Young Cultural Stewards
Chicago Park District’s Young Cultural Stewards (YCS) critically and creatively engage art, technology, and media to become advocates and caretakers of their parks, neighborhoods, and communities. Young Cultural Stewards cultivate:
Cultural Stewardship
Reframe public parks as sites for cultural organizing and creative capacity building
Build 21st century skills of creativity, communication, collaboration, and critical thinking
Civic Engagement
Cultivate the development of positive self-identity, community, and solidarity
Nurture the capacity to imagine change and the willingness to work for it
Practice culture making as a tool for social change
Community Safety
Foster trust, vulnerability, and the development of interdependent relationships
Utilize restorative and transformative justice to address harm and create accountability
Provide job training, career readiness, and building the capacity of youth as leaders and lifelong change makers
Using the framework from ArtsXIII as a launching off point, Young Cultural Stewards Fellowship is a program co-created by Irina Zadov and Mallory Craig under the general leadership of Meida McNeal. The Young Cultural Stewards Fellowship (YCSF) engages youth (ages 12-14) as caretakers of culture and agents of change within their parks and neighborhoods. With regional hubs in Willy B. White, Piotrowski, and Tuley Park, youth explore what culture and community mean to them while developing skills in cultural preservation, organizing, and building creative platforms for social change. YCS fellows grow their civic imaginations and practice cultural strategies to address issues impacting their communities. The work of YCSF is ever-evolving and is now stewarded by a team of climate justice fellows and program stewards.
If We Build It
In the inaugural launch of the Young Cultural Stewards Fellowship, youth gathered in three parks to meet with artists, each with their own unique cultural organizing practice, to learn strategies in finding and hearing the stories already being told in their communities, and amplifying these stories in a creative platform. Through the radical funding of Crossroads Fund, youth received an honorarium for their time and were given a budget to end their fellowship by integrating what they learned from artists to curate their own community gathering. Each event was planned with these guiding questions in mind:
Which cultures do we participate in? Create? Resist? Transform?
What impact do we intend to have in our communities? How do we measure this impact?
What is community-based art? In what ways is it similar to / different from community organizing?
How can we hold ourselves / communities accountable?
What are some ways artists can be held accountable to the communities they work with and vice versa?
Made Possible by the creative and dedicated work of: David Anthony Guiry, Patricia Nguyen, William Carmargo, Irina Zadov, Mallory Craig and guest artists: Ciera Mckissick, Tempestt Hazel, Maria Gaspar, Amara – Rebel Betty, Kuumba Lynx, Jasmine Barber, Monica Trinidad, Jackie Carmen Guerrero
Emergent Strategy
The second YCSF cohort, was built around adrienne maree brown’s book Emergent Strategy and pulled at the following threads:
Moving at the speed of trust
Resiliency and transformation
Shaping change
Who we are at the small scale is who we are at the large scale
The pace and pathways of change
Creating more possibility
In each park, young people took part in circle-keeping, movement, dialogue, and art-making to plan community gatherings that reflected their time in the fellowship looking to nature to learn how to work towards personal and social transformation through the emergent strategy principles. Curriculum was designed around principles in biomimicry, a principle that can be described as mimicking natural and ecological systems to lean into new ways of being and doing.
Made Possible by the creative and dedicated work of: Juarez Hawkins, Mykele Deville, Sojourner Zenobia, Peregrine Bermas, Amara – Rebel Betty, Jenna Anast, Irina Zadov, Mallory Craig
The Art of Flocking
The third cohort deepened what was built from Emergent Strategy in The Art of Flocking. The project included a series of public programs and community exhibitions for Chicago youth exploring the history and impact of Mexican-American public artist Hector Duarte and Sapphire and Crystals, Chicago’s first and longest-operating black women’s artist collective.
Made Possible by the creative and dedicated work of: Juarez Hawkins, Mykele Deville, Sojourner Zenobia, Peregrine Bermas, Amara – Rebel Betty, Jenna Anast, Irina Zadov, Mallory Craig. While Mallory co-created the foundations of The Art of Flocking, she stepped away from that work and Chicago a month before the final programming coalesced. And watched the brilliant work of her collaborators continue to build and carry out the program.
ArtsXIII
ArtsXIII was a neighborhood multi-arts initiative that fostered the exploration of identity and community through engagement in visual, literary, performing arts, and digital media, as well as exposure to professional artists, experiences, and materials. ArtsXIII promoted skill-building in the arts, collaboration and fun in equal measure, and was attuned to the social and creative interests of young people ages 12 -14. From 2015 – 2017 the program was co-stewarded by Leah Woldman and Mallory Craig. In the year 2018, ArtsXIII evolved into the Young Cultural Stewards Fellowship program co-stewarded by Irina Zadov and Mallory Craig.
Hauntings
Who and what are Chicago’s ghosts and what continues to haunt this city? Who and what are the ghosts of my family? What has been left behind for us to deal with? What very ghosts lurk within me?
In the Spring and Summer of 2016, ArtsXIII was shaped around the theme of Hauntings by looking to ghost stories, Chicago’s history, and the ghosts we carry with us. Through creating time capsules, creating alters of past selves, and setting up confessional booths to Chicago’s ghosts we looked at neighborhood histories, resources, and legacies left behind. Youth conversed with the ghosts from police brutality, the Great Migration, gentrification, and the ghosts and ancestors of their own families and communities. Field trips included the Burnham Wildlife Gathering Spaces, the Kerry James Marshall exhibit at MCA, the Experimental Sound Studio, as well as landmarks that hold ghosts in each of the parks neighborhoods through a bike ride with Slow Roll Chicago. Young people’s work was exhibited in the Fine Arts Building during a night of open studios.
MADE POSSIBLE BY THE CREATIVE AND DEDICATED WORK OF: JAZMIN DUA, PATSY DIAZ, JUAREZ HAWKINS, ART DEVOUR, FREE STREET THEATER, SLOW ROLL CHICAGO, INFERNO MOBILE RECORDING STUDIO, LEAH WOLDMAN, AND MALLORY CRAIG
Naming Our Powers
In 2017, youth took a deep look into the superpowers within themselves, their neighbors, and the spaces they occupy. The curriculum was rooted in the work of Chicago artists and aimed to introduce young people to artists from their very own neighborhoods.
A key component to ArtsXIII was the planning and facilitating of field trips in which the three separate camps, geographically spread across the city, had opportunities to come together to experience arts and culture across a hyper-segregated Chicago. In 2017, this took the shape of each camp group taking the responsibility of hosting the other camps to decide which aspects of their neighborhood and their park identity they wanted to share.
MADE POSSIBLE BY THE CREATIVE AND DEDICATED WORK OF: JUAREZ HAWKINS, NATALIA SMIRNOV, DOMINIQUE CHESTAND, AMINA ROSS, SILVIA INÉS GONZALEZ, LAURA SÁENZ, AMFM, IRINA ZADOV, AND MALLORY CRAIG