Victoria Rae Boynton Moore of North Charleston, South Carolina, is a writer and co-founder of TINYisPOWERFUL, an interracial, intergenerational, grassroots organization and community hub linking artists, cultural workers, youth and tiny business partners. As a member of our Emerging Leaders of Color (now known as the National Leaders of Color), Victoria is part of a growing regional and national collective of colleagues rising in the field of arts and culture.
“Being named and acknowledged as an Emerging Leader was really meaningful to my career development; to be able to have my leadership affirmed by peers and mentors was invaluable and I’m grateful.”
Victoria’s professional journey began through a three-year creative placemaking project, conNECKtedTOO, which was an artist-led project connecting with local business endangered by the threats of overdevelopment and gentrification. As an artist collective, conNECKtedTOO fostered partnerships with interracial, interdisciplinary, and intergenerational artists united by a mission and a set of values, including exchanging skills and art forms, and creating something together that was greater than individual ownership. Out of this collective, Victoria co-founded TINYisPOWERFUL. TINYisPOWERFUL embraces the spirit of the arts and the artists as activators of sustainability; to awaken in young people a spirit of community, engagement, and civic participation; and also to amplify the cultural significance of the arts and tiny businesses to community.
As a member of the Leaders of Color network, Victoria was invited to lead a facilitated in-person workshop with the members of her cohort at an in-person gathering. Victoria’s “Question Relay”— a system to guide community conversations where everyone participates — was adapted from Jacob Wren’s Relay-Interview and evolved through practice with the TINYisPOWERFUL community. In a Question Relay, there are two chairs placed in a room amongst a group of people. One person begins seated in a chair, and someone else from the room moves to the open seat and asks the first person a question. The first person answers the question and leaves their chair. A third person now can move to the newly-opened chair and ask the second person a question, who then answers and leaves their chair. The process repeats, allowing for any number and direction of questions and answers throughout the conversation. Through this type of democratic, community-led discussion, there is no pre-defined agenda or topic. Conversations can move into any direction, depending on who is in a chair at any given time. In the multiple times that Victoria led Question Relays with her Leaders of Color colleagues, the conversation touched on topics of challenges that people have faced, overcoming obstacles, career paths, successes in their work, relationship building, and personal and professional experiences.
Through the Leaders of Color network, Victoria has built and developed a growing network of colleagues across the region and nation. Asked to reflect on some of her most valued relationships from the program, Victoria is deeply appreciative of the mentorship from Salvador Acevedo and Margie Johnson Reese. Through their mentorship, Victoria has gained tools and resources that she brings to her work with TINYisPOWERFUL. Salvador introduced a “future visioning” tool that challenged Victoria and her cohort to imagine the year 2035, evaluating the impact of diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts and program success. This exercise became a valuable addition to Victoria’s work, influencing the strategic visioning of TINYisPOWERFUL. Margie charged the group to test systems, “burn fingers”, and protect culture by understanding the rules of the game. TINYisPOWERFUL, a fiscally sponsored project, remains an experiment consciously resisting the pressure to formalize as a 501(c)(3) entity. The project challenges existing systems, particularly in how artists are paid, valued, and the concept of ownership within the arts.
As a Leader of Color, Victoria embodies the goals of the program. She has grown and received lessons from the project while also giving back and offering leadership to her colleagues. This type of cyclical relationship between teacher/student and mentor/mentee is crucial to the development of new generations of leadership and progressing the field.
To learn more about Victoria and TINYisPOWERFUL, visit TINYisPOWERFUL.org.