CATALYST INITIATIVE ROUND 2
Mark Strandquist, an artist, activist, and educator, worked with the Legal Aid Justice Center's JustChildren Program— Virginia's largest children's law program, and ART 180— an organization that provides art-based workshops for youth. Their work together focused on how intentional arts-based training and strategic partnerships can create a container for incarcerated youth to publicly communicate their needs and perspectives in spaces where their voices are often silent. Their story over a year of collaboration is one of using youth-created art to educate civic leaders and policymakers, co-designing an arts-based training program with the Richmond Police Department to reduce the number of youth arrests, and inviting public investment in developing strategies that help make their communities safe, just, and whole.
Richmond, VA Center for Performance and Civic Practice RICHMOND - i
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Contents The Partners
2
The Impulse
4
The Belief
5
The Project: Performing
Statistics 6 Impact 12 Next Steps
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Training and Community Forum
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THE PARTNERS
Mark Strandquist and Art 180
Legal Aid Justice Center
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The Partners
Mark Strandquist is an artist and cultural organizer who
The Legal Aid Justice Center's JustChildren Program
has spent years using art as a vehicle for connecting
is Virginia's largest children's law program. They utilize
diverse communities to build empathy and support for
a range of strategies including individual representation,
social justice movements. At the core of his practice
community education, organizing, coalition building,
is the belief that those most impacted by the criminal
policy advocacy and litigation to ensure that Virginia’s
justice system (incarcerated individuals, their family
most vulnerable young people receive the services
members, and those in reentry) are the experts society
and support they need to lead successful lives in their
needs to listen to, and that by connecting those directly
communities. The “Educate Every Child” campaign is
affected with a multitude of community experts and
aimed at stemming the school to prison pipeline.
political stakeholders, we can create change on personal and policy levels. His projects include: working with
ART 180 creates and provides art-related programs
incarcerated youth to create their own police training
for young people living in challenging circumstances,
manuals (which are being used to train every police
encouraging personal and community change through
officer in Richmond, VA); working with incarcerated
self-expression.
men, women and teens to design interactive public art installations that have engaged thousands of viewers
Mission
across the United States; and organizing teams of
ART 180 gives young people the chance to express
lawyers, artists, and formerly incarcerated individuals
themselves through art, and to share their stories with
to help facilitate free legal clinics that have cleared the
others.
records of thousands of individuals. Vision Jeree Thomas worked as an attorney with the
ART 180’s work with young people will turn lives and
JustChildren Program of the Legal Aid Justice Center
communities around 180 degrees.
in Richmond, Virginia. She represents incarcerated youth experiencing education and reentry issues. Jeree received her B.A. from the College of William & Mary and her law degree from the University of Virginia Law School. Jeree has served as the co-chair of the Young Lawyers Conference Commission on Women & Minorities in the Legal Profession. She also served as the Chair of Madison House Board of Directors, a non-profit that coordinates over 3,000 UVA student volunteers. In June 2015, Jeree was selected as a National Juvenile Justice Network, Youth Justice Leadership Institute Fellow. In July, 2016, Jeree joined the Campaign for Youth Justice as Policy Director.
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The Impulse 10,000 In the state of Virginia, there are over ten thousand youth incarcerated each year.
40% 40% of youth incarcerated are between the ages of 8 and 15 years old.
70% 70% of youth incarcerated are rearrested after 3 years.
$140,000 It costs the state over $140,000 to incarcerate one youth for one year.
$14,000 It costs the state only $14,000 to educate them. While African-American youth represent only about 20% of the youth population in Virginia, African-American youth comprise: 42.5% of all arrested youth 52% of youth detained 69.8% of youth committed
Sources: www.performingstatistics.org and www.justicepolicy.org 4 - RICHMOND
The Belief
Prisons don’t work. Communities must work together to reinvest in youth, keep families together, and stop supporting punitive systems that are expensive, outdated, and ineffective.
