TheStoreFront Community story / My testimonial

I’m sorry.

I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry.

That’s how I’d like to start. It’s for everyone that I pissed off, everyone that felt confused, interested but unsure how to help. It was a complete mess and I was stuck in it. 

It started off in September 2007 when I chose to take a Think Tank 3 class with Bruce Hinds with just under 10 people in the class. Hey guys, I’m still on the project! It sure was fun diving into a neighbourhood that we didn’t know anything about. Our class project was to propose some ideas for what the Bloorcourt Village BIA could do with their money to improve the area.

Questions: What’s a BIA? What’s in the area? What kind of people live there? What kind of cultures are there? What groups, schools, parks, community centres and festivals are there? That took a few months of research. Walking around. Taking pictures, talking about proposing a Town Hall, something to do in Christie Pits, festivals, storefronts…lots of talking, that’s what ThinkTank classes are, really. Ideas are great! But the class ended and we thought that our pitch to the BIA about taking an empty storefront and transforming its use would be a great way to go about designing for the neighbourhood.

Nothing happend after our proposal. No one gave up a storefront, the BIA didn’t get back to us, the City didn’t find anything for us and we were stuck complaining about how nothing was happening. 

BIG was happening then. They were meeting at Bloor CI to plan their festival for June 2008. We met them in Novemberish I believe. Long story short, our idea for having a festival cooincided with their festival planning. I fell in love with all this neighbourhood stuff, and all became history after that.

I was brought onboard to help BIG out and ended up being the designer for the chaotic, grassroots, community organized, inaugural event that shook Bloor Street like never before in history. I took an Independent Study after the class ended in December and for the 3 months after I took on the mission to get a storefront. I knew I had to move to the area, I was living with my parents in Thornhill and in April 2008 I moved out, lived with 2 roommates off of Craigslist in a house just next to Dufferin Mall.

I managed to talk my way through. This person to the next, Sara Diamond (OCAD preseident) gave me $3000 and I had the key in my had with Rafael Gomez (ThinkTankToronto), Keith Rushton and Bruce Hinds behind it all with me. Robert Markovits liked the whole OCAD name, liked the vision, asked for 1/4 of the rent monthly and off were were to prove something. We approached it institutionally — part of the reason why it didn’t work, caused me stress and ate up my insides. Well, I let it do that to me, and I was hard on myself.

The collaboration with ThinkTankToronto saved me from dying obviously. Ralph gave me a research position to go around with a survey to research Toronto’s BIAs. That let me feed myself and pay my rent, plus some money from the BIG team, I was doing fine on the surviving and just needed to get something to start happening with the space.

Let me tell you how much an empty space can drag you down. It opens the door to so many possibilities that will come at you like maggots and circulate around your head and never leave you. I felt like I was opening up a shop, with no money, no management, no clear idea and no team. I didn’t know what the hell to do, so I picked one day in June and called it “Everything Local” and off I went. 

People started coming, friends started helping, neighbours offered support. It was crazy. It was beautiful. It was intense, it was livid, raw, dirty and full of sweat and tears. The event happened and I had a breakdown. PRESSURE!!! ART is IT! Make it an art space — make it an art gallery — use it for all kinds of things — i can help! tell me what to do — what do you need? — lets use it for film screenings — artist studio — i can do fundraising — i can organize a show etc. etc.

My answer to all: “Thank you so much, yeah, awesome ideas!”

What the hell am I doing? Pick something! Okay, so we picked a graffiti mural removal case, just next door, same property owner as my space, Robert. That became the next event and I took a lot of shit from the City and OCAD for standing up against the removal of a piece that had no right to be removed. It was so political. It got in the Toronto SUN front cover. We did a neighbourhood graffiti walk, had a discussion and connected to all sorts of people in the city supporting legal graffiti art. It was a milestone of TheStoreFront project.

But I still had to deal with: “What does this space do? When are you open? How can i get involved?”

I’m thinking to myself, “I have no fucking clue what I’m getting myself into and it’s driving me insane. I love it and hate it at the same time and I can’t stop going.”

So I kept saying “yes” to everything that came to me. My whole “yes we can” approach was long before I knew Obama was running as president. My “yes” approach was deadly and I schooled myself with it. It taught me more than I could have ever imagined and I’m thankful for every single person that hopped on the plane in this journey. It proved to me that without others, and without collaboration with others and help from others you can never be successful at anything you do. You must speak people’s language, bow to them, work for them, care for them, put yourself aside, and they will do the same. It’s not about money, it’s about sweat and heart. People see through you and if you don’t come from pain, they know you’re not real.

