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P R O J E C T S
Social Artists are leaders in many fields who bring passion and skill to align themselves with the earth's higher purpose, together co-creating the human and social changes needed to make a better world. Participants share here samples of some of the projects that have grown from their work in the social artistry programs.
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SWAMP GRAVY
Joy Jinks and Karen Kimbrel are social artists who have created a national model of community development through arts, culture and heritage. In their small town of 2,000 people in a rural county of 6,500 located in Southwest Georgia, they have created a cultural tourism initiative that brings 40,000 visitors to town. Swamp Gravy, Georgia's Folk-Life Play, was an idea birthed at Mystery School in 1990, when Joy Jinks met Richard Geer, a visionary theatre director. A new production, a ritual of community celebration, is mounted each year based on the oral histories of area residents. The plays are professionally written, directed and designed, and one hundred volunteer actors and musicians create a never-to-be-forgotten performance. Swamp Gravy is presented each March and October for four weekends. The Cotton Hall theatre, a vintage cotton warehouse, houses professional plays in the Summer and Christmas. Spin-offs have been a children's arts and tutorial center, a Victorian Bed and Breakfast with 17 rooms and restaurant, and a Marketplace for visitors to shop. Creativity attracts creativity, so Colquitt now houses the largest movie soundstage in Georgia, Florida and Alabama, the JoKaRa-Micheaux production studio. While economic development in a rural area is important, Colquitt has demonstrated that the release of the human spirit to creativity, risk taking and celebration is key to the future. www.swampgravy.com
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YOUTH POSSIBILITIES
Isabelle Healy chose Youth Possibilities, a collaborative network focused on young African-Americans in inner city Cincinnati as her project for the Master's program in Social Artistry (MLSA). She brought the perspectives, tools and ongoing personal transformation that Jean Houston teaches to the real world of violence and lack of resources many young black men live in by convening and facilitating conversations that brought youth and adults together. These events, as well as working side-by-side with a diversity of people, brought about the most important accomplishment of the project: connection, the linking of black and white; inner city and other localities; poor, affluent and middle class; simply, human being to human being. This is the basis for the community that is slowly being built. Isabelle Healy 513-351-5140
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GIVE A JUMPSTART
Give a Jumpstart is a non-profit organization dedicated to helping women in Africa to improve their living conditions by giving them an interest free loan or a one time donation to start their own business. It also serves to improve educational opportunities for AIDS orphans. On going projects include school hammer mill, carpentry workshop, tailoring workshop, solar oven baking and soy bean cultivation in Kashikishi, Northern Zambia. Initiated by MariElena Granger with the help of other Mystery School and Social Artistry participants, they now have 7 projects up and running. Pretty fabulous, they say, in one year, especially in Africa where sometimes the obstacles for completion are immense. Long term they will find other places in Africa where nuns or some other incorruptible group is willing to maintain the projects and distribute Jumpstart monies. Then, in time, they plan to expand to other countries. www.giveajumpstart.org
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| SACRED PLACES, SACRED SITES
Joyce McNamara provides opportunities for people to experience the wisdom and transformational power of ancient sites through conscious tours. The vision for these tours was born out of Joyce's experiences in the Social Artistry Leadership Train the Trainers program. To strengthen cross-cultural fluidity through travel, Joyce started her programs to Guatemala where she confirmed her suspicions that sacred places, ones invested with the energy of countless ceremonies and focusing the primal energy of Gaia, could evoke and facilitate personal transformation. Since then, she's designed and offered journeys that include 12-days in Guatemala's ruins at Tikal and the Mayan Highland villages of Santiago Attitlan and Chichicastenango, as well as Renegade Canyon in California's Mojave Desert, the location of over 6,000 petroglyphs, visioning sites and a medicine wheel.
Contact Joyce at
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