10 Forward

Table top game night! DND heads wya!!!

Get ready for another week of one-of-a-kind experiences at 10 Forward, the arts venue in Franklin County that feels like if Twin Peaks was a bar. Something different happening every night this week:

🎨🖌️Tuesday 10/8: Kinky Sip n Sketch – Doors @ 6, Locked @ 7 (Suggested Donation)
🎤 🎶Wednesday 10/9: Karaoke w/ DJ PRL – 7:00-Midnight (Free, All Ages)
😈🧛Thursday 10/10: Q***r Coded Villains Drag Show – Doors @ 8pm (21+, Sliding Scale)
🎲🧙 Friday 10/11: DnD Night! – Doors @ 7 (Suggested Donation)
🚲🍄 Saturday 10/12: CYCDAY – Doors @ 8 (18+, $10-20)
🫂🎶 Sunday 10/13: Singing Club – 3:00-5:00pm (All Ages)

Come out and support events produced by a variety of talented producers!

Last comedy show at 10 10 Forward!

Singing Club today!

Franklin County Fair After Party. Sing Karaoke with us!

Rave for Cassie!

Community Listening Session at The Brick House on September 5th from 6-7:30! Masks required.

For a more detailed explanation of the process, see the link to our website in our bio or here at 10forwardartsvenue.org/community-meeting-details

To the Greater Valley Community,

After careful consideration, stepping back, assessing, and being in discussion with both 10 Forward staff and other community members, Kaia, Jenyka, and Jules believe that it is in the community’s best interest to host a Community Listening Circle. We hope that this will offer everyone a chance to hear one another out and help determine next steps together. This is different from a comprehensive Restorative Justice Process, and we are choosing this strategy for a number of reasons.

How is a Listening Circle Different from an RJ Process?

A Listening Circle:
• Centers authentic self-expression of all parties
• Encourages the practice of active listening to build empathy and places of shared understanding
• Encourages but does not assume shared trust, values or mutual goodwill
• Allows an allotted amount of time for each participant to be heard
• Responses only come in the form of seeking clarity (ex: “I heard you say X, is that correct?”)
• Involves facilitation, but is less structured and does not necessarily require restorative mindset of all participants
• Is one step that may or may not lead to next steps in a comprehensive RJ process

A comprehensive RJ Process:
◦ Seeks to repair harms caused
◦ Relies upon shared trust and values
◦ Requires baseline mutual goodwill and the desire for shared growth of all involved
◦ Is highly structured, facilitated, and can only happen when everyone is ready to be in a restorative space with one another

• Can take varying, and sometimes quite expansive lengths of timeWhy are we choosing this method?

It’s clear that the workers at 10 Forward and community members within the Valley deeply want to be in conversation and take a next step in a restorative direction. However, it’s also become clear to us as facilitators that there is more work to be done in order to build the collective capacity and skills needed to implement a more comprehensive process. That work takes time; it’s “deep culture” work that can’t be done overnight. However, to continue to push out the conversation to wait for conditions to be right for a comprehensive RJ process is something neither 10F staff nor community members wish to do. The facilitators recognize that there is a need to be timely and responsive, but we also encourage everyone to exercise caution and come into the conversation adequately aware of both the risk and lack of guarantee of safety inherent in such an endeavor. Listening Circles can be extremely rich if we choose to see conflict as generative, but again, provide less support than the facilitated dialogues that are often part of an RJ Process. While we hope that healing will take place, we want everyone to opt in with full awareness and consent of what to expect.

In this spirit, we invite folks to gather on Thursday September 5th from 6-7:30pm at the Brick House Community Resource Center for the Community Listening Circle. Afterward, we will invite participants to form affinity groups to generate suggestions to be shared with 10 Forward, who will then be given the opportunity to decide how to best implement them into their future practices and procedures.

Wednesday...

All ages trivia in benefit of Big Brothers Big Sisters of Western Mass! Starts at 7:30; $10 donation please!

Oh boy there is a whole lot this week!

If you don't come to anything, we want you to come to the Community Listening Circle! We want to hear from you! With that being said, here's what we have in store.

Tuesday: All ages trivia in benefit of Big Brothers Big Sisters of Western Mass! Starts at 7:30; $10 donation please!
Wednesday: Karaoke! You know the drill; you love the drill. All ages, free! 7 to midnight
Thursday: Community Listening Circle. 6 pm masks required, at the Brick House Please read the link in our bio to find out about our decision to have a Community Listening Circle and what it will look like.
Friday: Intergalactic Rave (aka cassie's birthday party) featuring Cicada Rave, DJ VLNRBLE and ZBS.FM 18+ $5 notaflof
Saturday: Sing It From the Ferris Wheel: Franklin County Fair Karaoke afterparty; Free all ages
Sunday Singing Club. LALALA

Singing club is back! See you today!

10 Forward goes to Vegas baby! Play poker all night long while sipping on manhattans. Show us who the real card shark is. (There will be no real gambling; all poker games will be played for pretend magic play monopoly money)