In this episode of Change the Story / Change the World, we encounter one of those "how" stories. Our protagonist is a cultural organizer named Felicia Young. In it we will hear about her lifelong journey using arts-based strategies and tools to grab peoples attention and spur community action. We’ll hear how she helped save hundreds of New York's community gardens, clean up a sacred river in India, stymie one of America’s most powerful politicians, bring attention to local solutions to the climate crises, and most importantly bring people together to make real change.

This is Change the Story / Change the World, my name is Bill Cleveland

Part One: Why

We join Felicia's journey in the hallowed halls of one of the world's largest and most respected cultural institutions. as she ponders the question that will largely determine her life's course. How can something that is considered so wonderful, so enlightening, so exemplary, seem so wrong? This is the question that nagged youth program intern Felecia Young as she led a gaggle of young trainees through the Metropolitan Museum of Art's richly endowed African Wing.

They were meant to be seen within the context of a socially functional ritual that had community importance. So whether it was agricultural cycles, funeral rights, or even healing ceremonies to impact a particular calamity or crisis within that community, it was transformational. And so, that art object was really a means to get to another place to either connect with an issue, confront an issue, or to bring people through some transitional transformation to a new place within their lives. And so that was a pretty young age for me to have that awareness of that and how other art, and this is in the eighties. So what was existing in New York at that time?

BC: For the curious and questioning Felicia, the contemporary art world represented in the Met's Modern and Contemporary Art wings and was equally troubling. Why, she wondered, is art that does come from this place and time seem so disconnected from the community in which it was created.

Why are we being relegated to producing art for the marketplace? Why can we not have this kind of. Meaning, within our own culture and community, and there's so many problems that are out there, why can't we apply it? everything I was surrounded with in New York was the opposite. It was, the culture of a commercial art world. So of course that became my quest in looking for, other examples out there of how such art can be done, and within the community. And what form would that take?

[00:04:42] FY: At the time I grew up in New York, it was highly polluted, and I used to go to the east river and just see, floating garbage. And people used to talk about dead bodies dumping in them.

But generally it was like, we stayed away from the waterfront in New York. You would approach New York and it would just be covered in smog. There was just this cloud of smog, but then I saw like growing up, it was the establishment of the EPA and we moved towards this, I guess consciousness about the environment. So I had those two things going on between, being a product of a child growing up in a polluted city, but then seeing this trajectory that actually at the time of my childhood moved into a better place.

BC: When it came time for college Felicia's interest in art and community and museums led her down a predictable path that also led to a couple of unforeseen, unpredictable tangents.

FY: I went to Skidmore (College) and I studied art history. And,I did my junior year abroad in Italy and France. I did research on the painter, Jacque Louis David, who cluey David, who was this painter who was doing portraits of Napoleon, but he was also staging these theatrical pageants for the French revolution in the street and engaging hundreds of thousands of people. And many people didn't realize that even DaVinci and Bernini and all these other famous, artists that we know of in the classical sense of their work were also engaged in many other public, theatrical presentations that was largely ignored from my studies.

So I got really excited about discovering that and the potential. Of here were these well known artists, but nobody was talking about this other work sort of revolutionary work they were doing. So that was my, first, looking at the theatrical pageant form as combining music, theater, performance, visual art, dance, and community engagement.

It marked all the boxes of an art form that I was looking for. And it certainly was happening out within the streets and with often social reform or political intent.

And then my senior year, I decided to write my thesis on process. and I was in an African art history class. So then I have all these things percolating in my head and the professor is talking about this Mbari in Igboland in Nigeria.

And it's an art form that this community in Nigeria will commit to in response to some social calamity. So it could be infant mortality, or drought and their response. Is to have a section of the community, go into sort of a communal isolation and work under shaman, building this elaborate mud hut with sculptures, but It can take years of communal art making. And at the end of this process, reaching its pinnacle, they will say, okay, it's ready to reveal to the rest of the community who has been supported because they're obviously not working in the fields during that time. And then they walk, they have a huge celebration and then they walk away and leave it to decay. So that I was literally slapping the desk and saying, that's it. That's it. That is it. That is what I am looking for. I mean, here was an art form. It had social purpose. it was engaged with community. It confronted a calamity.

