NAS Alum Connection - Oct 25 — Arts for Social Cohesion

Together with inaugural Poet Laureate of MA Regie Gibson, Jean Mineo (CCF NE 2018) and Guy Mendilow (CCF NE 2024) invite you to join fellow NAS alums for:

A NAS Alumni Connection Gathering

Widening WE:
Principles & Strategies of Arts-Based Cohesion

Sunday, October 25 at 1:30 PM | First Parish Church, Barn Room
3 Church Street, Harvard Square, Cambridge MA

Let Us know you're coming

Discounted parking provided - just let us know you’re driving when you register.

Made possible with support from National Arts Strategies & Fractured Atlas Alumni Connection Grant and the Harvard Square Business Association.

What is this NAS Alumni Connection Gathering?

Led by Massachusetts Poet Laureate, Regie Gibson and composer and conflict mediator Guy Mendilow, co-directors of Arts for Social Cohesion, this professional development session offers participants experiential knowledge of principles of connection across difference they can apply to their own arts-based cohesion practice.

After a brief opening performance, we will start with Storying Past Small Talk, a playful, step-by-step process for making small true moments into small true stories — and stories into surprisingly meaningful connection.
Then we will reverse-engineer our personal experience with the process to identify design principles applicable to our own practice.
The session will conclude with a discussion of strategies to realize these principles across a variety of contexts, even when - on the surface - those strategies appear disparate from one another.

This training is a pilot towards Arts for Social Cohesion trainings for other organizations, such as the Furious Flower Poetry Center, the US’s first academic center devoted to Black poetry, housed at James Madison University in Harrisonburg, VA, in February 2027.

About Storying Past Small Talk

Developed by Regie Gibson and Arts for Social Cohesion, Storying Past Small Talk helps folks turn moments from their lives into vivid, true stories — and use those stories to move past awkward chit-chat to the kind of connection most want: vital and real.

Through inviting prompts, brief writing experiments and an environment of generous listening, participants discover they do not need an “extraordinary” story to feel interesting and interested with one another. As stories grow more sensorially detailed, participants feel more deeply into what they’ve lived. And strangers begin to encounter one another beyond roles or assumptions — as people with particular lives, memories, and meanings.

As journalist Monica Guzmán puts it: The more under-represented a person is in one's actual life, the more over-represented they tend to be in one's imagination. And often we don’t imagine complex people. We imagine simplified masks.

Storying Past Small Talk is a way to go beyond those masks and honor people’s actual, complex features — their own, and others’.

About Arts for Social Cohesion

Arts for Social Cohesion helps build up the health of groups, so they may navigate change, tensions and opportunities more skillfully — and be where people want to be.

Arts SoCo’s tools are the unique capacities of the arts, together with design principles for connection across differences.

Arts SoCo assists partners in realizing their aims — aims where quality and depth of relationships drive success. Partners range from Oxfam America and the TogetherUP Institute to Massachusetts League of Community Health Centers and Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church.

Arts SoCo is building a systematic, replicable and trainable arts-based approach to increase cohesion. To hone its methodological precision, Arts SoCo partners with rigorous researchers. Examples include Dr. Nichole Argo, social psychologist and author of the Belonging Barometer, measuring how Arts SoCo’s cohesion processes accelerate the formation of a civic hub cohort spanning political, business, faith, identity, health and social action organizations including town departments; Incevia Policy Partners, specializing in community engaged and participatory research on thriving communities, evaluating Arts SoCo cohesion processes with members of an African Methodist Episcopal church and a Reform Jewish congregation; and Dr. Sindiso Mnisi, a legal and social justice scholar studying Arts SoCo cohesion impacts on a college campus through an Ubu-Ntu framework. Such work aids Arts SoCo in developing an evidence base to increase recognition of arts-based cohesion interventions’ contributions across contexts and sectors.