I knew I was the reason why people were coming to me. I wanted to run away though. I didn’t want to be the person. I didn’t want to deal with all the pressure, the expectations, the voices, the suggestions, the emails….but I did. So I had to choose a side of me and I chose “leader”. With my leader side, I attracted “chance” and lots of cool people became my friend. NEVER EVER EVER would I have met these people in an institution, in a workplace, in one field. I realized that the school of life and community is everything that matters. It’s a language of humanity and nothing will make you realize until you throw yourself at it and deal with chaos. Dealing with chaos is how you find your true “self”.

You think I knew what I was doing when I was running around trying to find a storefront? I had no plan, no management, no money, no bodies…I had absolutely nothing but my gut. And when I got there, I figured it out, or “it” figured itself out because it was being shared.

Now ofcourse, I ran into a lot of criticism, confusions, battles and realized the toughest thing to do in life is how to manage “help”. How do you organize people? How do you allow people to do what they do best and support you while they do it? How do you find an organic structure in an inorganic space. How do you deal with politics? How do you know who is your boss?

For 8 months I hustled and talked my way into streams of money to pay the rent. I was certainly not being paid for all my sweat, but then again without Rafael’s support on the back-end, nothing would have happened.

I got an article in the Globe & Mail on Nov. 22. It was really well written. The reporter was amazing and she followed me around and listened to the chaos with me.

A lot of shit went down in 2008. 

On Dec. 2, I held a meeting that jumped to my mind (discussions, people, photos). Got lots of people that I had made connections with in one room and let them take leadership in coming up with ideas on how to maintain this concept. As soon as I did that event, I realized, wow, people care so much and coming together is magic. It’s amazing how much people care about bringing an idea to life. They all got to see eachother and the energy in the room was incredible.

A spark went off and I realized it wasn’t about maintaining that space. It wasn’t about fitting rennovations, shared studio space, organizing events, music fundraisers, projects, ideas for the streetscape, parks, cultures, families, students and entertainment in 957 Bloor West. It was about DESIGNING A SYSTEM that allows for all this to happen. It’s about people connecting with eachother and working together. It’s about business improvement by having people take ownership of place. The BIA is the root to connecting with cities and neighbourhoods need better communication systems to be able to engage in spaces!

It took me 2.5 years of thinking about what the hell to do with the Internet with a design thesis project that popped in my head in 2006, to all come back together in a new form but exactly what I wanted to do in the first place.

So that led me to MEconomist.com and 957 right now is empty. I’m sorry, but 8 months of standing there and taking charge was hard enough and brutal enough for me to deal with, and I hope there are no grudges held against me for not programming more things out of that space. But beleive me I tried to make it sustainable, and I’m sure it can be anything from a gallery, to a multi-use office space, to a cafe, a music venue or any other creative hub. I just cannot do it and I never wanted to worry about something like that. It’s all about MONEY. And getting money to run a space means business. My business is online, cheap and will do all these things that we think is great because it will be a SYSTEM that will aim to do that.

We need to design SYSTEMS. We need INFRASTRUCTURE and we need LEADERSHIP. Most of all, we need patience and a big vision!

2009, I’m coming. I’m almost dead but really I’ve never felt so close to being ALIVE. Get out of school and school yourself everyone. Life is chaos and if you can’t suck it up and live through it, you will be your own worst enemy. People care and you care about people. Just make something that you think will work and see if it does! It’s one big experiment and can make a BIG BANG if you get it right!

 

WITH LOVE

TO ALL OF YOU WHO BELIEVE!

Stay young, stay passionate and go through pain. It’s the best schooling.

Filed under: activism, city, community, education, experience, life

revolution finished

 

GOD and HUMAN

MOTHER and NATURE

CHICKEN and EGG

MAN and ROOSTER

INVENTOR and INNOVATION

can’t go backwards

LIFE is always forward

and equal.

 

be born

re-birth

revolution

sex

acceptance

Filed under: activism, art, city, community, creativity, cycling, design, education, experience, future, humanity, iran, life, love, music, nature, philosophy, poetry, politics, school, student life, sustainability, work

waste vs live

i don’t waste my life trying to prove i am right.
i live my life doing what feels right.

