conversations planning for pacoima

from November--

Timeline
November: We decided that we should meet with Pacoima Beautiful and Youth Speak Collective this month. Whether those meetings are informational interviews with individual staff members or with multiple people will be determined by what we learn in making arrangements for the meetings. If they are game for have a bunch of folks in a meeting we might add some elements outside of the basic introductory conversation to make it a story circle. We talked about Sigrid's schedule, availability and best days and time-frame for meeting with people and writing, etc. (Sigrid is out of town at a writer retreat the month of December. She’s back in California on January 4. The
best time for Story Circles is January 5 through 17 and February 8 through 21. She'll plan to write in March/April and have a first draft mid-April.
Then we can have an in-house reading at Cornerstone in late April and a community reading in Pacoima of a second draft in May.

I’ll be looking for existing community events that we might attend as well as looking to plan events we can offer like workshops with the local schools, maybe elsewhere with all ages, too.

Spanish
We discussed the need for a Spanish-speaker to help with community engagement and maybe with dramaturging. Sigrid is particularly interested in such a person being someone who maybe is a poet and who maybe doesn’t look like they are a Spanish-speaker. (“Like me,” Xanthia said.) We might get other ideas from the folks at Youth Speak Collective, too. Ongoing conversation.

Community Exploration
We talked about observations from visiting the community and the need to make choices about how to further define the community within the neighborhood geography. Pacoima Beautiful still seems like a great starting point. The location of our housing and venue will also be helpful guiding factors in those decisions. I’m trying to arrange a meeting with The Unusual Suspects’ Outreach Coordinator to learn from them what we can about the recent and ongoing projects they have in Pacoima. Sigrid is interested to learn more about MEND and is intrigued by the ranches in/near Pacoima. We'll all explore Pacoima again very soon...