Winter Reflections ❄️

As the year comes to a beautiful close, we are remembering the many joyful moments of the first half of our Kingston Fellowship.

Last week, we celebrated the many accomplishments and learnings from the year at our EXPO! It was such a joy to be able to share with friends, family, colleagues, and community our fellowship experience thus far: our new ideas, interests, creative projects, and skills.

Each fellow shared a bit about one component of the fellowship - we displayed Design Build projects (Konnor’s tensegrity table, pictured below!), crafted sweets with our new kitchen skills, and shared favorite moments from our time spent together.

We finished out the end of our 2022 together with a trip to New York City! We bundled up, laced up our skates, and ice skated at Rockefeller Center! For some of us it was our first time skating. We overcame a learning curve and were going around the rink in no time :)

We then explored The Metropolitan Museum! We were given a tour of the Afro-Futurist room, Before Yesterday We Could Fly. We imagined a fictionalized future space, one in which the Seneca Community in today’s Central Park was able to survive and thrive. It prompted us to imagine other possible future, other stories of Place, and our own imagined futures!

As we look forward into the New Year, we will dive deeper into our LOVE trimester. We will focus on our “Place Stories” which are narratives that fellows unearth through multiple forms of research about the places they inhabit. They are seeking to explore and define their unique relationship with their places, and through this, gain a fuller understanding of the world and their own position in it. Fellows approach this project by completing a series of oral histories and finding threads of curiosity that lead them forward to do more active research with mentored support. They also will partake in a series of workshops on ancestry and tradition, including a specific identity mapping workshop, with a Place Corps alumnus, Jordan Williams. The project will culminate in fellow's presentations at the end of the trimester at the Reher Center, a collaborative program partner who has been building an exhibit based on a series of Kingston immigrant oral histories. 

Place Stories are a way to learn more about our PLACES and why we want to nourish and love them. These stories center us and connect us as inhabitants of a space and time. They highlight our rich lineages and deep histories. At Place Corps these narratives become a springboard for how we learn to serve ourselves, our communities, and the earth in the areas where we are planted. 

With much love and warmth,

-Place Corps Team