Checking In With CHART

The City of Santa Fe officially-approved the CHART process—otherwise known as Culture, History, Art, Reconciliation and Truth—in January last year to identify and address community concerns surrounding the felled obelisk, as well as the future of public art and/or monuments on the Plaza. By July, it hired Albuquerque-based nonprofit Artful Life as the project facilitator.

Led by Santa Fe-born Valerie Martinez, formerly of local nonprofit Littleglobe, Artful Life immediately set about forming a team of paid facilitators and interns, all of whom are Santa Fe residents, and creating an outreach and engagement model that late last week, held its first-ever Zoom dialogue session to address one of a number of upcoming topics: monuments.

Martinez tells SFR that prior to the session, public outreach and online surveys pulled in the rough equivalent “of a 300-page book, single-spaced, in terms of data.” That information will continue to inform the topics for the dialogue sessions, which will run monthly for the time being. Each topic will be announced ahead of time to allow potential participants time to register for the session and prepare. And while Martinez says she understands “monuments” is a nebulous term, she is also quick to point out that her organization has not and will not be making any decisions about the talking points, the future of the Plaza or otherwise. The topics, she notes, are dictated by CHART participants, and Artful Life’s position in the process exists solely to gather information from and for the community.

“The survey launched last September, we had four months, and since online surveys tend to skew a little older, we made a particular effort to get to younger audiences,” Martinez says. “Anybody can register [for the survey and dialogue sessions], and we take that information and book people for particular times. They tell us their preferences and we can accommodate their needs—they can also request sessions in Spanish or that are bilingual.”

Martinez says it’s a little too early to have identified any particular patterns in the data Artful Life has gathered for CHART, but that 86 Santa Fe residents attended the first dialogue session. That may not sound like many, but it resulted in a goldmine all on its own. And there’s more to come.

“What I’d say,” she continues, “is that the first months will be creating that administrative structure and foundation, and then we launch a wide array of public events. These dialogue sessions are just one type, so we’ll also be hosting other kinds of community conversations. There will be lots of ways for people to participate.”

For now, she says, the best way to add your voice to the mix is to engage through chartsantafe.com. There, interested parties can also learn more about the 18-person team working on the process and sign up for dialogue sessions and surveys. The goal is for the process to adapt and evolve over time based on community needs. CHART facilitators, for example, are willing to talk with anyone interested in voicing an opinion, be they a single person, a DIY organization or what-have-you.

“The great thing is that anybody can contact us any time with information, and I think we’ve said this from the beginning, that the process is thoroughly planned and depends entirely on the input we’re getting,” Martinez explains. “But it’s also iterative, so we learn and adapt as we go. We need to learn along the way. For example, one thing we’re looking at is one of the hardest populations to reach, ages 20 to 29, who are maybe not at colleges, they’re working in service jobs; we’re doing our best in the midst of a pandemic for more in-person outreach, and we’re looking to demographics of the county to help us understand where we need to reach out in more creative ways.”