ENGAGE 3/C: A COMMUNITY PRACTICE BOOK

Between September 2024 and March 2025, I had the opportunity to collaborate on a community project stewarded by Pascale Ife Williams, PhD. Dr. Williams investigated how community-based arts programs fail to meet and move with community needs and gathered wisdom and insights from cultural workers and artists in Chicago about how they can do better. At the end of this project, Dr. Williams published Embodying Caring, Curious, Collaborative Arts Ecosystems – Engage 3/C: A Community Practice Book (“The Practice Book”), co-authored by Fariha M. Koshul and Lee Nah. As they lay out in the introduction:

"[The Practice Book] is a living resource to explore the sensorial elements of community-engaged arts. The Practice Book is rooted in and guided by three grounding values: care, curiosity, and collaboration. Care draws from frameworks of disability justice, Black queer feminism, and lineages of harm reduction. Curiosity centers the integration of creativity, playfulness, and childlike inquisitiveness as a method and honors innovation and imagination as a tool for survival for many communities. Collaboration takes inspiration from principles of Design Justice and exemplary models of co-creation, lovingly situated in imagery of cross-pollination drawn from the natural world.

We believe all community engagement, whether it be arts-based or otherwise, is activated and sustained by these intentional values and praxes. Throughout the Practice Book you will find values offered by our contributors that you should consider integrating, discussing, and expanding.”

Although I originally was hired to do graphic notes of the Kitchen Table Cyphers and create visuals to capture the sensorial activations, I asked to expand my role and create additional images to better capture the ideas I heard at the Cyphers. Alongside Amira Hegazy, who created the cover included above, and Dr. Williams, I helped visualize the participants’ offerings and synthesize ideas across conversations.

I am very proud to have been part of this work, and with Dr. Williams’ permission, include a PDF of The Practice Book below. Enjoy!

As noted in the copyright page, this book and its contents are copyrighted material and should not be reproduced or transmitted for commercial purposes.