And at the end of it, even though there was, let's say aesthetic ideals, they were trying to achieve with the object that was being created communally. But at the end of it, it was really about the process.

And I said, I don't know if I believe in the magic that you're gonna cure smallpox by building a sculptural hut, But what I did see was that the solidarity of the community is strengthened through the process. So whatever calamity they're dealing with, they are now strengthened to be able to confront that crisis together.

[00:09:33] CT: And so this idea of, in my mind, historically, all art was, it was for a purpose. it was for some type of gathering, it was either a birth or a death or marriage or a visitor, or there was something that was happening that brought people together, in these communal settings to engage in food and libations conversations.

And really to me, that's culture, and what is produced out of that is dance and music and storytelling, the artifacts The thing that now have been extracted from those processes and become the things that get sold as products. We're just the natural expressions of culture in a healthy and fully functional community.

[00:11:02] FY: I think, you know, ritual, ceremony, a lot of this art was created to connect people to a deeper understanding of the world, around them, to the problems they face and to imagine and envision a better future, and hope and action towards that end, and move people to another place. And it's such a powerful form and art has always been integrated into it. ceremony and ritual, it could also be used for very destructive purposes as we've seen in history.

And it could also be in used for empowerment and community and collaborative purposes. And it's who's creating the ritual and who's creating the ceremony.

In 1987, Felicia got an opportunity hone her organizing skills working with Judson Church artist Phyllis Yampolsky. In the 1950's and early 60's The Judson Church Dance Collective and the Judson Gallery comprised a multidisciplinary artist collective whose collaborative art-making emphasized improvisation, and a commitment to process over product. At the time, Yampolsky was working on a project to prevent the closing of a racially integrated public swimming pool in Brooklyn's Williamsburg neighborhood that was under pressure by racist community members. Through her involvement Felicia found that pageants and festivals could be an effective organizing strategy that ended up helping the more tolerant members of the community find their voice and each other.

Part Two: Gardens

BC: When she returned to New York she was excited continue her community focused work . This time though, with a new emphasis on rituals and ceremones that not only built new connections fbut also created tangible benefits for the broader community.

And so There were, over 60 community gardens that had been created out of neglected rubble string, lots. That was really city neglect out of the seventies. I mean the lower east side looked like a war zone and just abandoned buildings, vacant lots shack, dead bodies would be found. They were dense for drug and drugs and crime. And finally people in the community had enough with it and they started building these magnificent gardens.

If you lived on first and second avenue, you never went over to alphabet city and avenue B. You didn't even know the gardens existed. there was no social media, there was no way for the community to tell its story unless the New York times was covering it. It just seemed obvious. “Oh my God, this, I've gotta try and do this.” But did I know it would work? Did I know how I could possibly execute this? I just started going to show up at garden meetings. I would have to go up and down the streets to see flyers of when those garden meetings were right.

And at each garden that we go to the community gardens can tell their story. They can tell it through song, through poetry, through a skit, or they can just simply speak. They can cry. They can just say what they need to say. And you know what, we'll also go to the gardens that have been bulldozed. We'll have memorials we'll honor. What was, and we'll have a photo. So it started out with a pretty simple idea. I had people coming up to my rooftop to build things. We had no money. It didn't start with, oh, I'm gonna get a grant. I'm gonna get support and I'm gonna do this. No, I'm gonna do this. I got the people. Everybody wanted to do it. I had literally thousands of people the first year, like community centers and churches and the gardens.

So it was after that first year procession. where by doing it, I was doing already a form of organizing because I had to get to know each of the gardeners the process of creating the pageant. So I began to have phone numbers of all the gardens, and then people immediately after the first pageant started planning for the next one. So it, that was when I realized, oh, this is not a one of thing. I can't walk away from this now, but I never had the idea that it would take over the rest of my life or that project would go on for 15 years.

And as we're going year to year, the gardens became more and more endangered. Nobody else had the phone numbers of all the gardens. So what the pageant had done was essentially built the coalition by going to garden and garden. So instead of gardeners existing, isolated within their own spaces, they were now connected to each other.

And the story of that struggle was being told, not just to the core stakeholders of gardeners, who of course cared about the issue, but to the other residents care about the issue by creating the story and putting it in the streets and having people go to each site and connect with what the story was about each of these sites, the loss of sites and why we need to save these gardens. More and more people got involved in the effort.

