Volume 4, Number 2 - Spring 2006
Program Creates an
Ecosystem of Learning, Sharing
by Patricia Andres
Who are the people of People & Stories/Gente y Cuentos? There is, in program jargon, the “target audience.” That term seems not only inaccurate but also contrary to our mission. “Target” suggests a violent kind of aiming, and “audience” connotes a passivity that our sessions actively push against.
Our participants come from diverse situations: prisons, transitional housing facilities, GED or ESL classes in community learning centers, parole programs, subsidized housing for seniors, libraries all over the nation. To categorize them by their circumstances, education, age or class reinforces the hierarchies that we seek to undermine.
Even searching for more objective ways to describe our clients elides the larger reality: our organization is a network of people whose combined efforts provide unique access to literature; and, like any ecosystem, each part works individually and interdependently. So people includes board members, who work with the staff to chart the direction of the organization; directors of the foundations and corporations that enable us to do what we do; people whose donations make our work possible; program coordinators who bring literature alive at our sessions; and site staff who help us schedule and recruit for each series.
Now, under the sponsorship of the Princeton Area Community Foundation, we are launching programs that will expand our reach to even more people, while creating new ways for them to connect through literature. In our “Crossing Borders with Literature” series, we will create groups across municipal boundaries, bringing urban and suburban people together. Using the text as a bridge, people who often remain at a distance will work together to interpret the stories.
As always in a People & Stories session, we will examine literature, thus providing access to cultural capital. The Crossing Borders groups will include staff, board members, donors, philanthropists and members of diverse communities in Mercer County, including Trenton, thus encouraging a flow of social capital among people of widely different backgrounds and circumstances. Reading literature in a group that bridges communities will encourage an expansion of horizons. Just as the reader reads the story, the story reads the reader, tapping into individuals’ experiences and positions. Through discussion, those positions become visible, making it possible to see things differently.
It is this expansion of individual horizons that lately has me thinking about the image of Janie Starks, the main character in Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God. In the novel, Hurston depicts Janie as having been “to the horizon and back,” having loved, lost, suffered and triumphed. At the close of the book, Hurston has her at an upstairs window in a spirit of deep reflection: “She pulled in her horizon like a great fish-net. Pulled it in from around the waist of the world and draped it over her shoulder. So much of life in its meshes! She called in her soul to come and see.” It is this deep reflection, both about literature and the interpretations it sparks, that defines the People & Stories/Gente y Cuentos experience, now for an even more diverse group.