Ben Fink
Contributing Writer
Bio
Ben Fink worked for five years with the Appalachian grassroots theater company Roadside Theater, which collaborated with the African American grassroots theater Junebug Productions to create the story circle. He edited the book series Art in a Democracy, about the work of Roadside Theater, and he writes the newsletter We Own What We Make. Ben’s cross-cultural organizing, training, and facilitation work includes co-founding the Letcher County Culture Hub in the coalfields of east Kentucky, the All In alliances in the Naugatuck Valley of Connecticut, and the Performing Our Future project in West Baltimore and rural Alabama and Wisconsin, as well as the Kentucky-Massachusetts cross-partisan dialogue project Hands Across the Hills. His work has been featured by Salon.com, the Brookings Institution, MIT, Harvard Law School, and the National Endowment for the Arts. In 2020 Ben was recognized by Time Magazine as one of “27 People Bridging Divides Across America.”
Recent Articles
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How—and Why—to Facilitate a Story Circle
Story circles, a tool developed by rural grassroots theater makers and organizers, make it possible for people to share their experiences and discover–often to their surprise–how much they actually have in common. Here’s how it’s done.