And then over the years, as the gardens became endangered, we realized. we would get community board meeting minutes and we'd discover that our gardens were going up for development, but nobody was notifying the gardeners. They were listed like only as block and lot numbers. And somebody in the city gave us like the translation of block and lots to what actual sites they were. And it was like going through that every month to find the needle in a haystack and then notifying people to show up at the community board to protest and write letters.

So as the gardens became more endangered, we were doing the cultural pageant and we were doing traditional organizing. We were doing research and mapping and, showing up at city hall and showing up at community board meetings. we needed both because I've definitely seen that if you do just the traditional organizing, it can either have an angry, form of communication.

I mean, honestly, it's a miracle story because the pageant over the years, and going back to the, model of this pageant in India that told this story, We wanted to have a kind of overall storyline to it as well as the individual stories and struggles of each garden. So we enacted the, the battle with developers. That is what we were up against. And every year, the children in the neighborhood put on butterfly wings And then someone in the neighborhood grew butterflies from caterpillars and we released them at the end of the day.

[00:21:18] BC: Defining success in community-wide movement work can be extremely difficult, particularly when the landscape you are organizing in is constantly shifting. For New York's community garden Initiative the tenuous nature of the work became a stark reality when the gardens caught the attention of Mayor Rudolf Giuliani near the end of his first term.

FY: over the years we lost some gardens, we saved some, but then it really came to a head when, mayor Giuliani went after all the gardens from throughout New York cities, there were like the over 800 gardens. Luckily that was back in the day, you could call information and get people's home phone numbers. So yeah, we said, we've gotta meet. Hundreds of people showed up for a meeting in November of 96 and we formed overnight a New York City Garden Preservation Coalition. And that was very powerful.

And then in 2002, mayor Bloomberg Dave one is mayor. He unilaterally transferred, hundreds of gardens out of city owned, housing preservation and development, where they sit ready to be developed into the New York city parks department.

It was a magical resolution that I never could have envisioned happening at all. I think he had a sort of green vision for New York. Maybe being independently wealthy, he was less beholden to the real estate interests in New York. But it would not have happened without the power. of the coalition building that really got developed through this cultural project.

Part: Three Water

BC: Given the quixotic nature of arts funding, most of the community arts initiatives we study here at the Center are episodic. The ones that are sustained tend to have deep roots which, like the Garden Coalition, were nurtured in a way that allowed the individual garden stories to find each other and connect, much the same way tree roots do naturally under the earth. Another aspect of successful cultural organizing is that the skills and relationships that accrue from one initiative become a valuable community resource that can be brought to bare on other issues. Felicia's next chapter is a case in point.

So I worked on a river restoration project on the Hudson river for a few years, and then spontaneously decided to go back to India that in 1989 had inspired me. I had documented the Chithirai Festival which tells the story of this earthly queen who marries the Lord Shiva and the storyline is enacted over an entire city and neighboring villages with large sculptural effigies. Processions every day, it goes on for three weeks and millions of people participate it's been going on since the 1500’s. The king who developed that storyline, it was a peacemaking effort to bring the waring factions of the urban and rural warrior groups together.

So I go back 25 years later spontaneously, and the people I had interviewed during my research with a giant VHS video camera, were now like in their sixties. I mean, this was crazy. 25 years had passed. They are, they were leading, scholarly research.

I mean, it looked fine. Twenty-five years ago, the whole festival centers on the river and the crossing on the river. And he says, no, you it's really in bad shape. I mean, this area in India is so severely impacted by climate and severe drought. And what little water is there is highly polluted. And there's been very little effort to, really turn this situation around.

And I said,” That's really strange, cuz all my experience here in Madurai inspired me to do these pageants to save the gardens.” And then I recently did this pageant to engage people on restoration efforts of the Hudson river. I said, “Maybe we should do a Vaigai River restoration pageant.” So I just say things without understanding that the next two years of my life are gonna be taken over with actually making that happen.

So, after spending several weeks there and meeting people, I come back to New York. And the more that I think about it, one of the things that was missing in the crisis of this river is that the community was not being engaged, that the, municipality would get pay people to occasionally pick up garbage and take it out of the river. there was no recycling program in the town. People were just using it as a toilet.

