Consultancy and Professional Development Reports

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Since 2009, the American Folklore Society has supported consultancies and professional development opportunities for public folklorists that have led to the creation of best-practice reports on some aspect of public folklore work (including research, documentation, archiving, presentation, education, public programming, web development, new media, and organizational planning and sustainability), and of case studies of various public folklore projects. Funding from the Folk and Traditional Arts Program of the National Endowment for the Arts has made this project possible.

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    The Reestablishment of an Arkansas State Folk Arts Program: An Assessment of Resources with Recommendations
    (American Folklore Society, 2016-12) Thatcher, Elaine
    With the end of Arkansas State University’s support for a statewide folklife program in 2014, folklorist Elaine Thatcher was hired to do a resource assessment in Arkansas with an eye to determining the feasibility of establishing a new program with a new host institution. Thatcher spent a week traveling the state, talking to potential stakeholders and supporters. There is every likelihood that the University of Arkansas Library (located in Fayetteville) will host a new statewide folk arts/life program and that funding will be adequate to establish the program for the foreseeable future. Strong support for a new program—somewhere—was expressed by all to whom Thatcher talked, though no organization other than the University of Arkansas expressed a willingness and an ability to host such a program. This report recommends next steps and that they be undertaken as soon as possible. Steps include (1) the University of Arkansas Library (UAL) immediately beginning the process of writing a position description and identifying the support services the folklorist position would need; (2) the University making a formal statement or hosting a meeting in which the University of Arkansas Library declares its intentions and gets input from key stakeholders, i.e., the state arts council, the state humanities council, and others to be identified; (3) the UAL submitting a funding request to the National Endowment for the Arts on the next available deadline. This report also addresses opportunities and challenges facing the new program and makes suggestions for its success.
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    Report from the Association for Western State Folklorists Annual Meeting
    (American Folklore Society, 2017) Sullivan, Kristin
    This report summarizes my experiences at the annual Association for Western State Folklorists (AWSF) meetings held in Eugene, OR, April 19-22, 2017. As a public folklorist new to Washington State—I moved from Maryland in 2016—I was anxious to attend this regionally focused meeting, to interact with my new peers and develop some insight into the world of public folklore in the Western U.S., and particularly the Northwest. The meetings took place less than two months after I stepped into the position of Director of the Center for Washington Cultural Traditions (CWCT), Washington’s new folklife and traditional arts program. Though I met a few of the AWSF meeting participants during contracted fieldwork I conducted leading to my new position, I was anxious to interact more with them and meet others. Additionally, though I became Washington’s new state folklorist after working as a public folklorist in Maryland, my academic training is in applied and cultural anthropology, so I was also interested in getting a better understanding of the ways in which folkloristics are put into practice generally, and especially in this geographic region.
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    Technical Assistance Consultancy Program - Final Report
    (American Folklore Society, 2017-05) Shrake, Richard
    Vermont Folklife Center (VFC) Archivist, Andy Kolovos, worked with consultant Richard Shrake, a Vermont-based digital archivist and database/web developer, to achieve two goals: 1. Export data from legacy database, import data into VFC Omeka-based digital archive. 2. Update VFC’s Omeka-based online digital archive to the most current version. 3. Evaluate options for, and select, a new archival cataloging system. Assist with transfer of legacy content into new system.
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    REPORT ON STRATEGIC PLANNING FOR LOCAL LEARNING: THE NATIONAL NETWORK FOR FOLK ARTS IN EDUCATION
    (American Folklore Society, 2016-12) Mount, Lisa
    Local Learning is a national network comprising folk culture specialists, folk artists, and educators who have developed Folk Arts in Education (FAIE) programs and resources in a wide variety of educational venues. The organization is dedicated to the belief that "local learning"—the traditional knowledge and processes of learning that are grounded in community life—is of critical importance in education because local knowledge has the potential to transform learning, create stronger communities, and build intercultural understanding. Local Learning supports its associates and educates others through professional development for teachers and artists, participation in public policy as a national arts service organization, ongoing networking, quarterly electronic bulletins, and annual publication of the peer-reviewed, multimedia Journal of Folklore and Education (JFE) found on the Local Learning website, http://www.locallearningnetwork.org/.
