a month ago
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Posted On: September 29th 2026, 02:40 pm
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For some time, I had been developing another organization around what I thought I should build and whom I thought I should serve. But after losing my institutional position this year, many of my assumptions about work, institutions, ambition, and place changed.
People began sending me jobs around the country. I am grateful for them. I am still open to the possibilities my career may take me toward.
But I kept thinking: I don’t want to leave Boston.
And rather than treating that as sentimentality—or assuming that serious ambition inevitably means being willing to go wherever the next job is—I became interested in the question itself.
Why might I have to leave?
Massachusetts has extraordinary cultural wealth. We have world-class museums, universities, archives, libraries, historic sites, artists, scholars, foundations, galleries, performing arts organizations, cultural agencies, and cultural workers.
But having cultural assets is not the same thing as having a durable cultural workforce.
I’ve become increasingly interested in the gaps between our institutions: how information circulates, how people discover careers, where professional development happens, how cultural workers encounter one another across silos, how careers survive institutional disruption, why talented people leave, and what conditions make it possible for people to build not simply a job here, but an entire cultural life.
I realized I don’t only want to study those questions.
I want somewhere to experiment with them.
COMMON/PRACTICE is an experimental cultural workforce development lab rooted in Massachusetts. It will be a place for encounter, field study, professional development, experimentation, research, and eventually interventions into the institutional and civic conditions that shape cultural work.
I don’t know every form it will take yet.
That’s intentional.
A lab should be allowed to experiment.
What I know is the question I want to spend time with:
What makes a cultural workforce durable—and what makes it possible to stay?
Welcome to COMMON/PRACTICE.
People began sending me jobs around the country. I am grateful for them. I am still open to the possibilities my career may take me toward.
But I kept thinking: I don’t want to leave Boston.
And rather than treating that as sentimentality—or assuming that serious ambition inevitably means being willing to go wherever the next job is—I became interested in the question itself.
Why might I have to leave?
Massachusetts has extraordinary cultural wealth. We have world-class museums, universities, archives, libraries, historic sites, artists, scholars, foundations, galleries, performing arts organizations, cultural agencies, and cultural workers.
But having cultural assets is not the same thing as having a durable cultural workforce.
I’ve become increasingly interested in the gaps between our institutions: how information circulates, how people discover careers, where professional development happens, how cultural workers encounter one another across silos, how careers survive institutional disruption, why talented people leave, and what conditions make it possible for people to build not simply a job here, but an entire cultural life.
I realized I don’t only want to study those questions.
I want somewhere to experiment with them.
COMMON/PRACTICE is an experimental cultural workforce development lab rooted in Massachusetts. It will be a place for encounter, field study, professional development, experimentation, research, and eventually interventions into the institutional and civic conditions that shape cultural work.
I don’t know every form it will take yet.
That’s intentional.
A lab should be allowed to experiment.
What I know is the question I want to spend time with:
What makes a cultural workforce durable—and what makes it possible to stay?
Welcome to COMMON/PRACTICE.
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