A. Participants Share Experiences, Reflections, Perspectives

1. ASC & Community Leaders Determine Inquiry

• Based on time with community members, community leaders and ASC determine an overarching guiding inquiry. For example, previous poems have explored themes such as what members value in a community (e.g., an organization, faith community, neighborhood, board, etc); Reasons members have chosen to be part of that community; Members’ hopes and concerns for the group; Ways members feel they belong, or do not belong, within the community and what this looks like, etc

2. Develop Questionnaire/Interview to Explore This Inquiry

• Many guiding inquiries can be explored through customized prompts on a questionnaire (e.g., a digital form).

• More complex/sensitive inquiries may also call for in-person 1:1 interviews, allowing for nuanced meaning to be drawn out through well-crafted questions and generous listening. Depending on the guiding inquiry, such interviews may be developed with and facilitated by ASC partners specializing in mixed-method research such as Incevia Policy Partners.

3. Participants Share Their Reflections & Perspectives — Anonymously & Across Generations

• Anonymity encourages psychological safety for candor and vulnerability, whether through questionnaires or confidential interviews.

• Families with young children, or classes, often fill out digital questionnaires together, with adults transcribing younger people’s words.

B. Synthesis & Text/Music Composition

1. Rigorous Artistic Synthesis

• Regie carefully synthesizes individual voices into a unified spoken-word poem. If each response is a star, Regie looks at constellations, weaving members’ words and reflections into patterns expressed through spoken word.

• Guy composes original music for the text, accentuating and inflecting emotionality. The score ranges from chamber ensemble with voices, violin, clarinet, bass and piano to solo piano.

C. Live Performance

• The poem is performed live back to the community.

1. Mirroring a Collective Landscape

• The poem serves as both art and survey — reflecting back areas of unvoiced agreement as well as tensions.

• In many instances, the poem makes vivid values, perspectives and experiences that may be taken for granted.

• In most instances, groups discover they hold more in common than they may have realized. In some cases, groups realize that multiple views actually underlie assumed alignment. Perceiving such greater complexity, including unexpressed friction, can be an important step in expanding the range of perspectives and experiences recognized and valued.

• The experience helps shift unspoken inferences about group members and one’s place with them.

2. Recognition & Affirmation

• Participants hear their words, hopes, aspirations, trepidations, concerns and desires mirrored as part of artistic beauty (using John O’Donahue’s definition of beauty: that in the presence of which one feels more alive)

• This validates that members’ perspectives, experiences and values matter

• Explicit naming of shared values often re-energizes the group to what binds them, renewing a sense of shared purpose and identity

3. What Is Mentionable Becomes More Manageable

• Unnamed tensions may fester and even fracture the group. Named tensions can be tended where there is good process.

4. Informs the Group’s Next Steps

• Groups may choose to build on the common ground mirrored by the poem, to further explore particular areas or to engage with processes that increase understanding and resolution of surfaced tensions.

5. Builds Residency Trust, Motivation & Direction

• The poem demonstrates that ASC listens deeply, is artistically rigorous (i.e., members’ words are in good hands) and that the humans of ASC are authentic.

• Moving performance further motivates members’ residency participation

• ASC better understands some of the patterns alive in a community. This informs the course of the residency moving forward.

6. Primes Participants for the Gathering’s Purpose

• Engaging with the poem's guiding inquiry attunes participants to the gathering's themes and questions — whether they share their reflections and words weeks before the gathering or moments before a session where the poem is created on the spot. This preparation enlivens attendees’ personal connections to the gathering's purpose and makes the experience all the more meaningful.