Founded in 2024, Arts SoCo channels its directors’ decades of high-level artistic, pedagogical and facilitation expertise to an explicit social change mission. In Arts SoCo’s first year, Boston’s Center for Combating Antisemitism (CCA) identified Arts SoCo as one of three “high potential and high impact…strategic community-based projects well-positioned for moving the needle” toward deeper cross-community understanding. Arts SoCo was the sole arts-based initiative. Independent evaluation (Incevia Policy Partners) of the CCA-funded cohesion processes shows deepened humanization and stereotype disruption between participants from the African Methodist Episcopal church and Reform Jewish temple still holding 7-8 months after Arts SoCo’s interventions.

About the Facilitators

Regie Gibson

Co-Artistic Director, Arts for Social Cohesion

Inaugural Poet Laureate of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts

Literary performer and educator, Regie Gibson, has lectured and performed in the U.S., Cuba & Europe. Representing the U.S., Regie competed for and received both the Absolute Poetry Award in Monfalcone, Italy and the Europa en Versi Award for performance poetry in LaGuardia di Como, Italy. He and his work appear in "love jones”: a feature-film based on events in his life. He is a former National Poetry Slam Champion, has featured on HBO’s Def Poetry Jam, On Point, Radio Boston, and other NPR programs. Regie has presented at several TED X events and has been nominated for a Boston Emmy. He’s received the Walker Scholarship for Poetry from the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center, several Mass Cultural Council Awards, the Lexington Education Foundation Grant, a YMCA Writer’s Fellowship & the Brother Thomas Fellowship from The Boston Foundation. He’s served as a consultant for both the National Endowment for the Arts and the “Mere Distinction of Color”: an exhibit at James Madison’s Montpelier home. Regie has performed with, and composed texts for, the Boston Pops (including the upcoming 2026 July 4th Fireworks Spectacular, drawing some 500,000 viewers worldwide), the Boston City Singers, the Mystic Chorale, and Handel+Haydn Society. He was a poet-in-residence at Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts and is poet-in-residence at Lexington’s Cary Memorial Library.

He’s been published in Poetry Magazine, Harvard’s Divinity Magazine, and The Iowa Review, among others. His volume of poems, “Storms Beneath the Skin” has received the Golden Pen Award.

Regie teaches at Boston’s Berklee College of Music and Clark University in Worcester.

Guy Mendilow (CCF NE 2024)

Executive and Co-Artistic Director, Arts for Social Cohesion

Guy Mendilow’s commitment to increasing group resilience through rigorous arts-based methodologies emerges from synthesis: Artistically, Guy’s 10 nationally touring multimedia productions draw on 38 years of touring, starting with regular childhood Carnegie Hall appearances (American Boychoir). Since 1996, Guy’s artistic residencies have strengthened relationships from the Navajo Reservation and rural Midwest to metropolitan centers. A nuanced conflict mediator, Guy has facilitated group consensus since 1997. Guy’s Social psychology background includes belonging research and enhancing conflict mediation through the arts.

Guy is guided by three family generations devoted to crafting environments where those deemed excludable would be respected as insiders worthy of full regard. Guy’s maternal grandparents smuggled Jews out of WWII Hungary and founded a humanist home for ‘at-risk’ youth premised on full societal integration, defying norms of charity dependence; when Jerusalem dismissed elders as irrelevant, Guy’s paternal grandmother formed Yad LaKashish striving for elders’ dignity across ethnic, cultural and economic differences since 1962.

Guy helps cultural organizations design, fund and evaluate projects where change roots in social connection (e.g., securing $2.3M Mellon Foundation funding, and leading a two-year evaluation, for Ágora Cultural Architects’ BoriCorridor, bolstering diasporic Boricua pride through island-based artists' touring to mainland communities).

Guy’s artistry, cultural preservation & the strengthening of communities through the arts has been recognized through repeat funding awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, The Boston Foundation, New England Foundation for the Arts and Western Arts Alliance.

An Israel, UK and USA national, Guy calls Boston home.