Lana Reeves, Class of 2024: Nonprofit Leadership & Community Art

In summer 2022, I followed my interest in literary/arts accessibility right to The Canvas: a vegan café and two adjacent arts events spaces, which are open to local groups and host events. Tucked away near Shoreditch High Street, The Canvas brings diverse arts programming and a community-minded mission to East London. The borough of Tower Hamlets, which The Canvas neighbors, is one of the most underserved in the London area. The Canvas provides the residents of Tower Hamlets with a safe, welcoming, and enriching space by serving up food and uplifting local creativity. My Literary Careers Summer Award allowed me to work at The Canvas for roughly two months, collaborating with a small but passionate nonprofits team. They were excited to have an extra set of hands, especially from someone who studies literature and music!

During my time at The Canvas, I helped with a variety of projects, including organizing classes and workshops for everything from creative writing to dance, book launches for local authors, concerts, and open mics. Once a month, The Canvas also hosts a networking event for budding young creatives in the Shoreditch area, providing a platform for the sharing of new material. While the Harvard English Department doesn’t yet offer any specific courses on literary programming or nonprofit work, I employed a lot of skills that garnered in my English studies. I found that programming an arts event is very much like putting together a strong syllabus or research topic. Whose voices would be most interesting in conversation? How might one artistic or literary form throw another into relief? How might the form of a piece of literature itself say something unique about a pressing community issue? I’m lucky that my course syllabi have always included writers of color who are interested in the topics of race and class, as these are the primary obstacles, made even more concrete by city infrastructure, that face the Tower Hamlets community. That said, there are many uniquely marginalized communities within Tower Hamlets, which is why a plethora of arts events is both necessary and fruitful.

There were aspects of working at The Canvas that required some learning-on-the-go, primarily when it came to accessibility. Shoreditch is home to many recent migrants, so ESL programming and job training are vital parts of The Canvas’s mission. I didn’t have the language skills to participate much beyond childcare, but I was constantly amazed at the multilingual artists, writers, and comedians who spent time there. An English degree, as proclaimed in its name, focuses primarily on Western literature and language, but I do think that inclusivity in the field is improving. Witnessing so many talented multilingual poets and musicians gave me hope for a less Euro-centric academic understanding of literature’s parameters—especially since this creativity was happening in England, the very seat of old colonial power.

I was nervous about working at The Canvas, partly because I wasn’t sure how my skills from my English concentration would translate to literary programming (quite well, it turns out). Also, as a Harvard student (with the privilege that label indicates), I didn’t want to fall into any kind of savior complex, despite identifying as a woman of color. I stepped into my summer experience knowing that I was going to step out of it—and back into the Yard. What I learned from my brief time at The Canvas is that Tower Hamlets is a thriving, energized, artistic, multicultural community that still struggles to maintain access to necessities like subsidized food. The best thing I could do at the Canvas was simply to listen for and help create the kinds of events and resources that the community actually wanted, rather than projecting what I thought would be best.