Filed under: activism, design, education, life, love, philosophy, work , philosophy

internetoflife – the collective language to simply learn

Anyone who is reading this is a part of the book. internetoflife is one word but it assembled of three other words that we know in English.

The final direction for my thesis after 1.5 years of research is internetoflife.com

I believe in the power of the collective to share wisdom and create links.

I believe in words to reflect identity.

I believe in words of wisdom, quoted by you.

So please visit the site and contribute.

First round of submissions for final presentation at my gradshow are April 12, 2008.

Anyone, anywhere you are, if you are reading this and you are interested in the concept of my network and want to support it into fruition, please click on the submissions page. I would also like to request for volunteer translators to translate the internetoflife questions into other languages, so we can get a universal network of words. Text and colour are universal languages — lets ’simply’ use them to broadcast ‘who we are’.

More information on how I arrived here will be posted soon.

You are also welcome to add me to facebook since I have nothing to hide about who I am.

Filed under: activism, art, community, creativity, design, education, humanity, life, love, music, philosophy, poetry, problem solving, quotes, school, social community networks, sustainability

i care to DO

I’m frustrated with everything and I’m only saying this because I believe that I have answers for how to find the answers. I have a voice that I’ve made through listening and thinking. My voice is of DOING. I have a voice that cares to voice others because the voice of others is my voice.

I have never fit in, nor have I ever thought I had to fit in. Now people look at me and think that I’m too young to have answers, but I’m not telling you that I’M THE ANSWER, I’m telling you I know where the answers are and I care enough about them to bring them to the forefront of the conversation if we’re talking about answers. So don’t get intimidated by me or think that I’m self-indulgent. I just love what I DO because I do it for people and communities, hence I should love myself for doing it. I want to share the love with you all. You might see tears in my eyes if you catch me in a passionate conversation.

I just got home to my parent’s Thornhill condo suite, after a very important panel lecture series Manufacturing Neighbourhoods held by Toronto’s Architecture for Humanity at the Gardner Museum. The panel speakers included Bruce Hinds (my professor, close friend and project supporter) along with the highly reputable Ken Greenberg and other engaged reputable speakers just as concerned about community development in Toronto.

I thought it was a wonderful discussion and I just had to put my foot in there and talk about community activism since I know what that is about, because I practice it and preach it simultaneously. Sitting in the front row and having my hand up since the floor could ask questions, being dismissed about 5 times before the moderator came to hand me the microphone, I spilled my heart out on this topic of ‘building community’.

I’ve been at OCAD for 4 years and I have involved myself in its community and politics — because I care about making it a better institution with better education, more exposure to its possibilities and direction for building a unique community. Bottom line, I’m telling you, I know OCAD because I’ve experienced it and I care about its future. Everyone on the administration knows me. I have made myself and my voice visible, fearless and passionate. I have tried my best to speak for the majority of the population of the school and enhancement of its education for its students precisely with ‘building community’ and increasing student engagement, which mind you is not any different than doing something for a neighborhood. I have DONE things and that goes to tell you that I can speak about them and have a right to make a statement after doing something that people care about and don’t care enough to do something about.

Here is proof ONE and TWO of what I have done. Boom. Done. I’m publicizing myself because no one else on earth is going to do it for me. It’s not just two, it’s more! I care about my gradshow, so I care to get involved in making a structure for it so that the students are involved in the future. I put myself through challenges and hours of volunteering to initiate something I believe in. I care about the decisions made for the school. I care to speak up and give an input, because if I don’t, no one will know that I actually care. I want a better future for others and if I don’t act on what matters, then what matters will never have my voice in it. I know my voice creates vibrations and it’s those vibrations that I believe in, nothing else.

I’m fed up with people who don’t DO and sit and complain and complain and complain. There are people who talk about doing, tons of them might I add. In fact, that’s all we do! We (as in majority of Western society) just talk about doing and then the next time we do the same thing again. As much as I whole-heartedly agree the doing begins by having a conversation, but what about making the conversation HAPPEN? Who wants to take responsibility of that and who wants to invest their time in something that they’ve never done? Stop watching your damn television and stop listening to how hard it is to do things. It’s all built to scare you and turn you away. You’re not MEANT to have a voice; that’s what you’re meant for through the media.

Media yourself for goodness sakes! I’m a nobody and I’m media-ing me and through that I want to media my values and beliefs. Does that make sense? Ofcourse not, because you’ve never heard of it. You think that media is supposed to come to you because media is so far away and hard to reach.

