African Visual Artists Associates.

Local action, Global connection. ☀️

It is great to be in Singapore throughout this week. I will share where I can some of the themes emerging from my dialogue with folks. Here’s one theme: Well-framed questions are more consequential than well-intentioned answers when building community. Many of the World’s most urgent crises now require more profound and broader collective community-centred responses. Societies can only flourish or even endure with active citizens and their associations. Institutions shore up these fundamental civil pillars but can never replace them without causing harm. Sadly, the response-ability of the many is continually falling on the shoulders of the few. Whether we consider the “few” to be good actors or bad, there is a gateway crisis that underpins all other crises: citizenship is in retreat, and our shared social fabric is being systemically undermined when we need it most. This begs the question: how can we return citizens and their associations to the centre of democracy as the key actors in our troubled times? The latent capacity of “the many” to “be the change” often gets overwhelmed and overshadowed by moralistic arguments about what some believe others should take responsibility for. “You should do more about the climate crisis”, “You should not support that political candidate.” “They should do a parenting course”. “You should try working in a more asset-based community development way’, etc. There is an enormous difference between telling people what we believe they should take responsibility for and enabling fellow citizens and their associations to determine what they care about enough to act upon together. In other words, investing in the capacity of communities to collectively respond to issues that are priorities for them and the common good is at the other end of the power spectrum to initiatives that aim towards getting communities to do or think the way “we” want them to. The former is colonial even when well-intended; the latter, if truly inclusive, is liberating.