For six weeks, five participants and I met for several hours and shared photographs that we took in response to prompts about our communities: their problems, their strengths, and how we fit into them. The prompts were:
Share a picture/or pictures to help people understand something meaningful about you.
Share a picture/or pictures that would help people understand something about your community - however you define that.
As you think about your community (the people and place where this project is unfolding), where/how is your community flourishing?
What are your community's deepest challenges?
What has been done or could be done to address your community’s challenges?
What is your next step or the next thing you want to do to address your community's challenges?
We were facilitated by John Sarrouf, Co-Executive Director of Essential Partners. While we have been using Essential Partners’ Reflective Structured Dialogue practice for the past two years for the Deeper Dialogues project at Theological Horizons, this was a completely new and experimental structure that we learned how to facilitate as we participated. Whereas the traditional RSD model has questions followed by individual reflection and responses in a “go-round” format, Essential Photovoice has each participant speak about their photos and how they related to the week’s prompt for 4 minutes, the rest of the group ask questions for 2 minutes, then the participant speak for another 4 minutes about whatever was coming up for them, related to the questions or not.
Four of the six participants graduated from UVA earlier this year and have been forging their new circles in vastly different contexts. Whether traveling alone in the American Southwest, transitioning into new work in a new town, or living with their family before getting married, they considered questions like: what exactly constitutes a community? What are the different levels or sizes of community that we are a part of? How does one transition from the intentional, temporary community of the University into the sometimes haphazard, perhaps more permanent community of post-college life? We felt that the confusion and turmoil could be shared by many college graduates.