It’s not though; it’s really not. Internet confuses us, because we’re confused with ourselves so when we enter a digital world with confusion of ourselves, we are even more confused and don’t know how to translate anything into reality. Hence we talk about it.

I’m also working on a community project as you should know by now if you’ve talked to me or know me, because it’s really my life. You cannot do a community project if you don’t fall in love with the community. It simply will not work. You will fail miserably and become pessimistic about doing anything ever again. I’m in love with this project and I’m in love with it because (here we go again), I simply GIVE A DAMN. Research on an area with statistics, numbers, assumptions and politics is the easy part. Understanding what the community has to offer is the most important and the most time-consuming part. This requires listening, observing, making friends and showing appreciation for what exists. If you don’t show appreciation for what is already there, you will again, fail miserably and continue to go the wrong way to make change.

Here is the link to a brief description to TheStoreFront project and here is TheStoreFrontCommunity.com which I highly suggest you join if you are in Toronto since we are holding an inaugural festival in the area: The BIG Festival. I have now understood this community, and I realize still how little I know about what is going on and I’m dying to be a part of it — this is why I want to MOVE THERE and live there and experience the community — being a member of the community that I change.

Now what else have I done? I spoke up to this community! I clearly made the effort to show that I cared about them. I’ve understood what community groups exist. I KNOW who these people are now and they KNOW ME TOO! This is how you make a change! You come in as an outsider and see it your responsibility to be humble and listen. If you want to be a therapist — which is literally what urban planners and designers are for communities at large — you need to listen and understand. You need to realize that there are no fingers to be pointed. It is your responsibility to find out how to do it so that IT WORKS and that local residents and businesses ‘take ownership of their communities’ — the answer to the question Bruce Hinds proposed to the group.

Now listen to me, I’m telling you that I’ve done this and done the investigation alone. And I can speak about it for that very reason; because I have done it and I know how it needs to be done after going through difficulty figuring it out. I’m not done and I never will be, but I hope that someone listens and follows some of these steps that I’ve learnt by DOING what you’re TALKING about. Who am I kidding, no one will buy in until it’s all over the media, and then you can come and ask me, “how do you do it?” Ask me now because I’m always in the search for answers. Maybe what I say will be of value, despite my age.

Filed under: activism, community, design, education, life, love, problem solving, student life, sustainability, work

The Storefront: urban re-generator

Think Tank class; 4th-year interdisciplinary design; OCAD Toronto.

semester brief: make a change; design action; intervene

realproblem: Bloorcourt Village; underdeveloped business district in Toronto (between Christie to Dufferin on Bloor)

Join our online network: The Storefront — a strive for our physical space on the streetfront.

If you’re interested in how our class has moved from idea to actualization, you can subscribe to my podcast in iTunes. On the left bar, click ‘Podcasts’, under ‘Advanced’, go to ’subscribe to podcast’ and paste:

http://feeds.feedburner.com/thestorefront

Filed under: activism, art, bloorcourt, community, creativity, design, humanity, podcast

what does “best” mean?

page 43, Small Change, Nabeel Hamdi

‘Best’ means most excellent, most suitable, most desirable, something which surpasses all others. It is an ultimate state beyond which there can be little improvement, at least for now. It differentiates between talents hierarchically, and therefore unequally, and assumes single standards. It normalizes ambition and desires, differences in need and ideas from place to place, people to people. And, because it inspires envy, it undermines the self-respect of ordinary people. According to Sennet, ’self-respect fades when we respond to the example set by others’. In this sense, he quotes from Rousseau’s The Discourse on the Origin of Inequality:

He who sings or dances the best, he who is the most handsome, the strongest, and most adroit or the most elegant becomes the most highly regarded; and this is the first step towards inequality, and at the same time towards vice.

Filed under: activism, community, design, humanity, life, philosophy, quotes

Bloorcourt Village Festival

I am taking a Think Tank 3: Action class here at OCAD with Bruce Hinds in conjuction with Lewis Nicholson’s class working on the same target. Our class’s project is about making a difference in a community and the community we are working with is Bloorcourt in Toronto (from Bloor & Christie to Bloor & Dufferin). The neighbourhood needs revitalization. It is a targeted neighbourhood that needs improvement and a group of city workers / volunteers in the area assemble the Business Improvement Association (BIA) in Toronto. Keith Rushton’s Think Tank class last year got a great deal of recognition for what they did with Ward19 and the solution they presented to the City of Toronto was what has gotten OCAD a lot more involved with the City; they want our thinking to solve their problems.

