Arlene Goldbard’s keynote address, workshop and one-on-one consultations profoundly affected participants at the National Guild’s 2006 Conference for Community Arts Education, helping them reconnect with their passion for their work. One participant wrote “Arlene’s session and key note address were the highlight of the conference. They caused me to pause, take personal inventory, reflect, and renew my commitment…” Another shared that “Arlene was accessible, smart, feeling, direct and nurturing. She helped people to get in touch with the why of their work and re-envision it in an empowering way.” By reflecting on community arts education as spiritual practice, Arlene unleashed our members’ energy and enthusiasm, which surely made a difference upon their return home.
— Kenneth T. Cole, Program Director
National Guild of Community Schools of the Arts
Click here to watch videos, including Arlene’s provocative keynote, “Why America Needs Artists (It’s Not What You Think).”
Click here to read talks and speeches.
In The Camp of Angels of Freedom workshops
This workshop was profoundly inspiring and fruitful in deepening my understanding of my own educational journey. By reflecting on the “angels”, who embodied possibilities of how to live a fulfilling and self-invented life, I uncovered some unexpected truths about myself. Arlene is an exceptional facilitator and it was wonderful to be in a community of people willing to open up to a new way of seeing ourselves and what it means to be educated.
Olivia Teter, Head of Client Innovation, Second Harvest of Silicon Valley
Encountering Your Angels
An Interactive Workshop
Writing In The Camp of Angels of Freedom: What Does It Mean to be Educated? taught me something about myself through the process of discovering whom I wished to honor and why. I learned even more by revisiting the times in my life when I first encountered each person’s work, tracing the process of learning, integration, and impact. And as so often happens, reflecting on the little stories grounded in my own life opened a window on a much larger story.
The same discoveries await you. Who are your angels: the the individuals whose work and lives played catalytic, guiding, enlarging roles in your own life story thus far?
In this workshop, you’ll open a line of fearless inquiry into the true sources of your character, knowledge, skill, and wisdom. Who inspired you? Who catalyzed a turning point? Whom do you wish to honor? You’ll work with one individual, then come away with a clear, simple process for identifying, honoring, and learning from all of those who’ve helped make your path.
Via Zoom or in person. Handouts and worksheets provided. Discount code for In The Camp of Angels of Freedom: What Does It Mean to be Educated? provided upon registration.
What Does It Mean to be an Educated Person?
An Interactive Workshop
One thing that inspired me to write In The Camp of Angels of Freedom: What Does It Mean to be Educated? is alarm at the speed and harshness of the campaign to convert social goods such as education to profit centers, inflating the value of credentialed expertise and its privileges over even the most powerful lived knowledge. Apart from formal education as a path to wealth: What does it really mean to be educated? What does it mean to you?
Through readings, writing exercises, and provocative discussions, this workshop will help you discover your own truest answers to a question that badly needs to be asked—and then to make your own path to knowledge and wisdom by walking it.
Via Zoom or in person. Handouts and worksheets provided. Discount code for In The Camp of Angels of Freedom: What Does It Mean to be Educated? provided upon registration.
Sample Topics
Story Circles for Civic Dialogue and Art-Making
An Interactive Workshop
A story circle is a small group of individuals sitting in a circle, sharing stories—usually from their own experience or imagination—focusing on a common theme. Each person gets equal time and attention and no interruptions or contradictions, then the group reflects on the body of stories that were shared. It’s a way to share experiences, exploring commonalities and differences, to have a real dialogue around potentially polarized issues, and to surface stories for use in devising theater, murals, or other arts projects.
As stories are layered, complexity and richness emerge, and so do underlying commonalities between participants and onlookers. The sum of any story circle is a multidimensional exploration of its theme, making the points that there isn’t one way to look at any topic or situation, and that everyone’s story adds wisdom, shedding light where it’s most needed.
I have experience devising story circle events for intimate situations and large-scale dialogues, training facilitators and scribes, devising generative prompts, and using the resulting stories in myriad ways. In a basic workshop, participants learn to master this powerful democratic dialogue tool by doing a story circle themselves and analyzing the process together. I provide detailed written instructions as a takeaway.
A Culture of Possibility for Your Organization
An Interactive Workshop
When I travel around the country talking to organizations about a culture of possibility that releases and increases true potential, everyone gets it. When I say we need to bring our whole selves to work—minds, bodies, emotions and spirits—the room is a sea of bobbing heads. Yet in many organizations, people feel that their work serves organizational processes that they didn’t create and haven’t owned. To excel, it has to be the other way around. People must feel their work enlarges their creativity, their sense of personal achievement, and their pleasure in what they do and what it means.
I call this a culture of possibility. It lets organizations shed the stale mechanical and hierarchical paradigms that saddle them with tedious meetings, pointless planning, irrelevant reports, metrics without learning—in short, with mediocrity—and renew themselves.
Creating a culture of possibility means a significant step change, embodying the shift you want to see. People learn how to receive and use a much fuller range of information. They see their work and your collective mission through a cultural lens, spotting blockages and opportunities that weren’t evident before. They know how to bring everyone’s full and best capacities to each problem and challenge. They have much more powerful design tools, imagination plus inspiration. Individual learning aggregates into new organizational culture and new results. And that multiplies the impact your work and transforms your relationships with constituents and consumers.
In this workshop, participants learn about the old habits and models that block individual and organizational energy. They try out fresh approaches that connect purpose and pleasure. They learn to apply the skills that enliven artists’ practice—resourcefulness, patience, improvisation and innovation—to challenges and opportunities that may seem to have nothing to do with art.
A Culture of Possibility for Your Community
An Interactive Workshop
Listing obstacles to creative community-building can be a scary enterprise. Money is short while bureaucracy is long. Prohibitions proliferate while allowing isn’t even in the official vocabulary.