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THE PROJECT: PERFORMING STATISTICS
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The Project: Performing Statistics Prior to the start of his Catalyst Initiative project, Mark had been working with Jeree and the JustChildren Program, using art as a vehicle for empowering Richmond communities most impacted by mass incarceration to become advocates for social change. Through a collaboration with ART 180 and the JustChildren Program, Mark previously hosted an art and advocacy initiative over the course of two summers with a group of incarcerated youth who received permission to leave their detention facility three days per week and travel to Atlas, ART 180’s teen art center, for a series of art workshops. In these workshops, the youth, along with local artists and legal experts, were asked to re-imagine the juvenile justice system. Guided by artists and mentors, the youth created training materials for law enforcement that included ideas for a re-imagined relationship between these youth and police, one that resulted in fewer arrests. The youth created artwork for a series of media campaigns, mobile exhibitions, and community marches that would carry these young voices out into the public. In August 2015, Mark and Jeree traveled to Chicago, Illinois to attend the Catalyst Initiative convening. They spent two days with CPCP staff strategizing how to expand existing community partnerships and provide opportunities for policymakers and police officers to directly interact with these voices of incarcerated youth.
ONE OF THE WORKSHOP ACTIVTIES
The youth worked with a variety of artists
How can we keep kids free?
including filmmakers, poets, stencil artists,
What do you and your community need to be
woodworkers, and photographers to create work in response to prompts such as:
successful? What do you need to stay out of the system? What do youth in your community need to never end up in the system?
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The youth-created artwork was first shown in a public exhibit at ART 180's youth art gallery. The focus for this work is: attacking the school-to-prison pipeline by reducing the amount of youth arrests building trust between police, youth and families encouraging officers and the court to use, recommend and fund diversion programs more robustly, keeping young people out of the culture of incarceration whenever possible.
“So we can speak for them even if they physically can’t be there to speak for themselves. Many of these youth are still incarcerated.” — MARK
“I’m 15 years old, I’m dedicated, I’m 15 years old, I want to help my mom, 15 years old, no one will hire me.” — EXCERPT FROM A SHORT FILM CREATED BY A YOUTH IN INCARCERATION
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CHORAL POEM WRITTEN AND PERFORMED BY INCARCERATED YOUTH
WE
"When I close my eyes, I see myself in detention, I see myself dream I see myself free"
LISTEN TO THE POEM HERE: HTTPS://SOUNDCLOUD.COM/COMMUNITY-IDEA-STATIONS/WE-POEM
Source: www.performingstatistics.org
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IMPACT
IN OCTOBER 2015, PERFORMING STATISTICS
“We w Not Re No
gathered youth advocates and allies together for a public Justice Parade in support of incarcerated youth. “We took hundreds of pieces of art that the teens had made, reproductions, and turned them into a mobile art exhibit that we marched from the General Assembly building to ART 180, our core partner, to our exhibition there. There were huge photo banners that we were marching down the street, each with a portrait of one of the youth, the teens had written protest chants, we had musicians and hundreds of people singing these chants that they had written, such as 'Invest in us, Don't arrest us.' It was a huge moment. We later met police chief Alfred Durham who saw the exhibit and was inspired. Next Monday their entire new recruit class will spend 4 hours in our exhibit and get trained by our team on police/teen interaction. We'll be using the police manual the youth created to talk about how they can build stronger trust with youth in the city.” — MARK
“Members of the police department said it was one of the most powerful training moments they’ve ever had.” — MARK
Chief Durham became a key partner and helped ART 180 obtain a $500,000 grant from the Robins Foundation. Around this time and inspired by the project, his department initiated a sentencing diversion program that would keep kids out of the system. According to Mark, Chief Durham said that this new program had been inspired by the creative work and the statistics it brought to life. As the Performing Statistics team began a deeper partnership with Richmond police to expand the next phase of officer training, they continued to build a coalition of community partners, stakeholders, and allies invested in this work.
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Protest chant created by youth in incarceration www.performingstatistics.org
want education! t incarceration! ehabilitation! ot separation!”
“The police training was a huge moment. The police chief is committed to working with us to go beyond recruits and start training all their officers and that we’re hoping to do in the spring.” — MARK
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Performing Statistics also facilitated additional exhibitions of the youth created work, led public rallies, engaged in community dialogues, and shared recorded messages from incarcerated youth for the General Assembly.
