Intentional Community-Making: The Humanities in Times of Crisis
This blog post is generously provided in kind by Jeremy Reed. The Double Down blog is also supported by Nevada Humanities’ donors.
By Jeremy Reed
What are we going to do? What am I going do? I have been asking myself these questions – expressed with varying degrees of panic and anxiety – on a near daily basis for the past few months. As a recent transplant to the Las Vegas area, I have been grappling with the challenges of getting to know new spaces and new communities as well as the mounting threats to the work that I do in the public humanities.
Across an array of academic disciplines and public occupations, I hear from colleagues who have been furloughed or who have had hard-earned funding and grant awards summarily rescinded from them. A contract that was offered to me was first frozen in limbo and then evaporated with the rest of nationwide funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH). Here, in my new home, Nevada Humanities was alerted on April 2, 2025, that their already-authorized funding from the NEH was no more. 75% of Nevada Humanities operating budget gone overnight.
Recognizing that this moment requires all hands on deck, I reached out to Nevada Humanities to be a “person on the ground” – and I was put promptly to work. Over two defiantly sunny not-too-hot Nevada days, I witnessed communities and individuals showing up for one another. On Saturday, April 12, I spent some time at the 2025 Our Mother’s Garden Book Festival at the Obodo Collective and then on Sunday, April 13, I found myself leading a Latine poetry and art making event at Ferguson’s Downtown.
So, what are we going going to do? “We’re going to have these conversations that are important to have and we’re not going to shy away”, declared Cheyenne Kyle, urban farmer and food program coordinator at Obodo Collective during a dialogue with The Solidarity Fridge’s Victoria Lopes. Over the course of an hour, Cheyenne and Victoria affirmed the need for intentional community as the counter to intentional division.
Amidst books and garden beds, attendees young and old leaned in to listen to one another, ask questions of each other, and laugh together. Located within Las Vegas’ Historic Westide – a historically black neighborhood – Obodo Collective’s Our Mother’s Gardens Festival showcased the power of collective nurturing and cultivation. Cheyenne Kyle and Victoria Flores both emphasized the generational nature of the Obodo garden space. The tools for survival and a better future are already embedded generationally in the seeds themselves by ancestral hands who carried and cared for them.
The next day, I switched from the stance of observer to that of a facilitator. I was called on to guide an art-making event at Ferguson’s Downtown in which participants engaged with Latine poetry and used lightly structured prompting to creatively reflect on their own experiences of identity and belonging. The art that emerged from this event would then become a prompt in turn for an upcoming counterpart event in which Clark County poet laureate, Ms. AyeVee, created poetry inspired from by these art pieces.
I was aided by the immensely helpful staff at Ferguson’s Downtown and Nevada Humanities event co-sponsor TofuTees. More so, I was welcomed into a microcosm of the Las Vegas arts community by artists and passersby who joined in the event – some of whom I saw at the Obodo Collective. Some of the seedling ideas planted in our minds by Cheyenne Kyle and Victoria Flores sprouted as we continued the previous day’s discussion, further nurtured by the emerging creative expression in front of us.
Again, I ask, what are we going to do? We are going to show up, we are going to engage, we are going to hold space, and we are going to create. See you all soon.
Images courtesy of author.
Jeremy Reed, Ph.D. is an ethnomusicologist and public humanities specialist currently based in Las Vegas, Nevada. His research explores festivals and the public sphere looking at the ways festivals can be acts of public intervention in addition to being occasions of public entertainment. He is the co-editor of Festival Activism (Indiana University Press 2025). Each week he bakes two loaves of bread: one for his family and one for anyone who needs it. If you’re that person, feel free to contact him via jeremysamuelreed at gmail dot com.