But the main obstacle isn’t material; it’s a deficit of social imagination. We daunt ourselves by seeing community as a problem defined by challenges that are too large and complex to address. In reality, we have the inexhaustible resource of creativity, if only we know how to access it.
Every community has the capacity to innovate and excel, replacing a culture of demoralization with a culture of possibility. Imagine a community where everyone feels at home, where people care about community life and want to contribute, where creativity and imagination infuse local government, public space, education, medical care, neighborhood life, environmental protection, even public safety.
In this workshop, participants are introduced to:
Art-based community planning and design processes that bring maximum creativity to a community’s future.
Civic engagement that is exciting, fun, inclusive, and powerfully generative, regardless of a community’s challenges and opportunities.Ways to align leadership with a culture of possibility that responds to community aims, values, opportunities, and circumstances.
Reframing The Arts
An Interactive Workshop
For too long, advocates have been trying (and failing) to justify art’s public purpose with weak secondary effects: art boosts tax revenues through the economic multiplier effect, playing in the school orchestra raises students’ test scores, and so on. The net result is a 30-year decline in arts allocations; for instance, the NEA has lost nearly half the real value of its budget since Ronald Reagan took office. These advocacy strategies are too confining and too narrowly conceived to excite public support. A fresh approach is needed.
As cognitive science has been demonstrating, decisions about social issues are based on reasoning that includes emotions, metaphors, stories and other kinds of information, and often these factors matter more than numeric data. Advocates need to connect to resonant emotional themes and images that can really engage people. This workshop expands thinking, creating new containers that are big and strong enough to convey the real and awesome power of human creative expression. Reframing and renewal have to be grounded in exploring the way people actually think about art’s public purpose, and the larger context in which their thinking unfolds. With that grounding, participants try out different ways of seeing, releasing outworn ideas and searching together for new solutions that shine.
Ethics and Values of Participatory Arts Practice
An Interactive Workshop
As more and more artists get involved in the exciting field of community cultural development, they encounter the unique ethical challenges of participatory arts practice (community arts, social practice, whatever you call it). How is it possible to balance the commitment to a funder or sponsoring organization with commitments to community participants? Is the community artist’s role to channel others’ creativity without intruding, or should the artist’s own aesthetics, values, and priorities be part of the mix? How do you handle censorship, conflict, disruption?
Through this workshop, participants discover their own values and ethical commitments, equipping themselves to anticipate and head off conflicts, and finding mutual, respectful solutions when they do arise. Arlene’s advice is based on decades of experience with practitioners and their real-world challenges.
Cultural Recovery
A Talk Topic
Around the world, societies grapple with the challenges of recovering from economic crisis. Most interventions focus on banking and investment, jobs in physical infrastructure and the like. But in truth, sustainable recovery demands cultural recovery: supporting artists and creative organizers in helping communities discover and nourish the sources of their resilience; develop social imagination, learning to see themselves as part of a sustainable future; and draw on personal and social creativity for their own and their communities’ well-being. Arlene’s forward-looking talks and writings on cultural recovery have already helped to stimulate a vibrant national conversation on the need to put artists to work in national recovery. What is needed and why? How could it be accomplished? What could you do to make it happen?
The Art of Community Cultural Development
A Talk Topic
For decades, artists have worked for pluralism, participation and democracy in community cultural life, offering their gifts to support a community’s emancipation. Using theater, oral history, visual arts, film, music, dance and digital media, community members are helped to tell their own stories, preserving legacies and making their case to the wider world. Drawing on examples from her book New Creative Community: The Art of Cultural Development, Arlene portrays the history, influences, methods, ethics and current conditions of this burgeoning field.
Everything You Wanted to Know About Cultural Policy
A Talk Topic
Widely known as an expert in cultural policy, Arlene offers an uniquely incisive, commonsense take on the development of American cultural policy, placing it in the context of international policy thinking and action. She never fails to inspire, ignite, and enable listeners to understand this fascinating, complex policy arena.
Community, Culture and Globalization
A Talk Topic
The processes of globalization are dynamic and differential, at once creating transnational markets and endangering traditional cultures. Around the world, community artists use creative expression to help threatened communities stand for cultural rights and self-determination. Drawing on examples from the Rockefeller Foundation study she co-authored, Arlene demonstrates how, in the new global reality, art can be a matter of life and death.
Leading With Your Best Self
An Interactive Workshop
To lead others with heart and integrity, we must first learn to lead ourselves. People who work in the arts know a great deal about the power of imagination and creativity, about how much these powers are needed for social healing and growth. They are also needed to develop remarkable individual leadership: reconnecting to our deepest imaginative and creative energies transforms competent leadership into brilliance. Participants in this workshop re-encounter their best selves in aid of understanding how to lead with courage, heart, and beauty.
Refreshing Your Vision
An Interactive Workshop
Arts activists sometimes get advocacy fatigue: how to summon the energy to make the case one more time to people who don’t seem to be listening? This workshop offers fresh, new ways to look at your work, energizing your creativity and sense of mission.
Toward Integral Organizations
A Talk Topic
When people want to change the world, they form organizations, pledging allegiance to a slew of honorable values: inclusion, participation, empowerment, diversity, transparency and free expression, among others. But all too often, the challenge of translating these values into practice is too much to bear. People end up feeling demoralized, mired in unproductive process rather than where they’d hoped to be, navigating their way to solid accomplishment. In decades of providing advice and counsel to organizations, Arlene has learned how structure sustains organization: like the elements of an ecological system or the parts of a body, organizations need principles that govern communication, cooperation and power-sharing. Learn how to focus and conserve energy, increasing effectiveness by shaping integral organizations.