5. Project Personnel
 

Edwin Rutsch, Project Director and Filmmaker
Edwin Rutsch is a documentary filmmaker with a longstanding professional focus on the theme of human values. As both Director and Videographer, he will oversee the project’s logistics, as well as video tape and edit the final videos. He was Project Director and Videographer for “Inspiration and The Art of Living Black" on which the East Bay Stories of Empathy project is modeled. In that project, 45 African American artists were interviewed about their experiences with inspiration. 160 short videos, plus eight hours of stories and art were created.  In a similar recent project, he interviewed 250 people on the meaning of progressive values and recorded stories about empathy, caring, community, equality, responsibility, justice, etc. He has over 1,100 videos of various lengths on the internet and has made over 35 DVDs. He came to the world of video with a background in computer technology, having worked at a Silicon Valley Research Lab, and is the author of 3 books on the use of computers. Edwin has an interest in the common humanity and values that all people and cultures share.  Edwin has also spent 10 years traveling, studying and working overseas. He studied Indonesian language at UC Berkeley, Universitat Hamburg, Germany and IKIP Jakarta, Indonesia and speaks English, German and Indonesian. 

Joan Kuenz, Workshop Leader/Assistant Project Director
Joan Kuenz has utilized her skills in the art of education through teaching in the classroom, in hospitals, and workshops, where she has used arts of all persuasions as the major communication tools. One workshop that Joan facilitated, and was co-director with Edwin Rutsch, was the "Inspiration and The Art of Living Black." Joan has an M.S. in Education, and a 7-12^th grade teaching credential in Biology and Health Science.  Joan is employed at a Bay Area hospital as Registered Nurse, with certification in Infection Prevention, where she advocates for education programs that bring art into the world of health care. 

Sanjit Sethi, Humanities Advisor
Sanjit Sethi is Co-Director of the Center for Art and Public Life at the California College of the Arts. The California College of the Arts is the largest regionally accredited, independent, nonprofit school of art and design in the western United States. Sethi received a BFA in 1994 from the New York State College of Ceramics at Alfred University, an MFA in 1998 from the University of Georgia, and an MS in advanced visual studies in 2002 from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His work deals with issues of nomadism, identity, the residue of labor, and memory. He is working on an NPA project through the Richmond Arts and Culture Division together with the Ryse Youth Center.  The project’s goal is to examine the effects of community trauma; it will attempt to see the ways that art and design can be used to assist communities in coping with those experiences. There will be cross pollination between Sethi’s own projects and the East Bay Stories of Empathy project.

Susan Wehrle, Youth Workshop Facilitator
Susan Wehrle teaches art at Portola Middle School in El Cerrito, California. She is an artist with an M.A in Education from San Francisco State University, a B.A. in Art and Anthropology, teaching credentials in six subjects, and twenty-seven years of experience teaching full-time in the public schools. For the past 23 years at Portola, she has taught art and at times also taught classes in history and science. For seventeen years, Susan has been in charge of the school district art show at the Richmond Art Center, and has found many public venues for exhibitions of her students’ artwork in the community. She feels that art is not only self discovery but also provides a ‘language’ that unites human cultures and offers access to the natural world. Susan has sponsored two student clubs at Portola, a garden club, and the Gay Straight Alliance (GSA).

Staff Volunteers
The people listed below have all made a commitment to help Project Director Edwin Rutsch guide the East Bay Stories of Empathy Project to a successful completion. They will assist with all aspects of the project, including the recruitment of additional volunteers. These core volunteers are motivated by their shared appreciation of the importance of empathy and the arts in their personal lives and in our society.  Most of them take part in a weekly Empathy Collaborative Inquiry group, established in December 2008, which meets for 3 hours every Saturday. The group's operating mission statement is, "How might we nurture, promote and foster empathy within ourselves, as a group and within the larger culture, through a balance of action and reflection?" 

The group uses the Collaborative Inquiry model, which integrates components of action and reflection in the exploration of the experience of empathy. Participation in the East Bay Stories of Empathy Project is an integral part of the group’s ongoing Collaborative Inquiry. As indicated in the table below, these volunteers will participate in design, implementation, promotion, outreach, documentation, and numerous other facets of the project; various individuals have already committed to specific outreach tasks, including making presentations to community-based organizations, artists' organizations, and various social and religious institutions. We anticipate the list of volunteers to grow as the project progresses.