Drama in Appomattox: Summer Youth-Led Listening Project

Field Notes from Appomattox #2

After 30 years of working in communities at the grassroots level, I am convinced that every community has a shared dream, and every individual in that community has a unique set of gifts. When they discover their shared dream, community members will use their collective gifts to help that dream come to life. I have seen this happen in dozens of communities through hundreds of community-led activities.

This kind of co-creation is how ordinary people are reclaiming the power of democracy in their local community. I have seen this kind of community-rooted effort, which lies outside the confines of institutional agendas, metrics, and hierarchical power structures, reweave our frayed social fabric. I have seen it bridge the divides of race, class, region, sexual orientation, age, gender, and even political affiliation.

I think of those who are willing to work outside the lines drawn by cultural and institutional programming as wildflowers.

They don’t wait for permission.

They don’t wait for funding.

They don’t wait for an invitation.

They humbly follow the wild spirit wherever it leads them.

I am accompanying roughly a dozen such community-strengthening wildflowers. Some are co-laborers in co-created stories where I have the opportunity to participate in person, and others are coaching relationships where I get to drop in and fly back out like a butterfly, gathering as much sweet nectar as I can during my brief visit.

My Field Notes Series captures these unfolding stories, snapshot by snapshot. Today’s article is from Appomattox, Virginia. This development effort is the one I am most immersed in at the moment.

The Appomattox Back Story

This summer, my wonderful, wild-spirited friend Ruth Perry led me into a whole patch of wildflowers when she suggested we work with the theater kids from our local high school to conduct a community listening project in Appomattox, VA, where Ruth and I both live. The drama club was looking to raise funds to purchase new sound equipment, and we were able to pull together a handful of sponsors willing to donate $1,000 toward the project. These 20 free-spirited young social change makers are sure to make this a fun and lively summer!

For those of you who have graduated from our Power Shift Training, you know that youth-led listening is my favorite way of discovering the hopes, dreams, and gifts of a community. It is a process that builds connections and is transformative for youth, who learn to view their community through the lens of strengths and opportunities. It is also meaningful for the adults who have a chance to share their community stories with the next generation.

As I shared last month in the article titled “The Place Our Nation Reunites?” I began following the wild spirit about a year ago in the Appomattox community. It led me to do a series of informal one-on-one conversations with anyone who would have a cup of coffee with me. This opened the opportunity to host several facilitated conversations with various groups. Through these initial conversations, the shared dream that began to emerge was that Appomattox become a place of unity – a place where our nation truly reunites as we live our community’s tagline. Could Appomattox be a place where all experience belonging and where all are valued equally?

One of the divides I heard through these initial conversations was generational. There was a strong desire to bring the community together across all ages. So, partnering with the drama club was a perfect way to create an opportunity for those kinds of conversations.

I have worked with hundreds of youth through the years, and every group is unique. What struck me about this group of youth is how much they love their club. The first day I met them, we heard story after story from the youth about how they found a place of belonging in this club that they had not experienced elsewhere. Cultivating community for others will be much easier for these youth and likely more fruitful with them having already experienced a sense of community themselves.

I chose the image above because of the interconnected nature of my pollinator garden. The fritillary butterfly you see above most likely began as a caterpillar munching on one of the common blue violets that we have been cultivating as ground cover in the pollinator garden. The common blue violet is its host plant. If there is no host plant to feed the caterpillar, then there is no butterfly to pollinate the flowers. That purple coneflower will benefit from the sacrifice of the violet. Similarly, our summer listening project will benefit from the countless hours invested by the drama club leaders, Renee Hounsell and Danielle Hicks, throughout the year. I believe the youth will have an opportunity to strengthen their wings as they discover the beauty of their community.

Gift Mapping Day

This past week, we began mapping the gifts and dreams of roughly 20 high school students who will then be trained to map the gifts of other community members of all ages. As they clustered in groups, sprawled out across the stage, I heard laughter and excitement as they shared their gifts, hopes, and dreams for their community.

When asked what they would do to help youth in the region thrive, the Drama Club members’ top responses were: “Provide more things to do.” The ideas included everything from informal hangout spaces to large community-wide festivals. The strongest theme included promoting the arts.

At our next gathering, we will dive deeper into the underlying motivation for this dream, and we will get more specific about exactly what that might look like. We will start with the gifts and assets we have identified so far.

The second thing we began mapping was the gifts of the youth. The graph below is what we discovered.

At our next gathering, we will explore how the gifts of youth and adults might intersect to help bring community members of all ages together around their shared dreams for the community.

Prior Youth-led Development Efforts

Every community has gifts; every community has dreams, but how those gifts and dreams come together is what makes this process so exciting. I have helped guide over a dozen youth-led listening projects, and every one of them yielded a very different community-led initiative. Here are just a few examples:

Brookland Park Unsung Heroes Project celebrated the sacrifice of senior adults during the integration of schools in Richmond, Virginia. It leveraged the musical gifts of youth alongside the stories of the seniors and produced a community-wide drama, music video, and oral history collection.

Broadwater Young Heroes Project celebrated the leadership abilities of high school youth who created a variety of community-strengthening activities, most focused on older youth creating enrichment opportunities for younger youth in Chester, Virginia, with the support of Chester United Methodist Church.

Prince Edward County Culture Shift Project is a series of youth-led initiatives that helped youth grow their leadership skills, find their voice, and ultimately change their school culture. This is an ongoing development effort in Farmville, Virginia, being cultivated by our Heart of Virginia network of community cultivators under the leadership of Torrie Patterson.

These are three unique communities with three very different youth-led initiatives. However, all of them produced one common outcome – greater community unity. When communities come together around what they care about and use what they have to achieve those goals, communities are strengthened regardless of the form that effort takes.

It is far too early to know what an intergenerational cross-section of the Appomattox community cares enough about to work toward. Stay Tuned! It promises to be a very fruitful summer!

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Other Resources

If you would like to learn more about some of the other development efforts I am following, check out Convergence of Mountain Moving Streams, which contains a snapshot of our network-weaving efforts in Richmond, Virginia. The Ups and Downs of Community Cultivating, which documents the journey of one of my favorite wildflowers, Torrie Patterson. As well as additional stories over in our Mighty Network Newsroom like this one. You can also learn more about some of the wildflowers I am journeying with here.