Membership Structure Bootcamp

A common challenge in groups and collectives are all of the things that go unsaid: What are we all agreeing to? Who gets to be part of the group? Who gets to make which decisions, and how? When we don’t answer these questions early, we can fall into resentment and conflict down the road when members realize they aren’t on the same page. In this hands-on workshop, participants will be guided through a structured process for designing membership models for groups and organizations of various scales. Participants will leave with a thorough sketch of a membership model for a project they are working on or envisioning, such as a cooperative, ensemble, collective, or other grassroots endeavor; As well as a sense of how to continue to clarify, refine, and implement their model. If possible, we highly encourage attendance from at least two members of a given group.

Daniel Park is a theatre and performance artist, facilitator, and organizer for economic justice in the cultural sector. He is a worker-owner and Cooperative Business Manager with Obvious Agency. He co-designed and provided lead facilitation for ArtPlace America’s “Local Control, Local Fields” project and the Creatives Rebuild New York think tank. His thought leadership has been shared through platforms such as Grantmakers in the Arts, the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, Creative Study, and more.

At Obvious Agency our mission is: Play hard. Work together. Get free.

• We make playable theater and participatory experiences that model our vision of the world and how we want to get there.
• We develop, practice, and spread democratic and cooperative ways of making art, running a business, and fighting for a better world.
• We organize workers and workplaces to build power and create material change in the cultural economy and ecosystem.

The Parallel Play Symposium, presented as part of the six-week Collective Futures festival, is a two-day gathering of artists, scholars, organizers, and cultural workers exploring the practices, histories, and conditions that sustain collective cultural production. Through free panels, workshops, and performative presentations, participants will examine the cultural significance of collective art-making and artist-run spaces while sharing strategies for building and maintaining collaborative cultural infrastructures.

Organized around thematic tracks—including How To: Collective Tools & Tactics, Relational Infrastructures, “Have You Seen the ___?”: Memory and Collective Spaces, and Playground: Place, Ecology & Entanglement—the symposium will feature workshops, panels, performances, and conversations presented by ATUOMAT Collective, Luster Gallery + Studio, Obvious Agency, Vox Populi, Termite TV Collective, All Mutable, FORTUNE, FJORD, Big Ramp, Da Vinci Art Alliance, cinéSPEAK, Practice Gallery, and many other collaborators.

Registration is required for each session.