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    Folklorists in the South Retreat
    (American Folklore Society, 2017) Gerhart, Heather
    This year the biennial Folklorists in the South (FITS) Retreat centered on the theme of “the Power of Our Stories” and explored story as both a medium for communication and an approach to folklore practice. Held at the Gray Center neighboring historic Canton, Mississippi, presentations, workshops and discussions ranged from highlighting projects and artists that illuminate story forms, to leveraging our stories for advocacy, to publishing our findings, to considering the application of narrative approaches in the field.
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    Report From Curriculum Development and Best Practices Consultancy for the Center for Food and Culture
    (American Folklore Society, 2017-05) Eleuterio, Susan
    Susan Eleuterio worked with the Center for Food and Culture’s Director, Lucy Long, to create curriculum materials for K-12 and adult audiences to help develop new audiences for the Center among K-12 educators, colleges, community-based organizations, and others. Below is the case study with recommendations for expanding audiences for folklore-based organizations, particularly those interested in education and community engagement.
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    Report on Storytelling Workshop as Advocacy for Others and Ourselves Presented at The Folklorists in the South (FITS) Retreat April 2017, Canton, Mississippi
    (American Folklore Society, 2017) Eleuterio, Susan
    We began by examining what participants felt they Know (K) and what they Wonder (W) about advocacy. KWL is a writing and collaborative learning strategy that solicits existing knowledge from participants along with questions they have about the subject. We ended the session discussing what participants Learned (L) about advocacy. (The facilitator (s) takes visual notes on a large sheet of paper- these are used at the end of the session to check that questions and concerns have been addressed.) This strategy can be used when developing an advocacy plan to assess what participants know about a particular issue, along with its stakeholders and decision makers; what they wonder or want to know more about the issue, stakeholders and decision makers, and after a campaign to sum up what they learned about advocating for a particular issue.
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    El Shaddai Ambassadors Choir – Dillon, South Carolina
    (American Folklore Society, 2017-01) Dodge, Amber
    For my AFS short-term consultancy, I worked with the El Shaddai Ambassadors Choir, a gospel choir group based in Dillon, South Carolina, made up of resettled refugees from a number of East African nations. The group requested assistance with creating a website to sell CDs and DVDs online that they had previously produced. They intend to donate a portion of the proceeds from sales of their CDs and DVDs to support an orphanage in Uganda. The consultancy evolved from simply creating a website to sell their CDs and DVDs to devising a holistic marketing plan that generates awareness of the choir group and their availability for live performances.
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    NASAA Folklorists’ Peer Group Workshop
    (American Folklore Society, 2017-05) Cantú, Norma E
    On September 14, 2016, the Folklorists’ Peer Group met before the National Assembly for State Arts Agencies (NASAA) national conference held in Grand Rapids, Michigan. In my role as consultant, I attended the Folklorists’ Peer Group Pre-Conference workshop titled, “Where’s My Place in Racial Justice? Reflecting on Personal and Professional Roles in Creating Equity.” Colleagues and friends whom I knew from the American Folklore Society, Marsha MacDowell, Laura Marcus Green, and Amy Kitchener invited me to act as evaluator and reviewer of the Workshop. As a member of the Cultural Diversity Committee of AFS, I accepted the invitation with hopes of adding, in some small way, to the discussion and thereby moving our diversity agenda forward. In this report, I am reporting on the activities at the NASAA Folklorists Peer Group Pre conference workshop; I conclude with some suggestions for future actions that will build on the work done in Grand Rapids. This report focuses on the Workshop held during the first day of the Folklorists Peer Group gathering at NASAA. See Appendix A for the agenda for the first day meeting.
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    Vermont Folklife Center: Digital Preservation Storage Planning
    (American Folklore Society, 2017-06) AVPreserve, (AFS)
    In spring 2017 AVPreserve (AVP) consultant Bertram Lyons was supported by the AFS Consultancy and Professional Development Program to work with the Vermont Folklife Center (VFC). The goals of the NEA-funded project focused on an assessment of VFC’s digital preservation procedures and hardware, and the formulation of recommendations for improving their efforts and upgrading storage systems. On April 10–11, 2017 Lyons traveled to Middlebury and met with Kolovos for the on-site portion of the consultancy. During this visit Lyons gathered data to assist VFC with both the NEA-funded aspects of his work and the AFS-supported project. Lyons conducted additional work off site over the course of the next month.