“One legislator mentioned our presence at the budget hearing and also at a committee meeting that what really stood out was hearing the voices of the young people and asking the Department of Justice how they will look at creating these buildings as a result of hearing these voices. Others mentioned that something like this had never happened before, so hearing that people are actually listening to these voices is great.” — JEREE
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Mark, Jeree and ART 180 collaborators
began conversations with Chief Durham about expanding the training to include more officers of the Richmond police force. Pam Korza and Barbara Schaeffer Bacon, of Animating Democracy, led impact and evaluation efforts for the Center for Performance and Civic Practice, and worked with the Performing Statistics team and Richmond police department on evaluation strategies to help them communicate outcomes and create sustainable support and buy-in with funders and community stakeholders.
“How do we create an evaluation for the police training? How can we quantify and use that when we are presenting to hold trainings in other places? How to package that information and say ‘Here’s why our training has value.’” — JEREE
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CHALLENGES
WI T H T H E S C ALE OF THE PROJE CT GROWING beyond the small team’s expectations, concerns about how to balance project expansion with individual and organizational capacity began to arise. An additional challenge was making sure the training did not just change knowledge of the juvenile justice system and perceptions of the youth by the officers, it was to develop a model that resulted in changes in actions and behaviors when the officers were on the streets.
"The scale of the project is huge, we’ve had to take a step back and see what opportunities to agree to. There are so many incredible opportunities, we’re so passionate about getting the information out there, it’s so critical. We want to do everything, but we have to be thoughtful so that it’s manageable. The core of the project is working with these kids." — JEREE
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NEXT STEPS T H E P E R F O R M I N G S TAT I S T I C S T E A M AND the Richmond Police Department set the next round of trainings for August 2016, a year after their first training with another round of creative projects, including audio and video work. Additional partners were included in the planning, such as the Rise for Youth coalition. Four days of trainings were scheduled, culminating in a public forum held on August 26, 2016. Pam Korza of Animating Democracy and Michael Rohd from the Center for Performance and Civic Practice worked with the Performing Statistics team to support this event. Mark asked Michael to help design and facilitate the event. Both Michael and Pam joined the Performing Statistics team in Richmond for the Public Forum.
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POLICE TRAINING + COMMUNITY FORUM
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AUGUST 26TH, 2016
Police Training and Community Forum Morning: Police Office Training I attend the last of the officer trainings of the week. The heart of the morning is a gallery walk officers take amidst visual, video, audio and spatial art created by incarcerated youth about their experiences before and amidst life behind bars. The officers split into small groups and visit different stations at the exhibit; they have a facilitator who guides them through conversations about their responses. The art is powerful. Biographical panels with gorgeous images and autobiographical text, call-in phone lines with hushed messages, a built-to-scale jail cell with wooden planks that have poems young people wrote and burned into the wood themselves. After each group has rotated through every station, the whole group circles up and shares observations. Officers speak of empathy; they speak of the need for relationship-building. They speak of the tension between understanding someone’s story while upholding the law with its, at times, seemingly limited latitude for officer discretion and behavior. Officers speak guardedly, but also candidly, growing more animated with each other and the facilitators. They use the art to make points; they use the art to reference their own histories; they use the art as a way to evoke something they can’t quite speak but can allude to through a feeling summoned briefly by an image or sound or voice. They use the art to reflect, to discuss values and behavior… the art makes a space for difficult, complex expression and connection.
Afternoon: Community Partnership Building With Pam Korza of Animating Democracy, we spend an hour interviewing the police chief, Alfred Durham. He was a DC Police Officer for nearly 30 years, leaving his post there as Assistant Chief to run Richmond’s Department. He speaks of his commitment to transforming both public perception of law enforcement and the school-to-prison pipeline. He has been at almost every training this Excerpt from Michael Rohd’s Field Notes Source: www.thecpcp.org
week, asked his command team to be there, and has stated his desire to get as many of his 700 officers as possible through the process. RICHMOND - 19
Evening: Public Forum
Teenagers, young adult activists and police officers arrive for a pre-meeting before the Public Forum. I describe for them the process we will go through together — the structure of the event is a set of five table groups comprised of youth, one officer, and one youth advocate who will sit together and work through a sequence I will lead while they are observed by ten people surrounding them.
