Circle up

Apr 13

Held at the Laramie Plains Civic Center, Circle Up brings together community members, organizers, artists, and neighbors for an evening of rotating workshops, shared food, and collective reflection. Participants move through hands-on stations led by local facilitators, building practical skills in civic engagement — from contacting elected officials and testifying at the legislature, to organizing across difference, to reading and rewriting the language of policy itself.

ALCES Community Works supports Circle Up in partnership with Wyoming Neighbors for Housing and as part of Re-Storying the West, a three-year statewide initiative that celebrates the everyday stories of Wyomingites. Our involvement is rooted in who we are and what we believe: that creativity is essential to civic life, that the arts spark dialogue and deepen belonging, and that a vibrant democracy depends on who gets to be seen, heard, and remembered. When our stories are told, we are represented — and Circle Up is built on that conviction.

ALCES's role centers on two things we care about deeply: youth leadership and artmaking as a civic act. We are proud to support Kai Edwards and Ahmad Lockhart, two Rural Youth Leaders, as emcees for the evening — and to bring artmaking into the civic space through stations where participants use cut-up and erasure poetry to work with the language of bills and policy, and where visual practice becomes a tool for imagining change. This is the kind of arts-based, community-rooted work that sits at the heart of ALCES's mission: co-creating projects that reflect the lived experiences of Wyomingites and invite people into the ongoing work of shaping our shared future.

Circle Up reminds us that the West is still being written — and everyone in that room gets to be part of that writing.

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