Breathe Free Brainstorm Meeting

(Post by August Schulenburg.)

On Saturday August 1st, the Breathe Free producing team met at Judson Memorial Church to discuss next steps for Flux’s partnership with New Sanctuary Coalition of NYC. You can learn about past Breathe Free activities here.

The Breathe Free team in attendance was: Jerry Polner, Ravi Ragbir, Kia Rogers, August Schulenburg, Jason Tseng, and Christine Zagrobelny. We met from 11am to 5pm, moving through the following agenda with everyone taking turns as facilitator and note-taker (#ensemblethatshit):

• Introductions (11-11:30am) We checked-in personally, then set meeting goals and discussed group agreements and operating assumptions.
• Goal-setting (11:30-1:00pm) We discussed long-term goals to chart our general vision and direction, and then dug deep into “low-hanging fruit,” i.e., goals that might be achieved within the next year.
• Asset-mapping (1:00-1:30pm) The prior session ran long (and needed to do so), so we integrated asset-mapping into the next session as best we could.
• Break (1:30-2:00pm) So many delicious food options near Washington Square Park!
• Pairing assets and goals (2:00-3:00pm) We then looked at our prioritized short-term goals and asked what assets we had or could acquire that would bring them to fruition.
• Action plans and timeline (3:00-4:00pm) Based on that work, we began to take a deeper dive into action plans and timelines, but we were running late again, so…
• Simmering post (4:00-4:20) …we skipped over our Simmering Pot (discussions that arose during the meeting that didn’t fit in the agenda but were important to talk about later), and let right to…
• Voting and next steps (4:20-5:00pm) …where we approved the following rough goals and action plan (with a more detailed timeline to follow in the near future).

Breathe Free One-Year Goal:  A year from now, a Breathe Free meeting of 20+ people will be held, made up equally of Flux citizen artists and New Sanctuary immigrant activists, all committed to the power of theatre to re-humanize immigrants stories in our culture, build capacity in immigrant communities, and advocate for more compassionate legislation and political dialogue around immigrant rights. This Breathe Free team will then work toward creating a new cultural landscape for immigrants that ends the traumas of deportation and incarceration, and imagines new model of safe, collaborative, and creative communities where we can all breathe free.

While that’s a big goal, the emphasis in this first year is on building the community, as that along will take significant time and resources. To accomplish that goal, we identified three areas of activity over the next year:

• Embedded artists: Flux will embed key Breathe Free collaborators into New Sanctuary’s activities, including but not limited to the Accompaniment Program, bringing our theatre skill-sets to bear on various New Sanctuary campaigns;
• Workshops: Flux will provide workshops to New Sanctuary immigrants to empower effective story-telling, both in their individual relationships to the deportation system, and toward the creation of theatrical content that re-humanizes immigrant stories more broadly;
• Fully-developed Breathe Free artistic project: Past Breathe Free event have been lightly rehearsed and on-book, leading to a lower artistic quality than Flux full productions. We will build a short Breathe Free play that is fully rehearsed and of high artistic quality that can easily travel to various performance opportunities, raising awareness of the overall Breathe Free and New Sanctuary programs.

As you can see, it was a very productive day, but there is still plenty of work to be done to turn that rough plan into an actionable timeline…and there’s no time to lose, as the first opportunity for Embedded Artists is a New Sanctuary meeting next Wednesday night about an urgent deportation case.

More on that shortly; for now, we celebrate the re-igintion of our Breathe Free work!