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    Report to AFS for Short-Term Consultancy, Dutch Hop Film Documentary Project: Developing Plan to Prepare Video Materials for Deposit to Archives
    (American Folklore Society, 2016) Wier, Georgia
    Boulder Community Media (BCM) has for the past three years been involved with the production of a documentary film on Dutch Hop, the polka tradition unique to descendants of the Germans from Russia who immigrated to northeastern Colorado, southeastern Wyoming, and western Nebraska. It still is a living, breathing, (stomping) tradition in those areas. Organizations collaborating with BCM on this project are the Wyoming Arts Council, Nebraska Folklife Network, and Sageland Media. Folklorists working on the effort are Ann Hatch (producer and advisor), Chris Simon (director and principal filmmaker), Gwen Meister (advisor), and Georgia Wier (associate producer and advisor).
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    Redeveloping the Vermont Folklife Center’s Website
    (American Folklore Society, 2016-05) Castle, Ned; Kolovos, Andy
    The Vermont Folklife Center website had been little changed since 2002. By 2016 it became clear that we could no longer put off an overhaul of our primary online presence, which had become aged in both design and technology, and sprawling and Byzantine in its architecture. Inspired by VFC Director of Education Kathleen Haughey’s work in fall 2015 to redevelop the website of our school-based education program, Discovering Community (www.discoveringcommunity.org), VFC staff begin to investigate in earnest our options for reinventing our online portal. Staff consensus was that while much of the content of the old site still held value, the aesthetics and information architecture reflected poorly on VFC
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    Vermont Folklife Center AFS Infrastructure Report
    (American Folklore Society, 2016) Kolovos, Andy; Haughey, Kathleen
    In Spring of 2012 the Board of Trustees of the Vermont Folklife Center (VFC) appoitned Gregory Sharrow and Andy Kolovos to the positions of Co- Executive Directors of the organization. As they explored their new responsiblities, Kolovos and Sharrow hoped to create a more lateral and democratic internal organization for VFC with the goal of broadening out decision making and sharing executive responsiblities among all VFC staff. What followed were several years of ad-hoc experimentation that produced many organizational sucessess as well as a hightened sense of staff cohesion and engagement. However, as VFC sought to hire new staff members it became clear that the adhoc processes of the past would need to be rendered more transparent, be better structured, and more formalized. To this end VFC staff members began to search for models of decentralized organizational systems they could use to inform the establishment of a new organizational structure for VFC.
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    Educative Encounters, Liminal Advantages and Culturally Inspired Storytelling: A Critical Look at the “Peru: Pachamama” program of the 2015 Smithsonian Folklife Festival
    (American Folklore Society, 2016) Porter, Maureen; Belanus, Betty
    During the second five days (July 1-5) of the 2015 Smithsonian Folklife Festival, a team of anthropologists/educators from the University of Pittsburgh, working on behalf of the American Folklore Society's Consultancy and Professional Development Program and led by Dr. Maureen Porter, (referred to in the remainder of this document as “The Pittsburgh Team”), visited the Peru: Pachamama program with the charge of participant observation of the educational opportunities and potential of the Festival. Dr. Porter prepared a comprehensive report, the most salient points of which are summarized in this document. (Page references in this report are to the longer document.) These observations are pertinent not only to the future efforts of the Smithsonian Folklife Festival, but to other cultural events of various types and scope, as well as to Folklore and Education efforts in other venues (including museums, cultural centers, and classrooms).
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    Berkeley, California: A Primer to Documentation and Analysis of Urban Vernacular Architecture
    (American Folklore Society, 2016) Johnson, Jeanne Harrah
    The purpose of this project is to document homes in a neighborhood of Berkeley, the Elmwood District, through photography, sketches, oral histories, and informal interviews. That material ,combined with research from primary and secondary sources, connected the places and the people who live there. Unlike the majority of vernacular architecture publications and teachings, my approach does not include measured drawings, dating techniques, or construction and materials technology. I would encourage the use of those whenever they benefit the description and interpretation of architecture. I use a historical perspective and ethnographic methods to identify the social and cultural construction of meanings for this specific place.