The third week of class we had members of the BIA come in and we had a panel discussion on what the problems and issues were in the neighbourhood. We then all wrote a response to that meeting and started discussing possibilities for our approach to the project. I must say…this is what I love doing. I love listening, observing, discussing, coming up with ideas, researching then discussing more and coming up with more ideas and loop loop loop. We traveled to the site many times, took photos, and talked some more. The neighbourhood has many great qualities to it: 3 parks (one of which is Christie Pits: one of the largest most active parks in the city), local residential community, lots of ethnically authentic stores and restaurants, lots of diversity, full of artists and inarguably full of potential. The downsides are just like other downsides of a neighbourhood in demise which includes empty storefronts, drug dealing, bad lighting, no visual interest…basically nothing that really puts an identity to the neighbourhood to make it a destination.

We are about to change all of that.

We had a meeting that we had prepared a presentation for yesterday first with the City in the morning and then with the BIA in the evening. They both went exceptionally well and the room was filled with so much energy and excitement.

We ended the presentation with this:

“We propose to design a plan for holding a (possibly annual) festival event using the street and Christie Pits Park. The festival’s engagements and activities will be entirely based on the collaborations we make with local places including highschools, elementary schools, community centres, restaurants as well as current and former residents.

We intend to hold discussions, create excitement, document submitted ideas and creative input, and feature the results in a gallery/studio within Bloorcourt to encourage the revitalization of the neighbourhood and establish a genuine and visible vision
with a unified identity for the BIA of Bloorcourt Village.”

They are so excited and so are we. This is going to be such a fun project and you bet it’s going to hit the press; and it’s going to take it by storm.

Watch out OCAD and Toronto…here comes Think Tank.

Filed under: activism, art, bloorcourt, city, community, creativity, design, humanity, life, photography, school, student life

Ceramics no more at OCAD

I am taking a Virtual Communities class at OCAD as an expansion studio course. One of our projects was to document a story that we found interesting in our community and create a virtual (audio/video) presentation. Mine was ofcourse on the OCAD name change issue and a short audio collage of the student voice at the Forum. You can listen to it here.

Here is the link to our class blog where you can see all the posts and projects as a class.

I found another story that Kat O’Shaughnessy — a Material Art and Design student and Student Union Board of Director of the department — who took on the initiative to video document the voices and opiions of students in the major to really show what the concerns have been around this issue. Here is the link to her page. Great work Kat!

Filed under: activism, art, creativity, design, politics, school, student life

Choppy video of OCAD Student Forum 2007 (first half)

FORUM CONTINUED ON AUDIO

Here is the presentation that I had projected for this Forum.

Here is the document from Student Forum 2006.

Here is the first email ever received during the summer (August 1) notifying us of a decision made (to rename) without our input or concerns. The subject line read “Call for Creative Input from the OCAD Community”

And here is another note attached in the same email as above from the Chair of the Board.

This is the audio from the Town Hall meeting on Monday September 10 (first week back from school) — the first chance we had to meet as bodies given the guideline to contribute more names and support suggested names. It wasn’t about discussion, it was about stepping up to the podium with 1.5 minute to speak. Halfway through, people begin to speak up and question this decision; I suggest you listen to the second half, it relates more to the reason why Forum 2007 was conducted ASAP.

Here is the list of schools that OCAD should be looking at “competition”, not at UofT, Ryerson, York, Guelph, Waterloo, Concordia etc etc.

Royal College of Art
Rhode Island School of Design
Art Center College of Design
School of Visual Arts
Basel School of Design
CalArts
Otis College of Art and Design
Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design
Minnesota College of Art and Design
Maryland Institute College of Art
School of the Art Institute of Chicago
Parsons the New School of Design
Ringling College of Art and Design
Rietveld Academy of Art
Glasgow School of Art
College for Creative Studies
Laguna College of Art and Design
Savannah College of Art and Design
Pratt Institute
Academy of Art Univeristy (with 13 Schools)

I wrote this letter on Monday September 24th after I received an email from a member of the Communications Committee on the Board of Governors who wasn’t present at the Forum and wanted to know what had happened and have a better understanding of what the students brought up. She wanted to have more information before she stepped into the Board of Governors meeting later on in the day.