And, there's no education that is, communicating with the local population to of move it to another place. So, that was what got me — the missing link, that community engagement piece. And I'm like, “Oh my God, I can't walk away from this. I really think this can be helpful.” And I'm not imposing something from the west. It's not an idea of mine from the west. This is something I took from them and have used for a good purpose. Maybe if I bring this idea of their own cultural traditions and art form that can be applied to their local crisis, they're gonna get it.

So through Sekar, my friend in India, he introduces me to the largest NGO. That's dealing with poverty and rural issues and urban issues and water. And the head of this large organization says, “Absolutely let's do it.” They got it. But he says, “Now you go raise half the money to do this project.” So I think there was a bit of them looking at me like I'm bringing resources, that I didn't really have at all. And their perception of what I represent. And they also knew that I, my mother was from India. And I had discovered that I actually had family, buried in that town.

So I go there, and I get a lot of attention. It would've been harder for me to do this as a local Indian. It was a lot easier coming as the outsider, and having people say, “What is this about? And who is she? And what is this family story?”

And I think the mystical element in India of what that means — I mean, you had the head magistrate, say “If this woman could come from New York city with this important message, it's our duty to do this.” So I had all this stuff projected in terms of propelling this project forward. And then I'm like, where am I gonna get the money?

FY: Only one person out of a long list of connections called me back. And that was professor Geeta Mehta from Columbia University who has an organization, Asia Initiatives that does women empowerment, very important projects around the world and in Asia.

And she's also a professor at the, urban design, and architecture, program at, in, at Columbia. So she said, I meet with her 15 minutes later. She said she had heard of that organization. And she pledged $20,000 to also bring her methodology of social capital credits in, into the project. So there I said, okay, that in India, that's a lot of money.

That was half the budget. And I go back to India to launch the project for Gandhi's birthday in October. And then go back again in December and, it was the hardest thing I've ever done in my life, but I can't believe I could see how the process could be adapted. So, I said, who I had said, who are the stakeholders? Who are the organizations who are the schools?

And then they don't really have as much of a individual independent artist community, but what they have are artisans. Who've been carrying that craft through family generations for hundreds of years. So whether it's some goodies, sari, dying, or the making of clay pots and sculptures a whole village or a whole town will be the potters. They will make the pots and then they get hired by the temples to make the little statuary. So they were used to working with that traditional iconography.

But then, I was able through these meetings, we would have with the stakeholders, tell them about the idea of the pageant and they were all. “Oh, yes. Great. We can adapt the imagery.” But they were challenged, how? “What kind of images do we create and how do we adapt it?” So we came up with a fusion idea where I was able to get students from some of the architectural schools to help envision some of the actual design work.

And then the craftsman felt more comfortable incorporating some of those designs so we took different traditions of dance, different traditions of music, and many of these visual arts, even bamboo sculpture, and worked it into a pageant, which again was rooted in the sites along the riverfront. And even though I could only periodically India, we used Skype. So I was able to communicate with a locally hired director there. So it really became a project that they were directing on the ground.

But I couldn't foresee that we would get these actual results. So, you get the panel. Then I leave India. After that, thousands of people continue with monthly, full moon ceremonies to reconnect themselves to the waterfront and doing cleanups on a regular basis. And this officially appointed panel continues, and over the course of a number of years, by the time you got to maybe 2018, 2019, finally, Madurai gets recognized on the national level as a Smart City of India and billions of rupees get allocated to that city as a Smart City of India for the river restoration effort.

So, you never know when you start something, you share your idea, where it's gonna end up. Was it just gonna be a cultural pageant and that's it. I couldn't predict the things that happened. And also in a short period of time, because if you look at the garden pageants, I put 15 years of my life into that before we got that kind of amazing result, and it may not have even happened.

And then in that case in India, it was like a year and a half of an effort that resulted in some of these things. And the next few things happened over the next years when I wasn't even involved with the project.

BC: Felicia gives the impression that this extraordinary outcome is a product of serendipity and luck. And to a certain degree, thats true. But there is much more going on here than the luck of the draw. Felicia is an effective cultural community catalyst because she has an innate understanding of what it takes to help plant and germinate new ideas and actions that have a lasting impact in a community. She is an insatiable learner who brings both self confidence and humility to the task at hand. She has both a generous spirit and willingness ask others to go the extra mile and share their own good fortune. She is persistent in her faith in the venerable power of ritual and celebration to create the deep relationships that are needed to turn good intentions into meaningful change. And finally, she recognizes that change will not happen unless the people who will ultimately bear the consequences of an initiatives success or failure own the story of its making.

