Presenting in Nashville...

This June, I (Kirstin) will be presenting and facilitating at the Americans for the Arts Convention in Nashville, Tennessee. Not only am I excited to explore Nashville's sites and sounds, but I am thrilled to be partnering up with some of the smartest people I know to create some new content for convention attendees.

I will be co-designing and leading a session aimed at unpacking organizational biases with Tatiana Hernandez of the Knight Foundation and Charlie Jensen of Arts for LA. Here's the description: How do issues of bias and privilege impact your organization? In this interactive intervention, identify where you are, where you want to go, and the barriers you’ll have to confront—and start creating a more equitable organization today. I'm not totally sure I am comfortable with the use of the word intervention, but I think I understand the intention behind it - to get people into a space together to expose and unpack what's holding us back.

I am also building and leading a session on coalition building at the Leadership Preconference which takes place in the days before the full convention. This session will be focused on the tenants and principles of coalition building (from my perspective) and hopefully will engage the participants in an activity that models consensus building, collaborative thinking and processes...more to come on this!

Finally, I will be co-designing a session in the Leadership Preconference with Abe Flores from Americans for the Arts. The goal of this session is to create an open space for dialogue and reflection about ideas, questions, topics of the participants. I believe we will employ tenants of Open Space Technology or World Cafe to make this a reality.