Becoming Tapestry

Becoming Tapestry

A Dissertation Podcast by Kyle Matthew Oliver

Cutting cake at an All Tapestry event

All Tapestry: Subbing on Insta at Fall Picnic

Posted on Author kylePosted in Leslie Fisher Playground

The story of my engagement at the fall picnic begins before the event itself. Early in the week of the event, I received an email from Hannah:

I’m going to be out of town for much of the month of September, so I will be missing the picnic this Saturday. Since I believe you’re going to be there, I wondered if I could ask you for a favor of helping make a social media post about it on the [Tapestry] platforms. [Sam] is going to have so much on his plate already, and this kind of thing is not his specialty. I know you are familiar with the [Tapestry] social media (and the point of social media in general…) and I’d feel 100% comfortable leaving this in your hands. Of course, if this represents any kind of conflict with your research, please let me know.

September 3, 2019 at 3:11 pm.

I considered the request briefly and tried to get my head around any possible complications. Although earlier in my study I had performed an exploratory analysis of a sample of recent Tapestry social media posts, I no longer expected that work to figure prominently in the dissertation. Moreover, my interest had been primarily about Tapestry’s self-representative communication practices, and I knew it would be straightforward to either exclude any posts I created or account for the different authorship in how I treated them.

I didn’t have concerns about this becoming a burdensomely regular request, both because Hannah obviously enjoys the communications work she does for the organization and, more importantly, because Hannah and Sam model and negotiate consistently clear boundaries and expectations with others in the organization. I’ve never had any reason to think those expectations did not also apply to me. So I sent a brief reply that I was willing and indeed grateful for another avenue of “meta-research” reflection. She in turn sent more details, including the following guidelines:

It would be wonderful to have a few photos from the picnic and tie dye, but even if it’s just one it’s fine. (More could go on our story as well.) Only picture guidelines are that it can’t show youth’s faces or identifying features, as you know. There should be lots of fun opportunities for photos with the tie dye. But we know that your primary objective that day is to be present with teams and talk about digital storytelling, so please don’t let this be a distraction. Just trying to capture a couple snaps from this event and if you’re able to get any smiling small groups of mentors together those are always really valuable for general use.

Of course tweak if Sam cancels the tie dye or the weather is awful or there is anything else interesting!

And if on further reflection you don’t feel comfortable with this responsibility, would love your help snapping a few photos and showing Sam how to do a multi-picture post…

September 3, 2019 at 7:07 p.m.

She also gave sample text for the caption of the post, which I used almost verbatim. I’ve included at the bottom of this post all the shareable photos I shot, most of which I included on social media.

That is, “Hannah,” the co-director, shares a first name with “Hannah,” Sam’s wife. So I’ve assigned her that same pseudonym.

As for the day of the event itself: I arrived around 11:30, got a feel for the area, recorded a voice memo, and wrapped it up when I thought I heard some Tapestry folks arriving. That turned out not to be true, so I stood and watched activity at the playground for another 5–10 minutes before Sam and his wife, also named Hannah, arrived. I helped them carry sandwiches and tie-dye supplies to the three tables I suggested.

Sam told me he changed the sandwich order at the last minute to a different location of the same local chain, because he and (co-director) Hannah were almost late to a recent mentor thank-you dinner because traffic on a bridge was so bad. (They had to stop, park, and get on public transit to make in on time.) He said he didn’t want to “get here full of anxiety.” This comment felt to me like a very clergy-ish (maybe clergy-to-clergy)-type comment, discussion of active anxiety management.

While we set up, I told (Sam’s wife) Hannah a little bit about my DS project. Toward the end of our conversation, mentors started arriving, some of them with youth. In one case, two sisters brought a friend who had stayed overnight at their house. (I overheard this story twice, including once when I Sam asked someone “have I met her before?” after he helped set her up with a sandwich.)

During the picnic I moved around the space, actively introducing or reintroducing myself to mentors, and doing as much as I could to interact with youth in authentic ways.

I spoke with Tina, a mentor who has an advanced business degree and works in banking. When I explained digital storytelling to her, she said, “For marketing purposes?” and I clarified both for marketing purposes and to give teams the chance to explore for themselves what their relationships mean to them. At one point I asked her how she found out about Tapestry, and she told me she found it online. She had tried other kinds of volunteering. She said, “I wanted to do something with kids” but told me most of the opportunities she found were things like reading application essays for first-generation college students. She said in those roles it’s “hard to have a relationship.”

In general, if I learn someone’s name, then I assign them a pseudonym.

There was a new mentor there today who I observe but never meet. She’s there with two youth, I think she said sisters (not the sisters who had hosted the sleepover). I heard her tell some of the adults around that this was their first outing and asked someone if it would be OK if they took a walk. Those three mostly kept to themselves, as did one or two other teams. For others, the mentors mostly hung out together and left their youth to their own devices.

My guess is that these were mostly teams where the youth know each other a little bit from past All Tapestry events. I later tried to check this hypothesis out with Marie. She told me that her team once did a joint outing with another team but that otherwise these events are the primary places where the young people get to know each other. I noticed that several of the older-looking youth know each others’ names and seem happy to hang out and self-supervise.

