SWF Launches the Year-Long Radical [Re]Construction of Values Workshop Series

On Saturday, February 3rd, more than 25 members of the extended Sweet Water Foundation community attended the first of twelve workshops in the year-long Radical [Re]Construction of Values event series. The series is a direct response to the deafening cycle of rhetoric about our city’s “chronic urban problems,” “unending gun violence,” and “hypersegregation” and seeks to remedy the disconnection between people and the policies developed to serve them. Through this year-long series, Sweet Water Foundation will orchestrate critical dialogue and catalyze the actions required to begin to move our great City of Chicago from ‘a tale of two cities’ to a ‘Tale of the New City.’ 

The Radical [Re]Construction of Values series will focus workshops on one of four central themes each quarter: Housing, Work, Food & Health, and Education. For each theme, three workshops will be conducted, with Housing as the inaugural theme. The first two workshops of each quarter will engage local residents in authentic discussion and ideation. The outcomes of these workshops will, then, inform the content of a third, culminating workshop that will engage a broader, more diverse audience of relevant civic and community leaders influential within a given theme. All workshops will harness the power of nutritious food as a common platform across which we bring people together to build connections and nourish their hearts, bodies and minds.

Radical Reconstruction of Values will create the platform to uncover, unleash, capture and share the voices of the community that we know are abundant with solutions capable of creating sustained and transformational change. Amidst one reality of abandonment, exclusion, urban “blight” or disintegration, community members will learn to feel empowered, to re-envision both personhood and place, and travel from fragmentation to possibility and wholeness within self and community. Civic and community leaders will also gain access to a rare platform of authentic, community-led inquiry and ideation to our city’s toughest challenges.

Two workshops on Housing have been completed to date and planning for the third and culminating workhop on Housing is underway. If you would like to find out how to get involved in the Radical [Re]Construction of Values Workshop series, please email info@sweetwaterfoundation.com

Sweet Water Foundation is thankful for the support of the Field Foundation and ArtPlace America to make this event series possible.