Plato, Peña and Me

Photo: © Pedro Meyer, 1997

Just the other night I was casting around for some blog post inspiration. We all work so hard in the trenches and in our heads that sometimes it’s hard to get out of the present and think a little more broadly.

So there I am reading my local weekly paper and out jumps an essay about Plato. That is one of the attributes of living in a college town: professors will share their musings, often “dumbed down” for us mere mortals. In this particular article, Professor Victor Nuovo discusses “Laws,” a less well known work of Plato’s, and reminds us of the role of individuals:

“[I]f the rule of law is to accomplish [peace], it cannot be imposed upon a people from the outside or from above. It must operate within each individual member of society....” (Addison County Independent, March 11, 2010 p 17A).

This resonated with me. Our work at the Foundation comes from the very same conviction: that the most effective and long lasting change and stewardship in communities is lead by individual citizens.

Later that same night, again benefiting from living in a college town, I went to a performance by Guillermo Gómez Peña. In his program, he included the following:

“Dear Audience: How about we persuade every city Council in the US to host a weekly lecture by a well-known poet, philosopher or critical artist on the importance of art and education in a democracy. And the politicians are not allowed to talk back; they must sit, listen and, if they are smart, take notes.”

What a powerful statement and a fine example of an individual working to wake people up, think about what matters and do something. I appreciated his call to action to claim responsibility for our role as citizens and to bring creativity into an often mind-deadening process (the political one, I mean). I also appreciated his insistance that people—politicians in this case—listen well.

When we work with our communities, the Foundation stresses the importance of citizens, not only feeling like they’ve been heard, but finding their voice and using it to their greatest advantage. This means that, along with engagement techniques and messaging strategies, we teach the art of listening, which includes—as Guillermo Gómez Peña suggested in his plea to the audience—truly paying attention to the perspectives, critiques and perceptions of people different from ourselves.

This brings me to an exciting project underway here in Vermont called the Art of Action, which was conceived by the Foundation’s founder, Lyman Orton, and his partner Janice Izzi. The project aims to reorient the role of art and artists in society by acknowledging them as vehicles and catalysts for discussing and shaping the future. Watch this video we produced on the project, featuring 10 local artists and their thoughts on, as photographer John Miller puts it, “who we are, what this place is about, and how the arts can function in very responsible ways.”

Peña and Plato would be proud.