth workers, educators, and teaching artists throughout Iowa. ArtForce Iowa and our collaborator Jonny Stax Creations are committed to creating a learning and practice infrastructure for Iowa artists, educators, healers, and organizers. We are seeking students who come from: divested rural and urban communities, immigrant/refugee, LGBTQIA+, and BIPOC communities. We are also seeking staff at youth-serving organizations who serve youth often not reached by arts programming. These settings include detention centers, placements, shelters, hospitals, immigrant-serving, refugee-serving and resettlement organizations. We want to ensure we all have space for healing as well as exploring how we might integrate justice and creativity into our practices, no matter what communities we serve.
What does J.E.D.I. training look like?
J.E.D.I. training will begin with a four-part series (90-minutes each) that introduces frameworks and language to create a baseline knowledge base for participants. Sessions will be facilitated by Quenna Barrett, Alyssa Vera Ramos and Nik Zaleski, who will lead creative exercises to explore justice, equity, diversity and inclusion/intersectionality (J.E.D.I.) in our work and lives. We need to understand how we fit within systems of inequity and how to engage with youth to disrupt those systems using creative means with healing modalities.
Nik Zaleski is a theater artist, facilitator and cultural strategist rooted in the reproductive justice movement. She holds a Bachelor of Science in Gender Studies and Performance Studies from Northwestern University as well as a Master of Arts in Interdisciplinary Studies from DePaul University, where she combined Public Health and Theater Directing coursework in the MFA directing program. Professionally, she has worked as the Education and Arts Justice Director for the Illinois Caucus for Adolescent Health (ICAH) and as the Director of Sisters Empowering Sisters, a reproductive justice and leadership group for young women and nonbinary youth at the Chicago Girls' Coalition. Nik was the Founding Artistic Director for For Youth Inquiry (now a program of ICAH), which tours participatory plays about sexual health and sexual violence. She is a Founding Curator of Swarm Artist Residency, which brings interdisciplinary artists together for retreats in the midwest, as well as a creator of Ag47, an artist mentorship collective that serves girls in the Logan Square neighborhood of Chicago. She is an Ensemble Member of Sojourn Theatre, and a company member of Erasing the Distance and For Youth Inquiry. She currently consults on organizational development, arts-based strategy and storytelling for various organizations through her cultural strategy company, Murmur. Previous and current clients include Social Movements + Innovation Lab, Center for Reproductive Rights, Illinois Caucus for Adolescent Health, AdaptNation, Planned Parenthood Federation of America, Arizona State University, and Northwestern University.
Quenna Lené Barrett is a theater artist+practitioner, developing programs to amplify teen + community voice and hold space to rehearse, tell, and change the stories of their lives. She is a company member with the Illinois Caucus for Adolescent Health’s For Youth Inquiry company, Associate Artist with Pivot Arts, co-curator for Theatre on the Lake, artist-in-residence at Free Street Theatre, and is the Associate Director of Education at the Goodman Theatre.
Quenna received her BFA from NYU Tisch Drama, MA in Applied Theatre from the University of Southern California, and is pursuing an educational doctorate (EdD) in Educational Theatre at NYU Steinhardt. Recent directing and performing credits include: Don’t Go with Sojourn Theatre (ensemble), ob•li•ves•cence, The Theatre School at DePaul (Devised; Director); Free Street Theatre's 50 in 50 (Devised, Director); Eclipsed at Pegasus (AD), Radio Golf at Court Theatre (u/s), and This Boat Called My Body and First with FYI (Devised, Director). Quenna has also received residencies and awards from DCASE and the Santa Fe Art Institute. Quenna is an alumnus of Public Allies Chicago, has participated in: the Chicago Young Nonprofit Professional Network’s Leadership Institute, Ingenuity’s Outreach Collective Impact Panel as Panel Chair, the Jane Addams Hull House Cities of Peace Harm & Healing Teach-In Series, and Chicago Freedom School’s Young Leaders for Justice Institute, and received the 2015 Pegasus Award for Relentless Innovation and Professional Courage in Education from the Collaborative for Perpetual Innovation. Continuing to build the world she wants to see/live in, she is developing practices of poetic and participatory performance, and is re-writing the Declaration of Independence.
