Student Story

Larree Strickland – Arts Theatre

Sometimes, the only way to tell if a group of people are on board with a given idea for creating restorative change is to have a person challenge them.

That’s something fellowship student Larree Strickland learned when a community member came into a planning meeting for the overhaul of the historic Ambassador Theater in Northwest Baltimore as a cultural hub, and said, “you all don’t know what you’re talking about.”

The Ambassador Theater is located in Baltimore’s Liberty Heights neighborhood, a historically middle-class Black area with beautiful craftsman homes. The project, to turn the theater into a community arts space, is part of a revitalization and reenergizing of the whole corridor of Liberty Heights to create an epicenter for the re-emergence of Black culture.

“There are generations of Black people, an emerging Latino population, a pretty solid Black Muslim population, so it’s very diverse,” Larree said. “So the arts center can be a cultural anchor, uniting the community voice and giving people somewhere to safely be.”

Eventually, the center will be turned over to the community free from construction debt. It’s been Larree’s role to help the advisory committee figure out how to make sure the new center is accountable to the community and they have meaningful ownership. The committee has been meeting with local artists and residents to think about potential structures. They have been trying to understand different models and decide whether a nonprofit, cooperative or other combination might work best.

“When people are asked to take power, the question is, how do they want to do that?” Larree said.

Larree has found people have come together and gotten inspired by the possibilities, even if they were skeptical at first.

“It’s been a lovely experience of discovering the ways we can be collectively together, how we can make decisions together beyond just a democratic hierarchy,” Larree said.

Larree really only felt sure that the group was on track when a community member showed up to a meeting and questioned what they were doing.

“We were talking about the history of Baltimore and how structural oppression impacts people’s ability to engage in what we are trying to do, and this person came to the meeting and said, ‘I don’t think y’all know what you’re talking about. Do it my way.”

The response of the other community members to that question was telling, Larree said.

“They said, ‘Actually we absolutely can do this, and here’s why and how we’re trying to do it’,” Larree said. “And they really took ownership of what they’re trying to do together and they invited this person to be a part of the journey to get there.”

Instead of responding defensively to the community member, the group said they could see that he was passionate about the project and asked him to join them.

“They said, ‘why don’t you bring that passion to the advisory committee?’ And so it was really this moment of simultaneously watching people become a ‘we’, because they felt this resistance from the outside, and also recognizing that this person had something to offer and to bring in, which is exactly what we want.”

Such galvanizing moments are inspiring to Larree, who has worked in a fair share of nonprofit and social work environments.

“There’s a lot of distrust in the neighborhood because of historical challenges faced by various organizations,” Larree said. “There’s a lot of old disappointment from things not panning out. Bringing everybody into a room has been about doing something ineffable. You can feel it in the room. It’s hard to describe, but it happens when folks connect their eyes across a room. ”

Those ineffable connections happen particularly when young artists connect with the older community members, Larree said.

“Bringing people together like that really changes the energy,” Larree said. “We want this to be a space for everyone to co-create the future.”