Part Four: Climate

BC: Another intangible element of Felicia's remarkable journey is her drive and persistence to take on new community challenges. A case in point is how she built on her previous work with the gardens to help New York City address climate change.

And, out of that, you have this Eastside Coast Resiliency Project. Like how are we going to deal with the climate impacts of flooding? In the nineties, the gardens that we had preserved, we're preserving vital open space, a place for community to gather, park space, nature. We weren't thinking about climate. We weren't thinking about the gardens in that way at all. It just wasn't in our vocabulary at the time.

So, that was what hurricane Sandy changed, because the gardens being a permeable surfaces absorbed the flood water. So again, that was an overnight recognition that, these spaces mitigated that flooding, they absorbed these waters. And not only that, all of a sudden it became a whole new way of looking at the gardens. Look at how the gardens are mitigating climate in so many ways there within an urban setting — sequestering carbon, there have ponds that are collecting rain, water, they of, many of them are filtering ring pollutants from runoff that normally go into the river, and the trees filtering the air as well the gardens, also cool, lead to a natural cooling, in the areas immediately where they are. So that recognition of, okay, we have climate.But wow, had we not preserved the gardens, we would not have had this post-Sandy resilience.

So, they were given a federal grant, post hurricane Sandy funds to enhance the green infrastructure that already existed within the gardens. So it was like a million dollars that was now being input into this very grass roots, network. So I looked at that. I looked at other neighborhood solutions that were coming to life, people who were trying to set up community, solar projects on rooftops, the community center, where I had been based, had a rooftop, bee farm growing, and the earth school down the street, which is a public school, had a green roof where they were growing vegetables with the kids.

And then, you had the Eastside Coastal Resiliency Project being developed in design plans with the community along the waterfront, all to be like, “How is New York city, like, how are we going to, are we gonna build a sea wall berm, are we gonna build flood walls? what are we gonna do?

So even though we had saved many gardens in the past, it didn't make it any easier. Gardens were still other gardens that weren't under parks protection were still slated to be, demolished. New York city is officially, has a law that was passed to uphold the Paris climate agreement. Meaning we have to not increase temperatures beyond 1.5 degrees Celsius. And in order to do that, they say, “Oh, we have this, billion dollar plan and that billion dollar plan.” But at the same time they're destroying the solutions that the community's creating. So now, they're willing to put money into building what we don't have, but destroy what we already do have that was generated with hardly any investment of money or in community effort. So it's just, again, that opposition between top down planning, and recognition of all this ingenuity that I call urban improvisation.

FY: A lot of it is being created right now is in workshops twice a week. So, all of the workshops that we do for months develops visual sculptural puppets, as well as wearable costumes that are highly intricate and detailed. So one of them is a climate drawdown. Cape that Paul Hawken’s book Drawdown, we are basically taking the book and turning it to a costume

which has involved, a lot engaged, students and people and researching that actual data material that's provided in the book and then turning it into a visual form into this costume with people quilting as a collaborative artwork, this elaborate, Cape that will be worn.

[00:43:31] Paul Hawken: In 2013, Bill McKibbon wrote a piece in rolling stone called global warming's terrifying new.And I had many friends, who were literate, active, effective with respect to climate who came to me and used the same word over and over again, which is it's game over. In other words, We blew it. and I had a different response I felt like sometimes when you give up and surrender it's game on. And, I welcome actually, the ironically paradoxically, the despair that you see rising up, because I feel like there's an openness there that wasn't there before. So, what happened is Drawdown n started, in 2014, to map, measure and model the hundred, most substantive solutions to reversing global warming.

And the first thing I wanted to do was name the goal. If we don't name the goal, we're not going to achieve it. Mitigation is not a goal. Fighting is not a goal. A crusade is not a goal. Combating, tackling, these verbs that are used are not goals. What's the goal. The goal is to reverse global warming to reverse emissions.

So let's name it. And the second thing is, can we achieve it?