Alyssa Vera Ramos is a theatre maker, space holder, director, and culture worker dedicated to dreaming a liberated world-- and practicing living into that world every chance we get. Over the past decade, she has directed, devised, and co-written many plays (and workshops) for many audiences throughout Chicago, with tours to Austin, New Orleans, Detroit, and more. Alyssa is the Artistic Director of For Youth Inquiry (FYI) Performance Company, housed at Illinois Caucus for Adolescent Health, where she also co-facilitates the youth organizing cohort. FYI creates original, participatory theatre experiences for reproductive justice and to support the sexual health, rights, and identities of young people. She is also a founding member of femmes of color artistic collective, FEMelanin (documented in Ensemble-Made Chicago and featured at the LTC Sin Fronteras TYA Festival) and an organizer of Swarm Artist Residency, where she focuses on curating healing and racial justice experiences for Midwestern-based artists. Alyssa’s current work includes creating You Can’t Cover the Sky With Your Hands with her mother, novelist Marisel Vera, a play about reproductive oppression against Puerto Ricans, threaded with ancestral memory and musical resistance. She holds a Bachelor’s Degree from Northwestern University and is a graduate of the University of Michigan School of Social Work Sexual Health Certificate Program.
Adria Husband has nearly 20 years experience in educational leadership, operations management, and organizational development. Adria has served as an advocate for racial and social justice throughout her professional career, from orchestrating systemic social-emotional development in students grades K-12 across twenty large urban school districts to creating and implementing policy and practices around the equitable distribution of educational resources to historically underserved communities in Chicago.
Adria excels in facilitating organizational culture shifts, problem identification, and creative process design. Adria’s most recent work has included a participatory grantmaking strategy redesign project centering the voices and experiences of leaders of color, and coaching/consulting around culturally-responsive practices in program delivery and workplace practices.
Adria is passionate about bringing healing and restoration into equity and justice work. Adria is a coach, facilitator, mediator, gift cultivator, and lifelong learner of the human experience. Adria is the founder of D.I.V.A.s Middle School Mentoring Program which focuses on creating space to explore and develop the identity, voice, self-confidence, and unique gifts of young women of color in Chicago. Adria is mother to a teenage daughter and a boisterous Lhasa Apso puppy. She is a writer and poet in her downtime.
Teaching artists and youth workers interested in integrating art-based practices will learn and practice ways to foster feelings of competence, autonomy, and community among individual youth artists. Sessions will include affinity group break out time for Black participants, non-Black POC participants, and White participants, with time to come together to debrief collective learning. Sessions will be grounded in the same core values of anti-racism learning and practice, with separate learning and practice objectives for each affinity group:
Black affinity group: 1) Map pathways to healing, rest, and self-care; 2) Provide a space to grieve; and 3) Practice interrupting racism.
Non-black POC affinity group: 1) Identify and reckon with anti-Blackness ingrained in our own racial and ethnic communities and personal behaviors; 2) Navigate one’s own positionality in the world, in this moment, 3) Practice interrupting racism.
White affinity group: 1) Understand the habits of white supremacy that we hold; 2) Create a plan of action for sustainable movement building; 3) Practice accountability to harm (apologize and act); 4) Practice interrupting racism.
Participants will then be equipped with a tool they can use in their practices - Potions for Cultural Equity - that blends storytelling, powersharing, and artmaking around justice themes. Participants will be invited to ongoing learning and practice spaces where they can bring their challenges, successes, and lessons learned into a supportive environment. There they can access group and individual learning and growth opportunities.
The primary art goal for this training program is to build educators’, teaching artists’, and youth workers’ skills integrating justice conversations into their practices using creative methods with a healing modality.
When there is demand and resources, we will offer a second 4-workshop series to take students to deeper levels.
Support provided by the Iowa Arts Council, a division of the Iowa Department of Cultural Affairs and the National Endowment for the Arts.
