ASC Cohesion Processes & Residencies

A crowdsourced poem is made from community members' reflections and words.

• Community members write responses to prompts, tailored according to relationships developed over site visits.

• Those responses shape a spoken word poem reflecting the community's feelings, beliefs, values, inspirations, trepidations and aspirations.

• Anonymous participation encourages candor.

• The poem is scored with original music and shared back live with the community.

• The poem is like a survey, revealing both what’s in common as well as unspoken tensions and disagreements with the group.

Ponder to Page deepens and accelerates connection through a fun, easy, safe three-step process for crafting resonant stories out of seemingly small, meaningful experiences —  even those that may seem quite ordinary.

• Designed for the "non-writer," the workshop unfolds with “emphatic not-big-dealness,” extending from writing “experiments” (90 seconds!) to connection.  

• Participants ease into depth with their own experience, those of fellow participants, and the resulting bonding with people who, at first, are often strangers. Looking back, participants cannot pinpoint a “big-deal plunge.” The relational deepening occurs degree by degree, nearly imperceptibly. 

• Through deft pedagogy, Ponder to Page crafts the conditions for participants to listen generously, and share, real-life stories from increasing depth. Being moved by each others' stories shifts participant's unspoken inferences about themselves, each other and social situations. The workshop's environment helps these shifted narratives self-reinforce towards long-lasting changes.

• The workshop also offers proven story skills useful in many situations —personal, community-based & professional (e.g. both Regie and Guy's children recently used these skills on college/high school applications, resulting in acceptance and scholarship)                                                          

Even after the 2024 elections, and amidst intensifying fragmentation, some 70% of Americans — across party lines — feel they have a sense of responsibility to connect with people whose ethnic, political, religious and economic backgrounds and viewpoints are different from their own.1 The most common reason people give for seeking such “bridging” is to improve their communities. Among the most reliable reasons people do not do this is anxiety about engaging with others across these lines of difference. One promising strategy to reduce this anxiety is high-quality listening. 

Americans tend to know this. Some 80% - across party lines - think they are good listeners. Yet 66% also feel that others do not listen well. On average, approximately 50% of Americans — and 68% of Gen Z — express interest in further cultivate high-quality listening skills.2

• The Listening Lab draws on the science of connection but is more than academic: The Lab is a place of action, where participants test tools by doing, and gather data through experience.

• Through a series of fun, easy and safe experiments, participants explore ways to listen, models of conversation, techniques to cool the heat that often leads to interruption, tell moving stories, offer feedback that encourages more connection, and maintain joy and psychological safety.

• ASC’s moving stories — told through powerful spoken word, music, and theatrically projected sand animation — facilitate generous listening with fellow participants in conversations that are honest, intimate, and alive.

1. More In Common March 2025 national study of over 6,000 US adults across political, religious, economic and ethnic spectra.

2. More in Common June 2025 national study of over 2,000 US adults across spectra

Participants join each other for a dinner as we regale each other with meaningful conversation and stories in the form of toasts reflecting a theme, (e.g., “To Those Who Shape Us.*”)

It’s like a game: Participants dine in groups of 8-12 fellow travelers (hopefully whom they do not know or know well). At some point in the dinner, each participant is invited to ding their glass and share a brief story or experience that ideally no one at the table has heard before, relating to the theme: For example, a story about a person that shaped the teller, and about a way the teller was changed. At the end of their story, the teller raises their glass and toasts to an element or value their story highlights (e.g.,  to those who taught us resilience!) and invites all others in their group to raise their glasses as well.

The only other rule is that the last person has to sing their toast!

(*Note: this theme is a sample. Actual theme reflect specific groups)

This is an ASC adaptation of a gathering structure learned from Priya Parker, and includes live performance.

This takes various forms, ranging in production complexity.
Examples include: 

• Performances in which participant’s stories (from Ponder to Page workshop) are set to original music and professionally performed

• Books and audio archives of group members' stories

• Full-on multimedia productions in which real-world stories, told by the community members who've lived them are filmed and theatrically projected together with live original narration, cinematographic score & musical segments designed & performed by a world class artistic team