And since we had no money to hire scientists, we put out the word all around the world for draw down fellows These people are from 22 countries, six continents, and they basically wrote master thesis on each solution So we were a collaborative, it wasn't somebody knowing or doing and saying what they think. it was a group of us coming together and saying, what do we know? You know, can we learn together? Can we discover something that hasn't been brought forth, which is what it is.

We know actually. So the solutions we modeled exist. We know how to do them. what we did basically is hold up a mirror to the world and saying, this is what, you know, this is what we know. And then this is what we're doing.

So it's not just a performance. It turns into a ceremony where the gardeners offer water from their garden. That's put into a big bowl, that’s later offered to the river. At the end of the day, they receive a bio remediation amulet that enhances, the nutrients, beneficial nutrients, for the soil to their garden.

So it's a gift exchange. And then there's a presentation in some artistic form about the actual, solution that's at that site. So it's not just random. I mean, we're at a water harvesting pond, there's a water song, we’re at, there's a dance about solar at one of the gardens that has a solar micro-grid. There's a song, a poem about sustainable agriculture at a garden that's known for food growing and vertical farm. So, each of the sites enhances that solution, and you go on this journey. So it's, I call like an urban ecological pilgrimage. Now, in India, they go on for three weeks.

But in the context of New York, when I did the garden pageants, they were completely exhausting being eight hours long. This one is five hours long. So there's a bit of endurance required. That experience is also, transformative, cuz you're going from the chaotic urban streets and then going into the tranquility of the gardens, connecting to what each of them has to offer within this larger knitted together ecosystem.

And at the end of the day, we get to the waterfront. Yeah. And then celebrate the different aspects of coastal resiliency.

Festival Sounds

BC: The recurring theme in all of Felicia's work has been to use catalytic events to create ripples of awareness, learning, relationships, and commitment that lead to substantive change. This means that events like the procession on climate solutions is just the beginning.

But when that ends, like the end of the pageant, the action and the collaboration and the connections and the partnerships continue. So, just like with the garden pageants, the forming of that coalition and the friendships and the partnerships enable the community to continue those connections, dealing with any number of issues within the neighborhood.

So you, those social connections and network is enhanced. To go on and do many things within a neighborhood. So, I always feel that's like the process, that doesn't dissipate, that doesn't go away and then you have very real things.

like we have this east river park spirit. The community had worked on a vision plan for the coastal resiliency project that then got trashed by the mayor. So, we had to go, to Planning, Commission hearings at city hall, and we brought that spirit, the character in, and presented the character as creative testimony that was submitted into city hall documentation, yeah, planning.

So when people look, I say, it's not just like the end result of you got garden saved or you got this policy changed, but you're changing the whole fabric of how a community collaborates and communicates with each other.

They also learn different approaches to addressing issues. They're learning resource sharing and collaboration across communities in the lower east side, we have a Latino community. We have a Chinatown. you have people with special interests. You've got activists, you've got middle class families, you’ve got so many different kinds of people with many opposing viewpoints, very free thinking neighborhood. But if you can find those common points, you build real life friendships, you build collaborations across those divisions and that changes the way a community works going forward.

Ours is a social landscape where the everyday give and take that binds us to each other often gets translated for us, and by us in terms of a some kind of materialized cost benefit. This as much as climate change poses an existential threat. If we can't work together to imagine and create a different future then The future is in trouble

The good news embodied Felicia's story is that there is a ready antidote at hand that we have known and practiced for thousands of years. As Felicia's work has shown over and over we humans do know how to join together to create different stories that produce different outcomes. And like she says, the most valuable, the most precious products this kind of work are "the real life friendships that emerge-- The human connections that will, of course be needed to create the next set of change provoking stories.

For our regular listeners, you will no doubt agree that this, is one of the most persistent themes that we share on this show. It's a pretty simple narrative. Making art together, making stories together builds deep trust and capable, resilient communities. But, as we know, the doing is a bit more complicated. As is the doing that produces this show. Which we hope you have enjoyed and will recommend to your friends and, if you have any, your enemies.

This has been another episode of Change the Story Change the World. We are a production of the Center for the Study of Art and Community.

It's written and hosted by me, bill Cleveland and our theme and soundscape are by the stupendous Judy Munson our editing is by Andre Nebby Our special effects come from free sound.com and our inspiration rises up from the mysterious but ever present presence of UKE 235. Until next time, please. stay well, do good, and spread the good word