Week 6

Jake Maize

These Cornerstone projects seem to have a special energy that is brought in by the community. Many of my questions about Cornerstone, and companies like them, were answered by the articles. Here are some of the questions I still have:


- Where does a Cornerstone project start?

- How long is a typical project’s timeline from initial idea to opening?

- When hosting conversations about topics that really matter, I’d imagine there are some heated debates. Is the primary goal to incite a debate or to reveal a sense of community?

- In the blog article “Skid Row Theater and the ‘Invisible’ Los Angeles” Michael Garcés said, “I often get asked the question: why do you make plays with communities? What do you hope to achieve? I get asked that by people from many backgrounds, but perhaps most often by people in the theater business. I'm also asked, perhaps even more often, what impact we hope to have -- on the people we are collaborating with, on the communities at large, on the field of theater making, on society.” I admit, these are basically the questions I had when I heard about Cornerstone. But my question now is: Do you ever have to make a sales pitch to the community for why this work matters or what your hoping to achieve?