I talked briefly with another mentor, Chad, who was brand new and would be starting with his new team and new youth the following day. He was pretty open about being nervous and mentioned on several conversations that his biggest question was about what the groups will do. Another mentor, Joey, whom I had met at the mini golf outing, told him said that’s something he still really struggles with. A third (former) mentor, Amanda, told him that mentors have to get used to that idea of not helping, and made several comments about “being kind to yourself” and about how there will be good days and bad days.

A rare example of there being any sort of agenda to a team’s work, beyond living out the guiding principles. It feels to me somewhat out of sync with teams’ work being grounded in presence and recreation.

Amanda is no longer a mentor. She told me she just couldn’t any more. It’s been about six months she left the team. She’s recently married. I believe it was she who talked about being part of a “proof of concept” study around working with youth on setting goals. Their youth wanted to work on returning library books on time and doing something outside of her neighborhood once per month. I asked if those goals then become something they try to check in with the youth about each week, and she said yeah. She also mentioned it’s “for the donors.”

At some point, mentor Trisha gave tie-dye instructions and passed out shirts to each youth around the craft table. I watched one older-looking African American youth sit down and start twisting her shirt in a spiral, but she wasn’t able to get it compact enough. She grabbed the shirt, stood up, and said she didn’t want to do this. Another mentor asked what was wrong and how she wanted to make her shirt, and the youth went back to twisting and tying. I engaged a bit with a youth, Marisol, who was very friendly and responsive and let me take a picture of the socks she was working on doing stripes with.

At one point Reggie and Marie arrived. I said hi to Reggie. Later I asked him if he went back to school this week, but he said “I’m already in school.” He went to sit on a bench and eat his sandwich. Next I saw him with another of the older youth climbing on the playground equipment. Marie later told me she had asked about school as well and he was grumpy about it with her too. She said he was going through a lot right now.

Marie and I spent a lot of time debriefing the remembrance event. She apologized for not saying goodbye to me after I dropped off the boxes and talked about how she was so busy she dropped a lot of tasks she was supposed to do. I told her I had of course not expected her to drop everything and engage with me.

I asked her about if they do other events, and she told me they’ll do a vigil on the anniversary of the execution, but it’s for a different crowd, activists rather than a many people from the community. She also talked about how next year would be the fifth anniversary of his birthday since the shooting, so they were going to try to get some local celebrities. We also talked about how the new district attorney candidate had been there and that Michael had brought Reggie and they got a chance to meet and he said it was really cool.

Speaking of Reggie, I noticed a little later that another African American youth was at one point calling to him to get his attention and threw a grape toward him. Reggie said jokingly that that was racist. It was one of relatively few times I’ve heard race mentioned other than by the co-directors. The other prominent example at this event was in my conversation later with Marie and Abby when Marie asked me to tell Abby my impressions of the remembrance event, and later we talked about the new Linda Rondstatt movie: “She was the Beyoncé of her time – could sing anything,” and Marie said she was interested in the feminist take on how she was dominated by the music business and Abby mentioned that it was also an example of a Person of Color being treated in a strange and unfair way.

At one point I overheard someone talking to Sam about how Hannah had said he better remember how to post to Instagram and that he probably still had it on my phone, which was when I stepped in and said she had asked me to do the posting. He seemed relieved and the three of us talked about how good she is at it.

Toward the end of the time I was there, Sam called everyone over and said that this week was the five-year anniversary of Tapestry and said thank you and congratulations to everyone and cut the cake.

Toward the end of the event, when I was saying goodbye to Sam, he looked over at the playground and asked if I had had the chance to talk to Reggie. I told him I had briefly but had heard that he’d been “having a hard time” and that we weren’t in any hurry and that we wanted to start from a place of strength/comfort. He sighed in recognition when I talked about the hard time and said thank you but didn’t elaborate.

The act of photo taking was non-eventful. When I approached someone, I generally said that Hannah had asked me to take pictures and would always ask in a way that signaled my awareness of the representation and protection issues, e.g. “Can I take a picture over your shoulder of [action/item]?” People always said that was OK. I noticed that people almost always engage with me when I step into an opening, and I wonder about being a bit more adventurous about identifying openings.

A few other jottings from things I noticed:

Data collection

  • Field notes?: Yes
  • Audio recording?: Yes (voice memo)
  • Photographs?: Yes!

Read annotated voice memo transcript.

Significant observations

  • The tie-dye moment of encouragement was simple and powerful, reminding me of “tell me about the A’s” moment of non-anxious “ministry of presence” I would observe a month later at my first team outing. [NOTE TO SELF: LINK]

Interpretive insights

  • This event really solidified for me my understanding that a major function of All Tapestry events is to create space for the mentors to connect with and support each other.

Implications / reflections

  • My main takeaway from this event is admiration for just how much is happening simultaneously at All Tapestry events. The mashup of activities, roles, the size of the group, and the location of the event all richly inform what happens. And the more connected and experienced I get with Tapestry and its culture, the more of it I’m able to notice and interpret (or at least speculate about in an informed way). For example, I would soon find out about a falling out between Reggie’s caregivers and Tapestry, and I wonder about Sam’s (knowing?) sigh when I mentioned picking up on Reggie’s current struggles. It would be at a later All Tapestry that I would register the full impact of that incident on Team R and the organization.