Power the Narrative Through Art
This semester, I was co-project manager of "Power the Narrative Through Art" under the Inclusive Excellence Fellowship at Swarthmore College. Through the development of a project concept, my co-project manager and I articulated four main pillars of our mission (see image to the left). The next few sections will overview skills gained and lessons learned.
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I. Event Planning and Facilitation |
We created a Book Club series for Art, where a guest chooses. art they wish to discuss and guides a conversation around it. This initiative demanded organization in picking a host (ultimately developing a system in which a guest host would nominate the next one), guiding discussions about expectations in this role and what art they might want to present, designing and disseminating advertising materials (email, instagram), facilitating the event and providing/asking for feedback.
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II. Collaboration and Delegation
Through constant communication with my co-project manager and weekly meetings with our project advisor, it has been a semester of collaboration and delegation. As a team, we began learning each other's particular strengths and delegating the work in order to pull from them most efficiently. To name a few: Chandra, in conversation with the leadership team of inclusive excellence, aided us with focus on administrative details (budgeting, deadlines); Sarah's experience in film made her the clear leader of our interview initiative of underrepresented faculty in the arts. My strength in communication naturally pushed me to scheduling and leading meetings with various faculty, staff and students involved in our initiatives. Overall, while we succeeded in delegating much of the work, we stayed flexible and adaptable in jumping in wherever necessary.
III. Research and Outreach
One of our main goals this semester was to create a collection of accessible resources of art (film, tv, visual art, podcasts, performances...) uplifting marginalized artists or promoting social justice to eventually share with the Swarthmore community. For this initiative, we especially wanted to center resources that the community itself valued, thus needed to establish platforms that would gain traction and allow for this outreach and interaction. For this, we created an instagram page, an email, and google-form through which community members could submit art suggestions. One way in which we were particularly successful with outreach was through the nomination of guest hosts for our Book Club meetings, who then brought their circles into the realm of our project, who continued to spread the word. To complement the resources from outreach, my co-project manager researched resources that uplifted artists from marginalized communities or centered themes of social justice.
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@powerthenarrative | [email protected]