I thanked her for contacting me and I began to write her an email:

—
…

I will summarize the majority of the content discussed at the forum on Wednesday.
I presented a lot of research that I had gathered from talking to countless amount of concerned and even apathetic students about the name-changing procedure that has been drastically dropped on us as students; we really felt like we are not having much of a voice in this decision. Students are concerned about the current state of the school. People who have a thorough knowledge on Art and Design education understand that we are not in competition with other universities in Ontario but we are in competition with other art and design institutions on an international level. Yes, the term “College” in US doesn’t mean community college — not to mention that US holds the majority of the Art and Design schools in the world.

I am representing students who are participating “vicariously” through me due to their high apathy and many other highly intelligent students who were present at the Forum and came out to really speak up about this issue.

You can easily fool first and second year students and the general public with the excuse that “since we are degree granting, we must enforce that in our name with the word ‘university’”. I see so much potential for this school and I have appreciated it even more when I did a study abroad, but with this decision to suddenly out of the blue come up with a solution to a problem that had never ever crossed my mind or any other student in this institution. The problems that have crossed our minds are, “hmm, the administration doesn’t give a SHIT about students”, and I say this harshly because this is the mentality of the majority of OCAD’s population (the one’s who’ve been around to see how things happen). — excuse the language.

What we really want is more attention to detail. We want more of a community; we want your attention when we say “fix this”, because ultimately we are right about what needs to be fixed. Part of the problem here is…there are lots of things that need to be fixed and doing something quite as drastic as RENAMING this historic institution that has NO need to RENAME itself but to learn how to MARKET itself better in every sense — due to lack of great marketing team, thought as to HOW to market and what caliber of students we want to attend this school. It’s about the students that do great work, the ones that graduate from here who will only come back if they love their school. They will only come back if they are proud to contribute to a school that contributed to their experience…and the only reason I see myself coming back is because of my amazing teachers; I would do anything for them.

We are worried about the MONEY, not the name. We’re worried about why the administration would make this decision without asking us if it’s a good decision in the first place. If you had ASKED us if we wanted to change a name, took a vote and actually CARED about what we think, then more students would actually appreciate the fact that you had done THAT at least.

Name change? If you’re going to do it, make it OCAD U. It’s stupid, there’s no need for it, it doesn’t change anything OCAD is and if you were to rebrand it AGAIN and remarket it again JUST BECAUSE of the “university” that is added to it, it’s even more stupid and a big shame. I will leave OCAD and say what a dumb decision and how sad it was that I tried to state the facts, do research, listen to people from all avenues, communicate to the public and take an intelligent, articulate stance on something and actually see NOTHING come out from it, I would be highly disappointed.

We are worried with that term “university” itself and how THAT itself is misleading…truthfully, from an international standpoint. I can support all that I say here if you give me more time to gather more students. I’m willing to do another forum before your next meeting, this time with more time to plan it and also more research. I don’t see a rush for a need to change OCAD’s name…period.

I just care too much about the future of Art and Design in Canada and what OCAD can really become because I have been here for FOUR YEARS and I have always LOVED school; I’ve always loved homework; loved learning; loved throwing myself into risks and I love the fact that I did not go to another generic “university” in Ontario, but I went to a specialized College (with studio based education and liberal studies) to become the creative power-house I am today. I have changed as a person at OCAD and I want the school to get credit for it. If I do big things, I want to tell everyone I went to OCAD: the best art and design school in Canada and I must say, it is at the TIP OF THE ICEBERG in international acclaim for it’s exceptional education IF WE DON’T SCREW UP and ask the right questions and LISTEN to our faculty, our students and INVEST time, money and energy into doing that.

Look INSIDE OCAD for your answers. It’s all there. THROW MONEY INTO OCAD, don’t go OUTSIDE looking for more students…they will come to you. I came to you, and so did everyone who is already here. It’s not about enrollment percentages, it’s about the quality of the student’s work once they get out of here. Why not help them more? Ask faculty what they think, I’m sure they have lots to tell you.

The forum is video-taped. I’ve yet had time to put it all content together and publicize it. (Mind you this is very valuable voluntary time of my own breath I am putting into this as a thesis student with a full course load).

I am also very confused for the making of this decision. It’s very twisted for me and I sure never want to be a politician. I never thought institutions were just as bad as the real world with their politics, systems and decision making.

If you have more questions, I would be pleased to answer.

Thanks for your time,

ghazaleh

—

She agreed with a lot of the things I had mentioned and strongly supported my case.

Filed under: activism, art, creativity, design, politics, school, student life