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6P M
I look out and see over 100 people crowded into the room — one of the most visibly diverse gatherings I have ever seen at a forum like this one. Art 180 has worked diligently with community organizers and partner organizations to bring a complex audience of participants to this event. Diverse generationally, racially, in outward appearance on so many levels… they seem both expectant and slightly anxious. Both light and heavy in spirit.
6:15PM
Time to start. Trey and Chief Durham welcome everyone, and describe goals for the evening — to collectively break down stereotypes, build relationships and strategize how there can be less youth arrests in Richmond. Mark then talks about the art, and the process of working with local incarcerated youth to create it. He shows two short videos made in the summer workshop, and closes with an audio track made by a whole group of his young collaborators. He then turns it over to me.
6:35—7:40PM
Each table gets a one-paragraph scenario describing an incident where a young person ends up getting arrested. The scenarios are not Richmond-specific, and they are not real events — though they have been researched and feel true in this local and national moment. The goal of the activity will be for the table to interrogate what happened and rewrite the script so that what results is not an arrest, but an opportunity for all parties involved to move forward with their day and their life rather than enter the judicial system. Step by step, I walk them through a series of 5 and 7 minute increments during which they have collective assignments including dialogue, reflection, writing lines for their new version of the encounter, and feedback from their own circle, and the other one as well. They work as 5 teams.
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The room is focused, playful, serious — at times a table and its outer circle disagree, even vigorously — but nothing less than civil and collaborative exchange occurs throughout the session. At one point, Chief Durham, at his table, proposes a solution based on a respectful, casual approach that an officer might take when dealing with the young person in the scenario — adults around his table nod. But a young man smiles and says to him, "Chief, how do you think that’s gonna work? You think you smile and I’m just gonna trust you, and it’s all gonna be ok?" The chief says, "Well, it's just my solution, it will work for me, I can’t say it would work for every officer." And the young man, still smiling, says, "that wouldn’t work for you, not with me it wouldn’t." And the conversation continues — no one drops out. They talk about history and perception and trust… and after just under an hour, each table has a brief script they’ve created. I call everyone together, and each table has two folks stand and read the script. In most cases, the youth reads the adult role, and the police officer reads the youth role. These scripted encounters portray a range of hopefulness, seeming fantasy, considered strategies and communication styles. The room responds after each one...The art they have made together, the possibilities they have imagined together, these are energizing a dialogue that, as we move towards closing, people speak to with emotion.
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More on the Forum We finish by passing two microphones around and inviting people to finish the sentence, "Something I'll remember from tonight is:
"That people are willing to sit down at the table and talk about different ways of addressing the problem instead of coming up with a one size fits all solution.” — COMMUNITY MEMBER
“Right now I’m speaking as an officer — it’s extremely important that each individual officer build a relationship with everyone in the community they serve. That is the most important part. Whether it’s a juvenile, an adult, a teacher, whoever you are, a homeless man, you must build a relationship within your community because you are the people we serve. If we build that relationship, when I go ask her to move, she already knows me, she’s gonna say, “you got it”. — RICHMOND POLICE OFFICER
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RIPPLES The Performing Statistics team, partnering with the Richmond Police Department continue to be in conversation about further opportunities for every single police officer to attend the youthcreated, arts-based training. Conversations are taking place to potentially expand this training throughout the state of Virginia.
“Talk to police And keep the youth free! Mass incarceration won’t change our situation Invest in us! Invest in us!” Protest chants created by youth in incarceration Source: www.performingstatistics.org RICHMOND - 25
The Catalyst Initiative is an action research initiative — a model for supporting, advancing, and learning from innovative artist and community partner collaborations in order to reveal new possibilities for artistic contributions to community problem-solving and growth.
CENTER FOR PERFORMANCE + CIVIC PRACTICE © 2017 T H E C P C P. O R G THE ANDREW W.
MELLON FOUNDATION
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