Something I am really excited about in this course is definitely the group project. We are finding some connections to the key components of community development and this is really helpful for me. I am a visual learner so seeing how the components fits into our project is helping me see the material. especially some of the articles like the placemaking, really hit home with our project and then after we made those connections I was able to make sense of the material. I am starting to understand that community development includes more than just the local community in a city, but also the community that is developed by the creation of a space or place.

The only thing I am having difficulty with right now is just understanding all the material, because majority of our learning is auditory or reading, I need visual examples like videos for my brain to make connections, sometimes the case studies help when they are simple,but sometimes I have difficulty associating with them which makes my understanding of the principles confusing. If you have any advice it would be much appreciated.

Hello Friends,

I have set up a Doodle survey with three hour time slots for study sessions on Sunday the 20th, Monday the 21st, Wednesday the 23rd and Thursday the 24th.

Please follow the link to the Doodle survey and select all time brackets, that work with your schedule.

The meal I am preparing accommodates peers who are vegan. Please let me know if you have any food allergies.

Feel free to text or email me if you have any question. My cell phone number is 845-705-7499.

LINK:

https://doodle.com/poll/sep6hbkrmyqnribw

Kind regards,

Rose

Clackamas County 18-21 Cultural Plan

In the Rules for Radicals book Saul Alinsky describes a conversation with a group of “Canadian Indians” that was recorded by the National Film Board of Canada (page 110 and 111.)  I was curious and think I found the footage noted in the book.  If you’re interested, I think it’s worth watching.  Saul Alinsky talks like he writes, and many of the points made in the book are brought out in this footage.

While reading the book I couldn’t help but image Saul Alinsky’s personality and style of speech.   This video confirms exactly what I imagined.

You know the saying, it’s better late than never.  After struggling to post last Wednesday and not being successful, I set the idea of blogging aside until I had more time to figure out how the system functions.  I made several failed attempts and finally read the entire string of emails much more carefully.  Thank you Molly for the instructions.  Success!

Many of you know I’m in the process of transitioning from life in the corporate world with the goal of working for a nonprofit.  I enrolled at U of O with a general sense of where I’m wanting my career to go but didn’t fully understand the universe of options.  During Winter quarter Doug Blandy recognized my interest in using cultural development as a tool to strengthen my community, but I didn’t have the vocabulary to put my interest in those terms.  I don’t remember ever seeing the phrase “community cultural development” before registering for this class, and never imagined or understood the depth of research on the subject.  I’m thankful Doug recommended I take this class.

My interest stems from having witnessed the devastation that results when a dominant culture attempts to strip away the very essence of another culture. To borrow the terminology from Paula Freire, I have seen the native community in Alaska discard the status of “object” and reclaim the role of “subject.”  Alaska Natives have taken control of important aspects of life, such as economic development, health care, and cultural preservation and rejected being dependent on the Bureau of Indian Affairs or the Indian Health Service.  I never realized the effort by Alaska Native leaders to take responsibility for solving the community’s is properly labeled “community cultural development.”  My eyes are open!

I have been learning a lot about community cultural development recently from Winter and Spring term this year. It guided me in adding a minor in Disability Studies to my undergraduate degree. This term, I am taking a class called Living Theater. It is made up of community members with disabilities, volunteers who have experience in theatre, and university students. We are collaborating our ideas and stories that will turn into a performance for our final project. In our readings from Arlene Goldbard in chapter 5, she shares about Boal’s approaches using theatre to create dialogue with people from the community and providing a public place to express their issues and concerns. I really connected to this part in the book because I see similar connections in my theatre class.

Bronwyn Buffalino

I am a theater director, which means I am a story teller.  I am greatly concerned about the balance between truth and theatricality.  I want to make art that is artistically stunning and equally grounded in truth.  I also believe that being a trained artist is a privilege.  With that privilege comes responsibility to respond to my current time and place through my medium of theater.  I don’t identify as an activist, but see my work as community cultural development.  I look to my community to ask; what do we care about?  What do we fear?  What are our questions and curiosities right now?  I am a facilitator constructing a platform to project these concerns.

I am terrified of misrepresentation.  I never want the story of my project to be associated with exploitation, appropriation or misinformation.  I want the community perspective that I am sharing to be rooted in the truth of that community to where members feel that they are accurately represented.  Learning the tools of inviting, collaborating, and active listening will help me grasp with more authenticity the stories of my community.  With authenticity, I can more accurately stand by my stories and promote conversation throughout my community.

In all honesty, my understanding of community cultural development is still ruminating. I feel myself holding a new role in this class; one that is more introspective and reflective than the more conversationally engaged role  I usually feel comfortable playing. I think this new role informs my approach to community cultural development moving forward. Community Cultural Development seems to be an inaccurate way to describe our work, in that it implies an imposition of our into a cultural to make it better in a way that we see fit. Community Cultural Consensus Reanimation, perhaps, feels to more aptly capture my thoughts on the role I will play in this field. I feel myself as a service provider and coordinator. Community Cultural Development persons serve to revitalize, preserve, advocate for, and/or shift presentation of culture in their community.