Why Change? A Podcast for the Creative Generation Musical Collaborations with Distant Cousins – Part 1 Jeff M. Poulin, Ashraf Hasham, Distant Cousins Released on May 26, 2021 Jeff M. Poulin This is Why Change? The Podcast for Creative Generation. We are your hosts. I'm Jeff. Karla Rivera Hola. Hola, soy Karla. Rachael Jacobs It's Rachel here. Ashraf Hasham What's good, y'all. I'm Ashraf. Madeleine McGirk And I'm Madeline. Jeff M. Poulin Why Change is a podcast that brings listeners around the globe to learn how arts, culture and creativity, especially as applied by young people, can change the world, one community at a time. You're invited each week to learn and laugh while exploring the question. Why change? Alright, let's get started. Welcome to this episode of The why change podcast I am your host, Jeff Poulin. And I'm joined here by my co host Ashraf Hasham. How are you? Ashraf Hasham Yo, Jeff, I'm good. I'm actually in LA. You know, as some of the listeners know, I stay in Seattle. And I just needed to get out of town with the COVID vaccinations, because I work in art education. Now my vaccine like two plus months ago, so we've been planning this trip since the day I got vaccinated. I kind of went home and I was like, I gotta get out of here. So I brought my rollerblades. I brought some books and went to Venice Beach and LA, and I'm still in Venice. It's amazing. Jeff M. Poulin That does sound amazing, I am so jealous that you are near the ocean. That is a rejuvenating thing for me. But I really hope that it helps you come out of the craziness of the last few months and really get into that space to read and to think, and to rollerblade. I love that I'm sure there's a lot of creativity that happens on the rollerblades around Venice. Ashraf Hasham Yeah, totally. And it's just like driving a car, right? Like you just have weird thoughts. You just gotta continue with and you work some stuff out on your own right, there's something about physical activity in that way. And something about travel and motion in that way too. In fact, like the other day, I was, actually there's a conversation I had with a Distant Cousins who was interviewed last week, while I was on vacation, which was super fun. But I saw this young person with, you know, a Lakers jersey on who had this, this soccer ball, and they were trying to get into a basketball hoop and they were doing this move, like, I gotta say, like, 50 60 70 100 200 plus times. And I only saw maybe 50 of them, right. But they were there for a long time before me and probably a long time after me. But their resilience, they're trying, they're trying again, they're trying again, and again, like I just, there's some part of me that relates to that. And so, like, I would never do that, right? Like, that's not quite me. And yet I was so inspired by the idea of somebody, just taking the time knowing that it's gonna take a while. And then having this sort of outcome that you're aiming towards, right, like there was a phone on the ground with a tripod. So somebody was obviously trying to go viral. And Venice is a place to see and be seen. So nobody mad about that. I'm just, it's just kind of fascinating to think about, like the ways that I persevere and the ways that somebody like this, who's trying to get a soccer ball into a basketball who perseveres, it's a different type of perseverance, you know? Jeff M. Poulin Yeah, absolutely. And it's like those micro moments of inspiration that push you through. I mean, I actually recently just had a situation I was involved with, with some young people in a theater. And, you know, just seeing these kids go on to a stage, a real life stage with a real life audience. I'll be a very small audience for the first time in like two years. And to see them at first to notice the negative impact of that they hadn't been on the stage in two years. So there were new elements of stage fright and self consciousness. But then to see the pure joy and the overcoming of those obstacles, when they made it on the stage. They performed their hearts out and then came off to applause. And, you know, that is something that certainly keeps me going. And I those types of, of inspiration moments, we talked about that a lot at Creative Generation of how do we amplify those, those sort of small little nuggets that might get otherwise lost in the big sweeping dialogues that happen in our work lives around, you know, reports and grant seasons, and, you know, job interviews and all of this, but there's like those little things that really make a difference, and that absolutely inspire us to keep going with our work day in day out. Ashraf Hasham Yes, we're just you know, so I recently started managing our grants team, and I'm working really close to at the Seattle Office of arts and culture. I'm really close, really working with our impact assessment manager. And we're like, how do we like to tell the story about how the good these grants do we put out so much money into the community every year? And we get asked about these stories, but how can we get ahead of it like these grant reports? come in? How about we Just take, we boil it down to a sentence, two sentences, three sentences, right max. And part of it's the story of how we showed up in the community. And maybe it's, it's definitely not city centric, right? We don't want it to be funder centric in that sense. But we do want to say that like this, this group was trying to get these kids on the stage for a long time. And if it wasn't for this funding to come through, they may not have been able to do it, or the support that we gave them and connecting them to the parks department that had a stage open, that got to be able to lend it for that occasion, right? Like the stories of how we were able to build together something that couldn't have happened in people's zones. And sometimes that's just money. Sometimes it's a lot more than that, right? But, but let's tell a story in a sentence, let's have a whole book of sentences, right? At the end of the year, we have a whole file full of them. And we can share them with the City Council and the mayor and with stakeholders and with advocates so that we can say, Hey, we want actually more money going into our arts and culture as we recover as a sector, right? So thinking about these bigger things, how do we actually continue, like you said, inspiring ourselves, and telling the story in a way that actually amplifies and doesn't just gas us up, but actually is a lot more strategic? Yeah, Jeff M. Poulin That's really interesting actually, to think about that. There's a whole process about figuring out the story to tell because that's something that has always blown my mind, right? When you work within some of the type of work that you are I do working with funders or evaluators, or on sort of the tertiary levels, right, not not actually being the artist that works with young people, but supporting the whole infrastructure that allows for that really magic moment to happen. And in that, I always find it somewhat baffling. When you see some really amazing work happening, and you say to this person, like, that's incredible, I want you to share totally what happened. And it's like, it doesn't even faze them, because it's just what they do. That realization, when you see that light bulb go off to say, like, No, actually what you've been doing for five years, 10 years, is incredible, to then see them be like, oh, wow, it really is and to see and it's not your right, it's not like gassing anyone up. But it's that light bulb going off realizing that like they are powerful in their work, and they are making a difference, and that other people can learn from them. And that's actually something I know, you mentioned, you talked to the band, distant cousins who are based out of Los Angeles, seeing the themes on our podcast. And, you know, right at the start of the conversation, which our listeners will hear in just a moment, but they have a realization that they themselves are teaching artists, which is a term that you and I use probably every single day every day to describe artists who who use their artistic practice as an educational means with young people. They're not like certified educators in schools, but they are working artists who teach through the arts.