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    NATIONWIDE FOLKLIFE PROGRAMS STUDY: UNDERSTANDING THE INFRASTRUCTURE OF THE FIELD IN 2015-2016
    (American Folklore Society, 2016-05) Forloney, Robert
    Maryland Traditions, the folklife program of the Maryland State Arts Council, conducted an operational survey of the various folklife programs and centers in each state during late winter, 2015, and early spring, 2016. This project was supported in part by generous funding from the American Folklore Society (AFS) so that its findings could be made accessible to the field of folklore studies and public folklore as a whole. The purpose of this study was to gain a deeper understanding of the current infrastructure of the folklife field at the state level. In particular, the study aimed to produce a report that brings together information on the following aspects of each state’s folklife program: • Funding structure • Budget and staff size • Physical and operational structure • Activities, outreach, and programming Due to the fact that folklife programs nationwide operate in a variety of ways, such as through being based in arts agencies, or at universities, a well as through other non-profit organizations, compiling this information into one report should greatly benefit the field as a whole. Moreover, this knowledge will help to highlight particular programs as models for others, further strengthening the field and its interconnectedness. After the data collection period, the findings were complied into this final report and submitted to Maryland Traditions and AFS to be shared with its professional circles, members, and constituents
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    REPORT: DEMOCRATIZING THE (FOLK) ARTS NONPROFIT WORKPLACE
    (American Folklore Society, 2016-05) Condon, Eileen
    On Sunday, February 28th, 2016, beginning at 5PM in the Great Room at South Oxford Space, 138 South Oxford Street, Brooklyn, New York, the New York Folklore Society welcomed approximately 20 attendees, some who had come from as far as Philadelphia, to a folk arts forum convening local and national arts and labor leaders for panel presentations and an open forum on the topic of “Democratizing the Arts Nonprofit Workplace.
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    “Crisis of Place: Preserving Folk & Vernacular Architecture in New York”: Annual Conference of the New York Folklore Society, co-sponsored by The Cooper Union
    (American Folklore Society, 2016) Berlinger, Gabrielle; Turner, Kay; McHale, Ellen
    With generous support from the Consultancy and Professional Development Program of the American Folklore Society, the New York Folklore Society brought together 20 folk cultural experts to participate as panelists in a one-day convening around issues of folk and vernacular architecture preservation. The event took place on April 2, 2016 at The Cooper Union in New York City. Entitled “Crisis of Place: Preserving Folk & Vernacular Architecture in New York,” this gathering brought together folklorists, architectural historians, architects, historic preservationists, community advocates and activists, museum professionals, and graduate students from across the nation to present their academic and public-facing work related to questions of folk and vernacular architecture preservation.
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    Visioning Retreat for the Center for Washington Cultural Traditions
    (American Folklore Society, 2016-01) Beene, Melanie; Baron, Robert
    Three decades ago the first of three Washington State folklife programs was established. Now the state program is once again in transition. The folk arts program of the Washington State Arts Commission (now ArtsWA) was discontinued in June 2013 and the director of Northwest Heritage Resources will soon retire. Led by Northwest Heritage Resources, folklorists and representatives from government and nonprofit cultural organizations have been engaged in a series of conversations to strategize rebuilding the state folklife program and building a sustainable statewide network for the field. The results of these efforts has been the decision to establish a Center for Washington Cultural Traditions in July 2016 at Humanities Washington, as a collaboration with ArtsWA, Northwest Heritage Resources, and a network of nonprofit organizations and government agencies. The Center is envisioned as something more ambitious and sustainable than previous state folklife programs, engaging collaboration with multiple disciplines in the arts and humanities and attracting significant private and government funding.
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    AFRICAN DANCE IN AMERICA PLENARY
    (American Folklore Society, 2016) Artry-Diouf, Esailama G.
    On February 19-12, 2016, the Collegium for African Diaspora Dance hosted its second conference entitled, "Dancing the African Diaspora: Embodying the Afrofuture." This year’s conference aimed to re-ignite the discourse on defining Black Dance on a global scale by bringing together scholars, practitioners, educators, and other stakeholders for three days of research presentations, breakout sessions, movement workshops, film screenings, and a performance by Kyle Abraham/Abraham.In.Motion.